Your Brain Is Always Listening—What Is It Hearing From You?

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to a special re release of one of our most popular ad heart podcasts. I'm Deborah Rossman, CEO of HeartMath and your host. This month we're reaching into our archive to bring you a most timely episode Originally released in April 2022. In this conversation I'm joined by renowned brain health expert, psychiatrist and founder of amen clinics, Dr. Daniel amen. We're revisiting this popular episode because its message couldn't be more relevant. Today, in the midst of ongoing global challenges and growing mental and emotional strain, we believe it's important to share science backed tools and strategies to support our mental and emotional health and well being, restore balance and increase happiness. Please enjoy this encore episode of the Adheart podcast with Dr. Daniel Amen. Welcome to the Add Heart podcast. Inspiring forward movement and heart powered intention. I'm your host Deborah Rossman and my guest this month, Dr. Daniel Amen is on a mission to end mental illness by creating a revolution in brain health. I've known him for a number of years, we've worked together on a number of projects and I really appreciate his passion and heart for this. He's a physician, adult and child psychiatrist. Dr. Amen is also 12 times New York Times bestselling author. Dr. Amen, it's so good to have you here. [00:01:53] Speaker B: Hi Debbie. Such a joy to be with you. [00:01:57] Speaker A: Well, let's jump right in. What does your brain is always listening mean? [00:02:03] Speaker B: Your brain is always listening to the many influences that happen to us in our society. Your brain is always listening to the news. Your brain is always listening to the other people in your life. There's a science to happiness and that's what I wrote about in my new book, you happier that despite the craziness going on in the world, you can be happy because it's a daily practice. [00:02:38] Speaker A: Some of the research that HeartMath Institute has done with other researchers like the late Dr. Carl Prebin and others. And you're familiar with this how the brain is a pattern matching computer. The more we have anxiety or fear or love or care, the more the brain is always looking to see what's familiar and likes to recalibrate to what's familiar. And what's familiar becomes what's comfortable. Unfortunately for many people, anxiety has become familiar. Have you seen in the clinics and the people come to your clinics an increase in anxiety or I'm sure you have, but what have you seen and noticed in terms of that habit and anxiety habit in the past few years? [00:03:29] Speaker B: Well, the most shocking thing is the increased number of suicide attempts and shocked us. Because we follow our patients, we do an outcome study on all of our patients before the pandemic, we might have had, you know, one were none suicides among our patients in a year, and the first year there were eight. And we're like, oh, something wrong, Something bad is going on. And I think it's the hopelessness people fear and nobody likes to be controlled. And there was an element of that going on early on. And so not only was the pandemic, it was the political divide, the societal unrest. And when you get those three things together and then you add the war in Ukraine, it's like people think everything is awful. But right at the beginning of the pandemic, I put out on my social media channels a letter from C.S. lewis that he wrote in 1948 about the atomic bomb. And he said, I think we worry way too much about the atomic bomb because it's just the scientists have figured out another way to kill you when in fact you are already sentenced to death. And, oh, by the way, you could have lived in the 16th century when the pandemic visited London every year, where you could have lived in a Viking age, when raiders from Scandinavia could have come and slit your throat any night. And he basically said, the point is, you are already going to die. It's what's going to happen between here and there, whether it's Covid or nuclear bomb, that if it finds us, let it find us doing sensible and human things like praying, teaching, playing darts with our friends. And I love that because do you remember when we were little that we had air raid drills? [00:05:43] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. [00:05:44] Speaker B: Underneath our desk, we were worried about nuclear war every day of our lives. In the 1950s and the early 1960s with the Cuban missile crisis and all of that. This is not a unique time in history. There has always been wars and fires and floods. It's how do we manage life when it's uncertain, yet it's always been uncertain. Right. And there's a science to this. And in the opening of you happier, I actually talk how happiness is not frivolous, that in fact, seeking happiness is a moral obligation. And, Debbie, I just guarantee you, growing up Roman Catholic, that idea was nowhere to be found in church or in Catholic school, that happiness is a moral obligation. So why do I say that? Because of how you impact other people. And I just guarantee if you were raised by an unhappy parent or married to an unhappy spouse, and you ask that person whether or not happiness is an ethical issue, guarantee you they will say yes. And so it's not frivolous, and there's a neuroscience to it. And if your brain is sleepy, you're much more likely to be unhappy. We did a big study of 500 consecutive new patients Damon clinics. We gave them the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire, and then we scan them, because that's what we do at Amen Clinics. We do SPECT scans on our patients to understand their biology. And the people who were the unhappiest had the lowest blood flow to their frontal lobe. [00:07:35] Speaker A: Amazing. So you have them stand on their head and they're happier. I mean, how do you increase? [00:07:41] Speaker B: Well, I'm talking to you. I'm talking to the CEO of HeartMath. So what does that mean? It means low blood flow to the brain is associated with unhappiness. So your heart is obviously important. Your brain is 2% of your body's weight, but uses 20% of the blood flow in your body. So you don't want to have heart problems. You don't want to have vascular problems. You want to love your heart and love your vessels and take care of them, because if you have blood flow problems anywhere, it means they are everywhere. And so there's this great dance, we know, between the heart and the brain, and keeping both of them healthy is critical to being happy. [00:08:38] Speaker A: What new discoveries? Something prompted you to write this book, probably starting during the pandemic. Am I correct? Or before? I'm not sure. But what prompted you, inspired you to say, I need to write a book on how people can be happier? [00:08:54] Speaker B: No, it was in the middle of the pandemic, and when I read the statistic, Americans are the unhappiest they've been since the Great Depression. And I'm like, but there's a neuroscience to happiness. And then I also thought, well, what do I want to think about for a year? And now I filter every decision I make, like doing this podcast with you, will that make me happier? Everything I do, it's like, will that make me happier? And hedonism is actually the enemy of happiness, because hedonism actually wears out your pleasure centers. So in the book, I talk about the neurotransmitters of happiness and stress. But it's so important to see it as a science. And early in the pandemic, I had to close my New York clinic for a while because it was in Manhattan, the epicenter of early Covid. I lost my dad to Covid, you know, And I teach this stuff, and that is really helpful. And I'm like, people need this information. And most books on happiness. There's a lot of books on happiness. They never talk about happiness needs to be geared to your brain type because everybody's different. One treatment will never work for everyone to be happy or as an antidepressant or as an anti anxiety solution. You need to target strategies to individual brains. And then the second one, which people don't talk about is you got to get your brain healthier if you want to be happy. That there's a foundational physical component to happiness. And so it was really fun for me to write. I enjoyed it. Made me happy. [00:10:53] Speaker A: It made you happy. [00:10:54] Speaker B: Made me happy. I have all these little tiny habits of happiness. One of my favorite ones is looking for the micro moments of happiness. What's the smallest thing that happened today that made me happy? And often I make my family a brain healthy hot chocolate at night. And it's just a little ritual I do and I enjoy doing it. But the first sip of the brain healthy hot chocolate, the micro moment of happiness. [00:11:24] Speaker A: One of the things we at HeartMath teach is that we don't have to be a victim of our emotions and get stuck in the emotional loops that bring us down. We can activate the coherent rhythm of the heart to power us up to shift and uplift and feel happier. People keep gratitude journals because it feels good. It makes them happy. As well as being healthy for the body and brain. Learning just heart qualities that are not supposedly just for religion, but they're really powerful heart brain synchronizers like forgiveness. Forgiveness, kindness, compassion. They make you feel good. I'm happiest when I'm being kind. When I feel kindness in my heart, it just nurtures me, makes me happy. And I think that's true for most of us. And yet it's not necessarily well known or taught to kids in school. There's more like Sunday school, you should do this and you shouldn't do that, rather than, hey, you can actually choose what you feel more than what you know or more than what you think you can. How do you address that? Do you talk about that in your book at all or something? Tips like that. [00:12:47] Speaker B: Well, you know, high schools haven't been redesigned in 110 years. And I was actually part of a program here in Newport beach called High School Redesign. And like, I've never factored that I know of since high school or I don't do quadratic equations. And it just triggered for me Paul Simon's song Kodachrome, which starts with, when I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all. I'm like, why don't we teach kids brain health and mental health? Because they're gonna have to deal with that every day of their lives. We need to start teaching people how to manage their minds. So the book is based on these seven neuroscience secrets. Secret number five is master your mind and gain psychological distance from the noise in your head. One of the fun strategies is give your mind a name. Just because you have a thought has nothing to do with whether or not it's true. And many of the thoughts you shouldn't listen to. And it's not actually the thoughts you have that make you suffer. It's the thoughts you attach to that make you suffer. And so I have crazy thoughts. I just, like, don't hold on to them. If they're not helpful, I can let them go or dismiss them. But that takes skill. It takes work over time. I spend a lot of time teaching my patients to be good coaches for themselves rather than abusive parents or abusive coaches. Right. An abusive coach notices what's wrong and beats you up for it. Where an effective coach notices what's right and praises you for it, encourages you, and they notice what's wrong, and they teach you with love. Too often, people internalize the voice they're always listening to, which is hostile. And sometimes the voices we have are not just from our parents. They could actually be written in our genetic codes from our grandparents or great grandparents. If you look at grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, they have a very high incidence of anxiety. I would argue their anxiety is not theirs. It's from another generation that actually got written into your genetic code. So when a mother has. Is carrying a daughter, she's actually the daughter is carrying the genes for the granddaughter. So there's like three generations in that mother daughter interaction. Because when little baby girls are born, they're born with all of the eggs they will ever have. So grandma was going through stress before or during the time she was pregnant with the girl. The grandbabies are going to end up more anxious for no reason that impacted the grandbabies per se. And so this epigenetic road to anxiety is just so important to know that the anxiety you feel may, in fact, not be yours. And I just want to say, for all the people who are struggling with anxiety, and it's a lot of people, some anxiety is important. So the goal is not to eliminate anxiety. People who have low levels of anxiety die early from accidents and preventable illnesses. So you need a baseline level of anxiety so you don't travel the freeway at 125 miles in the rain or the first time a guy comes up to you. Don't tell them where you live. You want to have a little bit of anxiety to protect you. Obviously too much makes you suffer. But let's start with everybody needs a little bit. And then when it's too much. Heart math is amazing. Hypnosis. I'm a huge fan of diaphragmatic breathing. Learning how to not believe every stupid thing you think the right sense, the right images, the right sounds, all can help. [00:17:25] Speaker A: Well, these are all proactive things to take charge, to not feel like a victim, Whether it's of your genetics or of your environment or of your internal process. Everything that I saw in Your book, Everything HeartMath does, is How do we take charge of our reality and not have that inner critic beating on us, which just reinforces the problems so that we can have a balanced attitude. We call it intelligent concern rather than anxiety that drains like what is regenerative and what is draining. That's one way in our HeartMath programs, we help people distinguish their inner attitudes and approaches to life. I think all of this together, what you're doing, what others are doing, what we're doing is trying to give people tips and tools that they can use to take charge of their internal experience. How do you see psychiatry in 10, 20, 30 years? Where do you see this going? [00:18:37] Speaker B: I'm pretty irritated with my specialty. When I trained in 1982 to be a psychiatrist at the Walter Reed Army Medical center, so I'm a military trained psychiatrist, they really taught us to be primary care doctors for our patients. We evaluated them, we saw them once to three times a week. We did psychotherapy, we did biofeedback was one of my specialties. That's why I love heart rate variability training, hypnosis, medication if needed. And then in the late 1980s, early 1990s, the pharmaceutical industry and managed care got together and they went, oh, we could do the therapy for cheaper and we'll make psychiatrists the prescribers. And basically condemned psychiatry to the 15 minute med check. Now I want to know part of that, and that's not what we do at amen clinics. But psychiatry is just in this really dark place where they're basically the candyman and the prescribers. And I didn't sign up for that. Yeah, and it's hard because when you try to change a medical specialty, people hate you. Machiavelli in the 15th century actually said, there is nothing more dangerous than Trying to change a system that makes money in a certain way. My hope and what we do at Amen Clinics is I think psychiatry is really going to become a four circle specialty. That's my hope that we're going to really work to optimize your biology, your diet, your hormones, how your brain works. We're going to look at it too, right? You know, psychiatrists are the only medical doctors who never look at the organ they treat. That's insane, right? I'm a psychiatrist. I know how to diagnose insanity. That's insane. There's no other medical specialist that doesn't look at the organ it treats. So that's one of the things we're pioneering. It's not just hardware. You also have to get the software going. And that's where teaching people to manage their mind. And, you know, if we just think of heart math, it's a combination of biological and psychological programming. And then there's a social circle teaching people to get along better. I love that part of my job as a psychiatrist, family therapy. Although I do family therapy with scans. It's like, okay, let's get everybody's brain healthy and then we'll be able to. To do forgiveness in a much better way. Will increase communication in a much better way. And then there's a spiritual circle that most psychiatrists wouldn't touch. But ultimately it's, why do you care? What is your deepest sense of meaning and purpose? And in you happier. That's actually the seventh secret. Live each day based on clearly defined values, purpose and goals. Now, you and I are both CEOs of our companies. And you know, I suspect, like me, you have a business plan and you have quarterly goals and yearly goals and three to five year goals, but people don't have that for their lives. And when you ask people what they want, they might talk about work, they might talk about getting married, they might talk about money, but they've not really developed a plan for their life. Because purposeful people, they're happier, they live longer. But there's nowhere in school where people go, let's design your life. How do you want your life to be? Relationships, work, money, physical, emotional, spiritual health. And it's one of the most powerful exercises in the book. I help people really define what they want. Because if you really want to be happy, you need to make progress toward what's important to you. But if you don't know what's important to you, you will not make progress. [00:23:11] Speaker A: Right? Well, that's well said. Well said. We're going to do a heart meditation together like we always do at the end of each podcast on one of the themes of the podcast. And what struck me, what you said said is let's go to our hearts and really get clear. You may already know this, but what's important to you of everything you've heard today and what's important given what's going on in the world in your life, what's one thing that's important that you can be proactive about? So let's get heart coherent. First, we'll close with a meditation to get our heart and brain in sync. Not only to help release any stress, but connect with that higher intelligence. Let's focus our attention in the area of the heart. Just imagine your breath is flowing in and out of your heart or chest area, breathing a little slower and deeper than usual. Find an easy rhythm that's comfortable. Now as you continue this heart focus breathing, just make a sincere attempt to experience a regenerative feeling. Bring your heart rhythms into more synchronization such as gratitude or care for someone or something. Just breathe. Another uplifting feeling that you can connect with joy, love or kindness. Just breathe that heart quality for a few moments. Allow these quality attitudes, lift our perceptions and ask yourself at this synchronized place, what's important to you? What's most important to you? Or one thing that you could add more heart to that's important to you? One thing you could act on that could make a difference, make you happier? Now let's visualize creating together a reservoir of coherent heart energy that each of us can access and dip into as needed over the next month. When we feel stressed or anxious, hopeless or depressed or any of those energies where life or the world has gotten to us, we can go back to the heart and dip into that reservoir of uplifting heart energy and reconnect with our values and what's important to us. Every so often I like to add love, energy, care, energy, kindness as qualities, as energies to the reservoir to uplift myself and others. Let's just close this heart meditation by holding in our hearts with compassionate care. All the people who are experiencing anxiety, overwhelm stress during these uncertain times know that our hearts compassionate care can always help. Thank you for sharing that heart meditation with me doctor. Amen. Any last words for our audience? [00:28:33] Speaker B: Happiness is a daily practice, just like physical health is a daily practice for people who are not healthy. There were thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of decisions that went into that. If you want to be happy and really have good mental health, you have to have these simple practices day in and day out. [00:29:01] Speaker A: Yep, you've got to do something. Well, thank you so much. We really appreciate you sharing your experience, your wisdom. And thank you everyone for participating this Ad Heart Podcast. Take care. [00:29:17] Speaker B: Thank you for listening to the Ad Heart Podcast. Be sure to subscribe so you can catch the latest episodes. If you're wanting even more heart inspired content, find us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn. Look for HeartMath and also the HeartMath Institute. Both organizations are committed to helping activate the heart of humanity.