Psychiatrist Daniel Amen Answers Brain Questions From Twitter

Why the [bleep] is my anxiety

through the [bleep] roof today?

What do you want from me, brain?

There's a lot of that going on.

Hi, this is Doctor Daniel Amen.

I'm a double board-certified psychiatrist,

founder of Amen Clinics,

and the author of The End of Mental Illness.

This is Brain Support.

[rhythmic music]

Rory Banwell, Why does your brain sometimes

completely forget common words?

I just couldn't remember drawer, like what?

Interrupt signals that happen in your brain,

it can be due to a lack of sleep, not eating,

negative thoughts, low blood sugar.

If it happens once a week, I wouldn't worry about it,

but if it's beginning to happen two, three, four

times a week and if it's worse than it was 10 years ago,

it actually could be a sign of impending trouble,

and that's where you wanna really

begin to look at your brain habits.

If you have hypertension, high blood pressure,

as blood pressure goes up blood flow to the brain does down.

If you have any form of heart disease or vascular disease

like a heart arrhythmia, if you had general anesthesia

at some point in the past that can lower blood flow,

if you don't exercise.

The simple way for each of these risk factors, it's, okay,

what is it, how do you know if you have it,

and what to do about it,

and what to do about low blood flow,

exercise boosts blood flow to the brain.

There are simple things like eating beets, cayenne pepper,

oregano, rosemary, all of those things

have been found to increase blood flow,

as have simple supplements like ginkgo biloba.

Dylan_Saunders, Right brained people,

how do you turn off your left brains?

Well, we really can't turn off a part of our brain.

Dolphins can, dolphins actually sleep

with one hemisphere asleep at a time,

but humans can't do that.

You would literally have to cut

this area of the brain called the corpus callosum,

and it's like so many wires connecting the left

and right hemispheres of the brain

that it's just not possible to turn it off.

There's some people who are born without a corpus callosum,

so then the sides of the brain are not talking to each other

and they have some very interesting

neuropsychological findings,

but ultimately you want both sides connected to each other.

Dayaawarrior, Why does my brain start

to go 60 miles an hour when I'm trying to go to sleep?

As you start to sleep, your frontal lobes,

front part of your brain, start to get quiet,

which unfortunately takes the breaks

off your emotional brain, and so if this is happening

you need a routine and habits

to get your emotional brain back under control.

If the thoughts are repetitive, they just circle,

have a little journal by your bed and write them down,

and then ask yourself, so what can I do about it

and what can I not do about it,

but the act of writing it down helps

to get it out of your head.

When I go to bed I say a prayer,

very intentionally, specifically,

I review what went well today,

and I'm looking for at least three things.

I love it because, you know, like you, I'm busy.

I often don't take time during the day

to just go that was awesome.

How many special moments are in your day,

even during a pandemic?

You just don't think about it,

and when you do it right before bed

it sets your dreams up to actually be more positive

and REM sleep, dream sleep,

is one of the most important healing parts of sleep.

@Coywolfy, Anybody else having

some severe PTSD attacks during quarantine?

I feel like my overall mental health

has tanked over the past two months.

I'm losing my appetite, massive anxiety attacks,

and I'm having some intense intrusive thoughts.

I feel for you.

The term I use is we are now experiencing

a global amygdala hijacking.

So the amygdala deep in your brain is a structure,

it's in the shape of an almond, that responds to fear.

What's happening in the world

is activating our amygdala, and it's making very many people

feeling anxious and stressed.

I think our baseline stress levels went up about 30%.

So if yours were already heightened,

now you can be having massive panic attacks

and intrusive thoughts.

Mental hygiene is just as important as washing your hands.

We have to disinfect our thoughts and kill the ANTs,

the automatic negative thoughts, that steal our happiness.

You want to become masterful at diaphragmatic breathing,

and there's actually a very specific pattern

that will calm down your amygdala

and activate your frontal lobe so you make better decisions.

Three seconds in, so big breath, hold it for a second,

and then take six seconds out and hold it for a second.

So it's an 11 second breath, but if you do that 10 times

it'll actually trigger a relaxation response in your brain

and begin to give you some control.

You know, I think it's something they

should actually teach second graders.

Do this breathing.

It's the first step in getting control of your anxiety.

Jeff Golenski, As I'm getting older I'm noticing

that if I spend 10 plus hours working on my computer

on a given day, not typical, I often have difficulty

shutting my brain down at night to sleep.

When I wake the next day I'm often plagued

by a sort of a hangover from the day before, anyone else?

This is actually common.

The lights from the computer may

be sending interrupt signals to your brain.

Before they unleashed digital technology unto the world,

there's actually no neuroscience study on the impact

of being flooded with the blue lights from screens.

Many of my colleagues and I recommend blue light blockers,

especially if you have any screen on after dark.

Blue light in the late afternoon and the evening

begins to turn off the production of melatonin,

which sort of naturally helps us go to sleep.

Plus, if you're 10 hours plus on a computer screen,

you're not getting the exercise.

You know, the best natural treatment

for depression and cognitive impairment

actually seems to be exercise.

@hog_mild, So I got enough sleep, ate breakfast,

took my meds, am hydrated, don't have a crazy busy day,

am stable in my relationships.

So why the [bleep] is my anxiety

through the [bleep] roof today?

I can feel my heartbeat in my eyes.

What do you want from me, brain?

Anxiety disorders are still

the most common mental health issue in the world.

Begin to put a daily stress reduction practice in your life.

For me, I love table tennis.

It's exercise, it's distracting, it's good for me.

A lot of people love meditation.

There's a kind of meditation I really like

that we've studied called loving-kindness.

I'm a huge fan of hypnosis, self-hypnosis.

Certain music will activate you and make you anxious.

A lot of other music will actually calm and soothe you.

So I'm a huge fan of having a daily relaxation practice

to get control, and then what I teach my patients

is whenever you feel sad, or mad, or nervous,

or out of control, write down what you're thinking,

then ask yourself if it's true.

Thoughts are automatic, they just happen,

and what most people don't know is the thoughts in your head

often lie to you, they often terrorize you.

I teach my patients how to kill the ANTs,

the automatic negative thoughts.

You have to develop an internal anteater

patrolling the streets of your mind,

and just learning this technique is just so helpful.

Rylee B. writes, Why does my brain provide

only wonderful dialog when I shower,

and why is it always when there's shampoo in my hair

so I can't get out to write it down?

I like this a lot.

When you're in the shower

and you're doing something you know how to do,

then basically your cerebellum's doing it.

It's sort of an automatic process.

The rest of your brain can relax and you're distracted,

which is often when creativity flows.

It's happened to me a lot over the years.

I just have something that I can

get out of the shower, quickly write it down,

and then get back in and finish it.

Just have some mechanism to capture it

and you'll be able to remember it as you rinse your hair

and then write down your thought,

and if you can't then we have to boost your brain's health.

@aishakhvnx, Y'all ever forget

what you're talking about while you're talking?

It happens to me so often

that I swear I'm getting amnesia.

I hear this actually a lot

in my patients who have ADD or ADHD.

Because they have so many thoughts,

while they're talking they actually get lost.

Do you notice you have a short attention span,

you're easily distracted, you tend to be late,

you're disorganized, you procrastinate,

and you might say or do things impulsively?

When I first read that question, I go,

huh, I wonder if she has ADD.

If it's not that and it's happening so often,

I worry that your brain might not be as healthy

as it could be, and that's where I would begin

to explore those 11 major risk factors

that steal people's minds,

and the pneumonic is called BRIGHT MINDS.

The B we talked about is blood flow.

R is retirement and aging.

When people stop learning, their brain starts dying.

I is inflammation.

If you have low omega-3 fatty acid levels,

if you have an unhealthy gut,

if you have periodontal disease,

you're not really good at taking care of your teeth,

all of those things can actually increase inflammation

and negatively impact your memory and your brain.

Syddtayy, Why doesn't anybody talk about the brain fog

that comes along with anxiety and depression?

It makes me feel like I can't function normally,

and I thought I was going crazy until I looked it up

and realized that it happens to a lot of people.

Can we start talking about these things more?

So brain fog is when you feel like your brain is in mud,

that it just takes more effort to think and respond

than you think is reasonable.

It is very common.

Anxiety, because your brain is so focused on negativity

or depression where you don't have

enough activity in your brain,

there's one type of depression, I call it un-focus,

where they have really low activity in the brain

commonly associated with brain fog.

Again, you wanna keep your brain healthy

or rescue it if it's headed to the dark place.

You have to prevent or treat

these risk factors I've been talking about.

So BRIGHT MINDS, B is for blood flow,

R is retirement and aging, I is inflammation,

G is genetics, stuff like anxiety

and depression run in families,

but also the negative thinking,

the dysfunctional thinking patterns

can also be modeled in families.

I often say genes are not a death sentence.

What they should be is a wake up call.

Gene's load the gun.

It's what happened to us and our behavior

that pulls the trigger.

So if I know I have anxiety in my family,

then I'm gonna work even harder to prevent it.

The H in BRIGHT MINDS is head trauma,

a major cause of psychiatric problems

that nobody knows about because most psychiatrists

actually never look at the brain.

I actually have a database of 160,000 scans on patients

from 155 countries, and if you said, hey, Daniel,

single most important thing you learned

from the world's largest brain imaging database

related to psychiatry, I would say mild traumatic

brain injury's a major cause of psychiatric problems.

If you don't get the right diagnosis,

you'll never end up with the right treatment plan.

The T in BRIGHT MINDS is for toxins.

If you have brain fog, anxiety, and depression,

I wanna make sure you don't have mold in your house.

Mold is a very common cause of brain fog,

anxiety, and depression.

It's one of the toxins along with marijuana is a toxin,

alcohol can be toxic.

Of all the firefighters I've treated,

over 90% have toxic looking brains

because of the carbon monoxide they breathe

or the cyanide they breathe from burning furniture

or burning buildings and from fires.

Anxiety and depression, they're not single

or simple disorders, and if you wanna take care

of the brain fog you have to

become serious about brain health.

The bottom line is this, after looking at all these scans

most psychiatric problems are not mental health issues,

rather they are brain health issues,

and this one idea changes everything.

Get your brain right and your mind will follow,

and I'm convinced that the end of mental illness

will begin with a revolution in brain health.

Needysabs, My mental health really do be like,

arrows up, arrows down, arrows up, arrows down.

How do you fix a broken brain, please?

I've been talking about that.

This gives me an opportunity

to finish our BRIGHT MINDS pneumonic.

If you wanna keep your brain healthy or fix a broken brain,

you have to prevent or treat

the 11 major risk factors that steal your mind.

BRIGHT MINDS is the pneumonic.

Blood flow, retirement and aging, inflammation,

genetics, head trauma, toxins.

M is something I call mind storms,

which is abnormal electrical activity,

especially in the temporal lobes,

and it can come from a head injury,

you could be born with it.

It causes people to be up and down,

just like the icons you used.

Sometimes anti-seizure medications

can actually be really helpful to stabilize things.

Sometimes a ketogenic diet can actually help.

I found that can be really helpful in balancing the brains.

There are treatments like neurofeedback

to help reset the brain.

The second I in BRIGHT MINDS is immunity and infections,

and I had no idea how prophetic that would be

right before a pandemic,

and let me be really clear about this,

your best defense against COVID-19

is not gonna be a drug or a vaccine.

Your best defense is your immune system.

So keeping it healthy is critical.

You do that by what you eat, by keeping your gut healthy,

by making sure you have healthy vitamin D levels,

vitamin C levels, zinc, magnesium, selenium.

All of those are nutrients to support your immune system,

but this is why you need to stay away from sugar

and foods that quickly turn to sugar

because all of those are pro-inflammatory

and can damage your immune system, as can gluten and dairy.

The N in BRIGHT MINDS is neurohormone disorders.

Your thyroid is high or low,

you're gonna be anxious or depressed.

If your testosterone is low, odds are you're gonna be sad

and have no motivation and no libido for a girl or a guy.

The D is diabesity, it's this combination

of you have high blood sugar, you're pre-diabetic

or diabetic, and overweight or obese.

As your weight goes up, the actual physical size

and function of your brain goes down,

which should scare the fat off anyone.

And then the S in BRIGHT MINDS is sleep.

Getting your sleep right is so important.

So if you want to fix a broken brain, you can,

that's the exciting news that comes out of our imaging.

You are not stuck with the brain you have.

You can make it better, but you have to love it,

you have to treat it right.

I'm in a new docuseries with Justin Bieber.

I've been Justin's doctor for the last five years.

He would come and then he'd go and then he'd come

and then he'd go, and finally he married Hailey

and he kept coming 'cause she made him.

More than a year ago, he walked into my office

and he said, My brain can have problems

just like my heart can have problems.

If you told me I had heart problems,

I'd do everything you said.

I'm gonna start doing everything you say.

And then he got remarkably better.

You can be better.

This is Doctor Daniel Amen for Brain Support.

To learn more about my work, you can get my book

The End of Mental Illness or go to amenclinics.com

and learn about our clinics around the world.

And big thank you to WIRED,

and hope all of you stay safe.