0:00 there are in fact many roads to Alzheimer's disease and it's things like marijuana alcohol and football and then a study found that people had had a simple carbohydrate based diet had a 400% increased risk of getting Alzheimer's but one of the major classes is gosh Dr Daniel aan is the renowned psychiatrist and brain health expert who has scanned over 260,000 brains including Justin Bieber Miley Cyrus and Kendall Jenner to determine what we need to do for Optimum brain health in 2024 the word of the year was brain rot why because people are worried that their habits are shrinking their brain like food gaming social media pornography what about working with bad for your brain and then is there anything
0:46 nonobvious that we do to our children's brains yes and this is so important because this is one thing a lot of parents do without knowing the consequences for their children and we'll talk about that what about negative thinking well we just this huge study on this and the science is really clear it decreases activity in your preal cortex which impacts your motivation focus and mood it is detrimental to your brain so how can you kill the negative thoughts well there's a whole bunch of things when is sap on head-to-head has been shown to be equally effective as anti-depressants and then whenever you feel sad or mad or nervous what I want you to do is it's so simple
1:32 I have been forced into a bet with my team we're about to hit 10 million subscribers on YouTube which is our biggest Milestone ever thanks to all of you and we want to have a massive party for the people that have worked on this show for years behind the scenes so they said to me Steve for every new subscriber we get in the next 30 days can $1 be given to our celebration fund for the entire team and I've agreed to the bet so if you want to say thank you to the team behind the scenes at D of a CE all you've got to do is hit the subscribe button so actually this is the first time I'm going to tell you not to subscribe because it might end up costing me an [Applause] [Music]
2:18 awful Dr Daniel aan if someone's just clicked on this conversation now and they have no idea who you are which is highly highly unlikely can you tell me why listening to you and this conversation and the work that we're about to go through now is so important for everyone even those who believe that right now they have no issues everybody has a brain that's listening it controls everything they do how they think how they feel how they act how they get along with other people and most people know it but don't your brain is the organ of intelligence character and every
3:06 decision you make and when it works right you work right and when it doesn't you have trouble and most people have no idea that their bad decisions their sadness their anxiety their insomnia their poor relationship have has to do with the physical functioning of their brain so if they want to be happier they need to think about loving and caring for their brain optimize your brain you optimize your mind's
3:51 ability you mentioned scanning brains there remind me again how many people's brains youve scanned now so it's now about 260,000 260,000 people's brains and you've scanned some famous brains yes actually people from nine months old to 105 from 155 countries and it's public knowledge I've been in Justin Bieber's docu series seasons I scanned his brain I've scanned Miley Cyrus's brain um Mel Gibson just went on Joe Rogan and talked about me scanning his brain um Muhammad Ali Mike Tyson Jake Paul you also scanned my brain and you actually taught me a lot from scanning my brain which I'm did you think about your brain after we talked about of
4:38 course I think about it all the time now it's also interesting that in 2024 the year just gone the word of the year was the word brain rot and that's interesting because the subject of the brain I don't think has been given the credit and the attention it deserves really until recently and much of your work has played into that why do you think if you had to guess why do you think Oxford University's word of the year was brainroot because people are worried that their habits are shrinking their brain especially social media and digital addictions I'm so hoping they'll go to
5:25 brain health as be more aspirational we've talked about a lot of things on this show um one of the things that really stuck with me is how the content we consume can have a profound impact on our brains we often think of the chemicals the the drugs the alcohol and all those things which I want to talk about but one such piece of content which I don't think we have talked about is the impact of pornography on the brain is there a link between brain health and pornography consumption you know it's such an important question and the first thing that comes to my mind is exposing developing brains to pornography is so dangerous and8 nine 10
6:15 yearold boys are being exposed to the internet where they can see all sorts of pornography when their brains aren't anywhere near the ability to discern what's good what's not good what's healthy what's not healthy and it's deadening and I use that word purposefully the nucleus accumbens which is the area of your brain that produces that responds to dopamine so dopamine and I know you've done podcasts on dopamine it's the neurotransmitter that helps us with motivation which helps us with Focus which helps us
7:02 with happiness and mood and when the nucle succumbent gets hit repeatedly with pornographic images it's like dopamine dopamine dopamine it begins to deaden that area and then you need more and more to begin to feel anything at all it's why Fame is so hard on the brain but pornography especially in the young is incredibly damaging to the brain so is that applicable to all things that cause like a really sharp burst of dopamine and stimulation so you said there Fame ponography I mean potentially gaming or
7:47 gambling those kinds of things um alcohol is obviously one of those things as well cocaine cocaine especially for a developing brain especially for a developing brain if there's any message protect your brain until you're 25 and then your brain will protect you but until then your prefrontal cortex at from third of your brain is not fully developed which is sort of why God gave you parents it's like so supervise it's like oh my teenagers hate it if I supervise them and yeah they hate it more if you don't um but what if you get to 25 and you're listening to this now and you go Jesus I does this mean that I can do
8:34 nothing about my brain of course not I mean what I've shown is let's just take the NFL work H big damage right let's stop lying about this football is a brain damaging Sport and soccer as well is a brain damaging sport so high levels of damage 80% of my NFL players got better when we put them on a rehabilitation program so if you've been bad to your brain like non-stop gaming lots of pornography terrible food and all of a sudden you go oh I can
9:21 have a better brain your brain can be better in as little as a couple of months where you just feel better think better your mood is better but it has to start with this concept I think we've talked about brain Envy it's you have to want to have a better brain when when people come to you what is it they're typically motivated by like in ter when they come to you why do they come to you is it because they've heard of your work on the internet and they they want to just they're curious about getting their brain scanned or is do they usually come with a symptom or some other ailment no usually they come because
10:06 they're in pain that they're anxious they're depressed they're um marriage is falling apart or um their wife says come or I'm going to divorce you it's not an uncommon thing or they're struggling in school they're not living up to their potential in one way or another now about 10% of the people come to us go I'm fine but I want to see and I want to be better and I don't want Alzheimer's so a lot of people come because they love a parent or grandparent that has Alzheimer they realize there's a genetic component to it and they don't want to
10:52 have that but that's really someone who is Forward Thinking I think more people come because they're hurting what evidence have we got that alcohol is bad for the brain and bad for the rest of our body especially in moderation well the S US Surgeon General just came out wanting to put cancer warning labels on all alcohol um that's sort of big evidence I mean three years ago the American Cancer Society came out against any alcohol because drinking any alcohol increases your risk of seven different
11:40 cancers and that's a big deal and then the evidence I have and my first Clinic was outside of the Napa Valley in Northern California so alcohol is a big thing and as I was looking at scans I'm like your brain's older than you are that alcohol is not a health food it is detrimental to brain function and then of course you know so I've been a psychiatrist now I decided to be a psychiatrist 46 years ago the number one problem I see is someone drinks and they make a bad decision someone drinks and they say something to their partner that they just shouldn't have said or they drink
12:27 and they go to work or they drink and they drive or they drink and it just causes so much trouble and in 1999 I did a show uh called the truth about drinking and we took a young adult um who had trouble with alcohol got him sober scanned him and then on National Television we got him drunk just like he got drunk and it just crashed his frontal loes and you just it's so clear that alcohol takes the break off your brain and so people use it to calm the brain down but there's certain parts of your brain you really don't want to go
13:14 offline the part that says don't say that don't do that is that just when when I've had one drink and then when I say BR up I'm back to normal or is this chronic well it depends one drink will decrease um in a mild way your decision making when it becomes chronic your life begins to get out of control because I'm wondering you know if if people drink in moderation are they going to see long-term impacts to their brain what is there such thing as um drinking just a little bit and being fine well you I think there's always
14:00 sort of a dose response there was a study in Spain that looked at people who had mild moderate and severe drinking and they compared them to people who didn't drink at all even the people who only drank a little had disruptions in the white matter of their brain now most people have heard about gray matter and white matter gray matter is nerve cell bodies white matter is nerve cell tracks so if you think of gray matter is where the computation uh is happening in the brain and white matter are like the
14:45 highways and so even a little bit of alcohol is creating potholes it's disrupting the highways in the brain and if if you're drinking a lot you are prematurely aging your brain you've scammed a lot of people who are alcoholics Lots I mean I've got some scans here and which I'll put on the screen but can you explain to me exactly what a brain looks like when the person has been drinking heavily for a long period of time so again we do a study called Spa in Spec looks at blood flow and activity it looks at how the brain works and for people who know the mitochondria
15:32 those are the little Powerhouse energy plants in your cells the spect Tracer 49% of it is taken up by the mitochondria in the brain so we're also looking at energy metabolism and what we see with alcoholic brains is something we call scallopine which is This Global decrease in Act activ it so a healthy brain full even symmetrical activity it sort of look big fat and round with alcohol or other drugs too you see the brain begin to shrivel and you see it gets this wavy
16:18 appearance and I'm like the real reason not to drink is it damages your brain so if you drink then you have a smaller brain than you would have otherwise correct that's pretty scary what does it why does brain size matter you know when people say it's going to shrink your brain why does that matter so I often say the only organ where size really does matter is your brain um because you don't want to lose brain tissue right there is a part of your brain called the Hipp canvas which is on the inside of your temporal
17:04 loes right here and it's really important and um it makes new stem cells every day about 700 and if you're drinking it's not allowing those new stem cells to take hold to take root you want to strengthen them so they will continue to support mood memory um spatial orientation spatial processing so that's the symptoms you you're naming there inadvertently symptoms of someone who has damaged their hippocampus right so poor memory
17:49 probably poor spatial awareness brain fog and moood and me issues and judgment and impulse control um but it it impacts the brain globally so the cerebellum so they're not going to process as quickly their decisions are not going to be as good and um I worked with my friend BJ fog who wrote a wonderful book called tiny habits and he's the um director of Stanford's persuasive technology lab which is really on how people people change and he and I work together cuz I'm always interested in how I can help my patients better
18:36 um and I met him at a conference like 18 months after we worked together and he said I just want to thank you I'm like why he said I wake up 100% every day I'm like why I stopped drinking because people with and they're around me enough they either drink more I suspect or they stop and isn't that what you want you wake up 100% every day why would you ever do anything that damages stem cell production in your brain one might argue that it's serving
19:22 me in the short term of course but there are lots of things that like you see you know let's say you're married but but you're at a conference and you see this really cute person and you're like oh well in the short run that could be awesome and in the long run you lose half your net worth and visit your children on the weekends it's like that's not a good thing and you know in the short run you feel more relaxed right with alcohol you feel more relaxed and in the long run it increases your risk of Al Al's disease I'm like that's not a good tradeoff on your blog you published a study from 2019 sorry from 2009 it was a study on monkeys that
20:09 showed a decline in new brain cell development and in that study there was a 58% decline in new brain cells and a 63% reduction in the survival rate of new cells from alcohol use they had monkeys drinking alcohol yes they have monkeys doing all sorts of things they shouldn't be doing which is effectively like pre ual brain aging right and it's worse if you do it before your brain is finished developing and so if you think of fraternities yeah and surori like I'm not a fan of sending children away to college and um is because you have all these underdeveloped brains or not fully
20:57 developed brains and you put them all together without appropriate adult supervision and a lot of bad things happen at fraternity parties and sorority parties they're drinking less though now no they're still drinking it oh really there's one second and now they're adding mushroom parties to it so it's alcohol and psilocybin and marijuana because everybody thinks marijuana is innocuous which is a lie and uh is it m marijuana it's a lie yeah and I was actually really upset um so President Biden during the time he was running for
21:45 president so this is 2019 he's on debate stage with a lot of other people and they asked him if he would federally uh legalize marijuana and he Saidi don't think the science is decided and no I don't think I would and Cory Booker the senator from New Jersey shamed Biden on National Television he said man are you high which is just horrifying and I'm watching this going the science is actually really clear marijuana is bad for the brain I
22:31 published a study on a thousand marijuana users every area of their brain is lower in activity and just today a study came out in the Journal of the American Medical Association on a 21,27 marijuana users um it decreased activity in the hippocampus that affected their memory centers if you're a teenager and you use marijuana in your 20s you have a higher incidence of anxiety depression and suicide this is not innocuous and we've
23:17 been advertised this load of crap which is oh it's just good medicine and for some people it is helpful but let's not say say it's innocuous because that's a lie and we are now so many states have legalized marijuana for recreational use including here in California and the Mental Health crisis is not better if anything it's dramatically worse there's two issues here isn't there there's the impact cannabis has on the brain and then there's the whole issue of legalization and I was re as you was speaking I was was just looking at some of the research and it it says exactly what you said it says that there was a study published in Jama Network which
24:03 examined over a thousand young adults brains and almost 70% of heavy users exhibited reduced brain activity during working memory tasks the decline was associated with poor poor performance in retaining and using information long-term cannabis use has been linked to smaller hippocampus volume which again impacts memory and learning so I mean the science is clear that of what it's doing but the the question of legalization is a whole another issue well please don't put people who use marijuana in jail yeah like that's just a bad use of money yeah that that's not smart but the the problem becomes we're not educating kids on the potential damage to brain development which nobody really argues
24:49 about nobody's really nobody reputable I know of is going yeah give it to teenagers and let them smoke all they want no it's just dumb so I it's a bigger question and I think the answer I have a high school course in um it's called brain Thrive by 25 and we actually studied it in 16 schools decreases drug alcohol and tobacco use decreases depression and improves self-esteem why we teach kids to love and care for their brain you got your brain scan and now you love love your brain more you you want it to be better that's the answer it's not scanning
25:36 everybody it's educating everybody your brain controls everything you do and when it works right you work right and when it doesn't you don't so let's love it and let's learn together how to optimize it but the big innovation Stephen for 2025 in psychiatry marijuana psilocybin and ketamine the street drugs of the 60s are coming back and I'm like I feel like I'm living in this insane world where we're not talking about you should eat better and exercise and learn not to believe every stupid thing you think and meditation could
26:23 calm your mind probably more effectively than alcohol or marijuana it's not hard to learn what's wrong with cocy in magic mushrooms yeah everybody's so excited about micro doing and it's a treatment for depression and I think I've seen this story before so in the early 80s benzos you know like Xanax and clopen and Adavan they were Mommy's Little Helper and this will really help your anxiety the problem is they make your brain look older than you are and they're addictive as hell then there was alcohol is a health food marijuana is innocuous pain is the fifth Vital sign
27:08 which led to the opiate epidemic and now we're into mushrooms psilocybin Associated psychosis has gone up 300% in the last couple of years that not for everybody but for some vulnerable people and we don't know who they are it can flip them into a psychotic episode I'm like we need to be careful we need to be thoughtful so psilocybin hasn't yet been legalized in the US in Oregon oh it has been in Oregon um is it being delivered yet in Oregon in a theraputic just now is it so it there was a 2-year waiting period yeah
27:55 and they were training uh people to do psilocybin assisted psychotherapy but there isn't a psilocybin compound that's been approved yet by the FDA so there's still I think it's stage three clinical trials from what I understand I was quite involved in that world as an investor once upon a time so I understand the like rigor to get these compounds clinically approved and you're right so in the early like clinical trials there's I mean groups of like 20 people in some of the early clinical trials and as they're progressing now I I think getting to stage three they need to have bigger sample sizes and make sure that these compounds are safe and from what I've seen a lot of people are trying to get it approved in a clinical setting for CA cases of treatment
28:41 resistant depression where you do see even in those the studies that I've read you see some people have adverse responses so some people get worse and there's you know if you take a someone who's treatment resistant depressed and potentially suicidal and you give them a a a strong compound like of sideon some people can get worse but for the ones that get better it's pretty remarkable it's like I've been I remember the first study that I read I think coming out of the L uh one of the London universities that's really leading on this maybe Imperial College London or something and it said something like 30% of people that did one dose of celoc cybin were went into clinical remission after 12 weeks after one dose and there's
29:27 really like nothing else that I can think of that can deliver that kind of response in that period of time K ketamine ketamine I mean MDMA has I think been ketamine can do it but then ketamine can also be addictive and can be problematic so I'm like well why wouldn't we scan them first and then try to figure out why you're depressed CU if you think about it depression is like chest pain and nobody gets a diagnosis of chest pain why it doesn't tell you what's causing it and it doesn't tell
30:12 you what to do for it all sorts of things can cause chest pain right from a heart attack a heart arhythmia a heart infection gas an ulcer grief all of those can cause chest pain well there's a whole bunch of things that can cause depression like loss negative thinking low thyroid having a head injury um being exposed to mold or Mercury blad it's like if you don't look if you just give everybody you're depressed based on these nine symptoms and now we
30:58 go give everybody an SSRI which is ludicrous because that's assuming everybody with it's sort of like giving everybody with chest pain nitroglycerin which is stupid right you would never give everybody who has chest pain one treatment you'd go I have to Target the treatment to the cause but if you never look you have no idea so for example I was on the Kardashians and so it's public that um I saw Kendall and I saw her for postco anxiety her brain was on fire from covid
31:45 and a lot of people don't understand that covid and other infections can cause inflammation in the brain well that's not a psilocybon thing that's an anti-inflammatory cocktail to help postco anxiety or postco depression if you don't look you don't know you end up Flying Blind and that's what I'm in fighting with my colleagues for the last 33 years it's how do you know unless you look and what other Medical Specialists never look at the organ they so we could talk about oh I've seen these amazing
32:32 results and I think we should see well what's this scan pattern that you're going to respond to psilocybin or Lexapro or ketamine or lctl right I mean it's great we have all these treatments but let's not fly [Music] blind when we don't have to there's this graph I saw the other day circulating around the internet which I'm going to show you and I'll put it on the screen for anybody that can't see it but it shows globally which countries distribute the most anti-depressant pills ssris and the United States leads the way by a long margin I mean I think in in looking at that graph it's almost 10 times more anti-depressant pills per
33:19 person are handed out in the United States than other parts of the world and I wondered why why does the USA hand out anti-depressant pills like like their water or something it's such an interesting graph um because here in America we want the fast answer I don't feel well fix me and what doctors have do you know 85% of psychiatric drugs in America are prescribed by non- psychiatric physicians in 7-minute office visits that do standard of care
34:06 12% of the time what does that mean and that they do what most doctors would consider good medicine 12% of the time so you go to your family doctor or your nurse practitioner and you go I'm sad I'm anxious I'm not sleeping you might and we hear this all the time at clinics I have 11 clinics around the United States we hear it all the time that I went to my doctor and he gave me a prescription for Lexapro Xanax and ambian and it just blows my mind that they would put you on something that changes your brain to need them in order for you to feel normal see people don't
34:53 understand and I am not opposed to medication I use it when I think I need to but let's be clear they do not heal fix anything what they do is they suppress symptoms but then once they've suppressed the symptoms they've changed your brain so you need them in order to feel okay I don't like that like what can I do naturally head-to-head against anti-depressants saffron has been shown to be equally effective the spice saffron head-to-head against anti-depressants walking like you're
35:39 late 45 minutes four times a week equally effective head-to-head against anti-depressants taking omega-3 fatty acids equally effective in a study from Australia head-to-head against anti-depressants learning how to not believe believe every stupid thing you think has been shown to be equally effective so why not if you're depressed and you can't get scanned start walking take omega-3 fatty acids and saffron and learn how to kill the ants ants stands for automatic negative thoughts the thoughts that come into your mind automatically and ruin your
36:25 day and we grow up I don't know if the same thing is in England there's no training on how to manage your mind right I was 28 years old in my psychiatric residency when one of my professors said you have to teach your patients not to believe every stupid thing they think and I'm 28 and I'm in my residency which means I finished College I finished medical school and I believe every stupid thing I think that no one had ever taught me how to manage my own thoughts I can't believe that thing you just said about saffron I was reading about it here it says Research indicates that saffron may be as effective as ssris in treating mild and moderate depression and a metaanalysis of eight studies found no difference between saffron and ssris in
37:12 reducing depressive symptoms but in fact the side of effect profile is probably better for saffron well so I got interested in Saffron about 25 years ago because I saw a study so there are now 25 randomized controlled trials showing that saffron is as effective as ssris and other anti-depressants but the thing that caught my interest this may speak more about me is they didn't decrease sexual function in fact they enhanced it and so I've been a psychiatrist a long time and ssris for the right brain they work but
37:57 they make it harder to have an orgasm they decrease your libido and I don't like that I don't want to separate if you're depressed you're already separated from your partner yeah if you're depressed and you can't have an orgasm or you're not interested that's damaging not only to you but it damages your partner and so and I thought saffron can enhance sexual function and I'm like okay I'm paying attention and so I have collected every study ever published on saffron and brain and mental health there's actually five studies showing en hance's memory that it was as good as AOSP in people AOSP a
38:47 medicine we use in Alzheimer's disease and it's as good as AOSP so it helps memory it helps mood it helps sexual function I'm like mood memory and sex I'm going to take it mood memory and sex so yeah i' love saffron so why wouldn't we start with that and exercise and learn to manage your mind rather than start with Lexapro or even soloc cybin or ketamine one of the things when people are talking about psychedelics that they're trying to treat is trauma right Early Childhood trauma um is that something that you can see if you looked at my brain could you see trauma on my brain yes and have you
39:33 looked a diamond pattern that I've written about I published in actually discover magazine in 2016 listed my study so I published a study on 21,000 people showing we could separate post-traumatic stress disorder from traumatic brain injury with high levels of accuracy and then we repeated this study on soldiers and showed the same thing and this year I just published the world's largest study on childhood trauma so do you know the a score yes which is a measure of childhood trauma childhood trauma adverse childhood experiences so it's on a scale of 0 to 10 how many bad things happen to you as
40:19 a child physical emotional sexual abuse neglect um being being raised with parent that has a mental illness that's incarcerated addiction watching um your mother be abused so domestic violence so 0 to 10 I'm a one my wife's an eight we adopted our two nieces who are both nines and so I'm very interested in childhood trauma so so a nine is good or bad nine is terrible okay so higher the number so zero is means you have none of those okay a you have a lot and we if you have four or
41:05 more you have an increased risk of seven of the top 10 leading causes of death if you have six or more so my wife's in eight my nieces are nines you die 20 years earlier than the general population and in our study what we showed the more Aces you had the more activation of your limbic structures especially a very interesting area called the anterior singular gyus I think of this as the brain's gear shifter lets you go from thought to thought move from idea to idea be
41:52 flexible go with the flow and when this is overactive people worry they hold on to things it's like the trauma is always in front of them and I often do timeline I ask people do you see your life um going from left to right or from front to back and I see the past behind me my wife sees the past in front of her and that's often what you see with trauma and their brain becomes overactive in their emotional brain which makes them at higher risk for pain
42:40 syndromes um higher risk for anxiety higher risk for depression higher risk for insomnia that they're sort of always looking for bad things to happen is there anything someone can do at home because you know not everybody can afford to go to a therapist it's hard to get access to these kind of treatments if if I have some kind of Trapped trauma or traumatic experienc PTSD that I've been through and I don't have any money at all it what would you recommend for me well I mean the first thing I want everyone to do is love their brain right the healthier your brain and before we we started we talked about this idea it's the brain you bring
43:26 in into trauma that often determines how you deal with it and to get well you have to get your brain healthy so that's the first thing so that means getting off the alcohol exercise eat well certain simple supplements yes what supplements and then um multiple vitamin for basic nutrition know your vitamin D level and optimize it and most people need to supplement vitamin D and if you have darker skin you need five times the level of Sun as someone from northern Europe to get a healthy vitamin D level so you should know your vitamin D level and
44:13 optimize it like I always say can't change what you don't measure and vitamin D is a very important number to know so multiple vitamin vitamin D omega-3 fatty acid I did a study 50 consecutive patient Stam in clinics who are not taking vitamin D we measured their omega-3 index 49 were suboptimal and so I think most people would benefit from an omega-3 fatty acid supplement and then it's sort of depends if you have issues with your mood saffron would be great if you tend to be anxious don't go for the benzo um
45:01 theanine ashwagandha magnesium Gaba diaphragmatic breathing hypnosis so many things to help anxiety before you ever go to something that's addictive that makes your brain look older than you are that increases your risk of dementia one of the really really interesting things that you mentioned which I had never heard of or thought thought of before is the impact of negative thinking on your brain we just published this huge study on negativity bias and it's not good for your frontal loes and so I love doing positivity biased training like I train all of my patients start every day today is going
45:49 to be a great day I mean somebody asked me today if I believe in manifestation um part of I think you have to tell your brain what you want and then your brain will figure out how to get it and so if you go today is going to be a great day your brain starts looking like why is today going to be a great day and when you go to bed at night what went well today that's so helpful to just start programming your brain to look for what's right not just for what's wrong virtually every depressed patient I said have a high negativity bias and so training them to
46:35 be more positive now not irrationally positive because you need some anxiety people have low levels of anxiety die early from accidents and preventable illnesses people who have low levels of anxiety low levels of anxiety so I always I have an older brother who I love um but he's one of the don't worry be happy people and I sort of always wanted to be like him because I'm much more serious much more driven and I'm like no I wanted to be like him until I read the research the people who live the longest so there's a study from Stanford they started in 1921 and they looked at
47:23 1548 10-year-old children and they were looking for what goes with success Health and Longevity and what they found was shocking the don't worry be happy people died the earliest from accidents and preventable illnesses the people who live the longest the one theme was they were conscientious if they said they were going to show up and they showed up reliably consistently they live longer than everyone else and I just shows they had good frontal function it's like if I say I'm going to do something and I commit to it I do it
48:11 you live longer could that be also linked to like discipline those people are more likely to be disciplined with other areas of their life habits eating gym yes which means they had better frontal lob function so why would we ever take these guys fernal loes offline no love your fernal loses this is why when you have children don't let them hit soccer balls with their forehead it's just not a smart thing to do I think that's probably a big thing people are thinking about this time of the year so we're recording now in January 2025 wow um and everybody's thinking about new year new me they're thinking about their New Year's resolution becoming a new person habits motivation discipline
48:56 these are like the trifactor of what I I see people talking about the most at this time of year when you with everything you understand about the brain how do I become a more disciplined motivated person who has better habits so one you take care of your brain and two you know when relapse happens relapse happens when you don't sleep okay when you've gone too long without eating when blood sugar levels go low relapse happens you start making bad decisions when if you're a female when you're in the last week of your cycle because blood flow to your frontal lobe
49:42 drops for many women so I have five sisters and five daughters I completely believe in PMs and I've scanned people best time of their cycle worst time it's like they're two different people sort of like they have multiple personality disorder because their brain is just so different now obviously not with all women but for certain ones it's a big issue and if the ants are taken over so if the automatic negative thoughts which also tend to go up if you haven't slept if you've gone too long without eating if you're at that time of your cycle or you're under chronic stress or you're drinking or
50:31 using other drugs so you might suppress them but then they come back and they attack you so then you have to suppress them again and this is how addiction starts so is it fair to say that if you're trying to change who you are and you're trying to establish a new habit or crack motivation then the goal shouldn't be necessarily to get a six-pack it should probably be something further Upstream like sleep well or better frontales and so how do I get better frontales and it's three strategies frontal lobe Envy right brain Envy got to care about it avoid things that hurt damaging my frontal loes and do things that strengthen my frontal loes we talked about two of
51:16 these points earlier but you we talked about alcohol but in the context of sleep I've heard on you I think it was in your podcast change your brain after two drinks your REM sleep drops to roughly an hour after four drinks your REM sleep drops to 30 minutes and after six drinks your REM sleep drops to less than 2 minutes for many people um obviously these aren't specific numbers because everybody's brain is different but it just goes to show I guess the relative drop in REM sleep which is your restorative sleep based on alcohol consumption and so if I drink I'm not going to sleep while I'm not going to get restorative sleep I wake up the next day I'm going to struggle more with motivation and keeping any habit that I have ending anxiety and then you're going to be more ants and then you're going to drink more
52:02 to shut up the ants and then when they come back they come back stronger and by ants you mean the automatic negative thoughts okay the chatter that hurts you and we talked about how to kill them so whenever you feel sad or mad or nervous or out of control what I want you to do is just write it down and then ask yourself a series of questions um and I have I have this cute diagram of the different types of ants and I always ask my patients so which which are your ants are they like All or Nothing ants were you thinking words
52:47 like always never everyone every time are they less than ants given to us by social media uh where we compare ourselves others in a negative way guilt beating ants mind reading ants fortune telling ants blame ants um so identify the type do you have a example of a bad thought that just sort of runs around your head oh gosh um I think I live in a permanent state of assuming I'm going to get bad bad news and it doesn't haunt me I think I'm generally quite calm person and quite focused and peaceful in my brain but I think because I've ran companies
53:32 for the last 10 years or longer you're always just about to get bad news so I think that can be that can be playing on the radio in the background somewhere like I'm GNA open an email and it's going to be bad news there's so many opportunities for bad news in my world so yeah yeah so I think you write it down this is going to be bad and then my friend Byron Katie has has this process that I've refined a bit so that's a fortune telling amp right and so this is going to be bad news or I always get bad news fortune telling and all or nothing and so the first question is is it true right the second question is it
54:20 absolutely true with 100% certainty and if one is no two is automatically no the third question question is how does that thought Make Me Feel on edge on edge how does the thought make me act so the third question has three parts how does the thought make me feel tense on edge how does it make me act uh removed uh what's that word is it apathetic reticent yeah yeah and the third part of that what's the outcome of believing it's always is going to be bad news I mean there's no good outcome really suffering yeah suffering yeah the
55:06 fourth question is how would you feel if you didn't have that thought free and how would you act uh happier and uh more present and the outcome of not having that thought better relationships because you're more present yeah yeah and then the fifth question so the first one is is it true the second one is it absolutely true the third one how would I how do I feel act and what's the outcome of having this thought the fourth question is how would I feel act and what's the outcome of not having the thought the fifth question is my
55:53 favorite just take the thought and turn it to the opposite and then ask yourself is that true so it's going to be good news or it's going to be innocuous news and then go yeah 99 times out of 100 that's true and then I would because I'm also a CEO I'm like well how many of these things can't I handle virtually none of them I can handle all of them right so I'll be okay and then I meditate on the opposite of the thought
56:39 that's bothering me and so I take these thoughts captive I like that and people who are depressed are infested with negativity but you can train that your brain is healthy it's easier to do you can train that but you imagine there's no second grade class in the world where teachers teach children not to believe every stupid thing they think in fact I was watching one of the confirmation hearings today and the senators were filled with ants oh yeah
57:25 they were distorted things they were angry they were making things more negative than they needed to be we are model bad thinking and the News does it purposefully because they know if they piss you off if they scare you you're going to tune in so they can sell you more copper underwear so we're in a society that breeds these ant attacks so you have to be careful people who watch the news in the morning are 27% less happy in the afternoon and so you have to guard what goes in so every day your programming
58:13 happiness or sadness and I believe Dennis Prager has this great five minute video called why be happy and I love it so much I wrote a book called you happier and I start with his idea that happiness is a moral obligation and I'm like so I grew up not too far from here I went to Catholic School my mom was very serious about being Catholic and growing up the idea happiness is a moral obligation was nowhere in my childhood and I had a good childhood why is it a moral obligation because of how you impact other
58:59 people if you were raised by an unhappy parent or married to an unhappy spouse or raising an unhappy child and you ask those people is happiness an ethical issue they would all say yes so is it wrong to program your mind to look for what's right it's hard for some people it's just a pattern right it's like getting biceps are hard but it's it's not right it's just repeatedly doing the same thing that gives you the desire you want have you seen someone shift from being a
59:46 stereotypically negative person down and out negative depressed to the opposite yes truly the opposite a lot but you got to do the process it's you you got to do the work when you love yourself you do the work like I come from a family of fat people but I'm not why because I know it's a risk for me and so every day of my life I'm on an obesity prevention plan and wish I didn't have to be right I wish I could just eat anything I want and it would be okay but it's not the
1:00:32 reality of my life do you own a business or do you work in marketing if that's you listen up for a valuable opportunity from our show sponsor LinkedIn I'm an invested in about 40 odd companies and while they operate in different Industries they all face one challenge maybe the most important challenge when it comes to marketing getting their brand in front of the right audiences we can probably all think of times when we've been scrolling on social media and received an ad that absolutely wasn't relevant to us LinkedIn has now grown to a network of over a billion professionals including 130 million decision makers which means you can specifically Target your buyers by job title seniority industry even company Revenue so stop wasting your marketing Budget on the wrong audience and start targeting the right crowd through Linkedin now and because you're part of
1:01:19 my community LinkedIn is offering you a $100 credit for your next campaign head to linkedin.com diary to claim yours now that's linkedin.com diary and of course terms and conditions apply and only available on LinkedIn ads now for people that don't know who Elizabeth Smart is who is she and what did you learn from scanning her brain so Elizabeth is someone who made really international news many years ago she was kidnapped when she was a teenager and virtually raped every day for nine months and then she was found um that she was actually very
1:02:04 smart and she manipulated her kidnappers to bring her back to Utah Salt Lake city where the kidnapped her from and she was found by the police and one would think she would have severe lasting post-traumatic stress disorder and I was very interested to scan her and be helpful to her she in fact did not have post-traumatic stress disorder she had post-traumatic growth she took her trauma and made something special out of it where she
1:02:50 actually runs an organization for women who have been abused um and I just remember sitting there and her brain was actually quite healthy I think she helped me more than I helped her just so fascinated by how she could take something that's truly horrifying and come out of it and be quite okay and she's how old now she's in she's in her in 30s and she's in a relationship married she's married she has children she's running an organization she speaks around the country I mean when people hear that
1:03:40 they might begin to question how they think about trauma because we think of trauma as a very deterministic thing I if that happens to you I can predict that you're going to be X you're going to be you know maybe depressed you're not going to be social functioning you're probably not going to have functional good relationships that's the kind of thing we think when we hear about such a horrific event we kind of see it as deterministic of who you then become but she's proving that that that's not the case now in fact of people who go through something really terrible about 10% of people will develop PTSD and about 10% of people will develop post-traumatic growth and most people sort of land in the middle I
1:04:26 wrote an article 1982 when I was a resident at Walter Reed um called post Vietnam stress disorder a metaphor for current and past life events and it was when I was resident I got the idea it's the brain you bring into Vietnam that often determines the brain that comes out of Vietnam that if you grew up in an alcoholic home or you grew up with a lot of stress you are much more likely to become a heroin addict and much more likely to come home and struggle um obviously not
1:05:13 always but we should there's a concept since I started Imaging that I just dearly love so much called brain Reserve so brain Reserve is the extra tissue you have to deal with whatever stress comes your way and brain Reserve actually starts before you were conceived so you get your brain wrapped around that a little bit it's the idea of epigenetics that if your parents grew up in trauma and abuse it changed their genes to make you more [Music]
1:06:00 vulnerable and if so your genetic history matters the health of your mom while she's carrying you your brain starts to develop three weeks after she gets pregnant three weeks like about day 21 and so her stress level her infectious disease level burden her nutrition her sleep all of these things matter one of my patients wife is pregnant I'm like you need to be nice to her you need to like lower her stress because you a
1:06:48 child that this has generational consequences and then when you're born how did the birth go and then as a child what was your nutrition link what were your stress levels like did you play football did you fall off the swing all of those things are either building your brain Reserve or stealing your brain Reserve so when you get kidnapped or let's just take two soldiers and War they're in the same tank they go over an IED so they're both
1:07:33 the tank is blown up one walks away unharmed the other one's permanently disabled why it's their brain reserve the brain they brought into the explosion often determines how they are so I argue we should always be building reserve and I turned 70 this year and I know 50% of people 85 and older have Alzheimer's disease one and two horrifying statistics and so I know that
1:08:19 so between now and 15 years from now what are the things I can do to build my Reserve so the gravity of age has less impact on me because your brain is going to shrink with aging regardless of any it it's going to show although I have a whole group of super brains people that are 80 90 1005 like stunningly beautiful brains but they're people that had stunningly beautiful brain Reserve habits okay that they didn't smoke they weren't drinkers they ate well they were not overweight so on
1:09:05 this subject of Alzheimer's it's increasing globally the I reading something I think from like the Alzheimer's Association that said they're predicting by 2050 that there's going to be 150 or 160 million people globally that have Alzheimer's disease there's still a lot of question marks around what causes it what increases its probability Etc but what do you think the cause of Outsiders is I think there are many causes of it and the going wisdom until recently was excessive beta ameloid pla formation caused Alzheimer's and there's a lot of questions around that theory I think uh I have a pneumonic I like called bright Minds you want to
1:09:51 keep your brain healthy or rescue it you have to prevent or treat the 11 major risk factors so I think there are in fact many roads to Alzheimer's disease and people go what the difference between Alzheimer's and Dementia dementia is the umbrella category you start losing your faculties Alzheimer's is one of the types but the more you get into it you realize it's a pretty mixed bag and so um bright Minds blood flow retirement and aging inflammation genetics head trauma toxins mental health you know if a woman is
1:10:39 depressed it doubles her risk of Alzheimer's disease if a man is depressed it quadruples his risk of Alzheimer's and then the sleeper in all of these is infections immunity and infections many of of us think it's a major one of the major causes of Alzheimer's disease in fact there's a new study out on covid people who had covid had an significantly increased risk of getting Alzheimer's disease and then neuro hormones and we have this epidemic of low testosterone in young males now um diabesity and sleep diabet is you either
1:11:26 have high blood sugar and or you're overweight and that one risk factor if you have that one risk factor now all of a sudden you have 10 of the 11 risk factors because if you have one if you have diabetes if you're overweight or you have high blood sugar it lowers blood flow to your brain it prematurely ages your brain it increases is inflammation fat cells produce something called adapin which is inflammatory molecules it changes your genetics fat stores toxins you're more likely to be depressed you're it damages your immunity um takes healthy testosterone
1:12:15 turns it into unhealthy cancer promoting forms of estrogen and impairs your sleep om justly and then people go oh but you're fat shaming and it's like no I published a study on 33,000 people as your weight goes up the size and function of the brain goes down somebody's got to like say the truth the truth is being at an unhealthy weight is unhealthy for your brain and body I was reading a some studies earlier on when I spoke to a insulin resistance expert one of the things said to me was that they now almost describe Alzheimer's as type 3 diabetes that's a phrase that's often
1:13:02 used and when they look at brains that are insulin resistant the person between 40 or 80% of the time depending on which studies you look at has insulin resistance I.E they've had elevated blood sugar levels which have caused an insulin resistance or something else it could be stress that causes insulin resistance or many other things but it's interesting to think of to think of as you said that that one one thing which is the high blood sugar levels insulin resistance can have such a profound impact on the brain and if I've ever heard a case for being a bit more careful about sugar and other things that will Spike my blood sugar levels and chronically I think that's probably it you know because your brain as you said at the
1:13:48 start of this conversation drives everything in your life and to think that Sugar an overc consumption of sugar should I say has such a profound impact on the brain is is pause for me because I don't like sugar that much um you don't like it as much as you like your brain yeah and my life so there's a study from the Mayo Clinic where they looked at people who had primarily a fat-based diet so fish healthy oils avocados nuts and seeds they had 42% less risk of getting Alzheimer's disease and then they looked at people who had primarily a protein based diet
1:14:34 so think of a caveman diet 21% less risk of getting Alzheimer's disease and then they looked at people that had a standard American diet simple carbohydrate based diet bread pasta potatoes rice fruit juice sugar a 4 100% increased risk of getting Alzheimer's disease it's the sugar and the foods that quickly turn to sugar which goes with the insulin Diabetes Type 3 hypothesis you have to manage it and the reason this is so important to me is having high blood sugar makes your
1:15:24 blood vessel brittle and more likely to break which means it takes longer for things to heal and you're more likely to have a stroke and having a stroke increases your risk of Alzheimer's tfold so you a fan of the keto diet I sound like for some people I I I find that it doesn't have enough plants m in it which means it's probably not going to be awesome for your microbiome so I'm more a fan of a paleo diet that has healthy fat healthy
1:16:09 protein and lots of plants MH we've covered so much there's uh the one thing we talk we started talking about briefly I think before we started recording was the subject of Hope and grief I've never heard someone talk about the impact that grief has on the brain brain when we lose someone when we're going through prolonged pain because of a loss oh I know more about this than I want it activates the limic or emotional circuits in the brain and so when you lose someone important to you or even a pet like I hadry
1:16:54 a white shepher and so beautiful and so sweet and he got cancer and when he died he still lives in my head and I lost someone important to me about 20 years ago and for like a year I was just not okay and so I scanned myself and my emotional brain was so busy and it's like when you have someone they actually become ingrained in every fun place in your brain so they get stored in multiple places in your brain and when they're
1:17:41 not there anymore your brain still looks for them and figuring out ways to sort of calm down your emotional brain can be so help so helpful what part of the brain is that is that the amydala no it's more the insular cortex and the thalamus and that's what we found with depression I published a study with Scientists from USC and Los Angeles Children's Hospital on depression and what we found those were the structures that were dramatically overactive compared to people who were
1:18:27 not depressed so in grief the prefrontal cortex assuming because that's the more rational part of the brain that's probably going to be quieter right what do I and so it's the pre fernal cortex you bring in to the loss that often determines how you deal with it okay and so your emotional brain fires up if you're drinking and taking the prefrontal cortex offline it can't manage it so one thing people don't understand is the fibers from the preal cortex to the rest of the brain are inhibitory which means they calm things
1:19:14 down so if this isn't working right the emotional part can sort of override it and it becomes problematic IC um and so protecting this is so important to managing so much of your life I mean it's really the human most human thoughtful part of us and what we found within Hope was the insular cortex was low it's really interesting to us and hope is tomorrow can be better and I have a part
1:20:00 in it when you're hopeless you don't believe you have agency to make tomorrow better and so often there are hope training courses that can be good and I with all of my patients I do this exercise called the onepage miracle I referred to earlier it's like write down what do you want relationships work money physical emotional spiritual health all these things write it down and so talked earlier about we're recording this in January I have all my patients do it when I first see them and then every January for sure and then you just ask yourself does my behavior get
1:20:47 me what I want but but it starts with or what do you want you have to write it down like with my wife I'm very clear I want a kind caring loving supportive passionate relationship always want that don't always feel like that got these rude thoughts that show up or conflicting ideas that'll just show up in my head and I'm like oh no don't say that no don't do that because it doesn't fit and it's been the best relationship
1:21:33 of my life because both of us have the same goals and we're pretty good at matching our Behavior to the goal and as a CEO right what do you do with companies you have a business plan and then you have regular meetings and key perform indicators to like go how are we doing and if we're not doing great we change but it always starts with plan and most individuals never have a plan so they're kind of just being dragged around by whatever I mean and now in social media it's very dangerous because you might want what the Kardashians have and it's like wait
1:22:20 a minute relationships work money physical emotional spiritual health and then if I had tattoos I don't yet my wife got one that freaked me out it's my daughter's birthday but the tattoo would be does it fit know what you want and then ask yourself every day my behavior get me what I want and some people go well isn't that selfish it's like absolutely not cuz if I'm good I'm good for everyone around me your goal could be to be a great father it absolutely should be a great father
1:23:06 it's to be a loving husband kind caring loving supported passionate it's oh by the way when people do our program their erections are better just saying because blood flow is better when brain health is better CU your brain uses 20% of the blood flow in your body and so if you're working to have a healthy brain everything works better J say why did that come to mind when I asked about your goals well because I went passionate and I'm like okay you have to be clear um and or even think about work you know what's the goal with work it's to do
1:23:52 meaningful work it's to to make a difference I am you're a father I'm not a father yet but I hope to be um I've got three little nieces my brothers had three three two little nieces and one nephew my brother's a year older than me and he's had three kids already so I've got some catching up to do but as I'm progressing towards this season of life one of the things I think about having met you is how to raise healthy brains like what parenting style is going to make sure that my kids have very healthy brains there's so much conversation about parenting stuff um some people say just let them do whatever they want to do some people say be an authoritarian and put rules in place I'm wondering from the perspective of someone who scanned 260,000 brains how do you raise a perfect brain well
1:24:39 one you get rid of the idea that you're going to raise a perfect brain okay because there's a little OCD in there um the first thing you do is you have goals for yourself what kind of parent do you want to be and what kind of child do you want to raise and for me I want to be present kind and effective and for my kids I want them to be mentally strong and resilient and I want them to feel good about themselves and then you bond with them you want to be a good dad
1:25:24 bonding requires two things time actual physical time and listening so time have an exercise I love so much called special time 20 minutes a day do something with your child that your child wants to do and during that time no commands no questions no directions just time to bond the most important thing to Children is time with their parents and people are busy doesn't have to be a lot but if you do that 20 minutes a day it's money in the relational
1:26:10 bank so my first literary agent I think he was 42 when he had his first child and he's like my daughter she's to Laura never wants to be with me I come home she completely ignores me she just wants her mother she wants nothing to do with me that's because she's a girl right like absolutely not Carl you're ignoring her what do you mean I'm ignoring her I said you're ignoring her do this and I told him about special time and he's like that won't work I'm like negativity bias I'm like oh great you represent an idiot you represent me and you're telling me it won't work I said do this
1:26:56 it works and I'm going to call you in three weeks so I wrote them in my appointment book we had appointment books then and three weeks later I called him Carl it's Daniel Daniel she won't leave me alone all she wants to do is be with me as soon as I get home she
…
