Pod Insights The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett The ADHD Doctor: “I’ve Scanned 250,000 Brains” You (Steven Bartlett) Have ADHD! & Coffee Is Damaging Your Brain!!! Dr Daniel Amen About this episode If your brain makes you ‘you’, how can you treat your brain so that you are the best possible version of you?
In this new episode Steven sits down again with world-leading psychiatrist and brain disorder specialist, Dr. Daniel Amen.
Dr. Daniel Amen is the founder of Amen Clinics, which has the world’s largest database of 225,000 brain scans for psychiatry, he is also the founder of BrainMD, a company specialising in brain-directed supplements. Dr. Amen has provided brain scans for celebrities such as Bella Hadid and Justin Bieber, and is a 12-time New York Times best-selling author.
In this conversation Dr. Amen and Steven discuss topics, such as:
His aim of creating a revolution in brain health
Why brain and not mental disorders are the key issue
Depression comes from brain health
How optimising your brain will optimise your life
The difference between physical trauma and emotional trauma
Why playing racket sports will make you live longer
The scan of Steven’s brain
Steven’s ADHD and how to live with ADHD
Why orange juice can make your brain worse
The importance of blood flow to the brain
How caffeine and nicotine constricts blood flow to the brain
When you stop learning your brain starts dying
How loneliness accelerates dementia
Depression doubling the risk of Alzheimer's in women
Why he doesn’t believe in the power of positive thinking
Screen time creating anxiety and depression
How sleep cleans the brain
Sugars damaging impact on the brain
Why not flossing can make you depressed
How your body wash is poisoning you
Ways to stop negative thinking
The impact of certain fatty foods on reducing Alzheimer’s
How weight gain is making you dumb
You can purchase Dr. Amen’s most recent book, ‘Change Your Brain Every Day: Simple Daily Practices to Strengthen Your Mind, Memory, Moods, Focus, Energy, Habits, and Relationships’, here: https://amzn.to/40uCGhQ
Follow Dr. Amen:
Instagram: https://bit.ly/3tHjm4r
Twitter: https://bit.ly/3scQpgr
Follow me:
https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo
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Transcript 15,635 words · 3 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Daniel Amen? Justin Bieber, Muhammad Ali, Miley Cyrus, and then there's murderers, rapists, arsonists. I probably have seen more brains than anybody in the world. And now, your brain. So this is gonna be really hard for you. You have ADHD.
0:16 Steven Bartlett? Really? Dr. Daniel Amen. The world's leading expert on the brain. Dr. Amen's mission is to end mental illness. By creating a revolution in brain health.
0:26 Speaker 02 Buckle up, Dr. Amen. Let me know what you see.
0:29 Daniel Amen? Your brain is involved in everything you do. And after today, you will always care about your brain.
0:34 Steven Bartlett? What things make the brain worse?
0:36 Daniel Amen? Drugs, alcohol, not getting good sleep, sugar, fruit juice, hitting a soccer ball with your head, caffeine.
0:42 Steven Bartlett? Caffeine?
0:43 Daniel Amen? The shrinks it.
0:44 Steven Bartlett? What's bad about sugar?
0:45 Daniel Amen? You're more likely to get obesity. And as your weight goes up, the actual physical size and function of your brain goes down. That should scare the fat off anyone. And then there's social media. If you're on three and a half hours a day, you begin to wear out those pleasure centers that bring you happiness, and they bring you pleasure, and they bring you drive. You thrill them to death. But you're not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better. I can prove it. So it starts with...
1:16 Steven Bartlett? Let's look at my brain.
1:17 Daniel Amen? Let's do this. We have evidence of... And that's normal in our society. The problem is, two or three of those can impact the rest of your life, and nobody knows about it.
1:36 Steven Bartlett? Dr. Amen, if someone's just clicked on this podcast and they're considering sticking around or maybe doing something else with their time, can you explain to me, based on what you know that we're gonna be discussing and the subject matter we're gonna be discussing and how important it is, the benefit to their life if they stick around?
2:03 Daniel Amen? Ten extra years of cognitive performance in their life. Better love, better money, better health. Because your brain, we're going to talk about, is involved in everything you do. How you think, how you feel, how you act, how you get along with other people. And my goal is to end, it's going to sound huge, and it is. And it's going to sound impossible, but it's not. My goal is to end mental illness by creating a revolution in brain health. I hate the term mental illness. It shames people, it's stigmatizing, and it's wrong.
2:46 Daniel Amen? These things aren't mental disorders, they're brain disorders. If you get your brain healthy, well, your mind tends to follow. So you're depressed, an antidepressant is not doing one thing for getting your brain healthy. Nobody's talking to you about your diet, your level of exercise, your sleep, not living in a mold-filled home, not really allowing your kids to hit soccer balls with their head, right? Because that's not brain healthy. And if we can create this revolution in brain health, the incidence of mental health disorders will go down by half.
3:31 Steven Bartlett? And I guess that's part of the reveal here is you've actually scanned my brain. And you're going to tell me today the results that you have on your laptop over there in the corner of the room. So I came to your clinic in Los Angeles and they made me do a test on a computer. Like it was almost like a speed test of sorts. And then they made me lie down in a big machine for about, how long was that? About 30 minutes? Fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes? While this big machine rotated around my head and looked at my brain. That was my experience of what happened. And then I filled out some questionnaires about myself and my brain and my life generally. And from that, all that data feeds into the thing you're about to show me now.
4:14 Daniel Amen? Yes, so I never will make a diagnosis from a scan. I make a diagnosis from all the information. Which is why we had you fill out all that information. And I gave you a test called the Connors Continuous Performance Test, which is a 15-minute test of attention. And every time you see a letter, you hit the spacebar, except when you see the letter X. When you see the letter X, you don't do anything. So it measures impulse control and inhibition, response time. And you actually did fine on the test. And, but, there's other evidence
4:59 Daniel Amen? that you might in fact have ADD or ADHD, from getting bored easily, to poor handwriting, being disorganized, and so on.
5:12 Daniel Amen? And obviously, you're very bright, but struggled a bit in school. So, with all of that information, first thing to do is look at a healthy scan. So we know what a healthy scan looks like. And we're gonna show it in two different ways. We're gonna look at the outside surface of your brain. So a healthy one is the image on the left. And all we should see is full, even, symmetrical activity. So the image on the top left is looking underneath the brain. So the top is the front part of the brain. The bottom is the back.
5:56 Daniel Amen? The top is an area called the prefrontal cortex, hugely important in humans, largest in humans than any other animal by far. It's 30% of the human brain, 11% of the chimpanzee brain. And then the back is the cerebellum, back bottom part of the brain. Again, very important, involved in processing speed.
6:22 Daniel Amen? The bottom right of the images on the left is looking down from the top. The other two looking at the brain from the side. Color doesn't matter, it's the shape. It should be full, even, and symmetrical. The images on the right, the color matters. So it's what we call our active images. Blue is average activity. Red is the top 15%. White is the top 8%. And you see all the white. So the white is where things are really happening? It's really hot. Okay. And that's healthy. That's normal. And that's going to become very important for you. So if we look at your brain, it's a little bumpy.
7:07 Daniel Amen? And so I'll ask you about toxins. Is there anything toxic in your life? What are toxins? So think alcohol, marijuana, mold, the heavy metals in your body, infections. And so if it's not alcohol or drugs, then I begin to go, have you ever lived in a mold-filled environment? Maybe we should test you for that. Do you have more mercury in your body or lead in your body than you should? So for example, I had very high mercury levels. My brain sort of looked like that when I first scanned it. It was toxic. And I had very high mercury levels.
7:51 Daniel Amen? Like I never drank, I just don't like it, never smoked, never did drugs. But my brain looked toxic. And so you then have to go hunt down, well, why? And for me, it was mercury. Decreased activity in your left prefrontal cortex. So when I think of... Maybe ADD-like symptoms in your life, probably coming from there, and decreased activity in your left temporal lobe. And are you right-handed?
8:26 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
8:27 Daniel Amen? Yeah, so that can go with the irritability. What I've seen is that can go with sort of short fuse. And your prefrontal cortex is sort of the brain's supervisor. It watches you. And your prefrontal cortex is flat and unlike that. And then when I heard you played soccer, or when I read you played soccer, it's very common in my soccer players. Now, how long did you play soccer for?
8:59 Steven Bartlett? Pretty much all of my childhood.
9:01 Daniel Amen? And any concussions playing soccer?
9:04 Steven Bartlett? I think I had a couple of big head bangs that were significant, but not many, not nothing that took me to hospital. But I had a couple of moments where I've pulled off the pitch because like there was a clash of heads. So.
9:19 Daniel Amen? Your brain is soft about the consistency of soft butter. Your skull is really hard and has sharp bony ridges. Two or three of those can impact the rest of your life, and nobody knows about it because nobody looks, right? If you went and saw a thousand psychiatrists, say, I want to focus better and have better temper. You saw a thousand psychiatrists. Two of them would look at your brain, which I think is insane.
9:55 Steven Bartlett? So the colors here that I'm looking at, the what does the red and the greens?
9:59 Daniel Amen? So the color really.
10:01 Steven Bartlett? Doesn't matter here?
10:01 Daniel Amen? Doesn't matter. It's the shape. So when I see this hole, you don't have holes in your brain. What the hole means is less blood flow than is optimal. In fact, I'm going to show you, if you do what I ask you to do, and we scan you six months from now, that'll be better. I have a program that tells me. If you do what I ask you to do, this is what's generally gonna happen. And if you don't do what I ask you to do, well, this is what it's gonna look like five years from now, 10 years from now. And you're young.
10:40 Daniel Amen? If you get serious about loving and repairing your brain, your 60s, 70s, 80s are gonna be amazing because you're gonna have a healthy brain. If you go, oh, Amen's a quack and I don't believe any of this crap. It's gonna be really hard for you because you're not gonna have full access to your brain. And that's scary. So I know that's sort of a big deal. But I think this is from traumatic brain injury at some point and a bit of a toxin, which may be mold.
11:23 Steven Bartlett? When I say mold, our house was very, very dirty growing up. So that's what I assume you're speaking to there. And we did have like mold around the windowsill sometimes. And we had mice and rats at some point. And it was like living in a house that a hoarder had lived in because some of the rooms were just stacked to the ceiling with crap. So I think maybe if you're talking about mold or a toxic brain, I'm guessing that's where it's come from.
11:54 Daniel Amen? Well, once it gets in your body, unless you do something active to get it out, it stays and can continue to cause problems. And then if we go to the active scan, it's very different than I want it to be. And I know I can make it better. But if we go back to what's healthy, lots of activity in the cerebellum.
12:23 Daniel Amen? Your cerebellum is sleepy despite you probably being very coordinated. I need to activate that thing. It's really important to get better activity there. And you have this diamond pattern. So you have ADD and we'll talk more about it. It's a subtype I call overfocused ADD where you can be obsessive when you're really interested in something, but if it doesn't interest you, it's hard for you to focus. So if you look at this, it looks like a diamond.
13:03 Daniel Amen? And when I see that diamond, I think of past emotional trauma. And I published a big study looking at, and it's 20,000 people. Can I separate emotional trauma from physical trauma? And I can with actually high levels of accuracy. And it looks to me like there's sort of a bit of both for you. Do you play racket sports?
13:32 Steven Bartlett? No, I don't.
13:33 Daniel Amen? So that'll be one of my prescriptions for you. And actually a study from England. People who play racket sports live longer than everybody else by far. Soccer was on the bottom, like soccer and football were on the bottom, but tennis, table tennis, racquetball, now pickleball, badminton are on the top. But let's talk about this diamond for a bit. When I say emotional trauma, what comes up for you?
14:04 Steven Bartlett? So a few things. The first thing is my parents were always at war. Growing up as a kid in a household where there was so much screaming and negative energy, but then growing up with shame because I was so different from everyone else around me, never inviting friends back to my house in those 16 years that I lived there before I left. So nobody really knew where I lived either. I think of all that stuff when I think about like emotional trauma.
14:32 Daniel Amen? Well, that's a lot.
14:33 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
14:34 Daniel Amen? Yeah. I mean, if you grow up in a stressful environment, move in a hostile environment where your parents are at war, it trains your brain, your emotional brain to become hyperactive because you always have to watch for danger. And that gets programmed early. And even later, when there's not the danger, your body still can look for. You're waiting for that next bad thing to happen. And.
15:14 Steven Bartlett? Do you think I have ADHD?
15:16 Daniel Amen? I do. Now, the question would be,
15:22 Daniel Amen? who has it in your family? Because it doesn't just show up. But often, children who have ADHD have one or both parents who have it. And you can see those similar traits. And
15:40 Daniel Amen? it sounds like one or both of your parents could have been a little bit conflict seeking.
15:49 Steven Bartlett? My, my mother.
15:51 Steven Bartlett? And if I was to hazard a guess at which one of my parents had ADHD, and this is just me guessing, not trying to diagnose my parents, I would say it would have been my mother.
16:00 Daniel Amen? Why?
16:01 Steven Bartlett? She's the, she's the most irritable. Handwriting isn't great. She is a little bit more sort of like scat scattered, I should say. She's a lot more messy. My dad is like very organized with everything. My mom's very, very, very messy, like me.
16:21 Daniel Amen? The, the other thing I would ask is, what did teachers say about you?
16:29 Steven Bartlett? I went back to speak at my school.
16:32 Steven Bartlett? To the GCSE and A level students, I've done it twice. And I remember one of the teachers came up to me. Bear in mind, at this age, I'm 24, 25 years old. And she said, you are a useless student, but you're nice. You're a nice person. I was never swearing or throwing chairs, but I was useless. And I spent most of the time in the exclusion unit, which is where you go if you don't do your homework or you don't attend. I just couldn't sit in classrooms. I couldn't sit in classrooms and stay focused on what they were telling me. Especially when I wasn't interested. That's been like the defining quality of my life. I'm exceptionally good at not doing things I'm not interested in. And I'm good at when I'm interested, but when I'm not interested,
17:13 Steven Bartlett? I could see my peers almost like will themselves to engage in things they're not interested in. I could never do that. And I've always said I'm a remarkable quitter. So you think about stopped going to school, then went to university for one day and was like, no. Never went back after that first day. So.
17:32 Daniel Amen? So it's a very important piece of advice for people who have ADD. Is pick something you love, not a job that you think you'll just make more money in. And that's another sort of piece of the puzzle that completely fits with having ADD. And as we know, there are problems with it, but there are also huge benefits of it. Your prefrontal cortex, when it works too hard. So I imagine if I scanned your dad, that it would be busy because he's very organized and like collecting.
18:20 Daniel Amen? But there's less creativity that goes with the busy frontal lobes.
18:27 Daniel Amen? When they're a little bit sleepy, you entertain all sorts of thoughts. And you're a little less rule bound than people whose prefrontal cortex more active. They like rules and they like sameness and they like predictability. And probably like some of that because I think you inherited some of your dad. That's the top of the diamond. But you're obviously very creative.
19:02 Steven Bartlett? I do, I do think of myself as being a creative entrepreneur. I know other entrepreneurs that are like really good at finance and operations and processes. Whereas my skill in entrepreneurship has always been the creativity. That's why I'm a marketer. That's where I built my, my fortunes per se was in marketing and creativity. So, and I've always found other people to do the finance or the process or operation stuff for me. Because that's not where I, I'm engaged or all where I think I'm particularly good. So.
19:33 Daniel Amen? Well, and since a lot of CEOs listen to this podcast, a lot of CEOs have ADD of one form or another. And they thrive when they hire people who are organized. So it's very important because we tend to like to hire people like ourselves. And it's very important to hire people who help us where we're more vulnerable.
20:04 Steven Bartlett? It's almost like hiring people with different brains.
20:07 Daniel Amen? Yes.
20:07 Steven Bartlett? Literally.
20:08 Daniel Amen? Yes.
20:10 Steven Bartlett? We, we talked about something a second ago. You said, when you saw your brain for the first time, it changed your life. I do feel like that now. I do feel like when, I almost didn't realize my brain was there. And I think a lot of people, we go through our lives just kind of, because we never see the thing. We don't appreciate the thing. So step one is that awareness. And then step two is the realization that we can do something about it. Because I grew up thinking that your brain and your body generally is just, it just is what it is. Like I can't do anything about, you know, I tend to think I can't do anything about, I don't know, my fingernail. I probably, you can, but you just see these things as static objects that are what they are. This idea that I can do something about it is the most important idea.
20:54 Steven Bartlett? It's the, it's the empowering idea. And that is what you're telling me. Is possible. I can change my brain.
21:04 Daniel Amen? It's the most exciting lesson that I've learned. You're not stuck. I'm not stuck with the brain I had. You're not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better. I can prove it. In fact, every day, what I've come to believe, you're making your brain better, or you're making it worse.
21:27 Steven Bartlett? Let's start then.
21:28 Daniel Amen? By what you're doing.
21:29 Steven Bartlett? What things make the brain worse? What are the common things that most of us do without thinking that make the brain worse?
21:38 Daniel Amen? When my daughter Chloe was in second grade, I went to her classroom and I wrote 20 things on the board. And I went, separate them for me. Good for your brain, bad for your brain. Seven-year-olds. They got 19 out of 20 right. So, most people know. The only thing they got wrong was orange juice. They put it in the healthy category. When, in fact, when is it rational to unwrap fruit sugar from its fiber source? Because it turns toxic in your body. So, I'm not a fan of fruit juice. I'm a fan of fruit, not fruit juice. But, so, the bad category. Hitting a soccer ball with your head.
22:23 Daniel Amen? No, don't do that.
22:26 Steven Bartlett? What's bad about sugar for the brain?
22:28 Daniel Amen? It's pro-inflammatory.
22:31 Steven Bartlett? Which, what does that mean?
22:31 Daniel Amen? It makes you diabetic.
22:33 Steven Bartlett? But, I mean, as it relates to the brain, why is like orange juice or the ice cream bad for my brain?
22:39 Daniel Amen? Because it's ultimately gonna give you high blood sugar levels, which erode your blood vessels. And you're gonna have lower blood flow to your brain. That's a bad thing. I mean, there's so many things about it. So, it's addictive. It's pro-inflammatory. It makes it more likely you're gonna have diabetes and obesity. So, 72% of Americans are overweight. 42% are obese. I've published three studies on 35,000 people. As your weight goes up, the actual physical size and function of your brain goes down. That should scare the fat off anyone.
23:24 Daniel Amen? I used to be chubby, but when I figured out that connection, I'm like, oh no. It was that that gave me the motivation to drop about 25 pounds. And so, sugar is the gateway drug to diabetes and obesity. And so, not to mention inflammation, which is the cause of depression and dementia. So.
23:54 Steven Bartlett? I've got sugar, I've got head injury. I'm going to avoid both of these things. What else should I avoid?
24:00 Daniel Amen? And then you have low blood flow in those two very important areas. And so, how can we increase blood flow? So you want to avoid things that cause low blood flow, caffeine, nicotine.
24:14 Steven Bartlett? Caffeine?
24:15 Daniel Amen? Caffeine constricts blood flow to the brain.
24:18 Steven Bartlett? And what does that do to my brain?
24:20 Daniel Amen? Well, constricts blood flow, so you're going to get less blood flow. And remember, I showed you that progression with age? No, you don't want that. You want to do things that increase blood flow to your brain. So, exercise.
24:36 Daniel Amen? Ginkgo, this is one of the supplements I'm going to give you. Eat foods like beets, oregano, rosemary, cinnamon. They increase blood flow and.
24:51 Steven Bartlett? Do you think there's correlation or a link between caffeine consumption and a shrinking brain?
25:00 Daniel Amen? Yes.
25:02 Steven Bartlett? And a shrinking brain, is that associated with things like dementia?
25:05 Daniel Amen? Aging brain. You know, I don't think there's a connection. I haven't read any research that says there's a connection between caffeine.
25:16 Daniel Amen? And dementia, there's a connection with sleep problems and there's connection with sleep problems and dementia. I think if you have like 100 milligrams a day of caffeine, it's probably fine. But one venti Starbucks coffee has got 330 milligrams of caffeine. And people just aren't thinking about the level of caffeine they're having in our society.
25:44 Steven Bartlett? What are the very obvious things that are not good for my brain? Because I really want to make sure that I avoid those things. So I've got sugar.
25:50 Daniel Amen? And erectile dysfunction. I mean, while we're on, so B is for blood flow, right? While we're on blood flow, 40% of 40 year olds have erectile dysfunction. 70% of 70 year olds have erectile dysfunction. What that means, if you have blood flow problems anywhere, it means they're everywhere. And so like, no. And it means either you're too sedentary, you're overweight, you're smoking, or having too much caffeine, or using marijuana
26:32 Daniel Amen? because marijuana lowers blood flow to the brain. And so just in that one of the 11, it's exercise, Genko. For you, not for everybody, but for you, hyperbaric oxygen, those three things will make a big difference in blood flow.
26:51 Steven Bartlett? Genko?
26:52 Daniel Amen? Genko.
26:53 Steven Bartlett? What is that?
26:53 Daniel Amen? It's a supplement.
26:55 Steven Bartlett? What does it do?
26:56 Daniel Amen? Increases blood flow.
26:57 Steven Bartlett? To the brain?
26:58 Daniel Amen? The prettiest brains I've ever seen take Genko. There's actually a spec study. They gave people 120 milligrams of Genko twice a day, significant improvement in blood flow to the brain. And so, and one of the supplements I'm gonna give you, we have Genko. I've taken it every day for the last 20 years, at least. And then, this is where the US government got an F for the pandemic. Loneliness accelerates dementia and brain problems. And so, when they isolated us, the whole significant increase in brain problems.
27:41 Daniel Amen? So, get connected to other people. The I in Bright Minds is inflammation. So, what increases inflammation? Low omega-3 fatty acid levels. And we are deficient. 93% of the population is deficient in omega-3 fatty acids. 93%. So, all of us should be either eating more fish or taking an omega-3 supplement, like Fish Oil. Gum disease. Like, who knew? Like, I wasn't really that good at taking care of my gums until I started reading the studies. You have gum disease, you have inflammation, you're more likely to get depressed and have dementia.
28:26 Daniel Amen? I'm like, oh, my goodness. So, I'm a fluffing fool. H is head trauma. We talked about that. I did the big NFL study when the NFL was struggling with the truth on traumatic brain injury in football. 80% of our players got better. T is toxins, drugs, alcohol. But other things like mercury and...
28:52 Steven Bartlett? What are the unobvious toxins? Because...
28:54 Daniel Amen? Anesthesia.
28:55 Steven Bartlett? Anesthesia. I was looking at my bathroom items. And I have like mouthwash and toothpaste and deodorants and aftershave. And I was wondering to myself whether those were toxic to some degree.
29:11 Daniel Amen? So, there's an app. There's a couple of them, but the one I like is called Think Dirty, where you can scan those products. And it'll tell you on a scale of 0 to 10.
29:24 Daniel Amen? How bad they are for you. So zero is you live a long time and 10 is you die early. And so when I figured this out, I was scanning everything. I mean, it cost me hundreds of dollars to replace things. And my wife, more than that, with all the makeup and stuff. But I shaved for 50 years with barbersol. And it's a nine, which is die early. And now I shave with something called Kiss My Face, and it's a two. It's like, you know, we teach people, read the labels on food stuff. Should read the labels on anything that goes on your body
30:07 Daniel Amen? or on your child's body. And we have this epidemic, and we'll get to it, of low testosterone in males because the toxins we put on their bodies when they're young. What is the M in brain? So the M is mental health. It's the quality of your thoughts, the level of your stress, and the level of trauma you carry in your body. And whether or not you have any of the psychiatric stuff.
30:48 Daniel Amen? Like depression, for example, doubles the risk of Alzheimer's disease in women and quadruples it in men. And so the M is what's going on in your mind. And so I teach people to kill the ants, the automatic negative thoughts that steal their happiness. Understand and process their traumas and treat whatever psychiatric issues may be present. Like in your case, the ADD.
31:31 Daniel Amen? And I think you start with a supplement or even consider medication.
31:39 Daniel Amen? Talk about the natural ways to do it, the medicine ways to do it. And for me, I'm not opposed to medicine. I'm actually really good at it. But it's never the first and the only thing I think about.
31:53 Steven Bartlett? I've really never taken medication in my life. Even like if I get a headache, I don't take medication. I'm not the type of person. I probably haven't taken a pill in like, really in years. The only time I've taken medication is if I have a severe infection of sorts. So like, there was this one time where like, my foot was going green and I'd stood on some glass, whatever, and it was really getting out of control. I'm talking like a two inch purple thing growing on my foot. And I thought, okay, instead of getting my leg cut off, I'll take this medication the doctor's given me. Otherwise, I just do not take it. So I will rather go through severe pain than take medication because I believe that my body can fix things. So when I think about taking ADD medication or ADHD medication, I don't really know the
32:35 Steven Bartlett? difference, I go, well, if my, if I'm messy, or if I'm, my handwriting's bad, or whatever it might be, then that's just who I am. And that's okay. I can get better at it. I can be less, I can be more organized. But why, why do I want to take medication?
32:59 Daniel Amen? Well, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna be the one to sell you on medication. But what I would say is, so a lot of times, people ask me the side effects of medication. And for stimulants, for ADD, it could be it decreases your appetite, or can negatively affect your sleep. But you always have to ask the second question, which is, what are the side effects of not taking the medicine? What's the impact on your life, on your business, on your money, on your relationships, on your health? Because living with untreated ADD, for many people, and maybe not you, but for many people,
33:43 Daniel Amen? it goes with chronic stress because of the negative things that tend to go along with it.
33:53 Steven Bartlett? The dysfunction.
33:54 Daniel Amen? And for you, you're clearly not broken.
34:00 Daniel Amen? But are you optimized? Do you have full access to your own brain? And I would argue, no. And we can do, and we can do better. But we can do it in steps. And ultimately, I see my job is giving people options. And then telling them the pros and cons of each option. And then letting them choose, right? I mean, that's what good doctors should do. It's called informed consent.
34:36 Daniel Amen? And, you know, I can just tell you my experience. And I told you the story with my daughter. And I've seen that play out thousands of times. That people just become more optimized. And it's not necessarily the medicine. But that medicine, when it's for the right brain, right? The wrong brain, it makes people worse. And if you read my book Healing ADD, I talk about the ring of fire ADD. So ADD and ADHD are different terms for the same thing.
35:17 Daniel Amen? 1980, the American Psychiatric Association's DSM Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. I hate that, but it's what we have, was Attention Deficit Disorder, ADD, with or without hyperactivity. 1987, God knows for what reason, they changed the name to ADHD. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, basically throwing out half the people who have it. Because half the people who have ADD or ADHD are never hyperactive. And they don't get diagnosed because they don't bring enough negative attention to themselves
35:59 Daniel Amen? for parents to go, you have a problem. And you're giving me a problem. So anyways, different names for the same thing. And if you can manage it by having extra help for the things you're not good at, with exercise.
36:22 Daniel Amen? With all of the good habits you have, well, that's awesome. If you want to be 10% more focused, like, I treat this writer. And she only takes medicine when she has to get stuff done. But she never takes it when she writes because she has 16 plotlines going on at once in her books. And she goes, no, I think it decreases my creativity a little bit.
36:55 Steven Bartlett? Interesting. Because the, the fact that we're medicating the, a brain like mine. I, I go, is that for professional optimization? Because if you just go back, like, I don't know, a couple hundred years. If you go back even further to a time when we couldn't like read or write, there wasn't computers and all of these things. You would have had no idea that, you know, if you go, if you go back far, you wouldn't have been able to tell a, really an ADHD. Well, what I'm trying to say is.
37:26 Daniel Amen? You'd be able to tell their life. I mean, I have a patient from Ethiopia. And I'm like, so tell me the impact in your culture. And he said, the people with severe ADHD get excluded because they can't be relied on. And the isolation causes great shame and pain.
37:51 Daniel Amen? And they have no idea it's a brain thing.
37:55 Steven Bartlett? Where does it come from, ADHD or ADD?
37:59 Daniel Amen? Well, it's genetic. It's clearly genetic. I mean, I, if I don't see it in someone's family, I think head trauma. And with you, I think that's possible because of soccer, except you see it in your family.
38:15 Steven Bartlett? Is it a defect or is it a difference?
38:18 Daniel Amen? It's a difference.
38:21 Steven Bartlett? If I, if I chose to take a drug, was it like, you called it Ritalin? I think you called it one of the.
38:26 Daniel Amen? So Ritalin would be one of the options.
38:28 Steven Bartlett? Whatever drug it was, what exactly would it do under brain scanning to my brain? So if I scanned my brain and took the drug, what would you see in my brain?
38:37 Daniel Amen? Well, I can tell you, it would activate your cerebellum.
38:41 Steven Bartlett? Okay, the bit, that was a bit sleepy.
38:43 Daniel Amen? It was a bit sleepy and it would activate your prefrontal cortex. And it would give your brain better energy. So my first spec scan, 1991, a woman, she tried to kill herself the night before. I went to the lecture on brain spec imaging and then I walked out of the lecture and she was my new patient. Her name was Sandy, tried to kill herself the night before. And as I'm getting to know her, I'm thinking she has ADD. She has an eight year old son who has ADD, talked about the genetic connection. She had an IQ of 144, but never finished college. And I'm like, how'd you study?
39:24 Daniel Amen? She said, well, I never really did, except maybe the night before a test, I'd put on a pot of coffee, stay up all night cramming, and then I'd take the test. It's classic ADD way of doing things. And I'm like, you know, I think maybe you have adult ADD. And she goes, oh, adults don't have ADD. And I'm thinking, I'm the doctor. But I'm like, how about if we look at your brain? And, and I knew from other work I'd done that I should do it twice at rest and concentration. And when she tried to concentrate, her brain completely deactivated, turned off. Like for you, Will, I did it once, but if I had done it twice, probably your brain would be busier at rest.
40:08 Daniel Amen? And then when you try to do it, it would drop. And I put the pictures on, a couple of days later, I put the picture on the table in front of her. And as I explained it to her, she started to cry. And she said, you mean, it's not my fault.
40:27 Daniel Amen? And I said, having ADD is sort of like people who need glasses. And I wear glasses to drive and took my glasses out, put them on. And I said, people who wear glasses aren't dumb, crazy or stupid. Our eyeballs are shaped funny and we wear glasses to focus. I said, people have ADD aren't dumb, crazy or stupid. Some of them are the brightest people I know, but their frontal lobes deactivate. Taking the medicine is like glasses for your frontal lobes. Help you focus. And she did it. She was conflict driven. She was always poking her husband. They got into a huge fight, which is why she tried to kill herself. She stopped that. She's a better mom. She went back and finished college.
41:10 Daniel Amen? I mean, her life's, it's like your brain with glasses.
41:13 Steven Bartlett? Well, my friends that take medication for ADD say that to me. They say it's like their life is before and after that moment. So I've, you know, I completely believe what you're saying. Second ago, you said this phrase when we were talking about the M, which is your mental health and the impact that has on the development of a brain that's either healthy or unhealthy. And you said this thing about you've got to make sure you kill the ants, which is killing those negative thoughts. That's much easier said than done. How does, how does someone go about killing their negative thoughts? Is there a process they can go through to do that?
41:49 Daniel Amen? Yeah, it's a habit, right? And it's not hard, but like any habit, you have to do it repeatedly, like over and over and over and over and over and over. Whenever you have a thought, your brain releases chemicals. Whenever you have a bad thought, a sad thought, a mad thought, your brain releases a certain set of chemicals that make you feel bad immediately. Your hands get cold, they start to sweat, your muscles get tense, you start to breathe erratically and it all happens instantaneously. Whenever you have a positive thought, happy thought, a hopeful thought, a loving thought,
42:33 Daniel Amen? like I'm back, because I loved the first time I was on the podcast with you. A completely different set of chemicals come out and your hands get warmer, drier, your breathing slows down, your heart beats in a healthier, and it happens like immediately.
42:53 Daniel Amen? People have ADD, since we're talking about that. They tend to go more toward negative thoughts because negative thoughts are more stimulating. And here's the exercise. 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? Is it absolutely true? This is a process I learned from my friend Byron Katie. How do I feel when I have this thought? How do I act when I have this thought? And what's the outcome of the thought? So, is it true?
43:37 Daniel Amen? Is it absolutely true? How do I feel, act, and the outcome of the thought? How would I feel if I didn't have the thought? How would I act if I didn't have the thought? What's the outcome of not having that thought? Then my favorite part of it is take the original thought. Tana never listens to me. Tana's my wife. I've had that thought. And then turn it to the opposite. Tana does listen to me. And then just ask yourself whether or not that's true. And by directing my thoughts, by managing, so rather than being a victim, so many of my patients are victims of their thoughts
44:21 Daniel Amen? until they do the work, right? This is one of the things where do what the F I say. Write down 100 of your worst thoughts. Take them through that process. And by the time you get to 30, they'll stop bothering you.
44:37 Steven Bartlett? So if I'm a repetitive negative thinker or a repetitive positive thinker, does that alone change the shape of my brain?
44:45 Daniel Amen? Yes. And in my new book, Change Your Brain Every Day, there's actually pictures of Noelle Nelson. She was writing a book called The Power of Appreciation. And I had her, she wanted me to scan her while she was appreciating her brain. And it looked beautiful. And I'm like, as I'm showing it to her, I'm like, you need to come back tomorrow and I want you to hate yourself. And she goes, oh, I don't want to do that. I'm like, come on, you have to suffer for science. And I said, why don't we have positive scan, then we had negative scan.
45:22 Daniel Amen? And the negativity dropped her left temporal lobe, her left frontal lobe, and her cerebellum. So interesting, I mean, similar to what your scan looks like, but hers was way worse. I mean, it's a healthy brain and then a deactivated brain. And that explained to me athletic slumps. It's like, why do people get in athletic slumps? Because negativity turns off their cerebellum and they become just a little less coordinated. Interesting. And I'm not a fan of positive thinking.
46:02 Daniel Amen? I'm a fan of accurate thinking with a positive spin. So positive thinking is I can have this third piece of cheesecake and it's not going to negatively impact my body or my brain. Like, no. The don't worry, be happy people die the earliest of accidents and preventable illnesses. So, a lot of people come to me for anxiety. And I'm like, so, on a scale of zero to 100, how much is it? And they're like, 50. I said, okay, our goal is not zero. Our goal's 15. I want you to have enough anxiety, you do the right things.
46:48 Steven Bartlett? Somewhat linked to that is a word you used as well, which is stress. When we're talking about the M in bright minds, how to have healthy brains. What role does stress play on our brains?
47:00 Daniel Amen? Stress, especially chronic unremitting stress. So if we think of the stress you had growing up, where there was a lot of fighting. It raises a hormone called cortisol. Cortisol begins to shrink activity in the hippocampus, one of the major memory and learning centers in the brain. So one could at least argue or postulate your struggle in school was because your emotional brain was busy because you were worried about things at home. It makes it more likely you get infections.
47:41 Daniel Amen? It makes it more likely that you have learning problems.
47:49 Steven Bartlett? And trauma, trauma was the other word you used, which I thought was worth diving into, the impact that trauma has on our brains. And does trauma show up when you scan someone's brain? Can you see it?
48:00 Daniel Amen? Yeah, so trauma shows up as that diamond pattern, which is why I asked you about it. It's your emotional brain, anterior cingulate at the top, it's the brain's gear shifter, thalamus, often involved in mood, basal ganglia, amygdala, involved in anxiety. So we often see worry, anxiety and sadness, and it shows up as that diamond pattern. That after people do EMDR, a specific psychological treatment for trauma, calms it down. And I say psychological treatment, I'm like, yeah, but it has biological effects. It's a very interesting treatment.
48:40 Daniel Amen? So I get you to, like, first thing, write down 10 big traumas in your life and we'll go after the worst one first and have you bring it up. And there's a whole process to it. They'll have your eyes go back and forth while you bring it up. And it's so interesting, the connections your brain will make to it. But as you process it, you find you're actually less bothered.
49:09 Daniel Amen? Buy it. And it's masterful for single incident traumas like being robbed or being in a car accident. For chronic trauma, it takes longer.
49:21 Daniel Amen? But it's so helpful. When I met my wife eighteen years ago.
49:29 Daniel Amen? Her ACE score, adverse childhood experiences, on a scale of zero to ten, how many bad things happened to you? Was an eight. And I was so taken with this woman. And one of my first gifts to her was ten sessions of EMDR. One, I wanted to see if she would like wrestle with her traumas. She went for two years. And I'm absolutely convinced that's one of the reasons she and I rarely fuss with each other. Because we don't trigger each other.
50:03 Steven Bartlett? When you talk about trauma, it's not these big T traumas that some people sometimes talk of, which is, you know, when I was young, I was fondled by my uncle, for example. It can also be an isolated incident that happened when you were an adult.
50:18 Daniel Amen? Absolutely. It can be anything that attacks your sense of safety, either physical or emotional. Getting fired is traumatic for a lot of people. Not performing in a high, in an important situation can be traumatic.
50:40 Steven Bartlett? And that changes the activity within your brain.
50:43 Daniel Amen? Well, it depends on how strong it is.
50:46 Steven Bartlett? If it was really strong.
50:47 Daniel Amen? If it was really strong.
50:48 Steven Bartlett? Then the activity centers of your brain would change.
50:51 Daniel Amen? And there's one thing we haven't talked about yet called brain reserve. Which is how healthy was the brain that you brought into trauma? Because you can take two soldiers, put them in the same tank, and expose them to the same blast, the same angles, everything was the same. One walks away unharmed, the other one's permanently disabled. Why? It's the brain they brought into the trauma.
51:25 Daniel Amen? And so if your mother used drugs while she was pregnant with you, she decreased your reserve. If your mom and dad fought a lot, or they separated when she was pregnant with you, that decreased your reserve. If she gave you bad food, if she neglected you, if there was chronic stress, that's decreasing your reserve. So all of us have a certain level of reserve when we go into that trauma. And some people get post-traumatic growth that they're actually better after the trauma. You know, they make the trauma and make something meaningful out of it. And other people have post-traumatic stress
52:08 Daniel Amen? where it really causes them to suffer. So I love the idea of brain reserve because I'm like always thinking of boosting mine.
52:19 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, because then also when something traumatic happens, I'm in a better place, right?
52:22 Daniel Amen? Right, like if you kill the ants, if your ant population is low.
52:27 Steven Bartlett? My automatic negative thoughts.
52:29 Daniel Amen? Right.
52:30 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
52:30 Daniel Amen? So if you're masterful, if you have an anteater running around in your head cleaning up the negative thoughts that all of us have, when you go into that trauma, you're just better able to deal with it than if you have an undisciplined mind that's infested. And there's nowhere in school that people teach you to kill the ants. We have a foundation called the Change Your Brain Foundation. And I love it so much. We're dedicated to research, education, service. But last year, we produced this new course called Brain Thrive by Five.
53:13 Daniel Amen? So it's for preschoolers, kindergarten, grade one, where we teach kids to love and care for their brain. It's like 30 modules. They're six to seven minutes long. And six of them are on learning to kill the ants. Little kids just love that. You don't have to believe every stupid thing you think. And I don't know if you know, but Jerry Seinfeld once said, "The brain is a sneaky organ." We all have weird, crazy, stupid, sexual, violent thoughts that nobody should ever hear. And just because you have a bad thought doesn't even mean you believe the thought, right? It's not the thoughts you have that make you suffer.
53:55 Daniel Amen? It's the thoughts you attach to that make you suffer. I get all sorts of crazy thoughts and I'm like, "My brain is so creative." But I don't believe most of them.
54:07 Steven Bartlett? Tell me about the most unhealthy brain you've ever seen.
54:12 Daniel Amen? For a 15-year-old, it was Kip Kinkel. He's a 15-year-old boy in Springfield, Oregon, who brought weapons to school. Got arrested. His parents picked him up from jail. And sometime between 6 o'clock that night and 8 o'clock the next morning, he murdered his mom and dad. And then he went to Springfield, Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon, and shot 25 people. Based on my work, they scanned him for his trial. His brain was so awful. Like, I'd never seen a 15-year-old that had a brain so damaged.
54:55 Daniel Amen? And his life reflected it.
54:58 Steven Bartlett? What did you see in his brain?
55:00 Daniel Amen? It was shriveled.
55:02 Steven Bartlett? At 15?
55:02 Daniel Amen? At 15. And it's like, okay, why? Well, he murdered his mom and dad, so I couldn't get a good history. But he either had anoxia at birth, a lack of oxygen, a severe infection, or something was poisoning his brain. It could have been lead. It could have been an infection. I mean, we were talking about M, the I, is immunity and infections. It's a major cause of psychiatric problems. Nobody knows about it.
55:35 Steven Bartlett? Have you scanned the brains of lots of psychopaths?
55:38 Daniel Amen? I have.
55:39 Steven Bartlett? And what do you see when you look at psychopaths?
55:41 Daniel Amen? So I published a study on murderers and young murderers have really low frontal lobe function, older murderers, it's global low activity. Now, not all murderers are the same. I have one murderer's brain, her brain actually looked pretty good, but she was in the middle of being abused by her husband and she murdered him. And it wasn't that irrational, you know, when you really know her story. But most brains are troubled.
56:15 Steven Bartlett? Do you think you could look at a brain and predict?
56:17 Daniel Amen? Now, you should ask me, should you scan presidential candidates?
56:21 Steven Bartlett? Interesting.
56:23 Daniel Amen? Especially now.
56:26 Steven Bartlett? What do you think Donald Trump's brain looks like?
56:29 Daniel Amen? Well, I think if we scanned President Biden or former President Trump, neither one of them would be healthy. I mean, one, we talked about the older you got, the less healthy they are. And if someone is going to have nuclear codes, shouldn't we know what their brain looks like? And I wrote an op ed piece in 2008, when Barack Obama was running against John McCain, arguing for, don't you think we should scan presidential candidates? And yeah, I don't think either one of their brains would be healthy.
57:12 Daniel Amen? And that concerns me because, I mean, what do we need for our top politicians? Judgment, forethought, impulse control.
57:25 Steven Bartlett? Okay, so playing devil's advocate to that, if we started to do that at the very highest office in the land, then that philosophy might creep down to lower offices in the land. And when you go and try and get a job at, I don't know, a restaurant or a marketing agency, it might become the norm that there's a almost brain discrimination or brain prejudice in play where someone like me, they have their brain scanned, they go, listen, this guy's, he's not going to be very good at, I don't know, focusing on things.
57:52 Daniel Amen? It's an interesting question. I have to tell you, if you date one of my children for more than four months, I'm gonna get you scanned.
58:02 Steven Bartlett? Really?
58:02 Daniel Amen? I'm gonna figure out how to do that. It's the rule in my family. And if you have a bad brain, it doesn't mean you can't come back. But are you smart enough to fix it? That would be the question.
58:17 Steven Bartlett? Have you done that?
58:19 Daniel Amen? Well, my son-in-law, Jesse, who I love, his mother has paranoid schizophrenia. I'm like, I wanna scan your brain. And I have. He actually wrote a book called Change Your Brain Before 25. And he opens the book with this story of his scan. And him sitting with me, he's 6'4", I'm 5'6", and he said he'd never felt so small. And yeah, no, that's the rule in my family. Like I said, when I met my wife, I really liked her. And the first naked part of her I wanted to see was her brain.
59:04 Daniel Amen? And so three weeks into our relationship, I'm like, hey, you haven't seen the clinic. Don't you wanna see the clinic? She came, I scanned her, and it passed.
59:17 Steven Bartlett? Do you use her brain against her? I bet you do. I bet you do.
59:24 Daniel Amen? No.
59:24 Steven Bartlett? We spoke to Tanner, she said you do. You're telling me there's not been one time where you've brought up her brain in a moment of conflict or arguments? Not once, cuz I will call Tanner.
59:37 Daniel Amen? I don't, yeah, no. Because you know what I do? And this is, this is on par with killing the ants. I do an exercise with my patients called the one-page miracle. On one piece of paper, write down what you want. And in a very specific way. What do you want in your relationships? Your work, your money, your physical, emotional, and spiritual health? What do you want? And with her, cuz she's on the top of my list, I want a kind, caring, loving, supportive, passionate relationship. I always want that. I don't always feel like that. Rude thoughts come into my head.
1:00:24 Daniel Amen? And if I've slept and I've eaten, I never say them. Why? Because it doesn't get me what I want. Right? And that's not selfish. People go, oh, but, you know, what you want is... But what I want is not selfish. It's good. Because hedonism is the enemy of happiness. But happiness is a moral obligation because of how you impact other people. Your brain's so smart, but you have to tell it what you want. And every major business, including mine, we have a one-page strategic plan. We know what we want and we know what we're gonna do this quarter and this year.
1:01:07 Daniel Amen? But people don't do that in their lives.
1:01:10 Steven Bartlett? And you think they should have like a life plan?
1:01:12 Daniel Amen? Every person should. What do you want? Is your behavior getting you what you want?
1:01:20 Steven Bartlett? Do you think the brain almost conspires to make... To fit what you want? Either brain... Once you're clear on what you want, I guess your actions will change a little bit. And then your brain will change shape to fit what you've said you wanted.
1:01:34 Daniel Amen? And the brain is lazy. The brain does what you allow it to do. And it's habitual. I was talking to one of my patients about this yesterday.
1:01:49 Daniel Amen? Because we were working on his one-page miracle. And he's like, you know, I could be more positive.
1:01:57 Daniel Amen? And I go, it's a habit to be negative or to be positive. Which highways are you building in your brain? Positive highways or negative highways? Accurate highways or distorted highways? You build that. And if you watch the news, they'll become more distorted.
1:02:17 Steven Bartlett? Really?
1:02:17 Daniel Amen? Yeah. In my book, The End of Mental Illness, I did something, it was very fun for me to do. I imagined if I was an evil ruler and I wanted to create mental illness, what would I do? And watching the news, I think it was, there's 62 evil ruler strategies. And I think that's like 12. Because...
1:02:40 Daniel Amen? The news is no longer the news. The news is about eyeballs and selling things. And negativity sells. If I can scare you, that will sell. And so you have to be very careful with what you allow in your brain. And yes, you should be informed, but not over and over and over and over again. People who start the day with the news are 27% less happy in the afternoon.
1:03:13 Steven Bartlett? Well, I listen to lots of true crime and serial killer things like every day.
1:03:19 Daniel Amen? It's so funny. I have this show on Instagram called Scan My Brain. I take influential people and scan them. And I did Meghan Trainor, the musician. I love her music. And she goes, I can't sleep. And every night before bed, she's listening to true crime. And I'm like, stop that.
1:03:42 Steven Bartlett? Do you think it matters? Because I listen to true crime before bed.
1:03:45 Daniel Amen? I have this exercise that I recommend all my patients. I've done it for 10 years. What went well? When I go to bed, I start at the beginning of the day and
1:04:01 Daniel Amen? just go hour by hour, looking for what went right about my day. I think that's set your dreams up to be more positive. I think it's. I do both. And then I just see which one works better for you. Every day, win or learn.
1:04:18 Steven Bartlett? What is the I in Bright Minds?
1:04:20 Daniel Amen? Immunity and infections. So do you know your vitamin D level?
1:04:25 Steven Bartlett? No, but I do take the only supplement that I've take frequently. I'd say there's two is vitamin D and omega three. But because I'm black as well.
1:04:37 Daniel Amen? You need more vitamin D.
1:04:38 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:04:39 Daniel Amen? So people have darker skin need. And. Going from Africa, where there's a lot of sun, to the UK, where there's no sun, dramatically increase the risk of mental health problems.
1:04:54 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:04:55 Daniel Amen? Because of vitamin D deficiencies.
1:04:57 Steven Bartlett? Do you know what? I think there's a certain member of my family who I won't name, who went from Africa, they've got two Nigerian parents, went from Africa to the UK. And I saw their mental health deteriorate quite significantly to the point that we believe this person might have bipolar now. And I, I, I, part of me suspects, once I learn about vitamin D deficiency in people that have darker skin, this person has very, very, very, very black skin. Um, but it might be associated with that change. Being in a new country that has no sunlight for 30 years, when you're, you know, black, black.
1:05:33 Daniel Amen? You bet.
1:05:34 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:05:34 Daniel Amen? And it's part of, so if you see, mental health is brain health, then that becomes a critical intervention. If you're not paying attention to brain health, then you're like, well, what antipsychotic or what mood stabilizer can I give them? And I'm very well, I may use an antipsychotic or a mood stabilizer. But if I get your brain healthy, you might not need it, or you'll need half the dose. So, and, and then infections, I mean, we're just coming out of a pandemic. And COVID changes your brain in a bad way.
1:06:14 Daniel Amen? It causes, um, like a, a inflammatory bomb to go off in your brain. I was on the Kardashian show last year because I scanned Kendall. Kendall came to see me. And obviously I was on the show, so it was public knowledge. And it was post-COVID and her emotional brain just was on fire.
1:06:39 Daniel Amen? And that's what we saw with COVID. And long COVID, emotional brain is hot, but then the cortex begins to.
1:06:49 Daniel Amen? Get low in activity. It's a bad combination.
1:06:53 Steven Bartlett? Why? What does that mean?
1:06:54 Daniel Amen? It's like chronic damage.
1:06:56 Steven Bartlett? And what does that mean if the, in terms of behavior? What's the implications for behavior?
1:07:01 Daniel Amen? So the hot limbic brain tense anxiety that she hadn't had. If you start damaging your cortex and all of a sudden you're sad, you're impulsive, you're irritable, you can get dark thoughts, sometimes even suicidal thoughts. And people got COVID significantly increased in dementia.
1:07:30 Steven Bartlett? Someone who's listening to this right now that is depressed, clinically depressed, or just feels, you know, depressive symptoms. Where do you start? Let's go to the extreme end. Someone that can't get themselves out of bed. I sat here with Jada Pinkett and she told me that she was clinically depressed. And she, if she just got to four PM every day, to her that was a victory. There are lots of people out there that are in that situation right now. Where do you start with those people? What advice do you give them? Cause I'm sure you see a lot of them in your practice.
1:08:04 Daniel Amen? It starts with awareness.
1:08:07 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:08:07 Daniel Amen? That maybe this is not me, maybe it's my brain. And then it starts with loving your brain and then investigating your brain. Cause depression is like chest pain. So if you, if somebody like had chest pain, you're like, well, where would you start? Well, you start with an evaluation. You wouldn't start with drugs. I mean, that would be like ludicrous. You would like go, well, why do you have chest pain? Why are you depressed? You know, how's your thyroid, right? The person that can't get off the couch, they could be hypothyroid. Or one of my friends got depressed.
1:08:48 Daniel Amen? She had anemia, she had pernicious anemia because it was a B12 deficiency. I wouldn't assume, oh, you're depressed, take this medicine. Depression is what it is, it's not why it is. And if you don't know why it is, how do you effectively treat something? Like so many people come to me and they go, I have an autoimmune disorder. It's like, well, why do you have an autoimmune disorder? Why is your body so mad at you? It's attacking itself. And so.
1:09:16 Steven Bartlett? Because my body's broken.
1:09:19 Daniel Amen? But why is your body broken? Right? And I hate the term "broken," right? The series like "The Broken Brain." And it's like, no, it's not optimized. Let's optimize it. I never want my patients to think of them as mental. And I never want them to think of themselves as broken. You're awesome. So how can I help you be maybe 10% more awesome?
1:09:46 Steven Bartlett? People feel like their brain is against them, is working against them when they're feeling depression or those chronic cycles of negative thinking. Why is my brain attacking me? Why is it against me?
1:09:58 Daniel Amen? So part of it is it's not healthy and part of it's undisciplined. And I got to do a lecture last year for the coaching staff of the Miami Heat. It was so much fun for me. And I'm really thinking a lot about elite performance. And I think it's just such a better model. It's like, let me help you be your best, rather than let me fix you. And I think someone like you, I mean, it's like, you're already awesome. How can I make you more awesome? How can I give you more access to your own brain?
1:10:41 Daniel Amen? And it's just, it's easier to sell that than, you know, let me give you a diagnosis of a mental illness and then let me give you a medicine you have to take for the rest of your life. This is the wrong model that psychiatry is currently operating with. Really good for the pharmaceutical industry, really bad for our society. 25% of the American population is on psychiatric drugs. That's just horrifying.
1:11:13 Steven Bartlett? Is Ritalin a psychiatric drug?
1:11:15 Daniel Amen? It is. And I'm not opposed to psychiatric drugs. To be really clear, I'm actually really good with them. It's never the first and only thing I think about.
1:11:27 Steven Bartlett? What is the "N" in Bright Minds?
1:11:29 Daniel Amen? Neurohormone. If your hormones that affect your brain, which are all of them...
1:11:39 Daniel Amen? Are not optimal, you're not optimal.
1:11:42 Steven Bartlett? And the DNS?
1:11:43 Daniel Amen? Like if you're cold when other people are not, we should look at your thyroid. The D is diabetes, where you're overweight and/or have high blood sugar is the most common of the 11. Seventy-two percent of people are overweight. And as your weight goes up, you have seven of the 11 risk factors. It lowers blood flow to the brain, it prematurely ages the brain, it increases inflammation, it stores toxins. It's a bad thing. And then the S is sleep.
1:12:18 Steven Bartlett? I've got obsessed with my sleep recently. I have my Whoop on pretty much all the time and they're sponsor of this podcast, I probably should say, but I'm also like an equity shareholder in the company. But it's become one of my biggest obsessions in my life is waking up in the morning and looking at how I slept, how much deep sleep, restorative sleep I've had, my heart rate variability, all that stuff. I'm obsessed with it. What does sleep do to my brain? I guess you said earlier that it kind of cleans it, cleans it and refreshes it.
1:12:42 Daniel Amen? Well, we didn't even know that until, I guess it's 10 or 12 years ago, where researchers saw that the fluid system in your brain, it's called the glymphatic system, doesn't open up when you're awake. But when you're asleep, it opens up and then sort of cleans things, washes things. And so for those people like me, who I thought I was special because I could get by on four hours of sleep at night, I'm sort of running around with a toxic brain or a dirty brain. And so...
1:13:16 Steven Bartlett? What are those toxins? So what is it cleaning?
1:13:19 Daniel Amen? Have you heard of beta amyloid, which is a cluster of proteins that increases your risk of Alzheimer's disease? So they build up during the day, system cleans it. But if you're not getting good sleep, you have more of a toxic buildup of those kinds of clumping proteins that are problematic for you.
1:13:42 Steven Bartlett? Interesting.
1:13:44 Daniel Amen? Interesting.
1:13:45 Steven Bartlett? Is there anything else people need to know about sleep in the brain? Because I think everybody knows sleep is important. A lot of people struggle with sleep.
1:13:52 Daniel Amen? Sleep apnea triples the risk of Alzheimer's disease. One of the big lessons imaging has taught me that I can actually see the pattern for sleep apnea on a scan and it looks like early Alzheimer's disease. Bilateral parietal top back part of your brain decreases.
1:14:13 Steven Bartlett? What is sleep apnea?
1:14:15 Daniel Amen? Snore loudly, stop breathing at night, chronically tired the next day. So when you sleep, you're breathing. You have many apnic episodes where you stop breathing. And so, and if you're sleeping alone, you actually might not know it because no one's being woken up by your snoring. And even people who've been diagnosed with it don't treat it because they don't want to wear the mask at night. And I'm like, no, you have to treat it. Otherwise, the worst thing you can do for your brain is starve it of oxygen.
1:15:00 Daniel Amen? That's the worst thing you can do for your brain.
1:15:03 Steven Bartlett? So breath work then must be quite good for the brain.
1:15:06 Daniel Amen? Breath work is good for the brain. One of my tiny habits, I have many of them for brain health, is the 15 second breath. Eight seconds in, hold it for a second and a half, four seconds out, hold it for a second and a half. Do that four times, eight times, it'll break a panic attack. Do it on a routine basis, it'll increase your heart rate variability.
1:15:32 Steven Bartlett? Breath work, Will.
1:15:33 Daniel Amen? Breath work.
1:15:34 Steven Bartlett? Heart rate variability is this metric that I think society, much of society has suddenly become quite obsessed with, including me. Me and my friends literally have a heart rate variability contest every morning where we like screenshot our heart rate variability and drop it into the chat. And some of my friends are trying to increase theirs. One of my friends called, it's my friend called Ash, I mentioned him earlier on. His has been quite low, so he's kind of been trying to get it up. I guess we're gonna have to ask two questions here, which is, what is heart rate variability? And the second question is, how do I improve it, in your view?
1:16:02 Daniel Amen? So again, you can't change what you don't measure. And now people who wear Apple watches or Oura rings or devices that measure it.
1:16:12 Daniel Amen? Heart rate variability is the beat to beat variability of your heart rate. And people go, oh, well, my heart rate should beat the same. Well, no, actually, the more variable it is, bum bum bum bum bum bum, rather than bum bum bum bum bum bum. I first heard about heart rate variability with babies. That when a baby is being born, they actually put a scalp monitor on it and they look at the heart rate variability of the baby. And if it's very variable, it's bouncing all over the place. Well, it's a sign of heart health.
1:16:53 Daniel Amen? When it flattens and becomes even, like it's just 70, they go get the baby because that mean the baby is in trouble.
1:17:04 Steven Bartlett? Doesn't make any sense, does it? It's like counterintuitive.
1:17:06 Daniel Amen? It's a little bit counterintuitive. But if your heart rate variability is low, you have a higher risk of anxiety, depression and heart disease dying early. I mean, there's this huge connection between your brain health and your heart health. And so meditation increases heart rate variability. Breath work increases heart rate variability. Exercise can increase heart rate variability. Good sleep and good sleep hygiene can increase it and decrease heart rate variability.
1:17:48 Steven Bartlett? I stopped drinking alcohol for this very reason. People don't know this, but I, I mean, I've probably mentioned it twice now on air. But I quit drinking alcohol about a month and a half ago, I think. And part of the reason is when I wore my whoop and then I had, I don't know, one glass of wine or two glasses or three glasses of wine the day before, when I woke up the next day, my heart rate variability was like flashing red. It was 30, 40. Typically, on a great day, my heart rate variability is 150, 140. Which is strong.
1:18:18 Daniel Amen? Really strong.
1:18:19 Steven Bartlett? I know this because I compete with my friends, but on a day where I had a glass of alcohol, it'd be flashing red and it'd be forty. Also, if I was sick, it would be forty. Also, if I had a really stressful, unslept day the day before, it would also be forty. And the fact that alcohol was causing my heart to respond the same as an awfully stressful, unslept day or COVID, I thought, fuck, fuck that. And I've, so that's part of the reason I quit drinking alcohol.
1:18:48 Daniel Amen? And now that you have brain envy?
1:18:51 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:18:51 Daniel Amen? You're gonna have a healthier brain if you keep it away. Because alcohol lies to us.
1:18:57 Steven Bartlett? Alcohol lies to us.
1:18:58 Daniel Amen? Alcohol causes damage in the brain.
1:19:02 Steven Bartlett? Really?
1:19:02 Daniel Amen? Even a little bit of alcohol causes damage in the brain. It disrupts something called white matter. So gray matter, nerve cell bodies, white matter, nerve cell tracts. So white matter is the highways in your brain that transmit information and impulses. And even a little bit of alcohol has been shown to disrupt the white matter in your brain. I don't want anything messing with the highways in my brain. But I love that you measured it, you made the connection, and then you stopped it. It's a sign of intelligent life because you love yourself.
1:19:42 Steven Bartlett? Alcohol. Because there's a lot of people that are sat on the fence right now with alcohol. They probably don't have a really bad relationship with it. They're probably not alcoholics. But they kind of just, they have it because society is constructed in such a way that on a Friday evening, when the waiter comes over and puts down the wine list, you just go, oh, I'm getting whatever. That's who I was. I was just on the fence. My friend, one of my best friends, was an alcoholic. So I understand why he quit because he had this really dysfunctional relationship with it that would ruin his life. I'm the type of person that would have one drink, two drinks, and then I'd maybe stop. I didn't feel the need to have three, four, seven, nineteen. He was different. And also because of that, there was no adverse consequences in my life.
1:20:22 Steven Bartlett? So when I went away with him recently, he's writing a book on alcohol and alcoholism. He was telling me about the book and I was going, I personally wouldn't read that book because I don't feel like I have a problem with alcohol. This was before I quit. So I was like, what I would love from a book, this is just me personally, is a book that made the case to people who are kind of sat on the fence that drink or a beer or a glass of wine, just because, I don't know, society is constructed in such a way where it's hard to avoid. But they could go for a mocktail if someone gave them some performance-based evidence that alcohol, just even a little bit, the casual drinking, actually matters. So this is where you come in, doctor.
1:21:07 Daniel Amen? One of my biggest Instagram posts was I told you so. The American Cancer Society came out and said, any alcohol increases your risk of seven different types of cancer. And I've been talking about this for 30 years because I have scans. And people who drink any alcohol have lower activity than people who don't drink at all. And obviously alcoholics, they have terrible looking brains. Don't do that. But you gotta ask yourself why? And remember, we talked about the one-page miracle. What do you want?
1:21:49 Daniel Amen? Relationships, work, money, physical, emotional, spiritual health. So where does alcohol come in to that? Oh, well, it helps me relax. Well, the 15-second breath will help you relax, but there are no side effects to it. That will increase your heart rate variability. Alcohol will decrease heart rate variability and brain function. And if it decreases, brain function and decreases decision-making. As a psychiatrist.
1:22:19 Daniel Amen? Thirty percent, forty percent of the people I see, they initially come to my office because it's somehow alcohol related. Fight with their spouse, problems with their kids, whatever. I'm so impressed you noticed the difference with heart rate variability and then you stopped.
1:22:37 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, because I'm offended, I was offended with alcohol. And it's crazy, and I now understand how difficult it is to stop in our society. I was telling my team, I quit and I went for dinner with a guy called Skrillex. Everyone knows Skrillex is a DJ, Sonny. And this was a week after I'd quit, sat in the restaurant, the waiter comes over, bless him, and he goes, here's the wine list. I go, I don't drink alcohol. He goes, he goes and gets a bottle of wine and he puts it next to me and goes, this is not alcohol, this is art. I'm going to leave it next to you just in case you get tempted. And Sonny's, Sonny, to his credit, is telling this waiter, no, he doesn't drink. This waiter's having none of it. And in that moment, I understood how difficult it is to quit in a society that we've built,
1:23:20 Steven Bartlett? where every social interaction apparently needs to be fueled by alcohol. And if you say no, you're either weird or someone will try and change your mind or persuade you otherwise. It's just the culture we have.
1:23:32 Daniel Amen? Evil ruler society. I tell you, that's an evil ruler strategy. The food pushers, the drug pushers, the alcohol pushers. For me, I just, I look at people like that and it's like, so why do you want me to drink when I don't want to? What's it, what's going on with you?
1:23:49 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:23:50 Daniel Amen? And I usually shut them down. But why? Interesting question. When you go to a restaurant, the first thing they do is put bread on the table and ask you if you want alcohol, because both of them drop your frontal lobes. Both of them make it more likely you're going to order more and spend more money at the restaurant. So the bread is an investment on their part because bread gives you a sugar spike, a blood sugar spike, which then pushes serotonin in your brain and makes you happy. But serotonin drops frontal lobe function.
1:24:35 Daniel Amen? One thing they never tell you when they give you an SSRI for depression is, oh, you're going to become a little bit more impulsive because it's going to drop your frontal lobes. And then alcohol, which also drops your frontal lobes. So you'll drop more cash in the restaurant.
1:24:52 Steven Bartlett? Question then, on this point of alcohol.
1:24:56 Steven Bartlett? If I took two people off the street, let's say they do everything in their lives the same, other than what I'm about to say. I gave one of them a casual drink for the next decade. Just maybe two drinks a week, three drinks a week for the next decade. And the other person was completely sober for the next decade. When you looked at their brain, in 10 years' time, if they were doing everything the same, would you see a difference?
1:25:20 Daniel Amen? Yes. The person who is drinking two or three times a week will have less blood flow in their brain.
1:25:26 Steven Bartlett? And will that have changed the shape of their brain?
1:25:29 Daniel Amen? Yes, it'll be a little bit more shriveled.
1:25:32 Steven Bartlett? And then that means their behavior is going to change as well?
1:25:35 Daniel Amen? They'll have a little bit less impulse control.
1:25:38 Steven Bartlett? And when you look at the brain of an alcoholic?
1:25:39 Daniel Amen? A little bit less impulse control when you're doing hard things like marriage.
1:25:45 Daniel Amen? Not a good thing, or raising children, or managing a business. It's like, you don't want a little bit worse decisions.
1:25:56 Steven Bartlett? Sex, sex and libido. A lot of people are struggling with their sex lives, getting an erection, getting aroused, men and women. The brain and sex.
1:26:07 Steven Bartlett? I imagine you have people come to you and go, listen, me and my wife, me and my partner, me and my husband, we've stopped having sex. I've lost my libido. When you hear that, and you offer people advice on libido and sex, what is?
1:26:19 Daniel Amen? You get your brain right, your sex life gets better.
1:26:23 Daniel Amen? In large part, it's about blood flow. And if you're having erectile dysfunction or low libido, you gotta go, well, why? What are the risk factors with that? And many of them relate to what's going on in your brain. And I, so often, people go, I did everything you said, and my wife's so much happier with our sex life.
1:26:54 Daniel Amen? You have to check your hormones. I think that's very important. You have to deal with whatever sexual trauma might be there. The biggest sex organ in the body is your brain. If there's no forethought, there's no foreplay. And so it's about the decisions that you make.
1:27:16 Steven Bartlett? What else do I need to know about sex? If I'm trying to get my partner in the mood and I'm trying to make them aroused.
1:27:21 Daniel Amen? It depends on their brain.
1:27:23 Steven Bartlett? Okay, right.
1:27:24 Daniel Amen? So if your partner has a very busy frontal lobe, that part called the anterior cinguligiris, you can't go, "Come on, let's have sex." Because you've met people with the automatic no, that no matter what you say, they're gonna say the opposite of it, or they're gonna fuss with it. I mean, it's like, "It's a nice day today." "Oh, no, it was nicer yesterday." I mean, even simple things. So you're gonna, "Wanna have sex?" No.
1:27:55 Daniel Amen? I was at this lecture once, and somebody came up to me at a break and said, "You've helped me so much. I thought my wife just didn't love me." And what I realized is that part of her brain was just working too hard. So now I ask everything in the opposite. It's like, oh. Like, if I wanted to go to the store, she'd never wanna go with me. And I'd go... So now what I do is I go, "I'm gonna go to the store. You probably don't wanna come." "What do you mean, I don't wanna come? Of course I wanna come." He said, "But it doesn't sound right to say, 'Well, you probably don't wanna have sex.'" Oh, and I go, "Okay, I know her brain do this." And I gave him natural things to boost serotonin.
1:28:41 Daniel Amen? So I said, "Take her out for a pasta dinner." So I'm not a fan of pasta generally, except for these people. "Take her out for a pasta dinner, because pasta increases serotonin." "Then take her for a walk around the lake, because exercise increases serotonin." "Then give her a piece of dark chocolate." Not too many, because if you get her too many, she'll have no need for you. But...
1:29:08 Daniel Amen? Dark chocolate has PEA in it, phenylethlymines, that alerts your brain that something fun is about to happen. And then, put on a little baby powder, because baby powder, it's been shown scientifically, is a natural aphrodisiac for women. Because what do women unconsciously associate to baby powder? Babies. And unconsciously, they want one. And then, rub her back and don't ask for anything directly. And from about day four to about day 18 of her menstrual cycle, you're likely to get lucky. Why from day four to day 18?
1:29:50 Daniel Amen? Because she's the last week of a woman's menstrual cycle. Especially people who have this brain type tend to be more irritable. Is that before their period? No, it's before the period. Okay, so the week before their period is when she's gonna be most... So two weeks before their period is generally the best time. Do men and women have different brains significantly? Wildly so. So this whole thing about you can't put your gender on your medical forms is just insanely stupid. Because gender matters. Like estrogen and testosterone, they matter when it comes to brain function. I published a study on 46,000 scans,
1:30:35 Daniel Amen? looking at the differences between male and female brains. And they're wild. Women have much better frontal lobe function, much better blood flow to the front part of their brain. Which makes them... Which makes them good leaders. If you think of impulse control and collaboration and communication. And the one statistic that just hammers this home is who goes to jail? Men. Fourteen times more than women. But women get depressed twice as much as men because their limbic or emotional brain is much busier than the male brain.
1:31:19 Daniel Amen? And that's why in every human society, women are primary caretakers for children. Women have a bigger nesting instinct. So I told you, we moved recently. And moving is much harder on women in general than it is in men because they feel like they lose their nest and they have to redo their nest. And I was an army psychiatrist for seven years and I used to always tell the guys, I'm like, when you move, you stay home and help her put the house together because she's going to be way happier for you.
1:31:53 Steven Bartlett? On that impulse control, but I remember reading the statistics that men suffer with gambling addictions and betting addictions significantly more than women.
1:32:02 Daniel Amen? Drug addictions, alcohol, ADD, five times more than women. But women get help because they're not afraid to ask for help. Where for men, it's often a macho thing. It's like, there's nothing the matter with me. Which is why women attempt suicide three to four times more than males, but males kill themselves three to four times more than women do because men use more violent means. And men aren't communicating, I'm in trouble.
1:32:42 Steven Bartlett? Saunas, sauna is an exercise on the brain. Good for the brain?
1:32:50 Daniel Amen? So I'm a huge fan of saunas because the studies, mostly from Northern Europe, people who take the most saunas have the lowest incidence of Alzheimer's disease. And I told you about my mercury, detoxing is really important. And you can detox in a lot of different ways, but sauna is one of the most effective ways. Exercise is, you want to stay young, walk like you're late. If you're 80 and you can walk three miles an hour, you have a 90% chance of living till you're 90. If you can only walk a mile an hour, you have a 90% chance, you're not gonna live until you're 90.
1:33:34 Daniel Amen? So, exercise boosts blood flow, it increases brain-derived neurotrophic factor, it increases serotonin, increases dopamine. Another interesting thing is, should you do cold plunges? Because cold plunges have been found to fairly dramatically increase dopamine.
1:33:56 Steven Bartlett? So you should do cold plunges?
1:33:58 Daniel Amen? Not if you have heart problems. So, if you have heart problems, I wouldn't do that. But if you have inflammation, if you have pain, if you tend to be depressed, there's evidence cold plunges can be helpful.
1:34:12 Steven Bartlett? What about weight in the brain? When you look at someone who is clinically obese and you look at their brain, what do you see? And if I'm trying to lose weight, what do I need to know about the brain?
1:34:26 Daniel Amen? You know, I've thought a lot about this because I have obesity in my family. As your weight goes up, the size and function of your brain goes down. And that's horrifying. People who are, and our society is against us. I mean, you just, I wrote a book called The Brain Warrior's Way, and I argue you're in a war for the health of your brain. Everywhere you go, someone's trying to shove bad food down your throat that will kill you.
1:34:58 Steven Bartlett? I can see the emotion in your face when you say this.
1:35:00 Daniel Amen? Yeah. It's just horrifying, you know, to think of Carl's Jr. that'll take these, you know, Charlotte McKinney or Catherine Webb, these beautiful women, and have them eat cheeseburgers. And it's unconsciously, people are like, if you eat those burgers, these women will want you. Well, these women have spit buckets on those sats, where every time they take a bite, they spit it out because they'd never have those bodies if they ate that food. We are being manipulated. And it is causing what I think is one of the greatest epidemics ever of obesity. And as you're overweight...
1:35:44 Daniel Amen? Lower blood flow, aging, inflammation, stores toxins, makes you feel awful about yourself. Takes healthy testosterone. We talked about, you know, why the low. Takes healthy testosterone and turns it into unhealthy, cancer-promoting forms of estrogen. It's just a disaster what's happening. I think you have to start counting your calories. And, you know, I run up against all sorts of scientists, go, calories don't count. It's complete crap. Now, the quality of your calories is just as important, but don't eat more than you need. And we live
1:36:28 Daniel Amen? in a society where we're eating way too much, and people don't know. If you think of the Cheesecake Factory and these monster portions, it's like, that's insane. And it's a big thing that changed. But the obesity epidemic really started as the US government, among others, demonized fat. Everything became low-fat in the 80s. Low-fat, low cholesterol. And they put sugar in things to replace it. In fact, it just came out recently, it was
1:37:07 Daniel Amen? in the 60s, that some of the sugar companies paid scientists to say it's fat, not sugar. And it damaged millions of people.
1:37:20 Steven Bartlett? Last thing I wanted to ask you about is, well, there's really two outstanding questions that I have for you, doctor. The first one is about screen time. People want to know, does screen time, this generation that have grown up 11 hours a day on a screen or social media, up to 11 hours a day, according to some studies, does that have an impact on our brain?
1:37:40 Daniel Amen? It does. It shrinks it. It's sad. I mean, what it does is it wears out your pleasure summers. So you have these two areas in your brain called the nucleus accumbens, and they respond to dopamine. And they bring you happiness, and they bring you pleasure, and they bring you motivation, and they bring you drive. And...
1:38:05 Daniel Amen? When you're hitting them, like every buzz on your phone, every notification, every time you scroll and you like something, you've just got a little hit of dopamine. Well, the more you do it, pretty soon, you thrill them to death. You begin to wear out those pleasure centers. And let's just take fame, for example. I've been blessed to see Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus and a whole bunch of really fascinating, cool people who've been really depressed. It's like, how can you be depressed? You're Justin Bieber. Or how can you believe you're not enough? Right?
1:38:47 Daniel Amen? Because their pleasure centers get worn out by being noticed over and over and over again. Well, when you allow that in your brain, the screen time, three and a half hours, if you're on for three and a half hours a day, you have an increased risk of anxiety, depression, addiction, obesity, ADHD. And our society's on way more than that. And you go, so why are we having this epidemic of teenage suicide and mental health problems, especially in teenage girls? Social media, it's one of the big issues of the day. And not only are you wearing out your pleasure centers, you hate yourself because you think everybody's better than you are.
1:39:32 Daniel Amen? It's the comparison drag that is damaging you.
1:39:38 Steven Bartlett? My last question is about happiness, which we're talking about then. I spoke to, I think it was Tali Sharot that told me happiness takes on this kind of interesting arc throughout our lives, where at the start of our lives, we're a little bit happier, then in the middle of our lives, we're a little bit sadder. And then as we age, we go back into being happy. Now, I was contrasting that information to what you said about how the brain withers with age. If the brain is withering with age, then how come a lot of neuroscientists think that happiness resembles this kind of U shape in our lives? Where in the middle of our lives, we're less happy. At the start and the end, we're more happy.
1:40:22 Daniel Amen? That's a great question. We're less striving as we age, right? So after sixty five, seventy, we've sort of done much of the hard things that we need to do. And so depression also goes up with age, too. And obviously dementia goes up with age. So I think it's because I don't have to accomplish things, which makes the middle part so hard.
1:40:57 Steven Bartlett? So we're more satisfied with the nature of our lives because we're not trying to?
1:41:01 Daniel Amen? Well, if we are, right? If we're not, then that becomes a problem and increases the risk of depression.
1:41:10 Steven Bartlett? It's complicated, though, isn't it? Because, you know, you get older, you probably have less connections as well. So that's a confounding factor and.
1:41:16 Daniel Amen? Yeah, so I wouldn't. I mean, I have seen that research and I wrote a book on happiness. Because, you know, when I write a book, it'll take me six to nine months to write it. And I'm like, so what do I really want to think about for this next six to nine months? And I loved it because like
1:41:39 Daniel Amen? negative thinking is a bad habit, is happiness is also a habit. And when I go to bed and I go, what went well today? I'm feeding happiness. Or throughout the day, if I look for the micro moments of happiness, you know, what's the smallest thing that's going to happen today that's going to make me happy? Then I'm just happier.
1:42:02 Steven Bartlett? I hear all of this and I read all of this in your books. And one of the things I've really taken away personally is because I have so much information, what I need to do is select a couple of these habits and basically put them into my calendar. Like you talked about the breath work and you talked about the gratitude exercise at night and those kinds of things. What I need to do is get a couple of them and just insert them into my calendar. Because, you know, if they're not scheduled, they probably won't happen in a life as busy as mine. So as well as making small sort of changes to the, you know, maybe dietary things or water or whatever it might be, drinking a little bit less caffeine. I've already quit alcohol, make sure I focus on my sleep. Some of these I want to make routines in my life. So that's what I'm going to do. That's what I'm going to take away from this.
1:42:45 Steven Bartlett? We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for. And the question that's been left for you is quite perfect, I think. What have you changed your mind about in the last decade?
1:43:01 Daniel Amen? Well, the first thing that comes to my mind is this idea that I got from Dennis Prager,
1:43:11 Daniel Amen? which is happiness is a moral obligation. I never thought of it that way. I grew up Roman Catholic. That idea was nowhere in my family. It was nowhere in the Catholic school I went to. And, and I'm grateful for my education. Uh, and I'm grateful for my faith. But it was about should and shaming rather than elevation. And the fact that happiness is a moral obligation. There's this video that Dennis Prager produced that I just love called Why Be Happy?
1:43:57 Daniel Amen? And, and I never thought that
1:44:05 Daniel Amen? how I feel
1:44:09 Daniel Amen? influences everybody around me. That if I'm unhappy, that's not just about me. That's about everybody I come in contact with. So working on myself is the most loving thing I can do for other people.
1:44:33 Steven Bartlett? Daniel G. Amen.
1:44:36 Steven Bartlett? Thank you so much. Thank you for an amazing conversation and also thank you for taking the time to look at my brain. And you're totally right. Now that I have the awareness that that brain even exists, having seen it, it's almost like I feel like it's like a Pablo my dog. I now feel a responsibility to take care of it. And I think that that coupled with everything that you've imparted on me about the fact that I can do something about it, for me, is life changing. And, you know, I could have sat here all day and read tens of thousands of comments that I saw online about the work that you're doing to help people live happier, healthier, healthier lives. And the consequence that has for generations, I think, is maybe the most special thing of all. Because if you can tilt someone's brain in a better direction, you're not just tilting their brain in a
1:45:20 Steven Bartlett? better direction, you're tilting generations to come of brains in a better direction. And that alone will tilt society in a better direction. And that's exactly the work that you're doing. So I know we talked about your father last time around.
1:45:36 Steven Bartlett? You know, oftentimes, we don't get the praise from our parents that I guess we we always longed for. But I really hope you understand how proud everyone is of you. All the patience that you've invested time and love and energy in, all the people that listen to this show that were tilted in a better direction because of you, and me as well. My life's been tilted in a better direction because of you. So thank you. Thank you so much. What a joy.
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