A Limited Series: Take The Brain Health Challenge

Dr Daniel Amen: Welcome to the Brain Warrior's Way podcast, I'm Dr. Daniel Amen.
Tana Amen: And I'm Tana Amen. In our podcast we provide you with the tools you need to become a warrior for the health of your brain and body.
Dr Daniel Amen: The Brain Warrior's Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics where we have been transforming lives for 30 years using tools like brain SPECT imaging to personalize treatment to your brain. For more information visit amenclinics.com.
Tana Amen: The Brain Warrior's Way podcast is also brought to you by Brain MD where we produce the highest quality nutraceuticals to support the health of your brain and body. To learn more go to brainmd.com
Dr Daniel Amen: Hi this is Dr. Daniel Amen.
Tana Amen: And I'm Tana Amen.
Dr Daniel Amen: We're so excited you're with us. For this week's series what we're doing is we're playing the live class from The End of Mental Illness.
Tana Amen: We wanted you to join us on this journey because we had such a good time in our class and the people who joined us had just saw such an incredible transformation that we wanted to share the challenge with our tribe. So we wanted to share this with you and we hope that you will join us in the challenge. Welcome to The End of Mental Illness brain health revolution challenge. I'm so excited and I'm so proud of you. I am so happy to be here and I'm so proud of you. I think this is your most important book yet, The End of Mental Illness. So I'm just very proud of you and I'm very excited to be here doing this with you tonight.
Dr Daniel Amen: Well thank you so much and there's 1100 people watching.
Tana Amen: That is just great.
Dr Daniel Amen: So we're really excited and when, I thought about this is a new year but it's really a new decade. And our goal at Amen Clinics is to create a revolution in brain health. So the end of mental illness begins with a revolution in brain health and that's what I am just so excited about. And if we're going to end mental illness we need brain health revolutionaries. And those of you who have been following us for a long time Tana and I do a podcast called the Brain Warrior's Way podcast because you're in a war for the health of your brain. Everywhere you go someone is trying to shove bad food down your throat that will kill you early. And so, what we're going to do over the next six weeks is we're going to actually give you something to do every day, five, 10 minutes max that will create this revolution in health in you and in those people you care about.
Tana Amen: And I think what I really like about it is you're not saying that this is the end of people experiencing challenges but it's the end of the way we talk about it, the way we treat it, the stigma around it, how we think about mental health challenges as opposed to stigmatizing and labeling people correct?
Dr Daniel Amen: No we're going to get to what I mean by the end of mental illness because quite frankly these things aren't mental they're brain and if you don't understand that distinction it hurts people. So let's get to it. And as I open The End of Mental Illness what I say is mental health issues affect all of us. Either you've personally struggled with a mental health issue or you love someone who has, no one escapes. And the incidence of these problems is skyrocketing with the deaths from drugs, alcohol, and suicide at their highest level in recorded history and you know that.
Tana Amen: I do. So I almost canceled my first date with you because you were a psychiatrist. I mean besides the fact that I didn't want to be psychoanalyzed I had been hurt by a psychiatrist, people in my family had been hurt by psychiatrists. My grandmother was horribly hurt by a psychiatrist. And I just ...
Dr Daniel Amen: She was actually diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Tana Amen: And given electric shock therapy. She had a nervous breakdown and it was hormonal we think.
Dr Daniel Amen: And she had terrible PTSD.
Tana Amen: And diabetes.
Dr Daniel Amen: And she was part of the starvation ...
Tana Amen: The great famine.
Dr Daniel Amen: The great famine in Lebanon in 19 ...
Tana Amen: Well, she was born in 1910, it was around 1915 to 1918 something like that.
Dr Daniel Amen: It was during World War One.
Tana Amen: Yeah.
Dr Daniel Amen: And we know through epigenetics that that starvation, that famine can actually affect three generations of people.
Tana Amen: Oh man and it affected her entire life. I mean it really was, it was traumatizing.
Dr Daniel Amen: And so her PTSD, hormonal challenges, diabetes, manifested as psychosis for a time. She ends up with this labeled schizophrenia when it's way more complicated than that. So, both of us know about this but if you're tuned in odds are you know about it too. But what we've learned at Amen Clinics over the last 30 years is that most psychiatric illnesses are not mental health issues at all but rather they are brain health issues that steal your mind and this one idea changes everything. Get your brain right and your mind will follow. So let me say that again. Get your brain right and your mind will follow.
Dr Daniel Amen: Now at Amen Clinics we've been doing brain imaging on our patients for 30 years despite intense opposition from my colleagues. But I'm like, how do you know unless you look. If you don't look, you don't know. We really need to stop lying about that. And the imaging just changed everything for me and we'll talk a little bit about it as we go along. But I really want people to get this one idea, get your brain right and your mind will follow. And so often I say it's not a psychiatric problem it's a brain problem. And when the brain is better your better still. Your brain can have problems just like your heart can have problems. So, next week I have a very special announcement but ...
Tana Amen: Are you just teasing people?
Dr Daniel Amen: I'm just teasing people. But one of my young celebrities, he wouldn't take his medicine and just know clear we're not opposed to medication for a brain health issue. That would be like well you're opposed to medication for a heart issue or you're opposed to medication for a liver problem. It's like no we're not opposed to medication we're just opposed to that's the first and only thing you do without any biological information. But anyways, he needed medicine and he's like, "No, I don't want to because there's all this controversy about psychiatric medication." And then he came into my office one day and he had been scanned and he said, "Your brain can have problems just like your heart can have problems."
Dr Daniel Amen: And do you know that most people who seek cardiologists, so both you and I have seen a cardiologist we love him, have never had a heart attack, that they're actually there to prevent them. That's what I see for psychiatry, to end mental illness we must develop a similar way of thinking where we know the brain's risk factors and we go attack them as soon as possible. So I have heart disease in my family so I know I'm at risk but I don't have heart disease. Why? Because I do all the things to prevent it. I mean I walked the mall today. I hate to be thought of as a mall walker.
Tana Amen: Chloe will never let you live it down.
Dr Daniel Amen: So what are some of the risk factors? We're going to talk about a lot of them over the next six weeks. So for example if teenagers sleep just one hour less than their peers they have higher rates of depression and suicide.
Tana Amen: Yeah it's crazy.
Dr Daniel Amen: If you have got health issues, and I remember when you and I first met that you had gut issues and it's like well that doesn't have anything to do with your mind that it's associated with anxiety, insomnia, and brain fog. And you told me when you were little you had upper and lower ...
Tana Amen: Upper and lower GIs when I was four years old. I mean, that's kind of crazy.
Dr Daniel Amen: And then I asked you, "Well, what happened when you were four years old?"
Tana Amen: And then I went, "Oh, here we go you're psychoanalyzing me, this is nonsense." It started two weeks after my uncle was murdered. Yeah.
Dr Daniel Amen: So let's say that so they can actually hear it, it started two weeks after your uncle was murdered in a drug deal gone wrong. So, maybe that has nothing to do with the unhappy gut bugs.
Tana Amen: I thought it had nothing to do with it.
Dr Daniel Amen: If you have Lyme disease we're going to talk about that a lot. It can actually cause people to become angry, depressed, even psychotic.
Tana Amen: That's wild. If you are enjoying The Brain Warrior's Way podcast please don't forget to subscribe so you'll always know when there's a new episode and while you're at it feel free to give us a review or five-star rating as that helps others find the podcast.
Dr Daniel Amen: If you're considering coming to Amen Clinics or trying some of the brain healthy supplements from Brain MD you can use the code podcast10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com or a ten percent discount on all supplements at brainmdhealth.com. For more information give us a call at 855-978-1363.