- Why the [bleep] is my anxiety
through the [bleep] roof today?
What do you want from me, brain?
There's a lot of that going on.
Hi, this is Doctor Daniel Amen.
I'm a double board-certified psychiatrist,
founder of Amen Clinics,
and the author of "The
End of Mental Illness".
This is Brain Support.
[rhythmic music]
Rory Banwell, "Why does
your brain sometimes
"completely forget common words?
"I just couldn't remember
drawer, like what?"
Interrupt signals that
happen in your brain,
it can be due to a lack
of sleep, not eating,
negative thoughts, low blood sugar.
If it happens once a week,
I wouldn't worry about it,
but if it's beginning to
happen two, three, four
times a week and if it's worse
than it was 10 years ago,
it actually could be a
sign of impending trouble,
and that's where you wanna really
begin to look at your brain habits.
If you have hypertension,
high blood pressure,
as blood pressure goes up blood
flow to the brain does down.
If you have any form of heart
disease or vascular disease
like a heart arrhythmia, if
you had general anesthesia
at some point in the past
that can lower blood flow,
if you don't exercise.
The simple way for each of
these risk factors, it's, okay,
what is it, how do you
know if you have it,
and what to do about it,
and what to do about low blood flow,
exercise boosts blood flow to the brain.
There are simple things like
eating beets, cayenne pepper,
oregano, rosemary, all of those things
have been found to increase blood flow,
as have simple supplements
like ginkgo biloba.
Dylan_Saunders, "Right brained people,
"how do you turn off your left brains?"
Well, we really can't turn
off a part of our brain.
Dolphins can, dolphins actually sleep
with one hemisphere asleep at a time,
but humans can't do that.
You would literally have to cut
this area of the brain
called the corpus callosum,
and it's like so many
wires connecting the left
and right hemispheres of the brain
that it's just not
possible to turn it off.
There's some people who are
born without a corpus callosum,
so then the sides of the brain
are not talking to each other
and they have some very interesting
neuropsychological findings,
but ultimately you want both
sides connected to each other.
Dayaawarrior, "Why does my brain start
"to go 60 miles an hour when
I'm trying to go to sleep?"
As you start to sleep, your frontal lobes,
front part of your brain,
start to get quiet,
which unfortunately takes the breaks
off your emotional brain,
and so if this is happening
you need a routine and habits
to get your emotional
brain back under control.
If the thoughts are
repetitive, they just circle,
have a little journal by
your bed and write them down,
and then ask yourself,
so what can I do about it
and what can I not do about it,
but the act of writing it down helps
to get it out of your head.
When I go to bed I say a prayer,
very intentionally, specifically,
I review what went well today,
and I'm looking for at least three things.
I love it because, you
know, like you, I'm busy.
I often don't take time during the day
to just go that was awesome.
How many special moments are in your day,
even during a pandemic?
You just don't think about it,
and when you do it right before bed
it sets your dreams up to
actually be more positive
and REM sleep, dream sleep,
is one of the most important
healing parts of sleep.
@Coywolfy, "Anybody else having
"some severe PTSD attacks
during quarantine?
"I feel like my overall mental health
"has tanked over the past two months.
"I'm losing my appetite,
massive anxiety attacks,
"and I'm having some
intense intrusive thoughts."
I feel for you.
The term I use is we are now experiencing
a global amygdala hijacking.
So the amygdala deep in
your brain is a structure,
it's in the shape of an
almond, that responds to fear.
What's happening in the world
is activating our amygdala, and
it's making very many people
feeling anxious and stressed.
I think our baseline stress
levels went up about 30%.
So if yours were already heightened,
now you can be having
massive panic attacks
and intrusive thoughts.
Mental hygiene is just as
important as washing your hands.
We have to disinfect our
thoughts and kill the ANTs,
the automatic negative thoughts,
that steal our happiness.
You want to become masterful
at diaphragmatic breathing,
and there's actually a
very specific pattern
that will calm down your amygdala
and activate your frontal lobe
so you make better decisions.
Three seconds in, so big
breath, hold it for a second,
and then take six seconds
out and hold it for a second.
So it's an 11 second breath,
but if you do that 10 times
it'll actually trigger a
relaxation response in your brain
and begin to give you some control.
You know, I think it's something they
should actually teach second graders.
Do this breathing.
It's the first step in getting
control of your anxiety.
Jeff Golenski, "As I'm
getting older I'm noticing
"that if I spend 10 plus
hours working on my computer
"on a given day, not typical,
I often have difficulty
"shutting my brain down at night to sleep.
"When I wake the next
day I'm often plagued
"by a sort of a hangover from
the day before, anyone else?"
This is actually common.
The lights from the computer may
be sending interrupt
signals to your brain.
Before they unleashed digital
technology unto the world,
there's actually no
neuroscience study on the impact
of being flooded with the
blue lights from screens.
Many of my colleagues and I
recommend blue light blockers,
especially if you have
any screen on after dark.
Blue light in the late
afternoon and the evening
begins to turn off the
production of melatonin,
which sort of naturally
helps us go to sleep.
Plus, if you're 10 hours
plus on a computer screen,
you're not getting the exercise.
You know, the best natural treatment
for depression and cognitive impairment
actually seems to be exercise.
@hog_mild, "So I got enough
sleep, ate breakfast,
"took my meds, am hydrated,
don't have a crazy busy day,
"am stable in my relationships.
"So why the [bleep] is my anxiety
"through the [bleep] roof today?
"I can feel my heartbeat in my eyes.
"What do you want from me, brain?"
Anxiety disorders are still
the most common mental
health issue in the world.
Begin to put a daily stress
reduction practice in your life.
For me, I love table tennis.
It's exercise, it's
distracting, it's good for me.
A lot of people love meditation.
There's a kind of meditation I really like
that we've studied called loving-kindness.
I'm a huge fan of hypnosis, self-hypnosis.
Certain music will activate
you and make you anxious.
A lot of other music will
actually calm and soothe you.
So I'm a huge fan of having
a daily relaxation practice
to get control, and then
what I teach my patients
is whenever you feel
sad, or mad, or nervous,
or out of control, write
down what you're thinking,
then ask yourself if it's true.
Thoughts are automatic, they just happen,
and what most people don't know
is the thoughts in your head
often lie to you, they
often terrorize you.
I teach my patients how to kill the ANTs,
the automatic negative thoughts.
You have to develop an internal anteater
patrolling the streets of your mind,
and just learning this
technique is just so helpful.
Rylee B. writes, "Why
does my brain provide
"only wonderful dialog when I shower,
"and why is it always when
there's shampoo in my hair
"so I can't get out to write it down?"
I like this a lot.
When you're in the shower
and you're doing something
you know how to do,
then basically your cerebellum's doing it.
It's sort of an automatic process.
The rest of your brain can
relax and you're distracted,
which is often when creativity flows.
It's happened to me a lot over the years.
I just have something that I can
get out of the shower,
quickly write it down,
and then get back in and finish it.
Just have some mechanism to capture it
and you'll be able to remember
it as you rinse your hair
and then write down your thought,
and if you can't then we have
to boost your brain's health.
@aishakhvnx, "Y'all ever forget
"what you're talking about
while you're talking?
"It happens to me so often
"that I swear I'm getting amnesia."
I hear this actually a lot
in my patients who have ADD or ADHD.
Because they have so many thoughts,
while they're talking
they actually get lost.
Do you notice you have
a short attention span,
you're easily distracted,
you tend to be late,
you're disorganized, you procrastinate,
and you might say or
do things impulsively?
When I first read that question, I go,
huh, I wonder if she has ADD.
If it's not that and
it's happening so often,
I worry that your brain
might not be as healthy
as it could be, and
that's where I would begin
to explore those 11 major risk factors
that steal people's minds,
and the pneumonic is called BRIGHT MINDS.
The B we talked about is blood flow.
R is retirement and aging.
When people stop learning,
their brain starts dying.
I is inflammation.
If you have low omega-3 fatty acid levels,
if you have an unhealthy gut,
if you have periodontal disease,
you're not really good at
taking care of your teeth,
all of those things can
actually increase inflammation
and negatively impact your
memory and your brain.
Syddtayy, "Why doesn't anybody
talk about the brain fog
"that comes along with
anxiety and depression?
"It makes me feel like I
can't function normally,
"and I thought I was going
crazy until I looked it up
"and realized that it
happens to a lot of people.
"Can we start talking
about these things more?"
So brain fog is when you feel
like your brain is in mud,
that it just takes more
effort to think and respond
than you think is reasonable.
It is very common.
Anxiety, because your brain
is so focused on negativity
or depression where you don't have
enough activity in your brain,
there's one type of
depression, I call it un-focus,
where they have really
low activity in the brain
commonly associated with brain fog.
Again, you wanna keep your brain healthy
or rescue it if it's
headed to the dark place.
You have to prevent or treat
these risk factors I've
been talking about.
So BRIGHT MINDS, B is for blood flow,
R is retirement and
aging, I is inflammation,
G is genetics, stuff like anxiety
and depression run in families,
but also the negative thinking,
the dysfunctional thinking patterns
can also be modeled in families.
I often say genes are
not a death sentence.
What they should be is a wake up call.
Gene's load the gun.
It's what happened to us and our behavior
that pulls the trigger.
So if I know I have anxiety in my family,
then I'm gonna work even
harder to prevent it.
The H in BRIGHT MINDS is head trauma,
a major cause of psychiatric problems
that nobody knows about
because most psychiatrists
actually never look at the brain.
I actually have a database
of 160,000 scans on patients
from 155 countries, and
if you said, hey, Daniel,
single most important thing you learned
from the world's largest
brain imaging database
related to psychiatry, I
would say mild traumatic
brain injury's a major cause
of psychiatric problems.
If you don't get the right diagnosis,
you'll never end up with
the right treatment plan.
The T in BRIGHT MINDS is for toxins.
If you have brain fog,
anxiety, and depression,
I wanna make sure you don't
have mold in your house.
Mold is a very common cause of brain fog,
anxiety, and depression.
It's one of the toxins along
with marijuana is a toxin,
alcohol can be toxic.
Of all the firefighters I've treated,
over 90% have toxic looking brains
because of the carbon
monoxide they breathe
or the cyanide they breathe
from burning furniture
or burning buildings and from fires.
Anxiety and depression, they're not single
or simple disorders, and
if you wanna take care
of the brain fog you have to
become serious about brain health.
The bottom line is this, after
looking at all these scans
most psychiatric problems
are not mental health issues,
rather they are brain health issues,
and this one idea changes everything.
Get your brain right and
your mind will follow,
and I'm convinced that
the end of mental illness
will begin with a
revolution in brain health.
Needysabs, "My mental
health really do be like,"
arrows up, arrows down,
arrows up, arrows down.
"How do you fix a broken brain, please?"
I've been talking about that.
This gives me an opportunity
to finish our BRIGHT MINDS pneumonic.
If you wanna keep your brain
healthy or fix a broken brain,
you have to prevent or treat
the 11 major risk factors
that steal your mind.
BRIGHT MINDS is the pneumonic.
Blood flow, retirement
and aging, inflammation,
genetics, head trauma, toxins.
M is something I call mind storms,
which is abnormal electrical activity,
especially in the temporal lobes,
and it can come from a head injury,
you could be born with it.
It causes people to be up and down,
just like the icons you used.
Sometimes anti-seizure medications
can actually be really
helpful to stabilize things.
Sometimes a ketogenic
diet can actually help.
I found that can be really
helpful in balancing the brains.
There are treatments like neurofeedback
to help reset the brain.
The second I in BRIGHT MINDS
is immunity and infections,
and I had no idea how
prophetic that would be
right before a pandemic,
and let me be really clear about this,
your best defense against COVID-19
is not gonna be a drug or a vaccine.
Your best defense is your immune system.
So keeping it healthy is critical.
You do that by what you eat,
by keeping your gut healthy,
by making sure you have
healthy vitamin D levels,
vitamin C levels, zinc,
magnesium, selenium.
All of those are nutrients to
support your immune system,
but this is why you need
to stay away from sugar
and foods that quickly turn to sugar
because all of those are pro-inflammatory
and can damage your immune
system, as can gluten and dairy.
The N in BRIGHT MINDS is
neurohormone disorders.
Your thyroid is high or low,
you're gonna be anxious or depressed.
If your testosterone is low,
odds are you're gonna be sad
and have no motivation and no
libido for a girl or a guy.
The D is diabesity, it's this combination
of you have high blood
sugar, you're pre-diabetic
or diabetic, and overweight or obese.
As your weight goes up,
the actual physical size
and function of your brain goes down,
which should scare the fat off anyone.
And then the S in BRIGHT MINDS is sleep.
Getting your sleep right is so important.
So if you want to fix a
broken brain, you can,
that's the exciting news that
comes out of our imaging.
You are not stuck with the brain you have.
You can make it better,
but you have to love it,
you have to treat it right.
I'm in a new docuseries
with Justin Bieber.
I've been Justin's doctor
for the last five years.
He would come and then
he'd go and then he'd come
and then he'd go, and
finally he married Hailey
and he kept coming 'cause she made him.
More than a year ago,
he walked into my office
and he said, "My brain can have problems
"just like my heart can have problems.
"If you told me I had heart problems,
"I'd do everything you said.
"I'm gonna start doing
everything you say."
And then he got remarkably better.
You can be better.
This is Doctor Daniel
Amen for Brain Support.
To learn more about my
work, you can get my book
"The End of Mental Illness"
or go to amenclinics.com
and learn about our
clinics around the world.
And big thank you to WIRED,
and hope all of you stay safe.
