"DO THIS To Destroy NEGATIVE THOUGHTS & FEELINGS Today!" | Daniel Amen & Jay Shetty

Dr. Daniel Amen 0:00 Having treated many drug addicts through the years, is the drug addicts tell you initially the drugs made them feel awesome and then they used the drugs to prevent the depression.

Jay Shetty 0:09 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 0:10 So just so they would attempt-

Jay Shetty 0:12 Yeah

Dr. Daniel Amen 0:13 ... to feel normal, but then, you know, the addiction cycle kicked in and, and they were hooked.

Jay Shetty 0:20 You know how passionate I am about sitting down with deep, deep experts, people who can broaden and open my mind and yours, people that can teach me things that I've never thought about and that I can share with you as well. And today's guest will definitely not disappoint. He's a clinical neuroscientist, a professor, a psychotherapist, and he's a 10 times New York Times bestselling author. His name is Dr. Daniel G. Amen, and today we're talking about his new book, Feel Better Fast and Make It Last: Unlocking Your Brain's Healing Potential to Overcome Negativity, Anxiety, Anger, Stress, and Trauma. So if you like the sound of what we're discussing today, make sure you go out onto Amazon, go out to Barnes & Noble, and grab the book. Daniel, thank you so much for being here.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:10 Jay, it's just such a pleasure.

Jay Shetty 1:12 No, the pleasure's all mine. I was saying to you just briefly when we were speaking before that this is what I crave in life, is to sit down with someone who has dedicated their life and work and their purpose to such a deep and noble cause, and to be able to sit with you is, is a complete honor for me, so thank you for being here.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:30 Thank you.

Jay Shetty 1:31 Thank you so much. And yeah, this book, when I was diving into it, and the conversation we've just had, I instantly had so many questions because, for me, the brain's the most important thing for us to talk about right now, especially right now, and that's the question I wanted to start with you with is why did you choose the brain throughout all your work as being such a big area of focus?

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:55 Well, it runs everything. Um, but when I went to medical school, I wanted to be a pediatrician 'cause I adore children. And when I was a second-year medical student, I'd just gotten married, and my wife tried to kill herself, and I was horrified. And, um, I was traumatized. And I took her to see a wonderful psychiatrist, and I came to realize if he helped her, which he did, it wouldn't just help her, that it would help me, it would help our children, it would help our grandchildren. And so nearly 40 years ago, I decided to be a psychiatrist, and I have loved it every single day. But I joined the only medical profession that never looks at the organ it treats. And before I went to medical school, I was in the Army, I was an infantry medic, and I got myself retrained as an x-ray technician and developed a passion for imaging. And our professors used to always say, "How do you know unless you look? How do you know unless you look?" And now I'm a psychiatrist, and we're not looking. And I'm an agitator. My father, um, growing up, he called me a maverick, and to him, that was not a good thing. [laughs]

Jay Shetty 3:13 [laughs]

Dr. Daniel Amen 3:14 Um, but I got it from him. His favorite words growing up, when I was growing up, the first favorite word was bullshit, and the second his favorite word was no. Everything was bullshit or no, so obviously I got it from him.

Jay Shetty 3:28 [laughs]

Dr. Daniel Amen 3:29 And, and I loved being a psychiatrist, but I'm like, "Well, why don't we look at the brain?" And 'cause obviously the brain is our organ. The brain, you know, is involved in how you think, how you feel, how you act, how you get along with other people. It's the organ of intelligence, creativity, and every single decision you make. And, um, with my x-ray background, I'm like, "We should look." And so in the late 1980s, I started looking at the brain

Dr. Daniel Amen 3:59 with a study called, called quantitative EEG, and it was fascinating that I could see underlying patterns for things like depression and ADHD and autism. But in 1991, I went to a lecture on brain SPECT imaging. SPECT is a nuclear medicine study that looks at blood flow and activity, and it rocked my world. Um, let me take a little detour.

Jay Shetty 4:26 Please.

Dr. Daniel Amen 4:27 So how do addictions start? Um, let's take gambling addiction. Addictions start with a big win, right? Either cocaine, you're like, "Whoa, I've never felt like that before. I wanna feel like that again," or with gambling, you win the whole jackpot, and dopamine floods the pleasure centers of your brain, and you're like, "Oh, whoa, I want that again." Well, I'd been a psychiatrist for nearly 10 years when I ordered my first SPECT scan. My first 10 cases were big wins 'cause I went into this profession to get people well, 'cause I knew the pain of when you're not well from a suicide attempt from my first wife and then the, the level of emotional and personal pain that brought to me.

Jay Shetty 5:16 Of course.

Dr. Daniel Amen 5:16 Um, and so as patients got better, um, because I had more information, I'm like, "I have to do this again." Well, today we have 150,000 scans that we've done on patients from 120 countries, so I'm completely addicted, um, 'cause, you know, if you don't look, you don't know.

Jay Shetty 5:40 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 5:40 And we need to stop lying about that. But wholesale across the US, really across the world, you'll go to your doctor, you say, "I'm depressed, I'm anxious, I can't sleep, I have temper problems, I'm obsessiveness," and within a 20-minute office visit, you leave with prescriptions-

Jay Shetty 6:00 Mm-hmm

Dr. Daniel Amen 6:00 ... for anxiety, depression, sleep, and that's insane. When no one has looked at your brain, so you don't know does it work too hard or not hard enough? Is it toxic from drug abuse or from mold in your home? Or is it traumatic because you played a contact sport and it damaged your frontal lobes? And so I have been on this crusade really, um, to change psychiatry because we should act like our other medical colleagues and look at what we do before we do it. But along the way, I've learned big lessons, like first do no harm, that some of our medications are actually not that great-

Jay Shetty 6:44 Mm

Dr. Daniel Amen 6:44 ... for you, that there are natural ways to heal the brain. And oh, by the way, you gotta get your heart rate, you gotta get your gut right, you gotta get your kidneys right, you gotta get your liver right in order for your brain to be right. Because when your brain works right, you work right.

Jay Shetty 7:00 Mm. Absolutely. No, I couldn't agree with you more, and it was actually fascinating just earlier this week, I was speaking to Naveen Jain on the podcast as well, and I don't know if you've come across Naveen, et cetera. I should definitely connect you both. He feels very closely with the way you do around having a crusade around modern medicine and what's applied and how it's just prescribed to anyone and everyone without actually knowing anyone's gut, brain, or any other health. So I should definitely connect you. You've just sparked an idea. But I wanna, I wanna ask you before we dive into, and I know everyone listening

Jay Shetty 7:30 and watching, you're probably thinking like I am, "Oh my God, we cannot wait for this," because you can give us so many practical tips. But, but before we do that, I wanna ask you more of a, I guess a conscious question around what is the difference between the brain and the mind, and, and what are the mistakes we make when talking about the mind versus understanding the brain?

Dr. Daniel Amen 7:50 The mind comes from the brain. If your brain is damaged, it damages your mind. And without a brain, you don't have a mind. Um, now you can train the brain so that you have a healthier mind, but let me just tell you a story-

Jay Shetty 8:13 Mm

Dr. Daniel Amen 8:13 ... since I know that's what you love is stories-

Jay Shetty 8:16 Absolutely

Dr. Daniel Amen 8:16 ... storytelling. Um, there was this couple that were in marital therapy, and they went for three years, spent about $20,000, and at the end, the therapist flunked them, told them to get divorced. And, um, they were very unhappy that they had failed, and so they got mad at the therapist, and the therapist said, "Well, I know a doctor in Costa Mesa, California that takes care of really difficult people. You should go see him." [laughs] And, you know, as part of our process, we scan people, we do SPECT. And the wife had a pretty healthy brain. The husband had a moth-eaten brain. It was really low in activity, and it's a pattern we usually see with alcoholism or drug abuse. But in his history, he said he never used drugs and he didn't drink. Now, the first thing you learn about drug addicts is they lie. So in front of his wife, I'm like, "Well, is that true? You don't drink and you've never done drugs?" And he said, "Dr. Amen, that's not my problem. I've never drank and I've never done drugs." And then I looked to his wife and I said, "Is he telling me the truth?" And she said, "Oh, yes, Dr. Amen, he doesn't drink. As far as I know, he's never done drugs. He's just an asshole."

Jay Shetty 9:37 [laughs]

Dr. Daniel Amen 9:38 And I started laughing.

Jay Shetty 9:39 Can you imagine that?

Dr. Daniel Amen 9:40 But in my head, I'm like, "Why does his brain look so bad?"

Jay Shetty 9:44 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 9:45 And so I thought about, well, what are the different options? Drugs, alcohol? Well, probably not if your wife who doesn't like you-

Jay Shetty 9:52 Mm

Dr. Daniel Amen 9:52 ... says no. Um, an environmental toxin, anoxia, lack of oxygen, an infection, severe anemia, or hormone disruptions. And so my next question to him is, "Where do you work?" He said, "I work in a furniture factory."

Jay Shetty 10:11 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 10:12 I said, "What do you do?" He said, "I finish furniture all day long." He was doing drugs.

Jay Shetty 10:17 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 10:17 He was doing the worst drug of abuse, which is inhaling organic solvents. And I'm like, "Do you wear a mask?" He said, "No, they tell me I should." And I'm thinking to myself, but I don't say it 'cause I have good frontal lobe function. I'm thinking, "That is not the sign of intelligent life." Um, I'm like, "Is there ventilation?" He said, "Often not. It's hot. I'm sweaty." And I looked to his wife and I said, "So when did he become an asshole?" And she said, "What do you mean?"

Jay Shetty 10:45 [laughs]

Dr. Daniel Amen 10:47 I said, "Did you marry him that way? Do you have father issues you're trying to work out?" And she said, "No, when we dated and for the first three years, he was great. It was about five years ago," and then the light went on in her head, "about the time he got this job-

Jay Shetty 11:07 Mm

Dr. Daniel Amen 11:07 ... his behavior started to change. Do you think it could be related?" Of course-

Jay Shetty 11:14 Of course, yeah

Dr. Daniel Amen 11:15 ... it could be related. And I love this shift. That's what the scans do.

Jay Shetty 11:20 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 11:20 They shift from he's an asshole, and actually, his therapist gave him that same diagnosis. Now, you can't write asshole in the chart.

Jay Shetty 11:29 Absolutely. [laughs]

Dr. Daniel Amen 11:29 So what you write is mixed personality disorder with narcissistic and antisocial features. What's that? You're an asshole, right? It's just you can't... It's not a billing code, [laughs] right? And, um, that shift was so important 'cause play this out with me. He's angry. He's depressed. Um, he's- so he's mad and he's sad. If they did what the therapist recommended, which was get divorced, now- He- it's gonna be like his skin is being ripped off of him

Jay Shetty 12:02 The scales

Dr. Daniel Amen 12:02 ... 'cause this is the love of his life. He just can't act in a consistent way. What is the organ of acting? It's your brain, right? And his brain is damaged, and so if they would've gotten divorced, he very well could have killed himself, and as many people do, he also could have killed his wife and his children.

Jay Shetty 12:21 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 12:22 Right? So this is the consequence of not looking. But once we looked, she shifted and she's like, "Do you mean in his attempt to be a good husband, going to work, supporting the family, that he's been poisoned and that he's sick and he's not bad?"

Jay Shetty 12:44 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 12:44 Exactly. And so we took him out of work, worked on rehabilitating his brain, which is one of my favorite things to do is taking bad brains and making them better.

Jay Shetty 12:56 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 12:56 Um, and years later, they're still married. They love each other. He's much better, and she's not as stressed because when you live with someone whose brain is damaged, you become damaged as well.

Jay Shetty 13:12 Absolutely. Wow, that's incredible. So how- I guess my- my- my follow-up question to that is how many of us are living with someone who has a damaged brain? How many of us, me sitting right here, like how many of us have a brain that is somewhat damaged, and what are the mistakes we make when we're trying to heal that in our everyday life?

Dr. Daniel Amen 13:30 And- and the first mistake we make is we don't care about it.

Jay Shetty 13:34 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 13:34 That we don't love it. So when I started doing SPECT in 1991, I scanned everybody I knew. I scanned, uh, my sisters. I have five of them. Pray for me. I scanned-

Jay Shetty 13:44 I want you to scan- scan me one day.

Dr. Daniel Amen 13:46 I- I want to.

Jay Shetty 13:46 Yeah, I'd love that.

Dr. Daniel Amen 13:47 Um, I scan- and then I scanned my mom, and she had, at 60, a perfect brain. Um, in fact, she was our resident model of a perfect brain.

Jay Shetty 13:57 [laughs]

Dr. Daniel Amen 13:58 Um, and it fit the s-

Jay Shetty 13:58 She must have loved that

Dr. Daniel Amen 13:59 ... it fit the story of her life.

Jay Shetty 14:01 Right.

Dr. Daniel Amen 14:01 Even at 87, she has 48 grandchildren, great-grandchildren. She knows everybody's birthday. She's everybody's best friend. Uh, she's just a phenomenal human being. And then I scanned my brain, and I didn't like it 'cause I played football in high school.

Jay Shetty 14:15 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 14:16 And I had meningitis when I was a young soldier, and that just really pissed me off that my 60-year-old [laughs] mother had a better looking brain than I did. And so I developed a concept then called brain envy. I wanted a better brain. I wanted a brain that looked like hers. And, you know, as a psychiatrist, um, or as a trained psychiatrist, you have to, of course, read Freud.

Jay Shetty 14:42 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 14:42 And he had this concept of penis envy. And-

Jay Shetty 14:46 Absolutely, yeah

Dr. Daniel Amen 14:46 ... in 40 years I've, like, not seen one case. The only time I've seen a case of it is when I was at- on Broadway a few weeks ago, and at intermission I saw the long line at the women's bathroom and no line at the men's, and I go, "Penis envy, there it is right there." [laughs]

Jay Shetty 15:02 [laughs]

Dr. Daniel Amen 15:02 But, you know, it's really-

Jay Shetty 15:04 [laughs]

Dr. Daniel Amen 15:05 ... the- the only organ where size matters is your brain.

Jay Shetty 15:10 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 15:11 It's the three pounds of fat between your ears. So the first thing you have to do if you want a better life is you have to start wanting a better brain, and that is critical because that leads... I know you- you want, for your listeners and viewers, tips. Um, we call them tiny habits.

Jay Shetty 15:36 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 15:36 We work with, um, the Stanford Persuasive Tech Lab on how people change, and they make small, incremental changes that can make huge differences over time.

Jay Shetty 15:47 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 15:48 So the first tiny habit we'll talk about, and I actually think this is the most important one, it's whatever you do, whatever you say, whatever you eat, whatever you do, this takes three seconds. You just ask yourself, "Is this good for my brain or bad for it?" And if you can answer that question with intelligence and love, 'cause you do the right thing not because you should but because you love yourself, ultimately doing the right thing is the ultimate act of love, um, it just works.

Jay Shetty 16:22 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 16:23 Is this good for my brain or bad for it? And if it's bad for it, I don't do it if I care about myself.

Jay Shetty 16:28 Mm. You've ruined chocolate for me forever now. [laughs]

Dr. Daniel Amen 16:30 No, chocolate's great for your brain.

Jay Shetty 16:32 It is? Yeah?

Dr. Daniel Amen 16:32 And we actually make-

Jay Shetty 16:34 Okay

Dr. Daniel Amen 16:34 ... sugar-free, dairy-free chocolate.

Jay Shetty 16:37 I'm vegan, so that's just-

Dr. Daniel Amen 16:38 And we make a chocolate coconut bar, and they're phenomenal. And what they really are, are, 'cause that's not our primary business-

Jay Shetty 16:45 [laughs]

Dr. Daniel Amen 16:45 ... it's- it's a metaphor for there is no suffering-

Jay Shetty 16:50 Mm

Dr. Daniel Amen 16:51 ... in getting well. Plus, I am, um, named after my grandfather, who was a candy maker. I mean, that was his job.

Jay Shetty 17:00 Wow.

Dr. Daniel Amen 17:00 And, but he died early 'cause he was also fat and had heart disease.

Jay Shetty 17:04 Wow.

Dr. Daniel Amen 17:04 And I'm not fat, and I don't have heart disease because I know it's a risk for me, and I don't give in to the behavior making it likely to be so. But you don't have to give up chocolate. In fact, I don't know if you're like me, but I'm very much a creature of habit.

Jay Shetty 17:19 Mm-hmm. Me too.

Dr. Daniel Amen 17:20 And so, you know, I- I have maybe 30 foods I eat.

Jay Shetty 17:25 Yeah.

Dr. Daniel Amen 17:25 And I only want them to love me back, so I only want to be in love with someone or something that loves me back.

Jay Shetty 17:39 Isn't that all of us?

Dr. Daniel Amen 17:39 So I have... I don't know if you've ever been in a bad relationship.

Jay Shetty 17:43 I have, yes.

Dr. Daniel Amen 17:44 I mean, I get to meet your beautiful wife, and, um, and one day I hope you meet mine. And- and I adore her, but I've been in bad relationships.

Jay Shetty 17:51 Me too.

Dr. Daniel Amen 17:53 I'm not doing it anymore. There's just... I'm not. Um, and I'm damn sure not doing it with food.

Jay Shetty 17:59 Yeah.

Dr. Daniel Amen 18:00 That's too... Often people say, "I love bread," or, "I love pasta," or, "I love brownies. I love..." You know, in fact, I had one woman, we should talk about the Daniel Plan at some point. It's this massive program I did at Saddleback Church. Now thousands of churches around the world do it. Um, and one of the pastor's wives, after she heard me talk, she said, "You know, after I heard you, I told my husband I'd rather get Alzheimer's disease than give up sugar."

Jay Shetty 18:25 Wow.

Dr. Daniel Amen 18:26 And I'm like, "Did you date the bad boys in high school?"

Jay Shetty 18:29 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 18:29 'Cause that's like a seriously bad relationship.

Jay Shetty 18:32 Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Daniel Amen 18:34 Right?

Jay Shetty 18:34 That's terrible, yeah. So let's start talking about that kind of rehabilitation process, and in the book, you obviously have your incredible acronym, and I picked out some of the letters that I wanted to focus in on, and one of my big ones is when you talk about the rational mind. Now, I know that we are prone to making irrational decisions and choices all the time. We, we do it every single day as far as I know and far as my reading has gone, and I wonder why we do that, why we constantly choose to make irrational decisions and how we start to overcome that.

Dr. Daniel Amen 19:07 So in the book, there's this cool mnemonic, Brain Excel.

Jay Shetty 19:10 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 19:11 And it starts by getting your brain right-

Jay Shetty 19:15 Mm-hmm

Dr. Daniel Amen 19:16 ... because your rational mind is better when you do that.

Jay Shetty 19:19 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 19:20 And the rational mind is really about training your brain and training your mind to help you rather than hurt you. So often, people are just brutalized by the thoughts that go through their heads. And many years ago, I had a really hard day at work. I had seen four suicidal patients, and that's hard, um, because you feel responsible for them, but you actually don't have full responsibility. Um, I saw two couples who hated each other. I saw two teenagers who had run away from home. And at the end of the day, I'm feeling pretty stressed, and I walked into my house, and, uh, my wife and kids were gone, but there was an ant infestation in my house, in my kitchen, and I'm furious. And as I'm wiping up what felt like thousands of ants... Um, when you go to medical school, you have to learn 50,000 new terms your first year, and so you come- you get good at coming up with acronyms and mnemonics.

Jay Shetty 20:30 Sure.

Dr. Daniel Amen 20:30 And so I'm always playing with words.

Jay Shetty 20:31 Yeah.

Dr. Daniel Amen 20:32 And as I'm wiping up the ants, I'm thinking, "Oh, automatic negative thoughts. Um, my patients are infested with ants."

Jay Shetty 20:40 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 20:40 "And I need to teach them to eradicate the ants." And so the next day at work, I brought a can of ant spray, and I put it on the coffee table, and I'm like, "We're gonna get... I'm gonna show you how to get rid of the ants." And over time, that morphed into an anteater and an ant puppet 'cause I also see children, and I taught them how to do it, and it's one of the most important things that I teach anybody how to, how to do. You don't have to believe-

Jay Shetty 21:11 Mm

Dr. Daniel Amen 21:12 ... every stupid thing you think. And if you can learn to tell yourself the truth, 'cause this is not positive thinking. I am not a fan-

Jay Shetty 21:24 Neither am I

Dr. Daniel Amen 21:24 ... of positive thinking.

Jay Shetty 21:25 I agree.

Dr. Daniel Amen 21:26 Positive thinking means, you know, I can go a couple blocks to Jack in the Box and get four of their big desserts, and it won't have a negative impact on my life.

Jay Shetty 21:37 And it won't.

Dr. Daniel Amen 21:38 Or positive thinking is I can, you know, fool around on my phone until 2:00 in the morning, and it's not gonna have a negative impact on me the next day. People who have low levels of anxiety go to jail, and they die early. There's actually a cool longevity study out of Stanford where they looked at 1,548 10-year-old children in 1921, and then researchers followed them for 90 years, looking at what goes with health, success, and longevity. And the "don't worry, be happy" people died the earliest from accidents and preventable illnesses. The people who lived the longest, they're conscientious. They told themselves the truth.

Jay Shetty 22:22 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 22:22 "I have taxes to pay. I better pay them or I'm going to be in trouble." Or, "I said I'm gonna show up at 2:00. I show up at 2:00."

Jay Shetty 22:31 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 22:31 So it's conscientiousness, which is really a prefrontal cortex function, right? So you have to have your brain right. But here's the tiny habit. Whenever you feel sad or mad or nervous or out of control, write down what you're thinking, and then ask yourself, "Is it true?" So those are these three little words I love, um, and I have a process that I talk about in the book. So a bad thought like, "Today is gonna be hard," is that true? Well, I don't know. And then the second question is, is that absolutely true? No. How do I feel when I believe the thought? Awful. Um, who would I be without the thought? Free. Take the original thought, turn it to its opposite, and what you find, the opposite of what's torturing you is usually true. So it just blows your mind.

Jay Shetty 23:32 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 23:32 But if you can learn to be disciplined about questioning your own thoughts... And I got this technique from my friend Byron Katie. She wrote-

Jay Shetty 23:42 Oh

Dr. Daniel Amen 23:42 ... a brilliant book called Loving What Is.

Jay Shetty 23:44 Yeah.

Dr. Daniel Amen 23:45 It's brilliant. It's sort of a combination of cognitive therapy and Buddhism, and it's... I just- I love it. Whenever I'm off or I'm sad or I'm stressed, I'll- Read portions of Loving What Is or listening to it 'cause she read it and she has a beautiful voice and it's training your mind to help you rather than hurt you.

Jay Shetty 24:09 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 24:09 Another rational mind technique-

Jay Shetty 24:11 Yeah, please

Dr. Daniel Amen 24:12 ... is start every day with, "Today is going to be a great day." Why? Because your unconscious mind will find why it's going to be a great day. We are programmed through our evolutionary biology to wake up in fear because our ancestors woke up and the fear was real.

Jay Shetty 24:33 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 24:34 Something was going to eat them, something wanted to hurt them, and so you wake up anxious, but now that's not true-

Jay Shetty 24:44 Mm

Dr. Daniel Amen 24:44 ... for most of us. And if you start with, "Today is going to be a great day," your unconscious mind then begins to find, "Well, why is it gonna be a great day?" And for families, it's a great ritual. "Hey, honey, today's going to be a great day." And then you begin in your mind to find why it's gonna be a great day. It's so easy to find why it's going to be a bad day.

Jay Shetty 25:10 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 25:11 Um, at the end of the day, I actually do this as a ritual both at dinner and then when I put myself to sleep, is what went well today? And we focus on what went well. Now, we also wanna focus on, well, what can I learn from today? What could I have done better? 'Cause we're always striving to grow. Um, but when I put myself to sleep at night, I'll say a prayer, and then I'll just go back through my day, what went well, because it actually sets my dreams up-

Jay Shetty 25:44 Mm

Dr. Daniel Amen 25:44 ... to be more positive than negative because dreams, there's a purpose for them. It's really we're consolidating memories, uh, from what happened that day, and sometimes because you didn't consolidate them from the past, they get infected-

Jay Shetty 26:02 Mm

Dr. Daniel Amen 26:02 ... by negativity. So super simple, um, tiny habits that can make a big difference.

Jay Shetty 26:10 Yeah, that's a great tiny habit. I think building that, and this is what we find so often even in the work that I do, that people don't have a conversation with themself that is conscious. They have an unconscious or subconscious conversation with themselves, which is naturally taking down that negative rabbit hole or living out the pattern that they've built up for so many years or decades or whatever it may be. But I don't know how many people are having a conscious co- intentional conversation with themselves to dive deeper into a thought, a belief, a pattern.

Dr. Daniel Amen 26:43 And they've never, um-

Jay Shetty 26:45 Never been-

Dr. Daniel Amen 26:45 ... been taught-

Jay Shetty 26:46 Absolutely

Dr. Daniel Amen 26:46 ... how to do it.

Jay Shetty 26:46 Absolutely.

Dr. Daniel Amen 26:47 I, I have a children's book-

Jay Shetty 26:48 Right

Dr. Daniel Amen 26:48 ... that's relatively new I love called-

Jay Shetty 26:50 Oh

Dr. Daniel Amen 26:50 ... Captain Snout and the Superpower Questions. It basically teaches kids to think about what they think about and to not believe every s- stupid thing they think. And-

Jay Shetty 27:03 I love that

Dr. Daniel Amen 27:03 ... four-year-olds can do this. So one quick story.

Jay Shetty 27:07 Yeah, please.

Dr. Daniel Amen 27:08 My, uh-

Jay Shetty 27:08 Love your stories

Dr. Daniel Amen 27:09 ... my last one, I have four children, and Chloe's 15, and she's got red hair like her mother. And when, um, she's four, she announces to her mother that she's going to get her ears pierced that day, and you don't announce things to Tana.

Jay Shetty 27:26 [laughs]

Dr. Daniel Amen 27:27 Um, and Tana said no, that they didn't have time, and she had to wait until she was five, and Chloe said, "I can't wait till I'm five," bursts into tears, drama, runs into my office, climbs on my lap. She's just crying, crying her eyes out, lip, little lips going, and I'm like, "What's the matter?" And she said, "Mommy said I can't get my ears pierced till I'm five." I'm like, "Okay, what's the matter?" "I can't wait until I'm five." I'm like, "Is that true?" "Yes." "Is it absolutely true?" "What do you mean?" "Are you gonna die if you don't?" And no lie, she rolled her eyes at me. I didn't think that was gonna happen till 12.

Jay Shetty 28:08 [laughs]

Dr. Daniel Amen 28:09 "Of course not. How do you feel when you believe the thought you can't wait?" "I'm mad, and I'm sad, and my ears aren't cute." Um, "Okay, who would you be if you didn't have that thought?" Four years old, "Free." "Wow. So what's the opposite of 'I can't wait?'" "What do you mean?" I said, "You know opposites. We just read a book on opposites, tall and small and fat and skinny." Um, "I can wait until I'm five." And then she got off my lap and went and played with the dog. We could have had drama all day long over the ears, or we could just teach ourselves we don't have to believe every stupid thing we think.

Jay Shetty 28:51 Mm. Wow, I love that, and that's incredible. The, the children's book, if you have kids, there you go. What was the name of the children's book again?

Dr. Daniel Amen 28:58 Captain Snout-

Jay Shetty 28:59 Captain Snout

Dr. Daniel Amen 28:59 ... and the Superpower Question.

Jay Shetty 29:02 That's brilliant. I love that. That's incredible, and it's teaching kids how to think about what they think about. That's brilliant. That's amazing. That's something we could all use, too. We should start there before this. [laughs] It would be such a useful technique. That's amazing.

Dr. Daniel Amen 29:14 Well, I get the parents-

Jay Shetty 29:15 I love it

Dr. Daniel Amen 29:15 ... to read it to the children so the parents will get the idea. [laughs]

Jay Shetty 29:18 Absolutely. Absolutely. No, I think it's... You're, you're spot on that we've never been taught these things. We can't expect... If anyone's listening and watching right now, we can't expect to know these things, and so we have to look at alternative forms of educating ourself. It's the only way. It's absolutely the only way. Now, the next in your mnemonic is about attachment, and this one fascinates me a lot because when I lived as a monk, we focused so much on detachment, and detachment was such a-

Dr. Daniel Amen 29:43 Yeah, I've never, I've never got that quite down-

Jay Shetty 29:47 Yeah

Dr. Daniel Amen 29:47 ... 'cause I'm totally attached to my wife, to my work-

Jay Shetty 29:51 Yeah

Dr. Daniel Amen 29:51 ... how the book does. You know, I, I wanna not be attached-

Jay Shetty 29:54 [laughs]

Dr. Daniel Amen 29:55 ... to how the book does, but I totally am.

Jay Shetty 29:57 Yeah.

Dr. Daniel Amen 29:59 And I've-

Jay Shetty 29:59 Well, thank you for being honest with us and yourself

Dr. Daniel Amen 30:01 ... I've written 13 public television specials. They've aired 100,000 times across North America, and I'm sort of attached how they turn out. But attachment causes suffering. And so the idea, what I've seen as a psychiatrist, is when relationships break, that causes intense emotional pain.

Jay Shetty 30:26 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 30:26 So if we know that's true, that we are a pair-bonded species, that we are a relational species, um, we're wired that way, well, you need to know how to take care of them.

Jay Shetty 30:40 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 30:40 And so based on 40 years of helping couples, and helping families, and helping businesses, it's well, what are the ingredients? And there's a cool mnemonic for attachments. It's called relating. It's the R is you're responsible for it, so you're 100% responsible for that relationship. What is it you can do today to make it better? E is empathy, seeing things from the other person's point of view, which is a brain function.

Jay Shetty 31:07 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 31:08 And autistic kids actually have damage in the mirror neuron system of the brain, which is the part that allows me to see things from your point of view. L is listening, something parents are generally not very good at, and so I teach them this technique called active listening. So powerful.

Jay Shetty 31:28 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 31:28 A is assertiveness. T is time, actual physical time. Um, I is inquire into the negative thoughts you have, so it's about inquiry. N is notice what you like more than what you don't. How do they train penguins at SeaWorld? Um, they're not beating them. They're not noticing the negative. They notice what they like. That's how you shape behavior. And G is grace and forgiveness.

Jay Shetty 31:56 Wow.

Dr. Daniel Amen 31:56 And there's a technique on, uh, forgiveness that's just so powerful.

Jay Shetty 32:00 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 32:00 'Cause, you know, when you hold onto hurts, the person you're poisoning the most is yourself.

Jay Shetty 32:06 And how do we do that? Now, I know a lot of the people that watch and consume my work really love hearing my perspectives on relationships and dating, because online dating has completely changed my generation's approach to love and relationships and modern romance. And on top of all of that, we see this challenge with attachment and avoidance consistently. We have people who are scared of getting attached because they're scared of having their heart broken, so they avoid and play that avoidant role in a relationship. And there are those that go in full throttle and get attached and then get their heart broken. What would be your advice in terms of the best brain approach to building a healthy relationship?

Dr. Daniel Amen 32:49 Well, it's one, get your brain right. Um, I wrote another book called The Brain in Love.

Jay Shetty 32:55 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 32:55 And chapter six is how to have a first date from a neuroscience perspective.

Jay Shetty 33:00 Oh, I love this.

Dr. Daniel Amen 33:01 How you can screen the other person-

Jay Shetty 33:03 I'm gonna have to make a video about this

Dr. Daniel Amen 33:04 ... to know if you're [laughs] going to be... if, if this person's going to be a good partner or not a good partner.

Jay Shetty 33:09 Can you walk us through it?

Dr. Daniel Amen 33:11 Um-

Jay Shetty 33:12 Bits of it that you can remember

Dr. Daniel Amen 33:13 ... so it's pay attention. Be a good listener. Learn their family story-

Jay Shetty 33:21 Mm

Dr. Daniel Amen 33:21 ... because they'll tell you about the history of drug and alcohol abuse or physical abuse, violence. Look for attachments and, and then watch their habits. And know going into it, new love is a drug. New love works on the nucleus accumbens or the pleasure centers of your brain, and it works just like cocaine. So you have to be suspicious of new love because you're not gonna see things clearly for probably three or four months. And so just know that and, and be ready for it.

Jay Shetty 34:07 Mm. And when people are telling you about their family history, which I think is such a great example, I, I couldn't agree more with you. When people are telling you about their family history, how is that corresponding or what parallels are drawn between that and then their current habits? What are the kind of things that you're sensing? So let's say someone had, uh, a, a childhood where their parents were always arguing or n- not getting along. How would that... how is that seen trends pattern-wise to affect people today?

Dr. Daniel Amen 34:34 Well, people do what their parents did, not what they told, how they told them how to be.

Jay Shetty 34:43 Yeah. Yes.

Dr. Daniel Amen 34:43 And so you just are gonna... If they don't work on it, then that's going to be a source of potential pain.

Jay Shetty 34:54 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 34:55 And, you know, if you're gonna have babies together, you really wanna understand the history because, you know, things do tend to run in families.

Jay Shetty 35:05 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 35:05 Now, if you date one of my children for more than four months, I scan you. I'm not kidding about this.

Jay Shetty 35:12 Wow. [laughs]

Dr. Daniel Amen 35:13 It's sort of like meet the parents-

Jay Shetty 35:15 Yeah

Dr. Daniel Amen 35:15 ... but worse. [laughs]

Jay Shetty 35:17 But cooler. This is crazy. I love it.

Dr. Daniel Amen 35:19 Uh-

Jay Shetty 35:20 Do you have a scanner at home? Like, is this like, is there a special room like-

Dr. Daniel Amen 35:23 No, I, I, I... You haven't seen the clinic.

Jay Shetty 35:25 Yeah.

Dr. Daniel Amen 35:25 Don't you wanna see the clinic? [laughs] And, you know, my, um-

Jay Shetty 35:31 Love this

Dr. Daniel Amen 35:32 ... oldest daughter married someone whose mother had paranoid schizophrenia and whose father killed himself. Now, did that mean I didn't want her to marry him? No.

Jay Shetty 35:43 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 35:43 But if he had vulnerabilities, I wanted to make sure he was open to taking care of them.

Jay Shetty 35:50 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 35:50 And, and he was, and he and I actually... He's a professor at Corbin College now, and we wrote an online high school course called Brain Thrive by 25-

Jay Shetty 36:02 Right

Dr. Daniel Amen 36:02 ... where we teach kids to fall in love with their brain and how to take care of their brain.

Jay Shetty 36:07 Oh, wow.

Dr. Daniel Amen 36:08 So that early scan set up sort of a lifelong partnership. For us. In fact, um, you know, I told you about my first wife-

Jay Shetty 36:16 Yeah

Dr. Daniel Amen 36:16 ... and she tried to kill herself. I got divorced about 18 years ago, and I told myself, "If I ever got married again, I'm scanning her-

Jay Shetty 36:24 Wow

Dr. Daniel Amen 36:24 ... before we go to the next level." And when I met Tana, I just loved her right away, and I knew that was cocaine.

Jay Shetty 36:31 Yeah.

Dr. Daniel Amen 36:31 And I'm like, two weeks after I met her, I'm like, "You know, you haven't seen the clinic. Do you wanna [laughs] see the clinic?" And she was game because she's a neurosurgical ICU nurse, and she had a great brain. But by putting brain health toward the center of our relationship-

Jay Shetty 36:46 Mm

Dr. Daniel Amen 36:46 ... it really helps us.

Jay Shetty 36:48 100%.

Dr. Daniel Amen 36:48 Right? When you're-

Jay Shetty 36:50 Yeah.

Dr. Daniel Amen 36:50 And she grew up in some serious craziness, right? So I'm not advocating looking for the perfect person, 'cause there are very few of them, but I knew with her history that she could really deal with a little bit of EMDR. It's a psychotherapy for past trauma, and it was so helpful to her. And we, like, never fight with each other.

Jay Shetty 37:14 Wow.

Dr. Daniel Amen 37:14 And it's, it's awesome. But, you know, if, if you go out on a first date with somebody and they have three drinks to manage their anxiety, that's a bad sign.

Jay Shetty 37:25 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 37:25 You, you know, I know that was sort of in this, in the, the new movie, A Star is Born. That was, [laughs] you know, part of it. Um, but that just means you're going to suffer.

Jay Shetty 37:35 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 37:35 Um, I'm not a fan of alcohol and marijuana, just because of what I've seen them do to the brain.

Jay Shetty 37:41 Yeah, I'd love to dive into that, actually. But, and before we do, I was, I was gonna say, the reason why I'm finding this so fascinating is so many of these were subconsciously my ways of observing my relationship to be, be with my wife right now, but I never even knew about it from this perspective. So one of the first things I asked my wife about was her family and her relationships with her family, and my wife comes from an incredible family. Her parents are extremely respectful to each other, have a wonderful relationship. She, my wife has an incredible relationship with her father, and I knew that that was going to play into our relationship. And these were almost, uh, truths that I was looking for unknowingly, without knowing that there was science to back it up. So for me it's-

Dr. Daniel Amen 38:22 Right, 'cause chronic fighting-

Jay Shetty 38:23 Yeah

Dr. Daniel Amen 38:23 ... is a sign that something's not right in their brains.

Jay Shetty 38:26 Yeah.

Dr. Daniel Amen 38:27 Right? Because ultimately, you, you marry someone who becomes your best friend-

Jay Shetty 38:31 Mm

Dr. Daniel Amen 38:31 ... or your worst enemy.

Jay Shetty 38:33 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 38:33 And if you're not acting respectfully-

Jay Shetty 38:37 Mm

Dr. Daniel Amen 38:37 ... sometimes it's because the brain doesn't work hard enough, and people become conflict-driven as a way to turn it back on. They don't know it. It's not conscious. It's Pavlovian.

Jay Shetty 38:48 Yeah. Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 38:48 Um, other times, their brain has an OCD pattern, obsessive compulsive pattern, and if things don't go their way, they can't stand it.

Jay Shetty 38:56 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 38:57 And so in order for you to get them to do what you want, you actually have to tell them the opposite-

Jay Shetty 39:02 Wow

Dr. Daniel Amen 39:02 ... of it. And it's just, it's a lot of work.

Jay Shetty 39:05 Yeah.

Dr. Daniel Amen 39:05 But you can balance the brain. And, and I did a study once called the Couples from Hell study.

Jay Shetty 39:12 Okay. [laughs]

Dr. Daniel Amen 39:12 We studied 500 couples who failed marital therapy and wanted to be together, and 85% of them, one or both of them, were struggling, right? I mean, if, if people just buy this really super simple idea, your brain is involved in everything you do, how you think, how you feel, how you act, how you interact, then why wouldn't a marital therapist, the first thing he or she should do is scan-

Jay Shetty 39:40 Scan your brain, right

Dr. Daniel Amen 39:40 ... their brain and go, "Is it healthy? Does it work too hard? How can I balance that?" But no marital therapy program teaches anything about the brain. They're all teaching these outdoted, out-

Jay Shetty 39:54 Dated

Dr. Daniel Amen 39:54 ... dated, um, methods of better communication and problem-solving. But if you don't have a computer that'll run the software program, it's not going to work.

Jay Shetty 40:04 Wow. So we're actually not dealing with the root of the issue at all.

Dr. Daniel Amen 40:08 We're not dealing with it-

Jay Shetty 40:09 Yeah

Dr. Daniel Amen 40:09 ... at all. And the issue is always in those four circles, right? There's a biology, a psychology. And so the Brain XL format, B is biology. The rational mind is psychology. Attachments is the social circle. And I, or inspiration, is the spiritual circle. It's why are you here? Why do you care? And we are wearing out our pleasure centers in the brain by constantly hitting, getting these little dopamine hits from our cell phones, from social media, from, um, people screaming at each other on television.

Jay Shetty 40:43 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 40:43 And we're wearing out our pleasure centers, which is why depression is so high in our country now.

Jay Shetty 40:49 Let's dive into that a bit more. I've, I've, I've boxed the marijuana and alcohol conversation, which I really wanna get onto. I've shelved it for now. We'll bring it back out in a bit. But this is so, so important because I think too many people are talking about this, and they may not have the actual expertise and the insight that you do. What do you mean by our pleasure centers being worn out? What does that actually mean, and how is that leading to depression? How is that leading to the challenges we see in society?

Dr. Daniel Amen 41:14 So you have these two areas deep in your brain. They're part of a big group of cells called the basal ganglia, and within them are called the nucleus accumbens. And when you push on them, and you push on them with the neurotransmitter dopamine, you feel good, you know, sort of like the jackpot that I said when I first started doing scans. It's like, I love this. I love it when people get well. I have meaning. I have purpose. My education is working to be- benefit, uh, these people. Um, well, cocaine does that, too.

Jay Shetty 41:48 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 41:48 Oh, I love that. Um, pornography can do it. Um, a scary movie can do it. Jumping out of an airplane can do it. And the more y- you do it, um, the more it begins to wear out your pleasure centers. So it takes more and more in order to get the same response. And so in Feel Better Fast and Make It Last, I talk about the dopamine dump-

Jay Shetty 42:17 Mm-hmm

Dr. Daniel Amen 42:17 ... versus the dopamine- Drip

Jay Shetty 42:20 Mm-hmm

Dr. Daniel Amen 42:20 Right? So you wanna drip dopamine onto your nucleus accumbens, so that way it keeps them stimulated and happy, as opposed to the dump, the scary movie, pornography, cocaine. Um, 'cause if you hit them too often... And interestingly, people who are obese, their nucleus accumbens doesn't react like other people. It's sluggish. It's slow to react than if you're at a healthy weight, because those really high-calorie, high-sugar, high-fat foods, when it hits it over and over with dopamine, it just begins to wear them out.

Jay Shetty 43:03 Wow.

Dr. Daniel Amen 43:03 So you need more and more-

Jay Shetty 43:05 Got it

Dr. Daniel Amen 43:06 ... to feel anything at all. And, you know, having treated many drug addicts through the years, is the drug addicts tell you initially the drugs made them feel awesome, and then they used the drugs to prevent the depression.

Jay Shetty 43:18 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 43:18 So just so they would attempt-

Jay Shetty 43:20 Yeah

Dr. Daniel Amen 43:21 ... to feel normal. But then, you know, the addiction cycle kicked in and, and they were hooked. So you wanna always protect your pleasure centers.

Jay Shetty 43:31 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 43:31 And with social media, I did a show with Dr. Oz on Tinder.

Jay Shetty 43:36 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 43:36 And, you know, swipe left, swipe right. And, um, for the person who was getting lots of positive responses, his brain actually looked happier. But many of the other ones, their brain started to look depressed-

Jay Shetty 43:49 Mm

Dr. Daniel Amen 43:49 ... when they weren't getting the response they had hoped for.

Jay Shetty 43:53 Yeah. I love that you brought that up. I saw that. I highly recommend it. You can go and check it out with Dr. Oz and, uh, Dr. Amen. I highly recommend it. It was brilliant.

Dr. Daniel Amen 44:00 [laughs]

Jay Shetty 44:01 And, and it's so fun to see it because what's the difference then between the dopamine dump, the dopamine drip, and then purpose? Because with you having said what you said, that when you were able to heal people or you saw that breakthrough, we also get it. When I live my purpose and I create some content, or I see a breakthrough for someone through the work that I'm doing, what's then the difference between that?

Dr. Daniel Amen 44:26 You're getting this constant drip that keeps your pleasure centers healthy.

Jay Shetty 44:33 Right.

Dr. Daniel Amen 44:33 Plus, you're not doing anything that's damaging-

Jay Shetty 44:35 Right

Dr. Daniel Amen 44:36 ... them. I mean, it can keep it going on and on. But say, for example, you're a rock star and you get the high from being on stage over and over again. Um, you, you don't feel right because too much dopamine has hit your nucleus accumbens. And I have a prayer for the young stars I see. It's, "Dear God, please don't allow me to be famous before my frontal lobes have developed." And your frontal lobes really don't develop in girls until they're about 25-

Jay Shetty 45:13 Oh, wow

Dr. Daniel Amen 45:14 ... and in boys until they're about 28. So you see why all these young stars get into so much trouble, because they don't have the forethought, the judgment, the impulse control, it's all prefrontal cortex stuff, um, to manage their nucleus accumbens. And so there's this-

Jay Shetty 45:30 Ooh, wow

Dr. Daniel Amen 45:32 ... um, think of it as the elephant and the rider. So your pleasure center's really the elephant. I mean, it drives you toward whatever behavior. The prefrontal cortex is the rider, and it directs you. So when the rider is inefficient or ineffective or it's not there, y- it just ruins your life. Um, so you, you need a strong prefrontal cortex to break your p- pleasure centers, or you end up doing all sorts of completely stupid things.

Jay Shetty 46:04 Wow. That's amazing. So, and for women, it's 25 on average. Men, it's 28. That sums up so much.

Dr. Daniel Amen 46:10 So I, I w- I never recommend and would never let my children go too far from home to go to college, because they're right in the middle of massive brain development.

Jay Shetty 46:23 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 46:23 Um, the most important brain development occurs between about 15 and 25, and people think, "Oh, it's all from zero to three."

Jay Shetty 46:32 Yeah. Wow.

Dr. Daniel Amen 46:32 And it's like your prefrontal cortex is getting myelinated, which means it's really developing from 15 to 25.

Jay Shetty 46:40 Yeah, the reason why this is so current for me right now is I've been speaking a lot with the social media platforms of YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook, because even a lot of creators who are extremely young, uh, most of them younger than me, too, as a creator myself, a lot of creators are going through burnout and are going through feelings of depression and anxiety because of having had, A, rocketed accelerated fame early on in life, and B, having to keep up with the pace of social media as a creator to continue to create at that, that level. And-

Dr. Daniel Amen 47:14 So their pleasure centers are worn out-

Jay Shetty 47:16 Yeah

Dr. Daniel Amen 47:16 ... when they don't have frontal lobes to modulate it. But what you did, I mean, you spend time meditating and really developing your brain. We haven't talked about that, but I've actually published three studies-

Jay Shetty 47:28 Mm

Dr. Daniel Amen 47:28 ... on a Kundalini yoga form-

Jay Shetty 47:29 Oh, wow

Dr. Daniel Amen 47:30 ... of meditation called Kirtan Kriya.

Jay Shetty 47:32 Yeah.

Dr. Daniel Amen 47:32 And it activated the prefrontal cortex, and it calmed down the limbic or the emotional brain. So it had that very nice balancing effect, and it's like a 12-minute meditation.

Jay Shetty 47:47 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 47:47 Right? The, this isn't hard, or my favorite meditation, a loving-kindness meditation, developing practices to balance your brain. It should just be part of school. But unfortunately, you know, school really hasn't been redesigned in 110 years, and I often think of Paul Simon's song, "Kodachrome," which starts off with, "When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all." And that's why we developed our high school course, because come on, it's like teach them practical things like how to orc- manage the organ that's going to run everything in their life.

Jay Shetty 48:25 Absolutely. And then, okay, now, now you've got me- Now you've got me thinking of a million things. Uh, the next, uh, next thing was around that. So the research that you've done on meditation and the brain, what of, what are the specifics? So you say at Kirtan Kriya, they have Kundalini yoga. What would the direct, uh, a bit more detail around the direct impacts of that meditation on the brain? What was actually happening?

Dr. Daniel Amen 48:47 So we did three studies on it, and the first study, what we found, activation of the prefrontal cortex. And we're not the only one. They've done-

Jay Shetty 48:56 Sure, sure

Dr. Daniel Amen 48:56 ... a lot of studies at the University of Wisconsin. And calming of the emotional brain. It also dropped activity in the parietal lobes. That's the top back part of your brain. That's sort of where you sense space and time. So it, during that time, the 12 minutes seems like it actually went by in about three.

Jay Shetty 49:16 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 49:16 So things become timeless. And then we did another study at the University of Pennsylvania and found that people who did it for eight weeks, two months, had stronger resting frontal lobe function, and that's like the holy grail-

Jay Shetty 49:36 Yeah

Dr. Daniel Amen 49:36 ... of brain science, is if you want anything, you want big, fat frontal lobes-

Jay Shetty 49:41 Mm

Dr. Daniel Amen 49:41 ... 'cause that's what makes us human. 30% of the human brain is the prefrontal cortex, 11% of the chimpanzee brain, 7% of your dog's brain, 3% of the cat's brain, right? This is the part of us that makes us human, and it's called the executive part of the brain because it's about focus and forethought-

Jay Shetty 50:02 Mm

Dr. Daniel Amen 50:02 ... and judgment and impulse control and organization, planning, empathy, learning from the mistakes you make. So it's where you play chess. It's where you're not just thinking about the moment, "Oh, I can take your rook." It's where you're thinking five steps ahead, which is how we have survived as a species. We just don't, we don't have to be instinct like the squirrel. We can plan not just for this winter, but for 10 forward.

Jay Shetty 50:37 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 50:38 And when your prefrontal cortex is damaged-

Jay Shetty 50:40 You can't

Dr. Daniel Amen 50:40 ... you're just in the moment.

Jay Shetty 50:42 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 50:42 And people go, "Oh, but I wanna be," you know, and, and a lot of people-

Jay Shetty 50:45 Yeah

Dr. Daniel Amen 50:45 ... love the book The Power of Now.

Jay Shetty 50:47 Yeah.

Dr. Daniel Amen 50:47 And I actually love the book, but I hate the title.

Jay Shetty 50:49 Right.

Dr. Daniel Amen 50:49 Because if you're always in the power of now, you're screwed, [laughs] because you need to be now and later-

Jay Shetty 50:56 Right

Dr. Daniel Amen 50:56 ... which is why the title of the book, Feel Better Fast and Make It Last-

Jay Shetty 51:00 And make it last, yeah

Dr. Daniel Amen 51:01 ... is so important. People are too into feel better now, but not later.

Jay Shetty 51:06 Yeah, and let's dive into that too. This is, if you're listening and watching this right now, if you're just listening and you can't see my face, I'm blown away. Uh, I'm, I'm in awe because I feel like there's so many, cliches are not the right word, but there's so many things that are thrown about in this world right now about these themes and topics, and we take them as reality, but then getting to sit with you, and I almost feel like now I need to go and buy all your books and read all of them-

Dr. Daniel Amen 51:30 Thank you

Jay Shetty 51:30 ... uh, not just this one. That's genuinely how I feel right now. Like I'm about to walk out of here and ask my team to order every single one of your books, and I feel like I have to sit with them for, for weeks because I, I feel like you're giving me such a refreshing perspective on so many things that I feel I know subconsciously, things that I've known without the backing of science. But to hear that from your perspective is, is fascinating. One of the big ones for me is purpose is such a big part of my life. I became a monk because of purpose. I left being a monk because of purpose.

Jay Shetty 52:00 I married my wife because of purpose. I do what I'm doing right now with you because of meaning and purpose. Is purpose critical to happiness in life, or can someone be happy without purpose?

Dr. Daniel Amen 52:12 Y- you know, they probably can. It's just a heck of a lot easier to be-

Jay Shetty 52:16 With pur-

Dr. Daniel Amen 52:17 ... happy with purpose because we are a relational species. And purpose can take a number of forms.

Jay Shetty 52:25 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 52:25 It can be helping other people. It can be developing personal skills, like I have a ping pong coach because I love playing. It keeps my brain young. It makes me happy. Um, or it can be doing something massively important at work. Um, my favorite book, or at least it's in the top five, is Man's Search for Meaning-

Jay Shetty 52:51 Mm-hmm

Dr. Daniel Amen 52:51 ... by Viktor Frankl.

Jay Shetty 52:53 Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Daniel Amen 52:53 And-

Jay Shetty 52:54 Me too

Dr. Daniel Amen 52:54 ... he was younger than Freud, but they were competitors in the sense that Freudian psychoanalysis was very powerful in psychiatry. Um, but he developed a kind of therapy around logos therapy or meaning therapy, and I'd so much rather talk to my patients about meaning than their love relationship with their mother, right? That just, it just never went anywhere with me in that whole thing. But getting people into why you wanna be well, why are you on the planet, what is your deepest sense of purpose? And too often in the younger generation, nobody's asked them that question. And so now they go, "Well, I wanna be Jeff Bezos, and I wanna be the richest person in the world." And as soon as you do that, you will set yourself up to fall, right? And that is one of the origin thoughts of depression, and this is what the bad part of social media. It's you start comparing yourself to people that are actually not completely real, and because you can't live up, you feel less than, and then that drives depression. Along with, oh, by the way, you're eating crap. You have low vitamin D level. Your hormones aren't good because of the toxins your moth- toxic lotion your mother's put on your body, right? I mean, it's more complicated than that, but whenever you compare yourself, you know, I could go, "Well, I haven't won a Nobel Prize, so my life is meaningless." Well- That's just nuts, right? The, the person who won the Nobel Prize in psychiatry did it for prefrontal lobotomies, right? Putting an ice pick up above your eyes and wiping out your frontal lobe. So it's, it's not... I'm not pining for [laughs] the Nobel Prize, right? The thing that gives me joy and meaning and purpose is not being better than other people, it's being the best I can be and having the most meaningful existence. I learned that. So when I was in college, I was generally the top student in my class, um, but I helped everybody else. I was never about I need to be better than you. I wanted us both to be our best. And oh, by the way, if I helped you study, it's reinforcing the information for me. So Hans Selye was a very famous stress researcher, and he... It's a term he called egoistic altruism. It's mean when I help you, I'm also helping me.

Jay Shetty 55:35 Yeah, absolutely. And, and is there such a thing in the brain as completely selfless altruism? Like, does the opposite of that exist, and what does that feeling look like?

Dr. Daniel Amen 55:44 You know, I don't know.

Jay Shetty 55:45 Yeah.

Dr. Daniel Amen 55:45 I always... There's a phrase I say often, is we're all out for ourselves.

Jay Shetty 55:51 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 55:51 It's just the more sophisticated you are, the harder it is to tell. I recently adopted, um... My two nieces got taken by Child Protective Services in Oregon into foster care, which sent me... So I know you talked about vulnerability.

Jay Shetty 56:13 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 56:13 It sent me into a panic, and I'm like, "No, I'm not okay with this." But my wife grew up in a home where there was a lot of addiction, so I'm rescuing the kids, and she's like, "No, I don't wanna be part of that world." And so it was one of our very few fights. And so what we agreed to do was wrap services around their mother, my wife's half-sister, and then within five months, the kids were out of foster care, and now we care for them. And people go, "Oh, well, that's so kind of you," and it is kind, but it's awesome for me.

Jay Shetty 56:53 Yeah.

Dr. Daniel Amen 56:53 Right? When I see their report cards and they're getting straight As, when I see them fall in love with their brains, that turns on the dopamine dripping to my nucleus accumbens. And, you know, I see them do award. Yes. Okay. So that's a dopamine dump, but you don't want too many of them, right? [laughs] Uh, it's, it's meaningful, it's purposeful, but it's a huge blessing.

Jay Shetty 57:19 Mm. Mm. Absolutely. Yeah. So yeah, that one's I'm always fascinated by is, is, you know, what is selflessness and what is the definition of selflessness? Because I actually don't think it's... I don't think it's bad, as... And I think you agree from what you just said. I don't think it's bad to want to do good for others and, and feel good about it. But almost we sometimes look at that in a negative way and say, "Oh, well, you're only doing it to help yourself." But is there-

Dr. Daniel Amen 57:43 Well, you know, there are always negative people.

Jay Shetty 57:45 Yeah. [laughs]

Dr. Daniel Amen 57:45 And, you know, I think CNN and Fox have done more to promote mental illness, um, with the constant negativity, fighting-

Jay Shetty 57:57 Mm

Dr. Daniel Amen 57:57 ... um, looking for something to be wrong, and then they train the minds of the millions of people who watch-

Jay Shetty 58:06 Mm

Dr. Daniel Amen 58:06 ... to look for what is wrong-

Jay Shetty 58:09 Mm

Dr. Daniel Amen 58:09 ... which is a bad mental discipline-

Jay Shetty 58:13 Mm

Dr. Daniel Amen 58:13 ... rather than looking for what is right.

Jay Shetty 58:18 Mm. Mm. Absolutely. Absolutely. I wanna go back and pick up off the shelf the exciting topic you brought up because I thought, "Oh, yeah, let's talk about that," because I, I have some very similar views to you. But I wanna hear your perspective around marijuana and alcohol, specifically marijuana. We're in LA right now, and obviously it's legalized, and-

Dr. Daniel Amen 58:36 Pot dispensaries-

Jay Shetty 58:38 Absolutely

Dr. Daniel Amen 58:38 ... on lots of corners here in LA.

Jay Shetty 58:40 You can go... Yeah, you can go.

Dr. Daniel Amen 58:41 It's actually fairly-

Jay Shetty 58:42 Get an Uber as quick as you can go to dispensary

Dr. Daniel Amen 58:44 ... horrifying. Um, so I have no dog in this fight.

Jay Shetty 58:47 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 58:47 Um, in fact, I make more money if you smoke pot than if you don't smoke pot.

Jay Shetty 58:53 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 58:53 You are way more likely to come see me, and people just don't understand the research. They go, "Oh, well, there's not enough research." No, marijuana increases the risk of psychosis 450% if teenagers start smoking pot. That is not a good thing. And the reason I sort of turned negative on it was I've done 150,000 SPECT scans.

Jay Shetty 59:17 Yeah.

Dr. Daniel Amen 59:17 SPECT looks at blood flow and activity. It makes the brain look toxic. Uh, it does. I published a study in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease on 1,000 pot smokers. Every area of their brain was lower. And then just a few months ago, I published the world's largest imaging study on 62,454 scans on how the brain ages. So we looked at the brain from nine months to 105, and it's got fascinating aging patterns. Like, it's not really done until about 25 in girls and 28 in boys. And then we looked, well, what are the factors that accelerate aging? On the top of the list was schizophrenia. If you have schizophrenia, your brain looks worse than everybody else. The second worst thing was marijuana. It was worse than smoking. It was worse than alcohol. I'm not a fan. Um, and, um, I see so many people go, "But I feel better," or, "I concentrate better," or, "I'm more creative." And I'm like, there's so many other ways to do it that don't have a potentially toxic impact on your brain.

Jay Shetty 1:00:26 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:00:27 Now, having said that, I'm a huge fan, and I think it should be legal. You're really gonna put potheads in jail? You're gonna sleep deprive them, chronically stress them, let them hang out with people who do bad things. That's insane. Um, but let's not re- They're, they're really separate issues.

Jay Shetty 1:00:47 Yeah.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:00:47 Right?

Jay Shetty 1:00:47 Let's not glamorize the use of it.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:00:49 Let's not glamorize. And everybody thinks, and CBD now is like they're giving it to their dog, for goodness sake. And I worry. You know, cocaine used to be in Coca-Cola.

Jay Shetty 1:01:01 Yeah.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:01:01 And opiates used to be the antidepressant. And when Xanax came out onto the market, um, it was called Mommy's little helper.

Jay Shetty 1:01:11 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:01:11 And all of those things have caused disasters in our country, and we're, we're setting ourselves up again. It's sort of like 20 years ago, alcohol was a health food.

Jay Shetty 1:01:23 Yeah.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:01:23 Right? I gotta have my two glasses of wine a day because it's good for my heart. But we clearly know now it's related to seven different kinds of cancer. Even if you're only a mild to moderate drinking, any drinking shows an increased risk for cancer. So I don't smoke pot and I don't drink. Now, my wife drinks, like two or three glasses of wine a month.

Jay Shetty 1:01:46 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:01:46 Um, where when I first met her-

Jay Shetty 1:01:48 Mm

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:01:48 ... she drank considerably more than that. Never a problem, but I don't want it to have a negative impact on her health.

Jay Shetty 1:01:57 Yeah. You've all heard it. There we go. Don't have to just hear my perspective. I'll, I'll, I'll just-

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:02:01 We're gonna get haters.

Jay Shetty 1:02:02 No, but I'm so glad we met.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:02:03 [laughs]

Jay Shetty 1:02:03 No, but I'm glad we went. I mean, who better to speak to than someone who's looking at the direct effect? And it comes back to that same point that you brought up earlier around, if I go take that one back off the shelf of now versus now and later, and it comes back to that. Because, uh, I experimented with drugs throughout my teens, uh, absolutely everything under the sun. Never got addicted, never did something consistently enough, but always wanted to take one or two tries of everything. And then gave it all up at 18 and never met- I haven't drank alcohol or smoked anything or, or taken anything since then.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:02:35 And you feel like you're missing something?

Jay Shetty 1:02:37 Not at all.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:02:37 [laughs]

Jay Shetty 1:02:37 Not at all. Not at all. I feel amazing, and I get to be creative, and my whole life is creative, and I get to travel the world and it's-

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:02:44 And people go, "Well, if I go to a party, I'm anxious."

Jay Shetty 1:02:46 Yeah.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:02:46 Well, learn how to deal with the anxiety-

Jay Shetty 1:02:49 Yeah. [laughs]

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:02:49 ... rather than have to medicate the anxiety, because that's now, but not later.

Jay Shetty 1:02:56 Right. Yeah.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:02:57 And, you know, and when you're around and you go to a party where there are a lot of people drinking, you know, for me, I generally just leave 'cause they're sort of stupid.

Jay Shetty 1:03:04 Yeah. [laughs]

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:03:05 And they're, like, saying things that it's like, "Did you really say that?"

Jay Shetty 1:03:08 Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:03:08 "That's, like, so rude. Why would you say that?" Because it drops frontal lobe function.

Jay Shetty 1:03:14 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:03:14 And it drops cerebellar function, and your cerebellum's the major processing organ in your brain, and you don't wanna be slow.

Jay Shetty 1:03:22 Mm. Absolutely. Absolutely. And this is what we're saying. I'm not, I'm not judging anyone who does either of these things, and I'm not criticizing anyone. It's just making yourself aware. It's just becoming more aware, and that's, that's all I ... That's why I ask the question, not to judge anyone, not to criticize anyone, not 'cause I think I'm better than anyone for not having done it, just to be aware. And when I was young, the thing that made me become aware was my friend and I went to see his aunt, who happened to be a heroin addict, and she had a fit in front of us, and that was the day I was like, "Okay, I, I cannot do this any longer." Because actually seeing someone who is addicted to heroin have a fit in front of me was far more telling to me than any study or any research or whatever it was. Just seeing that and experiencing that, I was just like, "Okay, I need to stop messing around in this space."

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:04:15 So I was at the White House last year about this time. And all of my liberal friends, uh, go, "You'd really go to the White House?" And I'm like, "It's the executive branch of government." And we were ... They asked me to help them think about the issue of the opiate epidemic and prison reform. And so I was really honored to go.

Jay Shetty 1:04:38 Of course.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:04:39 And my input was we need to develop a national brain health program to teach people to fall in love with their brains, and that's why you don't drink, or that's why you don't do drugs, because you love your brain and you want it to be healthy.

Jay Shetty 1:05:03 Mm. Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. And, and congratulations, by the way. That's incredible, and I'm happy that people like yourself are being involved in those discussions and decisions. Because like you said, again, if you don't see it, I mean, how can you tell anyone what to do? Amazing. I wanted to start touching on, uh, a specific area that I had here, was around the I in the mnemonic is inspiration. And I wanted to talk about why is it that inspiration is often so short-lived instead of long-lasting. Like, we- we feel like even on social media now, people watch a video and they feel inspired, or people hear a speech and they feel inspired. And people, uh, people even hear this podcast today and they'll feel inspired, but then the change doesn't happen. There's no application. There's no practice. Why is that inspiration short-lived, and how do you make inspiration last into action and application?

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:05:56 Yeah, so you have to turn them into habits.

Jay Shetty 1:05:58 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:05:59 And 'cause we're habitual-

Jay Shetty 1:06:00 Mm-hmm

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:06:00 ... creatures.

Jay Shetty 1:06:01 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:06:02 And if you can turn the good things ... And so, you know, what's the smallest thing I can do today that will make the biggest difference? Start every day with, "Today is going to be a great day."

Jay Shetty 1:06:14 Right. Right.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:06:15 Um, what one purposeful thing will I do today? And, you know, people spend more time planning their vacations than planning their lives, which is a little odd. And so I'd love everyone to do the one-page miracle that's in the book. It's, so what do I want in my relationship? So for example, with my wife, I want a kind, caring, loving, supportive, passionate relationship. I always want that. I don't always feel like that.

Jay Shetty 1:06:50 Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:06:50 Right? But if I get my eyes on that, when I get that rude thought that comes into my head, I just filter it with will this get you what you want? And no, [laughs] it won't get me what I want, so I inhibit it. Now, how can I inhibit thoughts? Well, if I, if I'm drinking, I'm less likely to inhibit it. If I'm smoking pot, I'm less likely to inhibit it. If I haven't slept, I'm less likely to inhibit it. And so it's the brain health habits. It's then the clear direction, I want this. And so well then how do I get that?

Jay Shetty 1:07:33 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:07:33 And that's where I begin to break free of the bad habits. Plus, I published two studies that showed as your weight goes up, the physical size and function of your brain goes down. So you need to be a little bit horrified by [laughs] the... You know, I always think with motivation is know what you want, but also be clear with what you don't want.

Jay Shetty 1:07:57 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:07:57 Um, because pain is actually a bigger motivator for people than pleasure often.

Jay Shetty 1:08:03 100%, and that's what I love about this book. I love how strategic the book is and how practical it is, and that's, when I was speaking to you earlier, I love the fact that there are activities, exercises, questions that people can use to reflect on themselves in the book. And, and that's unique because often we find that when, when books are written from a, a medical perspective, it can be quite hard to digest. Whereas when I was reading through this, it didn't feel that way at all. So anyone who's watching and listening right now, if you're looking for tools, tips, practical habits to actually break through, then please, please, please go and get the book because it's gonna help you do that. So just, just thanking you for actually having gone through that, gone to that stage. So now we finish every interview, I will ask you if there's anything I missed, but we do finish every interview with what I call the final five, which is my final five questions. Usually rapid fire, quick fire in the final five minutes. So I have yours here. If they're not rapid fire, I'm not upset because I, I think your insights are beyond one to three words, and I'm okay with that. Uh, the first question I have, which i- which is from the book, but I loved it, was, what is the ki- quickest way to break a panic attack?

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:09:09 So four simple things.

Jay Shetty 1:09:11 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:09:11 The first thing is breathe. You gotta take a big breath and take at least twice as long to blow it out. That'll trigger a parasympathetic response in your body to calm you down. The next thing is, what are you thinking? Write it down because often fortune telling, negative thoughts drive panic attack. You're predicting the worst possible thing, and then your brain is just masterful at making it worse. So killing the ANT.

Jay Shetty 1:09:42 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:09:42 The third thing is don't leave. If you're starting to have a panic attack at work, don't leave. Because if you leave, the panic will now start to control you, and it could actually turn into something called agoraphobia, where you can't even leave your home because you're worried you're gonna have a panic attack. And then the fourth thing, if all those things aren't working, there's some simple supplements that can be really helpful. Theanine, GABA, ashwagandha.

Jay Shetty 1:10:09 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:10:09 I'm a huge fan of-

Jay Shetty 1:10:11 Yeah

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:10:12 ... uh, things like that to just help calm you down, and I talk about them in the book.

Jay Shetty 1:10:16 Absolutely. Amazing. Great piece of advice. Love that. Uh, second question is, what are the simplest food we can add to our diets to nourish our brain?

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:10:23 Colorful fruits and vegetables. So not Skittles when I say colorful.

Jay Shetty 1:10:27 [laughs]

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:10:28 Um, or M&Ms.

Jay Shetty 1:10:29 M&Ms, yeah.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:10:30 No. No, no, no.

Jay Shetty 1:10:31 [laughs]

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:10:31 But try when you're in the produce department to pick as many colors as you can because they're loaded with antioxidants. Also, scratch the low-fat diet because 60% of the solid weight of your brain is fat. Avocados are God's butter. Uh, I'm a huge fan of wild fish. The societies that eat the most fish actually have the lowest incidence of depression.

Jay Shetty 1:11:00 Amazing. Great advice. So succinct as well. I'm, I'm impressed. This is, uh, brilliant. Third question is, what's, w- where does ego sit in all of this, and how much have you studied ego at all, if at all? I'll just ask that.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:11:11 Well, I actually like Freud's concept of id, ego, and super ego, and I really think of them about prefrontal cortex.

Jay Shetty 1:11:19 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:11:19 So when your prefrontal cortex is low or you're young, it's just not developed, that's the child in you that takes over. And in our society, the four-year-old rules. Um, you know, whether it's with the White House or Congress or the media or, you know, just everyday society, it's we're way too impulsive, and there are way too many temper tantrums-

Jay Shetty 1:11:46 Mm

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:11:46 ... going on. Um, the ego is really healthy frontal lobe function. Um, so you're 28 or 40 and you're good to your brain, and it helps you make good decisions and be thoughtful. The super ego, in Freud's concept, is really when your frontal lobes work too hard and you g- you're rigid, you're inflexible, and you're harsh to yourself and to others. So balance your brain and balance the ego-

Jay Shetty 1:12:17 Mm

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:12:17 ... um, in a good way.

Jay Shetty 1:12:19 Brilliant. Question number four, you brought it up slightly earlier, what's your best advice for anyone who has party anxiety or social anxiety in those kind of circles?

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:12:30 So it's so common. It's actually one of the most common anxieties on the planet, and it's why people drink.

Jay Shetty 1:12:38 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:12:39 It's why people do drugs, because they feel uncomfortable around other people. And, and I think you'll like this, learning how to manage your anxiety through things like hypnosis- Guided imagery, meditation, it just should be part of everything we do-

Jay Shetty 1:12:59 Mm

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:12:59 ... along with learning how to not believe every stupid thought you have. In the book, I have one of my favorite rules. It's called the 18/40/60 rule, which says when you're 18, you worry about what everybody's thinking of you, and when you're 40, you don't give a damn what anybody thinks about you, and when you're 60, you realize nobody has been thinking about you at all.

Jay Shetty 1:13:22 [laughs]

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:13:22 People spend their days worrying and thinking about themselves, not you. So it's really hard for my paranoid schizophrenics to get this concept because they think the whole world revolves around them. And it, it just doesn't.

Jay Shetty 1:13:39 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:13:40 And if you can get it that a negative look from someone else may mean nothing more than they are constipated, you don't know.

Jay Shetty 1:13:51 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:13:51 And other people are anxious, too, and so often if you're at a party and you're feeling anxious, go, "You know, I just feel anxious sometimes," you know? And the other person's likely to go, "Oh, you know, I'm that way, too." And then all of a sudden everybody's anxiety goes down. When you believe you have to present yourself as that perfect person, nobody can relate to you because nobody's perfect.

Jay Shetty 1:14:17 Yeah. So true. That's a great piece of advice. As long... As soon as you open up and say, "Hey, I'm, I'm struggling with this," someone else has the permission to say that, too. Absolutely. I love that. And fifth and final question was actually all around what we spoke about before, which was about what I'm fascinated by you and when we spoke earlier as well, is your ability to bring together science and spirituality, your ability to understand both dimensions and, and both approaches to understanding our human selves and condition. And you spoke about earlier, we were talking about death

Jay Shetty 1:14:48 and, and I'd love for you to retell that story that we were speaking about earlier and just elaborate more on, on what you have found in terms of all your studies, et cetera, through spirituality coming out.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:14:59 We are all spiritual beings, and as a psychiatrist, if I don't understand your deepest sense of meaning and purpose, why you believe you're on the planet, and what happens to your soul after you die, um, then I don't really understand all of you, which is my goal.

Jay Shetty 1:15:20 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:15:20 And so I told you before, last week I had a friend that died-

Jay Shetty 1:15:25 Mm

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:15:25 ... and he told his partner that she had to let him go because he's been invited, uh, and where he's going, he's seen and it's beautiful. And, um, it was 1977, I wr- read a book called L- uh, Life After Life by Ray M- Moody, and it was about people who had near-death experiences, and it gave me a really deep sense of peace that I don't believe I'm here by random chance.

Jay Shetty 1:15:54 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:15:54 Now, I know a lot of my science friends, you know, they're 100% on evolution and we're all here by random chance. They just forget the second law of physics. The second law of physics is entropy. Things go from order to disorder in the universe. They don't go from disorder to order. And I'm sorry, I have a brand-new granddaughter, and I don't think Haven's here by random chance. It just, it makes... I think it actually takes more faith to believe we're here without any creative design or intelligent design, um, than to believe that our interaction today happened out of randomness.

Jay Shetty 1:16:37 Mm. I love that perspective. It definitely, my sense is to think things are undesigned is actually generally pushing our faith much further. I couldn't agree more. That's really well said, really beautifully said. Daniel, it's been absolutely incredible. I've learned so much today. I genuinely mean this, and I'm not lying, as soon as I walk out of this room, I'm gonna ask my team to order every single one of your books. I feel like I'm gonna dive deep into all of them, and I feel like I want to continue the conversation offline and back on the podcast anytime you like because I can only think that anyone who's watched and listened to this today has been benefited in some way, and I know that when they go and buy the book, they'll be benefited in an even bigger way. So I highly, highly recommend it. Is there anything that I haven't touched on that you really feel like I should have asked you, could have asked you, would have asked you, and, and you'd like to touch on? I'm-

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:17:25 You, you know, the only th- Well, two things.

Jay Shetty 1:17:28 Yeah.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:17:28 Um-

Jay Shetty 1:17:28 Let's do it

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:17:30 ... I finish the book with a chapter on love.

Jay Shetty 1:17:34 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:17:34 That you don't do the right thing because you should.

Jay Shetty 1:17:37 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:17:39 You do the right thing because you love yourself. And, and, and I've just thought more and more, um, one of my other books is called The Brain Warrior's Way because, uh, my wife and I wrote it together, and we just believe we're in a war for the health of our brain. Alzheimer's is expected to triple. Um, 36% of teenage girls suffer from depression. Um, that if you love yourself and you love your planet and you love your country and you love your world, that ultimately doing the right thing is not because you should do it, but because of love.

Jay Shetty 1:18:21 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:18:21 And if you do it out of love, it's just so much easier-

Jay Shetty 1:18:25 Mm-hmm

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:18:25 ... to do. Um, the other thing just to touch on for a second is, uh, beginning-

Jay Shetty 1:18:31 Can I... Before we get... Is there another thing separate? Is that different to what you... Can we go into the one you just mentioned? Because I'm fascinated by it, too. In, in the Vedas that I studied as a monk, it talks about the three types of motivation and, and the lowest motivation is ignorance or fear. Uh, the middle motivation is duty or obligation or responsibility or because you have to, and the highest, uh, motivation is love, as, as you rightly said. So I couldn't agree more. Do you think, though, that that begs the question that the biggest challenge we all have is that we don't love ourselves, like we don't love our brain? Like, we, we just, we're so inundated with trying to be that which we're not or letting the opinions of others affect how we are and our self-belief, and that's actually what's affecting our brain health the most, is we're not looking at it through the lens you're, you're recommending and suggesting.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:19:20 I think that's exactly right.

Jay Shetty 1:19:22 Yeah.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:19:22 And, you know, when I turned 50, my doctor wanted me to have a colonoscopy. I asked him why he didn't want to look at my brain. Wasn't the other end just as important?

Jay Shetty 1:19:32 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:19:32 But we don't screen it, we don't look at it, and ultimately, we don't love it. You can't let a child hit a soccer ball with their head and say you love that child or that child's brain. It's just not possible when you understand the physics of it, and-

Jay Shetty 1:19:51 I've hit a lot of soccer balls with my head

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:19:52 ... it horrifying.

Jay Shetty 1:19:53 All of them just flashed before my eyes.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:19:55 [laughs]

Jay Shetty 1:19:55 I love soccer. I'm a huge, huge football fan, so yeah. Okay.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:19:59 So if, and I tell-

Jay Shetty 1:20:01 Yeah

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:20:01 ... 'cause I have done 225 NFL players, I mean, Hall of Fame players, like Terry Bradshaw, and if you're gonna do it, 'cause we're always gonna have dangerous jobs. That's a dangerous job. If you're gonna do it, you should be putting your brain in a healing environment all the way along-

Jay Shetty 1:20:21 Mm

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:20:21 ... not just when you retire. See, that's like, doesn't make any sense.

Jay Shetty 1:20:26 Sure.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:20:26 'Cause if you're gonna play, and one of my players signed a $42 million contract, so he's going to play, you have to be rehabilitating it-

Jay Shetty 1:20:34 Yeah

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:20:34 ... all along because you'll actually be a better player.

Jay Shetty 1:20:37 Yes. Absolutely. And the second thing, you were going to go off on, then I stopped you.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:20:41 The second one is we had just, uh, began to talk about a book I'm just starting to write called The End of Mental Illness.

Jay Shetty 1:20:49 Yes, let's get into it.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:20:50 I am so tired of the stigma attached to mental health problems, and these, in fact, aren't mental health problems. They're brain health problems. Get your brain right and your mind will follow. And I just think we have to completely break the paradigm and create a new specialty.

Jay Shetty 1:21:14 So you're saying stress, depression, anxiety, all of these are brain health-

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:21:18 They're brain health-

Jay Shetty 1:21:19 ... they're not mental

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:21:20 ... problems. And when you get your brain right, then you realize, um, I have to learn how to manage stress because stress actually shrinks the major memory center in my brain, which is gonna make me more stressed if I can't remember what I'm supposed to do.

Jay Shetty 1:21:38 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:21:38 That depression clearly is a brain health problem, and there's not one form of depression, and that's the problem. You go to your doctor, y- and 85% of psychiatric drugs are prescribed by non-psychiatric physicians, um, or nurse practitioners or your physician assistant. Um, "I'm depressed," so they give you Lexapro.

Jay Shetty 1:21:58 And one size fits all.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:21:59 And one size fits all. When you look at the scans of depressed people, there are at least seven different kinds, and one, yes, can help this pattern, but will actually make that pattern worse.

Jay Shetty 1:22:10 Mm.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:22:11 And so all of these medications have black box warnings because they hurt people. And we can just do so much better. And coming here, I saw someone on Hollywood and Vine who was clearly psychotic. They were talking to themselves. They were having this whole conversation, and I'm thinking to myself, "I wonder if he had a brain injury. I wonder if he has an infection in his brain." Lyme disease is rampant in this country, um, for causing psychosis. Um, I wonder if his body's inflamed. And so easy to call him crazy, easy to give him an antipsychotic that he won't take 'cause it'll make him feel bad. The harder question, but the better question, is why is he that way? And if I balance his brain, will it help balance his life? In my experience, the answer is yes.

Jay Shetty 1:23:05 Mm. Absolutely amazing. Thank you so much, Daniel. Thank you to everyone who's watched and listened. Remember, you can get the book, Feel Better Fast And Make It Last. Uh, go get it right now if you're fascinated by this conversation. We literally just scratched the surface of what this book really takes, uh, into account. Make sure you go and get it if you like this conversation. Thank you so much, Daniel, for taking out the time to be here, and I feel like we need to do another 10 because I'd love to dive into all of the different types of clients you've worked with and hear the stories about how you specifically worked with them, with their specific challenges, to overcome them. So I think this is the first of many, hopefully, and I'm sure all of you watching and listening will agree. But Daniel, thank you so much for taking out the time.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:23:47 Well, I look-

Jay Shetty 1:23:47 So grateful

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:23:47 ... forward to being with you again.

Jay Shetty 1:23:48 Yeah, I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Dr. Daniel Amen 1:23:50 You're welcome.

Jay Shetty 1:23:51 Amazing. [upbeat music] If you want even more videos just like this one, make sure you subscribe and click on the boxes over here. I'm also excited to let you know that you can now get my book, Think Like a Monk, from thinklikeamonkbook.com. Check below in the description to make sure you order today.