This is the most dramatic podcast ever and iHeartRadio podcast. Chris Harrison and Lauren z e mc comedy from the home office in Austin, Texas. I am unbelievably excited for this show today. If there is a show you should sit down and listen to and take in, it is this one. I think this will be moving important, inspirational, educational. We're talking to doctor Amen, doctor Daniel Amen, who is really the foremost educator, philosopher on brain, on mental health,
on mental education, on brain scans. His aim in clinics have seen more brain scans than any in the world, and he's also doing TV shows and social stuff. With all the brain scans that he's done, he is so fascinating and I have a thousand questions for this guy.
Yeah, I've been following him on Instagram for a while, so I'm super excited to get to talk to him. And if you don't follow him on Instagram, do it because he does constant videos onlike you know, just quick tips on your mental health things, the way that certain
food affects your brain, that kind of thing. He's the advisor to major celebrities like Miley Cyrus and a bunch of other people and kind of also trains them on like how to focus into their success, how to change their outlook, like to give yourself an outlook of positivity, to create what you want through training your brain to
look for those things. So he does this incredible combination of he's got the real data he's scanning your brain, combined with like how you can use that and the way you literally talk to and in your own brain to create the life you want.
So he is fascinating.
Physician, but also an adult and child psychiatrist as well as the founder of the ABE and Clinics. So, as Lauren was just alluding to, has both sides cover as far as you know, the clinical side of being an actual but then the psychiatry part as well. So fascinating topic today with a very fascinating man. We are excited to welcome doctor Amen into the show today. Doctor Amen, how are you, sir?
I am really great, Chris, how are you?
I'm terrific. Thank you so much for the time. This is my wife, Lauren.
Doctor Aman. I'm fangirling.
I followed you on Instagram for a couple of years, so I'm so excited that you're here on our podcast.
Thank you so much for having me.
And did you just do something with our coworker slash boss, doctor Phil.
I feel like I saw you with him.
I did what did you guys do in the studio? We went after diet coke together.
Oh, he's a big iced tea drinker.
Well, I'm looking forward to scanning his brain.
Okay, I'm sorry we missed you. We're there probably a couple times a month we do. We're we're in a deal with Merritt Street, so we're here in Austin, Texas, and we drive to Dalla and we're working on some shows with them.
Well, how fun. I'm hoping to be there more. I'm going to be there again in a couple of weeks.
On another showed to I need to be up there whenever he's scanning brain. I want my brain. I kind of want my brain scan, but also scared to find out what that might reveal about me.
Well, let's launch into the podcast with that, Doctor Amon, welcome. Let me ask you right off the bat, should Chris Harrison get his brain scanned?
Are you scared about that idea? Of Babe?
No, I would relish the opportunity.
What do you think what would he learn For the people out there who are just finding out about you, you are the forefather of brain scans and all they can reveal. What are some of the basic takeaways people will get from having their brain scanned?
Well, it's only good news because you have what you have and if I can make it better, well then you're better. When I met my wife Goodness, almost twenty years ago, I like fell hard for her, But the first naked part of her I wanted to see was her brain because ultimately, it's your brain that creates chaos in your life, or it's your brain that creates happiness
and consistency and reliability and passion and purpose. And one of my friends, doctor Earl Henslen, who refers to me, he said, you know, if there's no forethought brain function, there's no for play.
So how quickly into dating did you scan her brain?
It was three weeks. In my family is if you date any of my children. I have six children, and I think second round, you got to get scammed?
Right?
What type of scan? Just so everyone listening understands, this a CT scan? What kind of scan?
Now? We do a study called brain spacked spect imaging stands for single photon emission computed tomography. It's a nuclear medicine study that looks at blood flow and activity, looks at how your brain works and basically shows us good activity, too little or too.
Much, and then my job is to balance it.
And so you can take that scan. Like you said, it's only good news because it is what it is. And then you said, you can make that better and better. So what are some things where you see for the average human being that you can give them the advice to better it? And what is that advice?
Well, brain health is three things. It's brain envy. You've got to care about it. Nobody cares about brain because you can't see it right. You can see the wrinkles in your skin, of the fat around your belly, and you can do something when you're unhappy with it. But because nobody looks at their brain, very few people actually care. Even though, if you're blessed to lift eighty five or beyond, you have a one and two chance of being diagnosed with dementia, you have a one and two chance of
having lost your mind. And so I think, like colonoscopies, you should evaluate your brain on a regular basis. So that's the first thing brain. Then you got to care avoid things that hurt it. You just have to know the lists. And quite frankly, both seven year olds know the list right right as you do tackle football, they'll probably go No, probably not good for your.
Brain, professor, boxing not great.
Boxing's not good, not sleeping, alcohol, nicotine, ultra processed foods. In fact, I went to my when my daughter was in second grade. I went to her class and I wrote down twenty things on the board and I went separate these good for the brain or bad for it, and they got nineteen right.
The only thing.
They missed was orange juice, which they put in the good category, but ultimately is way too much sugar because when you unwrap fruit sugar from its fiber source, it actually turns toxic in the body.
That's it. I want to, just before we move on, go back to something that I know a lot of our listeners are going to say alcohol. When you say alcohol, is it a zero sum game or is it a moderate sum game? Where do you lie on this?
You don't drink I think I don't drink.
No, it's poison. It's like, why would you drink poison?
And the American Cancer Society actually said it best. I've been railing against alcohol for thirty years just because I look at the brains of people who are regular drinkers.
Their brain is smaller.
And when it comes to the brain, size matters, right, it's the only organ wear size matters. And so the American Cancer Society a couple of years ago came out against any alcohol because any alcohol is associated with an increased risk of seven different types of cancer. Cancer is clearly bad for your brain. Right, the stress, chemotherapy and so on, and if you just think about it, and the pandemic was so instructive. Jim Beam, the whiskey company,
turned its whiskey plants into hand sanitizer plants. Why because alcohols are disinfectant. Well, in your mouth and in your gut, you have a hundred trillion bugs, bacteria, viruses, fungi. You need them. They're important. They support you. They make nerve transmitters, they digest your food, they detoxify your body, they support your immune system. Let's not pour a disinfectant down our throats.
It's just's not a good idea. On top of which, as a psychiatrist, every week, every week, one of my patients is talking to me about something bad that happened with alcohol. Whenever I go to a party, my father in law gets drunk and then they start telling all the things I told him, you know, in confidence. And I mean it's just people's level of decision making drops when alcohol is around.
And it's very normalized, you know. I mean it's yeah, I know you're here. Yeah, there's nothing for me to say. It's hard.
I know all this is true, and yet I do want a glass of wine. It's so hard. Is wine better than alcohol?
No?
Okay, it's just.
Don't tell the Italians of the Greeks.
It's a habit that. And you know, if you go to the Bible, the first story of somebody drunk in the Bible caused generations of problems. It was Noah after the Arc, you know, found some grapes after the flood and got drunk, and his child found him and then he cursed his child.
Yeah, but Jesus never turned wine into water.
Okay.
Can I ask one question though, I don't know if you've seen that docuseries The Blue Zone on Netflix that got pretty popular. And when that gentleman went to Greece to the Blue Zone and grease where people were living well into their hundreds and in Italy they were drinking wine every day.
So what is the why is that working in those environments?
Yeah, well it's a very small amount.
Okay, Plus they're doing other things right, got it right? And so if like I did the big NFL study when the NFL was sort of lying and had a problem about traumatic brain injury and football, and still I have active NFL players that I adore, and I'm like, look, if you're going to do something bad, you better do everything else right, Yeah, because that's clearly bad.
And there before we jump on there's a major subject I want to get to eventually. But in the realm of super foods, things that we can do right, because Lauren.
Has met and walnuts.
Every day I'm eating tuper zil nuts and some walnuts and you know, asa ebowl because that's a what are the what are the real superfoods where you're like, this is great brain food, take this daily.
Well, I think nuts, of course, without sugar on them. I think nuts are superfood. Berries are a super food, but they have to be organic. So just a little asterisk because non organic berries hold more pesticides.
Than almost any fruit. I think green.
Leafy vegetables, wild salmon eggs are a superfood.
In my mind, as long as you know they're raised in a healthy way.
And ultimately we are all creatures of habit and you just have to find twenty foods you love that love you back. And so if you think about the relationship, I was going to say that about alcohol, you love it. I don't know, Lauren, if you've ever been in a bad relationship in the past, I know I have. I'm not doing that anymore. I'm like married to my best friend, and I protect that relationship. I love her, she loves me. I'm not going to love stuff that hates.
Me, that beats me out, But so I love that I love I protect her, she protects me.
I'm gonna that's just sweet.
Okay, what we interrupted you it was brain. The three things were brain envy, you got to care and the things.
That hurt it. And what's the third one?
Do things that help it on a regular basis. You're on a better memory tomorrow, go to better half an hour early tonight without your gadgets. And I have a mnemonic that I write about in all my books called bright minds. You want to keep your brain healthy or rescue it. You have to prevent or treat the eleven major risk factors that steal your mind. And we know what they are, so bright minds. B is for blood flow. Low blood flows the number one brain imaging predictor of
Alzheimer's disease. Well, how do you know if you have low blood float, Well you can come get a scan, we would tell you. Or if you're smoking, if you're using marijuana, alcohol, low blood flow, if you're sedentary, if you have high blood pressure or rectial dysfunction, if you have blood flow problems anywhere, they're everywhere. And so a brain health program people's love, love lives get better. And so to increase blood floats, exercise and beats and regano
and rosemary and cinema and Genko. One of my favorite supplements is Genko. The R is for retirement and aging. When you stop learning, your brain starts dying. So always be engaged with something interesting. Eyes for inflammation, and you know ultra processed foods low may get three fatty acids. But the sleeper with inflammation is gum disease. If you have gum disease, you have brain disease. And so just
getting into the dentis getting your teeth claimed. Flossing regularly absolutely critical to brain health.
The geusgenetics know what's.
In your family. So do either of you have stuff in your family? I have obesity and heart disease, but either of you.
I have heart disease on my dad's side.
Yeah, yeah, So you and I should be in a heart disease prevention program every day of our lives. And I adopted my two nieces and both their parents. Both of their parents are drug addicts. And you know, I'm hammering. They're fourteen and nineteen, Like you should be on an addiction prevention program every day of your life.
And you know, people go, but what about moderation. That thought is.
The gateway to hell because it's like, oh, I'm about to cheat. Whenever you say, well, everything in moderation just means you're about to do a bad thing.
That into everything in moderation is a gateway to hell. Okay, yes, okay.
The age has had trauma, major cause of psychiatric problems. Protect your head. Stop texting while you're driving or walking for goodness sakes.
Tea is talks, and so we talked about alcohol and drugs. But it's also the toxins in your products that you put on your body.
I don't know if you've seen this app called Think Dirty. It allows you to scan your personal products and I'll tell you, on a scale of one to ten how quickly they're killing you.
Wow ssha.
I'm not a big fan of detoxes. I think your life should be a detox.
I use the Yuka app. Yuka It's similar. You scan everything and it tells you if they're hazardous. Everything's in it.
I love that right. So there's also one by I Think EWG and it just is information for people to actually read the labels. And then the amin Bright Minds is mental health stuff, and I teach people to kill the ants, the automatic negative thoughts.
Its steel your happiness. There's nowhere in school where they taught us not to believe every stupid thing we think. So it's learning how to direct your mind. The second eye is for immunity and infections. COVID unleashed a mental health pandemic, not only because of the isolation, fear, and poor public policy.
The virus itself.
Causes inflammation in the brain and increases anxiety and depression. So you've seen gen z go. You know skyrocketing mental health problems. Well, part of that is just inflammation from the virus itself. That N is neuro hormone changes. Your hormones are so important you should get them tested and optimized yearly. D is diabesity. We all know not eighty percent of Americans or overweight or obese. I published three studies that say, is your weight goes up, the size
and function of the brain goes down. And now we're in this body positivity movement where you can't say anything. I'm like, no, no, no, know the truth and the truth will set you free. Are we need to do a much better job at getting people to a healthy weight underweight. It's clearly bad for you being overweight. If you're overweight, you have seven of these eleven risk factors. Well, just you know, the fat on your body increases inflammation, storage,
talks and changes your hormones and so on. And then the S is for sleep, which just needs to be a priority for all of us.
Wow, the COVID thing is blowing my mind. I didn't know that.
I had never heard that about the virus, that it creates that much brain inflammation.
Is that so?
Is that just using everything else you've just talked about to try to get that down. Or is there one thing to fight the inflammation COVID's causing that you think people need to be doing.
So I really like hercumans and quercetin and omega three fatty acids and vitamin D to sort of help put out the fire inflammation. And then of course you want to be on a story diet. You want to kill sugar and foods that quickly turn to sugar and people go co carbs are not the enemy, and they're not.
It's high glycemic, low fiber carbs they're the enemy. There's the study from the Male Clinic where people who are on a fat based diet at forty two percent less risk of getting Alzheimer's disease, but people who are on a simple carbohydrate diet thing bread, pasta, potatoes, rice, fruit, juice, sugar had a four hundred percent increase risk of getting
Alzheimer's disease. All this continuous glucose monitoring craze that we're in now, I like it because it's just telling people blood sugar is important, and you know it's one of the eleven diabesity. It's being overweight or having hot blood sugar. You don't want that because diabetes and pre diabetes delay healing and reacavoc on every organ in your body, especially your brain.
Where do you fall on some of the carbs that I've that you've just mentioned, but I've hurt, like like sometimes I hear people.
Really advocate for sourdough bread like this is.
A great bread to eat, or like the much better quality pasta you'd find in Italy that we don't have in America.
Well, Italy, it's so funny.
So many of my patients, I think, even myself when I go over there, because of the walking and because it's not genetically modified and are raised with all the chemicals ours, is it just it seems to be better. But you still, you know, America has exported our obesity crisis. It's everywhere.
And when you.
Think of the Mediterranean diet, it's not pasta and pizza.
So, doctor, one thing I really wanted to dive in with you is something that is so big today, and that is depression and the prescription of antidepressants. It is Laura and I were talking before you came on. I said, you know, to me, the math isn't mathing. We are prescribing these kids so much medication, and yet mental health is off the charts, meaning bad problems. Suicide rates are skyrocketing.
So the more we are prescribing all this stuff, I don't see the end result and that this thing is being measured and weighed out.
No, you're absolutely correct. Prozac was released in nineteen eighty eight and since then depression has gone up five hundred percent.
So yeah, it's a mess. We're in a mental mess.
Gen Z in particular, of fifty seven percent of teenage girls report being persistently sad, thirty two percent have thought of killing themselves. Think of that, twenty four percent of planned and thirteen percent of actually attempted suicide. These are numbers we have never seen before. And last year there were three hundred and thirty seven million prescriptions for antidepressants. Twenty five percent of women in the United States are
taking them. I mean, these are really insane numbers. And most people get prescribed psychiatric drugs without anybody ever looking at their brain.
And I noticed this like thirty five years ago.
I'm like, why are psychiatrists the only medical doctors who never look at the organ? They treat If you just think about that, then you diagnoses based on symptom clusters with no biological data.
So you don't have.
To go, oh, you know, your brain's not really very healthy. Let's get your brain healthy and see if your mood would be healthy or your thought patterns are really not helping you. Let's work to train your brain to be more positive. I'm doing a study now on negativity bias. So if your brain tends to go to what's wrong much faster than to what's right, it puts you at
risk for virtually every psychiatric illness. So I start my days today is going to be a great day, and when I go to bed at night, I go what went well today? And I'm very serious about noticing even the micro moments of happiness, So and talking to you guys will make my highlight real tonight. It's so important to notice what you like about yourself and about other people more than what you don't look.
So it sounds like you feel like antidepressants are being overprescribed. And I think some people would say, oh no, we just were finally diagnosing it, but you feel it's overprescribed.
Now that's nuts.
We're twenty five percent of women are on antidepressants. And did you know, like I said, you know, I have six kids, five of them are girls. Birth control pills spike depression. Birth control pills increase the risk of depression by forty percent. And I can just tell, like when my twenty year old went on and I'm like, oh my god, she's such a different feman. And when she went off, she was just like herself. Wow, very few people are talking about I.
Was on birth control in my twenties. No one ever told me this is going to increase your risk of depression. Which it feels like almost any medication you see a commercial for increase risk of depression is a side effect they say in the commercial.
Well, and if they say everything like that, oh it may increase your risk of depression. But if someone said it may increase it forty percent, that's the flip of a coin. Essentially, that is different than oh it may.
Well, you know, I think about myself as a teenager. If my parents, like, if I was a teenager today and if my parents had taken me to see someone, I think I could have feasibly been prescribed and antidepressant. But when I look back, I was just a really I feel I was just a really hormonal, dramatic tea tenager and I kind of eventually grew out of that phase.
And I guess that was something I wanted to ask you about because I don't want to make light of like like you just said that, I never had suicidal thoughts. I never thought about that, And I hear from these kids that they are really really dealing with that. But as a parent, how do you navigate I have a
very hormonal teenager whose brain isn't fully developed yet. They're telling me they have these issues, and as a parent, you're scared, right, you don't want to risk that you wouldn't address an issue your teenager has.
How do you navigate that?
But while still having the spear in your head of like, well, should my kid really be on all this medication because that's scary too.
Well, I'm not a posed to medicine. I'm just posed to that's the first and only thing. Yeah, you think about.
So for example, saffron the spice.
Saffron as this supplement twenty five randomized control trials showing it's equally effective to antype essence. So why wouldn't we do and head to head against antidepressants. Exercise walking like you're late for forty five minutes, four times a week Omega three fatty acids head to head against prozac was more effective in a study from New Zealand, learning how to not believe every stupid thing you think. Cognitive behavior therapy equally effective to antidepressants.
So before you do meds, walk like.
You're late, forty five minutes, four times a week, take saffron omega three fatty acids, and whenever you feel sad, mad, nervous, or out of control, right down what you're thinking and then just ask yourself whether or not it's true. I have this whole process on how to kill the ends, the automatic negative thoughts, getting skill in managing your mind and your body. Your brain and your body should be
found days. And if we did just those things, we would cut antidepressing use in half, doctor Amand there are a lot of parents listening to this who have kids who have been prescribed indepressants and other drugs. Has it been over prescribed? Is this a life sentence? Are they going to be on it for the rest of their lives? Well, so right away you can walk like you're late, You can introduce exercise right away and it's free right away. You can have them take Omega three fatty acids not
very expensive, right away. You can introduce saffron. Now, of course you should talk to your doctor about it. If I say that, then I go, well, most doctors don't know that, but right away, you can do those simple things right away. And I think all of us, I actually think it should be a class taught in grade school, middle school, and high school. Teach kids how to manage their minds,
simple cognitive therapy principles in schools. And then if they get stable and they're better and they don't think of marijuana as innocuous or alcohol is a healthy right, Let's get the brain as healthy and clean as it can be. Then work with your doctor and exactly as you said, if you're on anti depressants and you just stop them,
you can go through withdrawal. And what I do because at aim in Clinics, I have eleven clinics around the country, we spend more time taking people off meds than putting them on meds. And so it's like we'll cut it in a half and we'll do that for a couple of months and then we'll cut it in a quarter and do that for a couple of months and everything is okay, then we'll stop it.
Well, I hate that what you just said is revolution. That is sad to me that at aim in Clinics we are trying to get more people off of medication than getting them on it. And it is our whole medical industry is based on the opposite, which is terrifying.
Right.
It's because medicine has been taken over by business people and the goal is for pharmaceutical companies and many doctors, it's not to be in the order business. It's to be in the reorder.
The lifelong customer business.
Because what's interesting is we talk to a lot of women and they're like, well, I'm on antidepressants, but I don't even know. Am I supposed to just stay on these for the rest of my life. It's there's no goal.
The role when I.
Was in training was stay on it for about nine months. If this is your first episode, then slowly go off.
If it's your.
Second episode, do it for about two years to sort of reset things, and then slowly ring yourself off. And if it's your third episode, maybe you should be on it for the rest of your life. I find that is true for such few people enough I can get them to love and care for their brain.
Interesting, well, and what about that we're like, we're talking about so many teenagers and young people are getting prescribed this, these medicines, but.
Their brains are still developing, developing. I could be wrong. You tell me.
Is it that your your frontal the front part of your brain isn't fully developed until you're twenty six?
Yeah, about twenty five for girls, in twenty seven or so for boys. And you know, I love lord your story. It's like, you know, I was sort of an emotional, hormonal teenager and then I outgrew it. It's it's very common for teenage girls and boys to be hormonal and emotional because your brain is undergoing wild development. And then about your middle twenties, if you've been good to your brain,
it sort of finishes. And you know, I tell so many of my parents of eighteen year olds I treat I said, let's just get them safely to least twenty five in national again, and things will be better. But the problem is is we're drugging these kids because psychiatrists and most family doctors, that's the tool, right, that's the tool in the toolbox, so they use it, but it's
at society's detriment. The big mission I have in life is to end the concept of mental illness and create a revolution in brain health because I think, well, one, nobody really wants to see a psychiatrist. I told my dad 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. So he didn't get Father of the Aar award, but Stigmas still lives. Nobody wants
to see a psychiatrist. Everybody wants a better brain.
What if mental health was brain health?
If we just got that one concept through our culture. That's why I always loved being a doctor Phil because he helps me with that. We get that one idea through our culture, everything changes because if it's brain, you have to eat for your brain, you have to sleep for your brain, you have to stop poisoning your brain.
How important is because you have these eleven clinics. Obviously getting a brain scan is not like part of our you know, immunizations and things like that that we get as kids.
How much do you.
Want that to be part of standard healthcare? And how often can we get brain scans? I don't know if there's a certain number you can get kind of the way you should be careful with MRIs, I don't know.
Psychiatry should not be the only medical specialty that never looks at the organ it treats. So think about that. If you're going to go on to medicine and the doctor said, well, you may need this for the rest of your life, wouldn't you want to know ahead of time what your brain look like. I mean, the whole conversation I think is insane. And with spec because it's a nuclear study, there is some radiation about the same
as a head ct that you know. We usually start with two and then I may do one or two in the next two or three years to go how am I doing? And maybe every five years. So it's not something you do without thought. But if you're dating any of my kids, you're getting scanned.
By the way, have you rejected anyone? Have you done the scan and told one of your kids, no, he can't date that person?
I did?
You did?
He didn't listen to me, and it was a disaster.
So regrets it. I'm like, I think she's doing drugs. So and we never said. One of my son laws mother.
Has paranoid schizophrenia and his father killed himself and the scan doesn't disqualify people. But I'm like, oh, you need to take this seriously. And he actually wrote a book called Change Your Brain Before twenty five where he opens the book with our interaction of you know, with his skin and his brain.
Well, it's funny what you're saying is seems so common sense. It says, if I tore my acl or I broke my arm and a doctor goes, okay, I'll operate, I'm like, well, do you want to see it? Do you want to look at it? Do you even know what arm it is? And that's the way psychiatry is acting. It's like, well, just just tell me what's wrong, and I'll tell you what we're going to do.
We're only going to tell you my symptoms.
Yeah, like, do you all even want to see me? It is amazing that you're not seeing the organ that we're treating it. That I've never really heard it put like that, and it really does hit home.
It's insane what's happened. And I'm just prayan and I live long enough to see it change.
Wow. Well, thank you for all you're doing.
I did want to ask you because I follow you on Instagram and there were a couple quick questions I had about some of the high profile brains you scanned. I saw you scanned Nick Cannon's brain and you told him he had to many children. No, I'm not if Nick Cannon has to get the brain scan of all the people his kids are going to be, that's so
many scans, so many scans. No, you told him that he had some brain damage, but I didn't understand where that came from, like if he'd had an injury or It made me wonder, can we all have brain damage without like having had a major brain injury or an episode of some kind.
What is that damage that's potentially there?
Now?
He had physical damage from.
An accident from an accident, okay, and.
He also had add which might fit the commitment issues. But you know, two his credit, he's like, I'm.
Going to be serious about having a better brain.
I love and you know I love you know all of my patients. But you know, some of my athletes, for example, they like being coached. It's like tell me what to do. We're not telling people what to do in a way they can hear.
And then I saw that you work with Miley Cyrus and she just want her first Grammy and she's killing it, and I know you'd really worked with her on her goals and her success. I loved what you've been saying about how to keep your brain happy. What are some of the things you do with people to help them get towards their goals in terms of how they're working with their brain to that success they want.
Well, the first thing is to define your goals. You know, with Miley, it's like you have to be the.
CEO, and I teach them how to act like a CEO of their life, which means, of course, you have to take care of your frontal lobes because that's called the executive part of the brain. It's the CEO part of your life. You know, what do you want? Does your behavior.
Fit what you want? Is this good for your brain or bad for it?
And you know, I've worked with her for twelve years, so I'm so happy with her progress. And you know, sometimes it just takes a while to kick in, and it's certainly been with my leg, but she's a warrior for her yeah, yeah, and Flowers. You know the song that one song of the year, it's about self love.
And just I'm such a fan of hers, So thank you for your work because I love her music and her I'm off of what you just said, the frontal lobe thing. I'm going to ask what might be a bold question, if our front lobe is the CEO of our brain, and if it is not developed until we're twenty five for women, twenty six, twenty seven for men, should we not be making any major life decisions before that time? Like, by that, I mean a lot of people get married in their early twenties.
I did.
I got married at twenty four and guess what, I got divorced. He got married at twenty two and he's divorced. We are kind of making these huge decisions and that really early period. I mean, legally we're considered adults at eighteen, but our brains aren't fully developed.
So does this make sense the way our society is operating.
In that way? Yeah, I think it's insane. You send eighteen year olds away to school with other underdeveloped brains in dormitory sororities and fraternities. With a lot of alcohol and drugs. When you really sort of step back from a neuroscientist's perspective, you're like, that's ludicrous. You know, that's why there's a high incidence of depression when kids go away or suicidal behavior when kids go away. And I've argued for many years keep them close, wow, because.
Their brains aren't developed.
And I know, and when I was eighteen, I told my dad I could do anything I wanted. I was eighteen, ended up in the army as an infantry medic and I'm like, how did that happen? It's because he told me I.
Couldn't do it because we're rebellious then too. Wow.
So when do you think is a good time people should get married brain wise?
Yeah, I think middle twenties, when your brain's getting close or toward the end of your twenties.
I mean, everybody's.
Different, and you know it has cultural implications as well, but you want marriage is hard with a good brain. It's harder with an underdeveloped brain, or it's harder with a traumatized brain, or it's harder with a toxic brain. In fact, I often wanted to do a program called brainmatch dot com, where I could, you know, scan everybody.
So let's get that show on Merit.
It's like, which brain would I want?
That's the that's coming to you next to next year up on marriat Street Media.
When you scanned your wife's brain when you were three weeks into dating, What did you like about it? What made you say I want to keep dating this person?
Well, I could actually see the injury that happened to her brain. She was going seventy five miles an hour. Sister fell asleep, but the whale and flipped three times, so I could see that.
But overall it was really healthy.
And what I loved about.
Her still like about her is she was curious about it and she wanted it to be better. She's a neurosurgical I see you nurse, so we sort of bonded over the brain. But she didn't take it as weird or invasive. She's like, oh, how can I make this better? In fact, since we've been married, she has written eight cookbooks for me and wrote a wonderful book called The Relentless Courage of a Scared Child.
Wow, before we let you go. The parents out there have their kids and they're thinking, Okay, I want to take this brain health so much more serious. I hate to say this, but I would say the majority of the doctors and psychiatrists that maybe our kids are going to are not helpful. Do we find these clinics? I know you have eleven clinics around, but if we can't find one of those, what is a way to find good brain health doctors?
Well, I think a good place to start.
I have a brand new book called Raising Mentally Strong Kids, and I talk a lot about raising brain healthy kids. They can also get my book Change Your Brain every Day, which is just sort of simple daily practices to optimize your brain. And we have a brain Health network, so if they go to Amanclinics dot com, they can find out where we're located and where some of the people I've trained or located.
We Laura and I are coming in.
We're got to get scanned. You have one in Texas.
I do have a clinic in Las Colinists in Dallas, right down.
The street from Merritt Street Media.
We'll be there.
Come in us and Phil, Although did you already scan doctor Phil's brain?
Now? I want to okay, so forward.
And doctor Amin. I just want to end on a note of I think. I hope I'm understanding this right. It's coming from a hopeful place. It sounds like you're saying, like, yes, change your brain and treat your brain.
Well.
Can we reverse damage in our brains. If somebody's you know, maybe feels like they've drank too much, if they've done damage in certain ways, can we fix that? Or is the brain like you did it and now it's done.
Change your brain, change your life. You're not stuck with the brain you have. You could make it better. I couldn't prove it.
Amazing. Thank you so much. This has truly been such a dream.
Like I said, I've been following you, and guys, follow doctor Amen on Instagram because he is just constantly posting quick, helpful videos, amazing insight. It's I've been following you for two years now and I just love following you.
So thanks for all you do.
And I heard your relaunching your podcast I just saw today, so we'll be excited to see that too.
Thank you so much.
What a joy. Looking to meeting you guys in person.
Thank you. And you're in California.
I am, I'm in Newport Beach.
Okay, Well, we're going to have to stalk you and come to Dallas and do some stuff at work next time you're in for Merritt Damon.
Thank you so much for your time. Truly appreciate it.
You're welcome, take.
Care, We'll see you soon.
Bye bye.
Thanks for listening. Follow us on Instagram at the most dramatic pod ever, and make sure to write us a review and leave us five stars. I'll talk to you next time.