The thing I think about most, especially when I'm on the go, but also when I'm sat here in the Diro of CS studio, is the WiFi internet that we have to work with. In fact, anytime I'm filming away from the studio, one of the first things I do is when I arrive, I open up an app and do a speed test to see how strong the signal is. And the number of screenshots I've sent to my team about WiFi signals at different locations is actually pretty crazy. It matters that much to me because it's such a competitive advantage to have Fast WiFi.
Because on any given day, if I'm recording, let's say hours and hours of footage with a podcast guest, I then often have to have my team send that across to our London team who then do the edit. So Fast WiFi internet is not a nice to have. It is absolutely business mission critical. So when it came to finding the best provider who could supply internet WiFi to our new LA studio, which I'm sat right now, we looked at every single option.
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That's spectrum.com. Restrictions apply service not available in all areas. There are in fact many roads to elsewhere. And it's things like marijuana, alcohol, and football.
And then study found that people had had had simple carbohydrates. They had a 100% increase in the customers. But one of the major causes is, gosh. Dr.
Daniel Aeman is the amount of psychiatrists and brain health experts. 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. They're brain. Like food, gaming, social media, pornography.
What about with ourselves? That's a bad dream. And is there anything not obvious 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 published this huge study on this. And the stance is really clear. It decreases activity in your work for your children. Which impacts your motivation, focus, and move.
It is detrimental to your brain. So how can you kill the negative thoughts? Well, there's a whole bunch of things. When it's sapphire, head to head, it's been shown to be deeply affected.
Because amp-type depression. And then whenever you feel sad, or mad, or nervous, what I want you to do is, it's so simple. I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple and all the other channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven't yet hit the follow button or the subscribe button. Wherever you're listening to this, I would like to make a deal with you.
If you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly for now and forever to make the show better and better and better. I can't tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button. The show gets bigger which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests you want to see, and continue to do this thing we love. If you could do me that small favor and hit the follow button, whatever you're listening to this, that would mean the world to me.
That is the only favor I will ever ask you. Thank you so much for your time. Back to this episode. Dr Daniel Eman.
If someone's just clicked on this conversation now, and they have no idea who you want, 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 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 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 ability. You mentioned scanning brains. They remind me again how many people's brains you scan 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 docuseries seasons. I scanned his brain. I've scanned my least Cyrus's brain. Mel Gibson just went on Joe Rogan and talked about me scanning his brain.
Muhammad Ali, Mike Tyson, Jake Paul. You also scanned my brain and you actually taught me a lot from snoring my brain, which I'm. And did you think about your brain after we talked about it? Of 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 brain rot? 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 brain health as be more aspirational. We talked about a lot of things on the show.
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 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. And eight, nine, 10-year-old 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 with happiness and mood.
And when the nucleus accumbens gets hit repeatedly with pornographic images, it's like dopamine, dopamine, it begins to deaden that area. And then you need more and more to begin to feel anything at all. So I think it's 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, pornography, I mean, potentially gaming or gambling, those kinds of things. Alcohol's obviously one of those things as well. Cocaine.
Cocaine. Especially for developing brain. Especially for 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, that from third of your brain, is not fully developed. It's just sort of why God gave you parents. It's like, so you supervise.
It's like, oh, my teenagers hate it, buy supervised them. And yeah, they hate it more if you don't. But what if you get to 25 and you're listening to this now and you go, Jesus, I, does this mean I can do nothing about my brain? Of course not.
I mean, what I've shown is let's just take the NFL work. Had 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 nonstop gaming, lots of pornography, terrible food, and all of a sudden you go, Oh, I can have a better brain.
Your brain can be better. And 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 people come to you, what is it they're typically motivated by? Like 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 want to just be curious about getting their brain scanned or is they usually come with a symptom or some other ailment?
No, usually they come because they're in pain. But they're anxious. They're depressed. Their marriage is falling apart.
Or their wife says, come here, 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's, they realize there's a genetic component to it and they don't want to have that. But that's really someone who is forward thinking.
I think more people come because they're hurting. Well, evidence that we got the alcohol is bad for the brain and bad for the rest of our body, especially in moderation. Well, the US urgent general just came out wanting to put cancer warning labels on all alcohol. 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 cancers. And that's a big deal. And then the evidence I have in 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, unlike your brain's older than you are, that alcohol is not a health food. It is detrimental to brain function. And then of course, 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 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 called The Truth About Drinking.
And we took a young adult 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 lobes. And 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 offline. The part that says don't say that, don't do that. Is that just when I've had one drink and then when I say I brought my back to normal?
Where's this clinic? Well, it depends. One drink will decrease in a mild way your decision making. When it becomes chronic, your life begins to get out of control.
Because I'm wondering if people drink in moderation, are they going to see long-term impacts of their brain? What is there such thing as drinking just a little bit and being fine? Well, I think there's always 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, where the computation is happening in the brain and white matter are like the highways. And so even a little bit of alcohol is creating potholes. It's disrupting the highways in the brain.
And if you're drinking a lot, you are prematurely aging your brain. You've scanned a lot of people who are on our colleagues. A lot. I mean, I've got some scans here, 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 Svectin. Svectin looks at blood flow and activity. It looks at how the brain works.
And for people who know the mitochondria, those are the little powerhouse energy plants in your cells. The spectraiser, 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 scalar being, which is this global decrease in activity.
So a healthy brain, full even symmetrical activity. It's sort of what big fat and round with alcohol or other drugs too. You see the brain begin to shrivel. And you see it gets this wavy appearance.
And unlike the real reason not to drink is it damages your brain. So if you drink, then you have a smaller brain, then you would have otherwise. Correct. That's pretty scary.
What does it, why does brain size matter? You know, people say it's going to shrink your brain. Why doesn't that matter? So I often say the only organ where size really does matter is your brain.
Because you don't want to lose brain tissue. Right? There is a part of your brain called the hippocampus, which is on the inside of your temporal bones right here. And it's really important.
And 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, spatial orientation, spatial processing. So that's the symptoms.
You're naming that, investing symptoms of someone who is damaged, they have become this right, so poor memory, probably poor spatial, brain fog. And mood and mood issues. And judgment and impulse control. But 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 I worked with my friend, BJ Fogg, who we're a wonderful book called Taney Habits.
And he's the director of Stanford's Persuasive Technology Lab, which is really on how people change. And he and I work together because I'm always interested in how I can help my patients better. 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 went in there around me enough. They drank more, I suspect, or they stopped. 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 me in the short time. Of course. But there are lots of things that are like you see, you also say you're married, 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 Alzheimer's disease. I'm like, that's not a good trade off. On your blog, you published a study from 2019, sorry, from 2009, it was a study on monkeys that 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 drink alcohol. Yes. They had monkeys doing all sorts of things they shouldn't be doing, which is effectively like premature brain aging.
Right. And it's worse if you do it before your brain is finished developing. And so if you think of fraternities and sororities, like I'm not a fan of sending children away to college. And it's because you have all these underdeveloped brains or not fully 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 than now. No, they're still drinking.
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 is it marijuana? It's a lie. Yeah. And I was actually really upset.
So President Biden, during the time he was running for president, so this is 2019, he's on debate stage with a lot of other people. And they asked him if he would federally legalize marijuana. And he said, I 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 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 1,000, 21,000, 27 marijuana users. 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 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 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 kind of this has on the brain. And then there's the whole issue of legalization. And I was re I was speaking, I was just looking at some of the research and it says exactly what you said, it says that there was a study published in JAMA Network, which examined over a thousand year now, those brains, and only 70% of heavy users exhibited reduced brain activity during working memory tasks.
The decline was associated with poor performance and retaining 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 of what it's doing, but the question of legalization is a whole nother issue. But please don't put people use marijuana in jail.
Like, that's just a bad use of money. That's not smart. But the problem becomes we're not educating kids on the potential damage to brain development, which nobody really argues 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 it's a bigger question. And I think the answer.
And I have a high school course in it's called brain thread by 25. And we actually studied it in 16 schools, decreases drug alcohol and tobacco use decreases depression and improve self-esteem. Why? We teach kids to love and care for their brain.
You got your brain scan. And now you love your brain more. You want it to be better. That's the answer.
It's not scanning 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, for 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 calm your mind probably more effectively than alcohol or marijuana. It's not hard to learn. What's wrong with the psilocybin magic mushrooms? Yeah, everybody's so excited about microdosing 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 Klonopin and Ataman, 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 addicted as hell.
Then there was alcohol is a health food. Marijuana is innocuous. Pain is the fifth vital sign, 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. Is it being delivered yet in Oregon?
I think just now. So there was a two-year waiting period. Yeah. And they were training 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 they're like rigor to get these compounds clinically approved.
And you're right. So in the early 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 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 cases of treatment resistant depression, where you do see, even in those studies that I've read, you see some people have adverse responses.
So some people get worse. And there's, if you take someone who's treatment resistant to press and potentially suicidal and you give them a strong compound, like psilocybin, 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 day that I read, I think coming out of the one, 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 psilocybin were went into clinical remission after 12 weeks after one dose. And there's really like nothing else that I can think of that can deliver that kind of response in that period of time. Ketamine, I mean, I'm the amazing thing. 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? Because 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 you what to do for it. All sorts of things can cause chest pain, right?
From a heart attack, a heart arrhythmia, a heart infection, gas, an ulcer, grief, all 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, being exposed to mold or mercury, lead. It's like, if you don't look, if you just give everybody your depressed based on these nine symptoms, and now we go get everybody an SSRI, which is ludicrous because that's assuming everybody would, 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 I saw Kendall and I saw her for post-COVID anxiety.
Her brain was on fire from COVID. And a lot of people don't understand that COVID and other infections can cause inflammation in the brain. Well, that's not a psilocybin thing. That's an anti-inflammatory cocktail to help post-COVID anxiety or post-COVID depression.
If you don't look, you don't know, you end up flying blind. And that's what I'm infighting 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 treat? So we could talk about, oh, I've seen these amazing 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 lamechol, right? I mean, it's great. We have all these treatments, but let's not fly blind when we don't have to. This is Graphis, all the other day, you start connecting around the internet, which I'm going to show you.
I'll put it on the screen for anybody that can't see it. But it shows globally which countries distribute the most antidepressant pills, SSRIs. And the United States leads the way by a long margin. I mean, I think in looking at that graph, it's almost 10 times more antidepressant pills per person are handed out in the United States than other parts of the world.
And I wondered why? Why does the USA hand out antidepressant pills like their water or something? This is such an interesting graph. 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 seven-minute office visits that do standard of care 12% of the time 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 in the 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 Ambien. 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 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.
What can I do naturally head to head against antidepressants? Saffron has been shown to be equally effective. The spice saffron head to head against antidepressants, walking like you're late, 45 minutes, four times a week, equally effective head against antidepressants, taking omega-3 fatty acids, equally effective in a study from Australia, head to head against antidepressants, learning how to not 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 in saffron and learn how to kill the ants. Ant stands for automatic negative thoughts. It thoughts to come into your mind automatically and ruin your 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. 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. It's a company that I think you just said about saffron. I was reading about it here. It says research indicates that saffron maybe is effective as SSRIs, intriguing models of moderate depression, and a meta-analysis of eight studies fund no difference between saffron and SSRIs and reducing depressive symptoms.
But in fact, the side of fact profile is probably better for saffron. So I got interested in saffron about 25 years ago because I saw a study. So they're now 25 randomized controlled trials showing that saffron is as effective as SSRIs and other antidepressants. But the thing that caught my interest, as I 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 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 already separated from your partner.
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 when 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 it enhances memory. That it was as good as aerosapt in people, aeroset to medicine we use in Alzheimer's disease. And it says good is aeroset. So it helps memory.
It helps mood. It helps sexual function. I'm like, mood memory and sex. I'm going to take food 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 FlexiPro or even SoulSiben or ketamine. One of the things when people are talking about psychedelics that they're trying to treat is trauma.
Right. Early childhood trauma. Is that something that you can see if you look to my brain? Could you see trauma on my brain?
Yes. And I have you as 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 the 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 ACE score? Yes, which is a measure of childhood trauma. Childhood trauma adverse childhood experiences.
So it's on a scale of zero to 10. How many bad things happened to you as a child? Physical, emotional, sexual abuse, neglect, being raised with a parent that has a mental illness, that's incarcerated, addiction, watching your mother be abused. So domestic violence.
So zero 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 a nine is good or bad? Nine is terrible. Okay.
So I've been a zero. Zero always means you have none of those. Okay. Eight.
You have a lot. And if you have four or 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 an eight, my nieces are nines, you died 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 gyrus.
I think of this as the brain's gear shifter, let you go from thought to thought, move from idea to idea, be 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 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 syndromes. 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, not everybody can afford to go to a therapist. It's hard to get access to these kind of treatments. If I have some kind of trapped trauma or traumatic experience PTSD that I've been through, I don't have any money at all, 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 started, we talked about this idea, it's the brain you bring into trauma that often determines how you deal with it. And to get well, you have to get your brain healthy. That's the first thing.
That means getting healthy alcohol, exercise, eat well. Certain simple supplements. Yes. What supplements?
And then multiple vitamins 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 is someone from Northern Europe to get a healthy vitamin D level. So you should know your vitamin D level and optimize it.
But 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 three fatty acid, I did a study 50 consecutive patient's name in clinics who are not taking vitamin D. We measured their omega three index 49 or sub optimal.
And so I think most people would benefit from an omega three fatty acid supplement. And then it 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 benzene.
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'd mentioned, which I had never heard of or 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 lobes.
And so I love doing positivity bias training. Like I train all of my patients, start every day. Today is going to be a great day. I mean, somebody asked me today if I believe in manifestation.
Sort 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, well, 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 be more positive, 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. 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, not wanting to be like him until I read the research, the people who lived the longest. So there's a study from Stanford. They started in 1921. And they looked at 1548 10 year old children.
And they were looking for what goes with success, health, and longevity. And what they found was shocking. That 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 that just shows they had good frontal lobe function. It's like if I say I'm going to do something and I commit to it, I do it, it will have 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 lobe function. So why would we ever take these guys, frontal lobes offline? No, love your frontal lobes.
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 recording now in January 2025, wow.
And everybody's thinking about New Year, New Me. They're thinking about the New Year's resolution becoming a new person. Habits, motivation, discipline. These are like the trifecta of what I see people talking about the most of this time of year.
When you, with what everything you understand about the brain, how do I become a more disciplined, motivated person who has better habits? So why do 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 female, when you're in the last week of your cycle, because blood flow to your frontal lobe 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 are two different people, sort of like they have multiple personality. They're 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 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 it's it fair to say that if you're trying to change who you are, you're trying to establish a new habit or crack motivation, then the goal shouldn't be necessary to get a six pack.
It should probably be something further upstream, like sleep well, or better frontalops. And so how do I get better frontalops and three strategies, frontal lobe envy, right? Brain envy, God care about it. Avoid things that hurt damaging my frontalops and do things that strengthen my frontalops.
We talked about two of these points earlier, but you talked about alcohol, but in the context of sleep, I've heard when you 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 two minutes for many people. 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 restoratively based on alcohol consumption. And so if I drink, I'm not going to sleep well, I'm not going to get restoratively, I wake up the next day, I'm going to struggle more with motivation and keeping any habit that I have. And anxiety, and then it is going to be more ants, and then you're going to drink more to shut up the ants.
And then when they come back, they come back stronger. And by ants, you mean the automatic negative thoughts? 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. And I have a 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?
Are you thinking words like always never, everyone, every time? Are they less than ants given to us by social media, where we compare ourselves to others in a negative way, guilt beating ants, mind reading ants, fortune telling ants, blame ants. So identify the type. Do you have an example of a bad thought that just sort of runs around your head?
Oh, gosh. I think I live in a permanent state of assuming I'm going to get bad news. And it doesn't haunt me. I think I'm generally quite a calm person and quite focused and peaceful in my brain.
But I think because I've run companies 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 and the background somewhere. Like I'm going to 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 this process that I've refined to bed. So that's a fortune telling ant. Right. And so this is going to be bad news.
Or I always get bad news, fortune telling, an all or nothing. And so the first question is, is it true? The second question is it absolutely true, with 100% certainty. And if one is no, two is automatically no.
The third question is how does that thought make me feel on edge on edge? How does the thought make me act? So the third question is three parts. How does the thought make me feel?
Ten son edge? How does it make me act? Removed. What's that one?
It's apathetic. Redicent. Yeah. Yeah.
And the third part of that, what's the outcome of believing it's always going to be bad news? I mean, there's no good outcome. Really suffering? Yeah.
Suffering. The fourth question is how would you feel if you didn't have that thought free? And how would you act happier and 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?
Fourth question is how would I feel act? And what's the outcome? Not having the thought. The fifth question is my favorite.
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 that's bothering me. And so I take these thoughts captive.
I like that. And people who are depressed are infested with negativity. That you can train that. You 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 hands. They were distorting 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 anti 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 you are programming 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 about 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 of 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 people. If you were raised by an unhappy parent or married to an unhappy spouse or raised in 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 the pattern, right? It's like getting biceps are hard.
But 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 stereotypical negative person down and out negative to press to the opposite? Yes, truly the opposite.
A lot. But you got to do the process. It's 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 I 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 reality of my life. Do you own a business or do you work in marketing?
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That's linkedin.com slash diary. Of course, times 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 that she was actually very 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 actually runs an organization for women who have been abused. 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 her 30s. And she's in a relationship. She's married.
She has children. She's running an organization. She speaks around the country. I mean, when people hear that, they might begin to question how they think about trauma.
Because we think of trauma as a very deterministic thing, i.e. if that happens to you, I can predict that you're going to be ex, you're going to be, you know, maybe depressed, you're not going to be socially 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 as deterministic of who you then become. But she's proving 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 wrote an article 1982 when I was a resident at Walter Reed 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. Obviously not 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 if you get your brain wrapped around that a little bit, this idea of epigenetics, if your parents grew up in trauma and abuse, it changed their genes to make you more 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, her 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 your 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 like? 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 in war, they're in the same tank, they go over an IED. So they're both 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, how about Alzheimer's disease? One and two horrifying statistics. And so I know that.
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's going to show, although I have a whole group of super brains, people that are 80, 90, 105, like stunningly beautiful brains. But they're people that had stunningly beautiful brain reserve habits that they didn't smoke, they weren't drinkers, they ate well, they were not overweight.
So on this subject of Alzheimer's, it's increasing globally, I think from the Alzheimer's Association that said, they're predicting by 2050 that there's going to be 150, 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 Alzheimer's is? I think there are many causes of it.