Psychiatrist Daniel Amen Answers Brain Questions From Twitter | Tech Support | WIRED

– 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.

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Source: WIRED