Different types of stress and emotions have measurable effects on different systems in the body. Therefore it’s crucial to pay attention to your thoughts in order to keep them from wreaking havoc on your health. In this fourth and final episode in a series with “Ancient Remedies” author Dr. Josh Axe, he and the Amens discuss the phenomenon of disinfecting your thoughts, and how you can diagnose your emotions and learn to foster positivity to keep your body and immune system strong and healthy.
For more info on Dr. Axe’s new book, “Ancient Remedies”, visit https://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Remedies-Essential-Powerful-Medicine/dp/0316496456
Daniel Amen, MD:
Welcome to the. Brain Warrior’s Way podcast. I’m Dr. Daniel Amen.
Tana Amen, BSN RN:
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.
Daniel Amen, MD:
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, BSN RN:
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
Daniel Amen, MD:
Back. We are here with our friend, Dr. Josh Axe, having a great time talking about magic mushroom,
Tana Amen, BSN RN:
Essential oils.
Daniel Amen, MD:
Essential oils and probiotics, and how to eat right, and disinfect our environment. But now let’s talk about disinfecting our thoughts.
Tana Amen, BSN RN:
Right.
Daniel Amen, MD:
And how we can become spiritual triathletes. But stress is everywhere. I mean, it’s everywhere you look. The incidence of anxiety and depression has tripled in the last year. People lost their jobs. They’ve lost relationships. They’ve lost loved ones. And it’s a monster stressful time.
Dr. Josh Axe:
Yeah.
Tana Amen, BSN RN:
One of the reasons I wanted to talk about stress in relation to your new book, Josh, and all these natural remedies, we’re talking about ancient remedies, is because, I’m using myself as an example here, just for the purpose of using myself as an example. But our listeners often relate to it. So for people listening right now, I mean, I just wrote about it in my new book. And you touched on it in the last episode. I was a frequent flyer in the hospital. I was on constant antibiotics. And I remember when I met my husband, we were talking on one of our dates, one of our early dates. And I was telling him about how my uncle was murdered in a drug deal, gone wrong when I was four. It was a really scary time in my life. And two weeks later, I was in the hospital having upper and lower GIS as a four-year-old.
And I mean, why would a four year old go in and need upper and lower GIs? And they didn’t really find any connection. They didn’t find anything physically wrong with me. And so I was just put on more antibiotics. And by the… I mean, I’ve had 10 medical surgeries. So my point being people endure traumatic childhood [inaudible [00:00:02]:44]. They endure right now, one of the most stressful times in history that we’ve lived through in our lifetime. And we don’t often make that connection between the stress we go through and what happens in our bodies. And you touched on it with cancer. You’ve touched on it with some of the other things that can happen. And we go through these stressful events. So I want to talk to you about what those things do to our bodies and what you recommend in your book for remedies?
Dr. Josh Axe:
Yeah. So, to start off, I think it’s important to recognize one taken care of… And I mean this, because I talk a lot about nutrition, right. But I think that our mental, and emotion, spiritual health is actually even more important than what they eat. I’m not saying a lot more, but I’m saying, I think it trumps it in a lot of cases. And I can tell you in taking care of patients over the years, if I had a patient with inflammatory bowel disease, what will cause them, if they eat dairy and gluten, they’ll have flare up. You know what we’ll also have them cause an equal flare up just as bad? Is if they have a lot of relational stress at home, or if they’ve had a bad week, or the… So we know that emotions attacks our organs.
In fact, in Chinese medicine, they actually label different types of emotion, affect different organ systems. And so they really believe, and I believe this as well as that, like it’s genetics affect our health, but what affects them even more in terms of determining the condition that you have within your body is the emotion you experience. So for instance, why does one person get breast cancer in their left side, but not the right? Why does one person get thyroid, another person colon, another person uterine, another person prostate. It has to do with this. Somebody that has a lot of the emotion fear. I mentioned this earlier. Fear affects the adrenals and reproductive organs. We know that as a fact, right? You’re in a fight or flight state, fear affects the adrenals. It causes disease there if you live in a fearful state constantly. And it could be fear of failure, fear of disappointing the ones you love, worry.
If somebody worries a lot, they’ll say, Oh, my stomach feels like it’s tied in knots. We know that worry affects the upper GI. Specifically, the stomach in the pancreas is affected by worry. If somebody has, let’s say something like anxiety, blood pressure, right? Blood pressure increases. If somebody has anger that affects the liver, gallbladder. And if somebody has something that’s happened in the past, they haven’t dealt with yet. It could be a divorce. It could be losing a loved one. It could be, hey, I wanted this thing to happen in my life and it never happened and your living in the past. That’s your immune system, that’s your lungs and colon. So your immune system is affected. If you have someone die you love or anything like that, that affects that organ system. And hey, these organs are made to process this.
But if you live with this day after, day after day, it’s building up disease in those organs. So what I suggest is number one, diagnose yourself. And what is that specific emotion? Is it fear? Is it anxiety? Is it anger? What do you feel? Write it down. Okay. And then what I would do is really focus on what is the opposite of that emotion. Fear is really know the opposite of sort of something like hope. Okay. Those are both futuristic. If you’re talking about anxiety and fear, oftentimes those emotions are something bad’s going to happen to me in the future. You’re thinking about it versus having hope in the future and building up your hope. And you can do that by reading positive quotes, reading the Bible, getting around encouraging people. But focusing on that. If you worry a lot, that’s actually more of an identity issue to where you have low self-worth or lack of security.
You don’t feel secure, you feel unsafe. It could be relationally. It could be something in your life. So focusing on reading books that build your self esteem, that build your security. But that’s the thing I think really some of the most positive healing emotions are going to be faith, hope, love, and a spirit of joy. When my mom had cancer, one of the things we did for her is I read research on happiness and how that affects your immune system. It’s really profound. So like today, and you guys see this, right? There are so many dark TV shows. Growing up, there’s a lot more funny TV shows and whatnot. Anyways. So we went and watched all the comedies, things like Bill Murray, and What About Bob? We just started watching all these funny movies and comedies, and that’s what she started watching all the time.
And you could literally see it making a difference. Belly laughs, good for her health. So all that being said, I think scheduling fun or scheduling times to build and foster these healthy emotions is really important. So it could start with that spiritual triathlon in the morning and then schedule… And also getting around the right type of people, right? People that are encouragers, people that are lovers people that lift you up. Because we have those people in our life, right, sometimes that are sabotaging our results. And they’re speaking negatively, hurting our self-esteem. Spending less time with those people, more time with those people, it’s kind of like iron sharpens, iron, improves our mental health. I think it’s a big deal.
Tana Amen, BSN RN:
Yeah. I like it. It’s really interesting. I remember when I first told Daniel that story about being four years old and going in the hospital and he’s like, well that’s interesting. It was two weeks after your uncle was murdered. There might be some connection there. And I’m like, no, that’s ridiculous.
Dr. Josh Axe:
Absolutely.
Tana Amen, BSN RN:
But no one really thinks about how that affects you. And not just the past, how much it’s going to affect you going into the future so.
Daniel Amen, MD:
Well, that’s one of the reasons we call this podcast, the Brain Warrior’s Way because we believe, and this is before the pandemic, you are in a war for the health of your brain. Everywhere you go, someone’s trying to shove bad food down your throat that will kill you early. Someone’s trying to put a gadget in your hand that will steal your attention. The news is negative and will scare you. That you need to be armed, prepared, and aware, to win the fight of your life. And now it’s never more true than during COVID. That I think… I was talking to my friend, pastor Rick Warren over the weekend. And he said, the grief that is happening now will affect us for a generation.
Tana Amen, BSN RN:
Yeah.
Dr. Josh Axe:
Yep.
Daniel Amen, MD:
But it doesn’t have to, if you get your mind and your habits going in the right direction, you can counteract the negativity that is coming at us. But it starts with what you think, with how you behave, which is what you eat. And the people you spend time with. We often think about these four big circles,
Dr. Josh Axe:
Yeah.
Daniel Amen, MD:
Biology, so think of diet and exercise. The psychology, the social circle, who you hang out with. And the spiritual circle, which is, I love spiritual triathlete. I just read,
Tana Amen, BSN RN:
So do I. I love that.
Daniel Amen, MD:
An article on spiritual fitness in the journal of Alzheimer’s disease.
Dr. Josh Axe:
Wow.
Daniel Amen, MD:
Love that. And it’s are we spiritually fit? Or are we spiritually bankrupt?
Tana Amen, BSN RN:
And people don’t make the connection between food and stress. It’s becoming more common knowledge, but really your diet matters when it comes to stress. Because if you are eating foods that increase inflammation, that in turn is going to cause more problems with you feeling more stress. So and people don’t make that connection a lot.
Dr. Josh Axe:
Or eating foods that damaged your microbiome,
Tana Amen, BSN RN:
Right.
Daniel Amen, MD:
Coming bact to what we were talking about earlier.
Tana Amen, BSN RN:
You’re definitely going to feel more stressed. You feel more anxious.
Daniel Amen, MD:
It’s like we’re protecting the warriors, the soldiers that protect your gut lining, that help you digest your food. That make hormones, and vitamins, and detoxify you just so important.
Tana Amen, BSN RN:
I love the story about your mom. So I love that. So ancient remedies and how you put that into play. That’s awesome.
Dr. Josh Axe:
Yeah. So in the new book… And one of the things, I really go through that, like how my mom beat cancer naturally. I go through the supplements, the foods, the whole thing. But also in the book I have over 70 prescriptions on what are the top remedies and foods for healing different conditions? So I have it for-
Tana Amen, BSN RN:
[inaudible [00:11:01].
Dr. Josh Axe:
Yeah. Things like everything from alzheimer’s to hypothyroidism, to depression and anxiety, to auto-immune disease, to chronic pain. And go through here’s the exact foods, the remedies, the recipes. So I think people love the book. I think of all the books I’ve written, it’s the best in terms of helping people just see big results and breakthroughs in their health. So anyways. Yeah, I appreciate you guys. I always love, first off, you guys have such good chemistry. I just love, I love every time I get to talk to you guys, because it’s so much fun. And I know we’re all in mission together, right?
We want to help heal the world. I mean, so many people today are living in a state of fear and have bad health. And I just feel like when my mom was growing up, she was sick and tired all the time. My mom had to take naps every day. She was so tired and exhausted. She was diagnosed with chronic fatigue as one of those conditions, along with auto immune disease. And I really saw when she started eating better and that anti-cancer diet and all the things we had her do, she’s literally now, my mom’s in her late 60s. She water skis. She’s ran a 5K. She says, she feels better now in her late 60s then she did in her 30s. And it was through, using food as medicine, the stuff I teach in the book, Ancient Remedies and from probably watching Dr. Amen’s, PBS special. But I mean, my mom is one of those people, by the way, she’s like the biggest fan. She’ll watch like your show in my show and Dr. Hyman, all of them. And she’s a health warrior, as you guys are training people up to be.
Daniel Amen, MD:
Yeah. We’re on a mission together and we’re grateful for you and for your friendship, for your new book, Ancient Remedies. You guys can pre-order it now. And let’s help. And it makes a great gift for people who care. This is something you want to do with other people in your life. It’s just easier when you get information, give it away because what you’re really doing is creating your own support group.
Tana Amen, BSN RN:
And be proactive.
Dr. Josh Axe:
Yeah.
Daniel Amen, MD:
And when we did this big project, Saddleback church, the Daniel plan, we found people who did it with another person and it doubled.
Tana Amen, BSN RN:
There small groups made a difference.
Daniel Amen, MD:
There were was success.
Dr. Josh Axe:
Wow. I love that.
Daniel Amen, MD:
Thanks, Josh. Great to see you again. We wish you all the best.
Tana Amen, BSN RN:
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Daniel Amen, MD:
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