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March 19, 2023 - The Charlie Kirk Show
34:14
How to Change Your Brain with Dr. Daniel Amen

On this special Sunday episode of The Charlie Kirk Show, Charlie is joined by Dr. Daniel Amen, author of Change Your Brain Everyday. He walks listeners through the active steps to take, actions to avoid, and things to prioritize in order to take charge of your mental health and truly change your brain.Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Time Text
Healthy Brains for Every Age 00:12:11
Hey, everybody.
Happy Sunday, a game-changing book, Change Your Brain Every Day.
Maybe you're dealing with depression, anxiety.
Maybe your loved one is.
I encourage you to listen to this episode.
I think you'll learn a lot about what this doctor is presenting and what he is doing.
Dr. Amin from Amon Clinics, change your brain every day.
It could change your life.
Email me, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Get involved with TurningPointUSA today at tpusa.com and support our program at charliekirk.com/slash support.
Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.
Turning point USA.
We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
That's why we are here.
Doctor, welcome to the program.
Charlie, I'm just so grateful that you helped me spread the message of brain health.
It just changes everything.
It does.
I am grateful to you.
Well, I got an advanced copy of your book, and we've got a chance to get to know each other, albeit only in the last couple of weeks.
And I think you're onto something here that could change the world because a lot of people talk about mental health.
But if I understand the approach that you argue in this book, you talk about, well, first, let's talk about brain health.
And you've been doing this for quite some time.
You've done hundreds of thousands of brain scans.
And this book is written in a really digestible way.
It's called Change Your Brain Every Day.
I want everybody in my audience to pick up a copy.
And it's written in a way where every single day there's a little piece of wisdom, everything from how to deal with unwanted intrusive thoughts or automatic negative thoughts to what is a healthy brain look like and all that.
So, doctor, before we get into the specifics of the book, introduce your general philosophy.
What is brain health and how does that contrast with people labeling it as mental health?
So about 32 years ago, I started looking at the brain with a brain imaging study called SPECT.
And SPECT looks at blood flow and activity.
It looks at how the brain works.
And very early on, I learned that most psychiatric problems are not mental health issues at all, but rather they are brain health issues that steal people's minds.
And this one idea changes everything.
Get your brain right, and your mind will follow.
Nobody wants a mental illness.
I have to tell you, when I told my dad in 1979 I wanted to be a psychiatrist, he asked me why I didn't want to be a real doctor, why I wanted to be a nut doctor and hang out with nuts all day long.
Now, my dad would not get Father of the Year award, but he reflected what society thinks about people who struggle with their mind.
Nobody wants a mental health issue, but everybody wants a better brain.
And I have argued for decades: well, what if mental health was really brain health?
Then everybody would want it.
Plus, it's your brain, the physical functioning of your brain that creates your mind.
So if your brain's not healthy, you have post-COVID, you have a head trauma, you have Lyme disease, you have mold in your home.
If your brain's not healthy, it's really hard for you to think right.
What it's such a rational way to put it.
And having read a couple books in the genre and also having so many listeners that email us and they say, Charlie, I'm dealing with depression or anxiety.
Your first question is, why is the profession that's focused on the mind or the brain not even looking at the organ that they're trying to improve?
I mean, you say that, look, if you have a heart issue, you're going to try to figure out what's going on there, kidney, liver.
But, doctor, what percentage of people in psychiatry actually look at the physical brain before they go about treating it?
Less than 1%.
It's horrifying.
We are the only medical specialty that virtually never looks at the organ it treats.
And because of that, stigma lives.
And Charlie, do you know last year, there were 337 million prescriptions for anti-depression?
337.
That's almost the whole population.
Well, you know, people get all of course.
No, I'm just saying the volume of that is extraordinary.
It's extraordinary.
25% of the population is on psychiatric medications.
And it's just nuts when you think of they make diagnoses exactly like they did in 1840 when Lincoln was depressed.
You know, here are my symptoms.
And then they go, oh, well, here's your diagnosis and here are the drugs to treat it.
And I argue there's a much better way.
Now, sometimes medicine is really important and helpful, but flying blind is not helpful.
For example, I did the first and largest study on active and retired NFL players.
I published this study in 2011.
What we found, high levels of damage, and they had four times the level of depression as the general population.
So does this mean, oh, they should all be on antidepressants?
It's like, no.
First thing is let's rehabilitate their brain, which is clearly possible.
I mean, that's what my work has been about.
Change your brain every day.
And when you get to the root cause, there's less shame.
There's more compliance because people want a better brain.
And it's the future.
The future is we are going to see mental illness as brain health issues.
Which is, it's such a clear and easy way to understand it because I think far too often this conversation gets lost in abstractions.
And also people feel as if there's nothing I can do about it, right?
I have to take the medication.
It's the only way.
And that might be the case.
But having really carefully read your book, doctor, the way that you go about it is you say, well, let's exhaust every possible natural option, healthy living.
We're going to talk about all this, by the way, throughout this hour, dieting, supplementation.
And, you know, talk about medication should not be the first option, in your personal opinion, correct?
Well, when I was in medical school, I was taught, as all doctors are, first do no harm, use the least toxic, most effective treatment.
And head to head against antidepressants, exercise, omega-3 fatty acids, learning how to not believe every stupid thing you think have been found to be equally effective.
So why wouldn't we start with that while at the same time making sure your thyroid's not low?
That can cause depression.
Or your testosterone level, which is at epidemic levels with young men, your testosterone levels aren't low.
Because if your testosterone levels are low, it affects your libido, but also your memory and your mood.
So we need to find why you're depressed.
So I hate the diagnosis of depression because depression is like chest pain.
Nobody gets a diagnosis of chest pain because it doesn't tell you what you got it.
Okay.
What to do for it.
And that's so clear.
You say here on day 36, this is the most rational question that I've heard in this whole topic, which is not an insignificant issue.
We have the most depressed generation in American history right now.
How do you know unless you look?
And then you link at the bottom of here, page 40, the most important lesson from 83,000 brain scans.
What is that lesson, doctor?
What is the most important lesson that you derive from now?
I think it's what, 247,000 brain scans, right?
I mean, it's much more than that now.
Is you are not stuck with the brain you have.
You can make it better.
And I can prove it.
And we've done thousands of before and after scans.
I do a series on Instagram called Scan My Brain.
And about 16 months ago, I scanned Major League Baseball player Troy Gloss, who's the 2002 World Series MVP.
And his brain looked terrible.
He had four concussions.
He was drinking too much.
He had lots of dark thoughts.
He was suicidal.
And I did his third scan last week and it looked dramatically better.
And he's dramatically better, which not only impacts him, it impacts.
You see a correlation then.
You see the healthier brain.
You also see symptoms improve.
And it's proof that 99% of the profession is missing it.
And it's a long-term play.
So it's not just, oh, let me give you this medicine and you're less depressed.
Let me get your brain healthy.
So long term, you have a dramatically decreased risk for Alzheimer's disease.
And I turned 69 this year.
And one statistic that just horrifies me is 80 is 50% of people 85 and older will be diagnosed with dementia or Alzheimer's disease.
And I'm not okay with that, right?
It's more normal to be demented than not to be demented.
So as I take someone in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, the idea is not to just get them symptom-free.
It's to get them to fall in love with their brain and keep it healthy for the rest of their lives.
Most psychiatrists never even entertain these things.
And become a brain warrior.
So Dr. Amin, let's go through some of the specifics you talk about here.
One that I thought was so interesting.
And you go there because in the culture we live in, you're not supposed to say that, but you say, look, you got to lose some weight.
That if you're overweight, it actually might be impacting your brain health.
And I read that.
I was like, boy, I got to try to trim down a little bit.
It compelled me.
Explain that because you don't hear that every day.
Well, and I had no clue about this connection until I think it was 2009.
There was an article from the University of Pittsburgh that showed as your weight goes up, the actual physical size and function of your brain goes down, which should just scare the fat off anyone.
I looked at my normal population.
I have a group of normal scans, and we didn't use weight as an exclusion criteria.
So we looked at overweight versus healthy weight, significantly lower blood flow in people who are overweight.
And then I published a study on 33,000 scans, one of the world's largest imaging studies.
And we demonstrated as your weight goes up, the function of your brain goes down almost in a linear pattern in virtually every area of the brain.
And people go, well, why?
Weight Matters for Brain Health 00:04:21
And in the book, I talk about bright minds.
So if you want to keep your brain healthy or rescue it, you have to prevent or treat the 11 major risk factors that steal your mind.
And the acronym is bright minds, blood flow, retirement and aging, inflammation, and so on.
Well, if you have the D, which stands for diabetes, high blood sugar, and/or overweight, you now have seven of the 11 risk factors because the fat on your belly produces inflammatory cytokines.
It decreases blood flow.
It increases aging markers.
It stores toxins and disrupts so many different functions in your body.
And, you know, the whole purpose of the body is to care around the brain.
Yes.
On day 93.
So every you could read the book as I did its entirety, or you could do it throughout the course of a year and just say, Hey, I got it.
I got one page a day.
It's called Change Your Brain Every Day.
Day 93.
And I just love how blunt you are with this because you're not allowed to say this.
You say, Look, a half dozen ways donuts can ruin your life.
And you talk about here, you say, Look, chronically high blood sugar can lead to type 2 diabetes.
And then you have an action step: list foods that are a struggle for you to give up.
How many of them are sugary?
And you talk, this is a theme.
I mean, I've got to say, probably on 20 or 30 of the days of pages, you're basically saying, Look, if you care about your brain, you have to care about your diet and care about your waistline.
And you do it in a really loving, but also factual way.
Doctor, tell us about one of the friends you talk about in this book where you met with a friend who was overweight and you loved him enough to say, Hey, you probably need to lose some weight if you want to get your life right.
And he did, and he lived a better life.
Oh, it's just such an emotional story for me.
Mark and I had been friends.
He's a psychologist, and we go to the same conference every other year.
And we're having dinner at the restaurant, and I see him injecting himself with insulin at the table.
And I'm like, Mark, how much, how tall are you?
He said, I'm six feet.
I said, how much do you weigh?
He said, 244 pounds.
And I calculated on my phone his BMI, which was 31.
And I'm like, dude, you're obese.
And I also saw him order chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes, and a brownie for dessert.
And after I saw that, I just, I couldn't just stay quiet.
And I saw it, I'm like, Mark, you're obese.
And he's like, Daniel, you're so cold.
I'm not as cold as you're going to be when you're six feet under.
What's the matter with you?
Why aren't you paying attention to your health?
And he didn't eat any of the dessert.
And I felt because I love him.
But when we were at that conference two years later, he'd lost 52 pounds.
And I was having lunch with his wife and with Mark, and he was telling me how much better his sex life was.
And I'm like turning red, but it's absolutely true.
When you get physically healthy, blood flow, you have better blood flow to your brain.
It's just so simple.
You have to wonder how many people that go in and they get these very aggressive pharmaceuticals, how supplementation, we'll talk about supplements in a second after the break, and just losing some weight could at least improve some of their symptoms.
Buy his book, Change Your Brain Every Day.
If you have a child, if you have a grandchild that says, I'm dealing with depression or anxiety and all this, this book is a great starting point.
You'll learn so much.
So, Dr. Ahmed, while we're on the theme of talking about things that people don't want to hear, there's two topics that sometimes my target demographic college kids don't like it when I talk about the negatives of drinking and marijuana.
Let's start with drinking.
Alcohol, Caffeine, and Anxiety 00:14:48
Is it true that if you drink too much or drink to excess or even drink at all, that it can damage your brain?
Any drinking, any alcohol has been shown to disrupt the white matter in your brain.
So gray matter is brain cell bodies.
White matter is brain cell tracks, or it's the highways in your brain.
And alcohol is poison.
I mean, everybody should know that, right?
Drink too much, can't walk a straight line.
Walk in a straight line is brain function.
Drink too much, you say stupid things, you act like an idiot.
Well, inhibiting is a brain function.
But there's so many reasons that alcohol is bad for a developing brain because it disrupts a process called myelination.
Your brain constantly is putting down this white fatty substance called myelin that causes your brain to mature.
And so if you're drinking at 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 22, you're delaying and sometimes permanently damaging the maturity of the brain.
Not to mention last year, and I've been talking about alcohol for 30 years, ever since I started looking at the brain.
Last year, I wrote a blog called I Told You So.
The American Cancer Society came out against any alcohol because any alcohol increases your risk of seven different types of cancer.
And I predict, you know, if you see somebody smoking now, you sort of look at them like, really?
You know, at least where I live, it's like, seriously?
Smoking cigarettes, that is.
Yes, that's right.
I think we're going to get that same societal look at alcohol years from now.
And marijuana is just a disaster.
I am so unhappy about what we're seeing in our country.
Last year, babies born with marijuana in their system has gone up 1700% in Colorado.
It is just a nightmare.
As the perception of the dangerousness of a drug goes down, its use goes up.
And even during the last presidential debate, that President Biden said, you know, somebody asked him, should we legalize marijuana?
And he said, I think we need more study, which I thought was a reasonable answer.
And Corey Booker shamed him.
He said on national television, man, are you high?
Like, it's been decided that marijuana is safe.
Except, teenagers who use in their 20s have a higher incidence of anxiety, depression, and suicide.
Teenagers who use have a 450% increased risk of having a psychotic illness.
And Tana and I, my wife and I, adopted our two nieces because their parents had problems with substance abuse.
And when we adopted them, I'm always like showing them scans, I'm teaching them, and I taught them a new word.
And there's a new word called scrommeting.
Like, what's squometing?
It's a combination of screaming and vomiting.
And emergency rooms are seeing more and more with teenagers and young adults who are being poisoned by marijuana.
Because when I was growing up, the THC in marijuana was 10% what it is now.
And still not good for you.
And it's unfortunately one of the tragedies of this, and I spoke out, I speak out against this, and people don't like it when I say that I don't think it's a good thing that we're commercializing the widespread use of marijuana, is that we're almost making it just normal and mainstream for a 13 or 14-year-old.
What does that do to a developing brain in particular, though, doctor?
I mean, you talk about the alcohol effects.
I mean, you have THC-laced, very heavy THC-laced marijuana for a 15-year-old.
I mean, no wonder why they're 21 and they're depressed.
It's damaging their brains.
I published two big studies, one on a thousand people, where I compared healthy brains versus marijuana brains.
Every area of the brain was lower in blood flow and activity.
And then I published the world's largest imaging study on 62,454 scans on how the brain ages.
And it's just fascinating.
Little kids have really busy brains, older people, not so much.
And then we looked at, well, what are the factors that accelerate aging?
And schizophrenia was the worst, so very severe psychiatric disorder.
The second worst was marijuana.
And then it was alcohol, and then it was smoking.
But marijuana ages your brain.
It also ages your lungs, and it's worse than nicotine.
So the lung damage, they looked at smokers who just smoked cigarettes versus smokers who smoked marijuana.
And the marijuana was significantly worse.
The lungs aged faster.
So this is not innocuous.
And I worry so much about it.
And I've seen it.
You know, I'm old enough.
You know, I saw, oh, benzos are mommy's little helper in the 80s and they're innocuous.
They're totally not mommy's little helper.
They're addictive.
And once you start them, it's hell to get off of them.
Or opiates.
My wife is a nurse, and pain was the fifth vital sign.
And you were almost shamed if you didn't give your patients opiates.
And we know how that turned out.
Well, the same thing, the exact same thing is happening.
Alcohol is a health food.
No, that was a lie.
Marijuana is innocuous.
That's a lie.
Honestly, God bless you for speaking out on this because too many people dance around this when it's so obvious it's not good.
One that was very hard for me, though, doctor, and I have reduced my intake and I have seen positives is some caffeine is okay, but caffeine does limit blood flow to the brain.
Do I have that right?
You do.
And it's like, you know, I have no dog in the fight.
And when I first started doing imaging, SPECT is a blood flow study.
And I read one study that showed caffeine constricts blood flow 30% to the brain.
And I'm like, well, then it's going to prematurely age the brain.
Plus, if you start the day with caffeine, caffeine also increases cortisol, which is a stress hormone.
And cortisol puts fat on your belly, impairs your immune.
It's like, it's not your friend.
It kills cells in the hippocampus, the major memory center in the brain.
So if you have 100 milligrams a day, it's not a big deal.
But one Venti Starbucks is 330 milligram of caffeine, which is an addiction dose.
I fully acknowledge marijuana drinking, not even close to, you know, that's not my, the caffeine thing is where I have to be most improved player.
So doctor, however, you say something also fascinating in the book.
You say the goal should not be to get rid of anxiety, the don't worry, be happy people, that some anxiety is actually good.
What do you mean by that?
Well, if you think of anxiety on a scale of zero to 100, 100 is totally freaked out.
And zero is you just have no anxiety at all.
Well, the no anxiety people, it has been discovered, they die early from accidents and preventable illnesses.
I want your anxiety to be about 30.
I want you to be, oh, I don't text while I drive.
I'm not driving fast in the rain.
I see a cute girl, but I have enough anxiety to know my wife will kill me.
So some anxiety just helps you make good decisions.
And so we don't want, there's actually this great study out of Stanford, started in 1921.
They looked at 1,541 10-year-old children, and then they followed them for up to 90 years, looking at what goes with health, success, and longevity.
And the don't worry, be happy people, the low anxiety people died the earliest.
The number one hallmark of success, health, and longevity was conscientiousness.
That if you said you were going to show up and you show up consistently, predictably, you do what you say, you're going to do, you live longer than everyone else.
And the don't worry, be happy, who cares if the rent is late, the landlord can litigate, that doesn't work out really well, actually.
It actually probably makes you more likely to, you know, make a pretty, pretty terrible error.
Another one I have marked here, doctor, and I don't want to focus too much on the kind of things you're not supposed to talk about, but I can't help but ask you about this because we get questions about this from young ladies.
You talk about how the pill could actually be making young women depressed.
That was fascinating to me.
What did you find here?
Increased risk of depression, 40%.
It's the pill often depletes serotonin, one of the chemicals that's just essential to have stable mood.
It depletes magnesium, so you're more anxious.
It can deplete zinc.
So your immunity and your mood is not as good.
Now, it's just, it's important to know these things.
And if there's an alternative, that's probably better.
But just know the risk.
And, you know, I hate prescribing an antidepressant to deal with the side effects of another virus.
Yeah, the reason I ask, though, doctor, and because sometimes the way that these things are communicated to young people, no side effects, perfectly safe, perfectly fine.
And that is not true.
In fact, that does a fair amount of damage.
People need to know what you're signing up for, what you're getting into.
The book is called Change Your Brain Every Day.
Doctor, we have 45 seconds in this segment.
Can you also just talk about your clinics?
You have them across the country.
I guarantee you, people will also be interested.
Like, wow, this sounds, you know, I'm a believer.
Where can they find information on that?
AmonClinics.com.
So, Amon, like the last word in a prayer, clinics.com.
We have 11 of them all around the United States.
And if you've struggled and not gotten the help you need, somebody should look at your brain.
And we have more experience than anyone in the world.
Just can you just kind of pepper off a couple of the things?
How else can people improve their brain?
Obviously, by the book, but omega-3 supplementation, understanding inflammation, healthy diet, exercise, not doing marijuana, not doing alcohol.
But I love this, also embracing the attitude of a brain warrior.
What am I doing today to improve my brain health?
Well, you're in a war for the health of your brain.
Everywhere you go, someone's trying to shove bad food down your throat that will kill you early.
Everywhere you go, people are trying to put an addictive gadget in your hand that steals the dopamine, the pleasure centers in your brain.
Negative news that you and I both know the news is no longer the news.
It's new meant to scare you so they can have your attention to sell you copper underwear.
We live in a society that perpetuates mental health problems and we're seeing it.
It's just horrifying, especially in teenage girls.
The level of anxiety, depression, suicide is at epidemic levels.
So being a brain warrior, you're armed, you're prepared, you're aware to win this most important fight for your life.
In closing here, Doctor, as much as you're comfortable with, we have an audience that is very faithful and dedicated Christians.
You helped write a forward to a book with Rick Warren.
Can you talk about just some of your faith and how you incorporate it in the work that you do?
You know, I always think of myself and my patients in four big circles.
It's what's the biology, so the physical function of your brain that we've been talking about.
What's the psychology or how you think?
What's the social circle, the situation you find yourself in?
And the spiritual circle, which is ultimately, why do you care?
What is your deepest sense of meaning and purpose?
It's your relationship with God, with the planet, with the past, and with the future.
And I was raised Roman Catholic.
Believing God has always been part of my life.
And when I was a young soldier in West Germany many years ago, I got involved with a group called Teen Challenge, a Christian group that deals with drug addicts that deepened my own faith.
I went to medical school at Oral Roberts University.
So I learned medicine in the context of my faith.
Faith and Medicine Together 00:02:53
And people go, oh, how can you be a neuroscientist and believe in God?
It's like, well, how can you be a neuroscientist and not believe God?
To think all of this happens by random chance, that's stupidity, right?
If you just know the second law of physics, where things go from order to disorder, you know, random evolution just virtually makes no sense to me.
Creative design, that makes a lot more sense to me.
Plus, you know, I know through the things I've done and my personal relationship with Jesus, it's the only way I've been able to accomplish the cool things I've been able to do to help people.
Do you find in your patients, younger ones in particular, if they get that spiritual bucket filled, do you find that they start to heal in other areas of their life?
Yes.
In fact, there's really good research that demonstrates if you have a close relationship with God, that if you get depressed, you heal faster, that you also tend to live longer and your baseline level of happiness is higher.
And yet, it seems as if our culture, that's the one thing they don't always want to talk about.
The book is Change Your Brain Every Day, one minute remaining.
Any closing thoughts, doctor, that we didn't cover or points that you wanted to make?
Brain and mental health are daily practices.
So just like spiritual health, just like physical health, you want a sharp mind.
You want to be happy.
You want to have energy and memory.
We got to take care of your brain every day.
And it's basically three things.
Brain envy, got to care about it.
Avoid things that hurt it.
Do things that help it.
It all comes down to this one simple question.
It's really a theme throughout the book.
Whenever you go to make a decision, just ask yourself, is this good for your brain or bad for it?
And if you can answer that with information and love, all of this is about love, love of yourself, love of family, love of the reason God puts you on the planet.
You just start making better decisions.
Change your brain every day.
Dr. Raman, thank you so much.
Hope we're going to have you back on soon.
There's so many more questions and we'll get questions from our audience, I'm sure, as well.
Thank you so much.
So grateful, Charlie.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Everybody, email us freedom at charliekirk.com.
God bless you.
Check out the book, Change Your Brain Every Day.
Have a great day.
Talk to you soon.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Thanks so much for listening and God bless.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk dot com.
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