Brain health revolution and the path to mental wellness

The message in our society is wrong. You're not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better, and I can prove it. Meet Dr. Daniel Amen, a celebrity psychiatrist, a brain health expert, and a 12-time New York Times bestselling author.

So if I'm right, and I am, you need brain envy. You need to love your brain. The mission is to end mental illness by creating a revolution in brain health. Today we discuss all things brain health, dementia, Alzheimer's, and ADHD, and debunk a few myths along the way. Come on, we need to get into the 21st century.

Psychiatrists are the only medical doctors who virtually never look at the organ they treat. Think about that. If you want to keep your brain healthy or rescue it, you have to prevent or treat the 11 major risk factors that steal your mind.

Today's episode is brought to you by the awesome organizations that make this show possible. Well, Dr. Amen, it's a pleasure to meet you. Thank you for making your way on a very rainy day here in Los Angeles to spend time with me. I'm looking forward to discussing all things brain health, optimizing brain health, focus, memory, cognition, preventing things like cognitive decline, dementia, Alzheimer's.

I'm interested in the mutability of the brain and brain health. And we're going to talk about your new book also, of course, Raising Mentally Strong Kids. I'm a parent of four kids. This is very interesting to me. But I think the two primary motivating things that made me most excited about sitting down with you today is first, a little over a year ago, I was diagnosed with ADHD, which came as quite a surprise. Many questions for you about this. It was not something that I thought would

be something I would be associated with. The second is that my mother is currently in the throes of dementia, obviously a quite devastating situation, as you know all too well. And so I want to learn as much as I can about how to help her, how to help my dad, as you also might imagine, is in a very challenging situation. And of course, to do everything I can to avoid a similar peril for myself.

and as much as that might sound like I'm trying to make this about me I'm actually not maybe a little bit with the ADHD part but when you consider the statistics on dementia and Alzheimer's it really is about all of us isn't it I kind of looked up some statistics about an hour ago and it's quite devastating the extent to which these diseases of dementia are kind of

taking over and growing at alarming rates. In 2023, 6.7 million Americans over 65 have Alzheimer's, which is like one in nine, 55 million around the globe. Two thirds of these people are women, which is fascinating. And it's very much on the rise. I saw some statistics like by 2060, the CDC predicts a sevenfold increase and globally from 55 million to 139 million by 2050.

So this is a problem that is going to leave very few people untouched. No question. I mean, if you're blessed to live to 85, you have a one in two chance of being diagnosed with dementia. One in two. One in two. Which means it's either you or your partner, and that's horrifying. But what most people don't know is you can have an impact

on that and it's 2005 i wrote a book with my friend rod shankle called preventing alzheimer's and i updated it in 2017 with memory rescue

and the big idea is if you want to keep your brain healthy or rescue it you have to prevent or treat the 11 major risk factors that steal your mind and you talked about your mom having it the mnemonic that we'll talk about is called bright minds and the g in bright minds is genetics but we don't think about it properly oh well i'm

overweight because my family's overweight or I have hypertension because it runs in my family or I have diabetes because it runs in my family or I have Alzheimer's disease or I'm vulnerable to it and there's nothing I can do about it and that's a lie genes increase your vulnerability and they teach you what you should be doing so for example I have

Six children, three of them are adopted. Two of my nieces we adopted because their parents couldn't stop with drugs and alcohol and it was a disaster for these kids. And I tell my nieces, if you never drink or do drugs, you're never going to have a problem.

but if you do, it could be serious. You need to be on an alcohol drug prevention program every day of your life. I have obesity and heart disease in my family. I'm gonna be 70 this year. I'm not overweight and I don't have heart disease because I'm on an obesity heart disease prevention program every day of my life. So if you have it in your family, as soon as you know

you should be serious about preventing these 11 major risk factors I want to get into all those strategies but let's talk a little bit about what's driving this what is causing this I mean I would imagine a portion of the spike that we're seeing this increase in incidents is related to the fact that people are living long and baby boomers are aging up but also I suspect that lifestyle habits are contributing to this as well with the increase in

type 2 diabetes, obesity, hypertension, and the like. So what's causing cognitive decline? Are seriously unhealthy lifestyle and undisciplined minds. Did you know depression doubles the risk of Alzheimer's in women and quadruples it in men? What is the relationship between depression

and dementia so many people think if you're an older person and you get depressed it's actually a precursor to dementia they're both brain diseases or brain problems if you will and it's critical and the m in bright minds mental health stuff so i am so excited about this because

What I came to realize, I started looking at the brain in 1991, and we've looked at over 250,000 scans. But early on, I came to realize, you are not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better, and I can prove it. And so...

If I look at your brain and then you have a car accident, your brain is going to be worse. If I look at your brain and then you go on a drug bender, your brain is going to be worse. If I look at your brain and then all of a sudden you stop sleeping or you go through a divorce, odds are your brain is going to change in a negative way.

but I also did the big NFL study when the NFL was sort of lying they had a problem with traumatic brain injury in football 80% of my players got better I could see the damage but when they go on a brain healthy program 80% their brains looked better anywhere from two to six months later that's exciting

I was a consultant on the movie Concussion. And I was sort of bummed because the movie is sort of a downer. Is that the Will Smith one? The Will Smith one. Yeah, I remember that. And it's like where's the hope? And the message on football dementia or CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the message in our society is wrong. It's like, oh, you have this.

It's chronic, progressive, untreatable. And so players don't come and get help because they feel hopeless. It's like, no, get help early, probably while you're still playing, so that you can begin to reverse the damage. It's the big, exciting lesson over the last 30 years in neuroscience. Neuroplasticity. You're not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better. There's an area of the brain called the hippocampus

I collect seahorses. It's Greek for seahorse. It's shaped like a seahorse. Every day you are making 700 new stem cells in the hippocampus, or I think of them as baby seahorses. Your behavior is going to grow them or it's going to shrink them.

And so if you're vulnerable to dementia, that's the area that gets hit early in dementia. And you want to love those seahorses, nourish them, feed them, teach them, rather than get them drunk or stoned or shriveled them. Your main protocol in evaluating people's brains is this imaging technology called SPECT, right? So can you describe what that is?

So can I tell the priest story just to put it in context? So when I was 18, Vietnam was still going on and the government had a draft. And I became an infantry medic where my love of medicine was born. But about a year into it, I didn't like being shot at. It's just not for me. It's for some people. It's not for me. So I got retrained as an x-ray technician and developed a passion for medical imaging. As our professors used to say, how do you know unless you look?

and then 1979, I'm a second year medical student, I just got married and two months later my wife tried to kill herself. Horrified. And I take her to see a wonderful psychiatrist and I come to realize if he helps her, it won't just help her. It'll help me. It'll help our children, our grandchildren.

as they would be shaped by someone who's happier and more stable. So 45 years ago, I fell in love with psychiatry and I've loved it every day since. But I fell in love with the only medical specialty that never looks at the organ it treats. And I knew it was wrong and I knew it would change. I just had no idea I'd be part of it. 1991, I'm now a psychiatrist for about a decade.

and I went to a lecture at my local hospital on brain spec imaging, single photon emission computed tomography. It's a nuclear medicine study that looks at blood flow and activity. It looks at how your brain works and it basically shows us three things, healthy activity, too little activity, or too much. How is it doing that? What is the process by which that's revealing itself?

Again, it's a nuclear medicine study. So what we do is we take a radiopharmaceutical. So you take a radioisotope. We take one we use is called technetium. And technetium has self-esteem problems. It doesn't like being who it is. And it changes shape. And when it changes shape, it produces a photon or a little packet of light that we can measure. So we combine technetium.

with HMPAO, a medicine that's easily taken up by cells in the brain, combine them, inject them into your arm, and it's called a first pass extraction, so 70% of it is taken up in your brain in that first pass, so within about two minutes. And then, so the hardest part of the procedure, a little tiny needle into a vein in your arm, inject the medicine, it lights up your brain,

and then we can measure it have you lay on a camera table it's not claustrophobic it's not like an mri uh people lay on the camera the camera heads come around your head in about 15 minutes and we get about 10 million counts or 10 million times that little piece of light hits the crystals in the camera and then we reconstruct it it looks like a brain and

we then can see in your brain which areas are most active which areas are healthy which areas are sleepy compare it to our massive database and my eight-year-old grandson can look at a scan and go healthy or not and it's so helpful to look and

Off camera, we talked about controversy. So I start looking at the brain. I'm like a little kid. So excited. And we never make a diagnosis from a scan. So that's really important. We make a diagnosis, like all doctors, with all of the information. Take detailed history. If you came to see us, you'd fill out about an hour's worth of paperwork. Talk to our historian for a couple of hours. I mean, we really get to know you.

and then we would test your brain. We do a computerized neuropsych assessment and we would scan your brain. And when you put that puzzle together, it's so powerful. The first patient I ever scanned. So I went from the lecture on brain spec imaging given by the head of the hospital where I worked into Sandy's room. And I met her, I just met her. She tried to kill herself the night before.

and as I was talking to her, I'm thinking, she has adult ADD. Impulsive suicide attempt after a fight with her husband that she caused. IQ of 144, but never finished college. When I go, tell me how you studied? She said, well, I really never did unless it was the night before the test. I put on a pot of coffee, stay up all night, do the test. 10-year-old son that had ADD. So in my mind, I'm feeling pretty confident about this. But when I

the subject with her she's like oh adults can't have add and i'm thinking i'm the doctor she was resistant i said well why don't we look at your brain and i had been doing a study called quantitative eeg up to that point so i knew i needed to do it twice once at rest once while she did a concentration task and then after i got the results a couple of days later i'm in her

Hospital room, she has a table. I put the scans on the table. She had a healthy brain at rest. And when she tried to concentrate, her frontal lobes and her cerebellum, which we'll talk about, dropped. It was so clear. What does that tell you? The harder she tries, the worse it gets. It's a classic, is what I was predicting I would see, because that's what I saw in quantitative EEG. And when I showed her

the scans and explain them to her, she starts to cry. And she said, you mean this is not my fault? And I'm like, you know, people who have ADD, it's sort of like people who need glasses. They're not dumb, crazy or stupid. You know, people wear glasses. I wear glasses to drive. We're not dumb, crazy or stupid. Our eyeballs are shaped funny.

and we wear glasses so we can focus. People with ADD are dumb, crazy, or stupid. Their frontal lobes and cerebellum often turn off when they should turn on. So medicine or supplements or other strategies we'll talk about so you can focus. I could see with the image that her shame melted away and her compliance went up. And she took the medicine. Her relationships were better. She ended up

She was underemployed, as many ADD people are, finished college, got a better job, and was in touch with her for about 10 years. So this was sort of an inciting incident that allowed you to see the benefits of using this as a diagnostic tool, this imaging technology. Yes. Yeah.

i like it when my patients get better so i went into psychiatry and it was totally personal for me and i loved it but i was already getting criticism from it it's like oh we don't do this it's not standard it's not what we do but 1992 all day seminar at the american psychiatric association

brain spec imaging in child psychiatry because I'm also a child psychiatrist I'm so excited because I'm meeting colleagues who do it and in 1993 I teach with that group so I'm like all in on the technology but it was 1993 lots of pushback from the American Psychiatric Association because it doesn't fit the current diagnostic paradigm it's like

Stop giving people the diagnosis of depression. Depression is a symptom cluster. It shouldn't be a diagnosis. Sort of like chest pain is a symptom. It's not a diagnosis, right? If you have chest pain, it doesn't tell you what's causing it and it doesn't tell you what to do for it, right? Right. It's just indicia to look deeper and use other diagnostic tools to confirm what's happening.

Yeah, I don't know what to do about Wikipedia.

2016, January, I published 80 studies. People go, oh, he's never published his work. It's like, dude, do you read? Discover Magazine listed our research as one of the top 100 stories in science for 2015. I was pretty excited about that. 2021, the Canadian Association of Nuclear Medicine wrote procedure guidelines on SPECT, basically as if I wrote them. And

Five of the 10 authors had been my students at some point. Had 10,000 medical and mental health professionals referred to our 11 clinics. And 250,000 scans that you reviewed. People from 155 countries. It's a massive data set. What are some of the general trends that you see? What can you extract from that giant data set that speaks to brain health

the mutability of brain health, and the types of conditions that you see most consistently in the patients that end up in your clinics. Well, can I stay with the controversy just a little bit longer? Because it really irritates me. The people who criticize me say, oh, he's only doing it for money. Oh, you can't see these things in the scans, even though they're not experts. But what's the alternative?

I mean, I had said it earlier, psychiatrists are the only medical doctors who virtually never look at the organ they treat. Think about that. And obviously, if you have a brain dysfunction, that's going to dictate a mental health outcome. Well, if we agree that your brain controls everything you do, right? How you think, how you feel, how you act, how you get along with other people.

and when it works right, you tend to work right. And when it's troubled, you're more likely to have trouble in your life. If your brain, the moment by moment functioning of your brain creates your mind, then why wouldn't you assess the organ that you're working on? And so just a little more history in 1993,

I start to get anxious because I have two big flaws. Now, I've worked on them a lot, but I like people to like me. And you can't change a medical specialty if you're anxious about what people think of you. And I hate conflict. I'm a middle child. You and I both. I hate conflict and I like people to like me.

and all that changed in 1995 so I spent from 1993 to 1995 just anxious because I knew I had to do this right there's not a choice once you look you can't unlook and 1995 I got a call late one night from my sister-in-law Sherry who told me my 9 year old nephew Andrew had attacked a little girl on the baseball field for no particular reason and I'm like what

And she said, Danny, he's different. He's mean. He doesn't smile anymore. I went into his room today and found two pictures he had drawn. One of them, he was hanging from a tree. The other picture, he was shooting other children. So if you think about it, he's Columbine or Sandy Hawk or Parkland, Florida waiting to happen. And I'm like, I want to see him tomorrow. And they lived eight hours for me.

So they brought him to me. I'm like, buddy, what's going on? And he's like, Uncle Danny, I'm just mad all the time. Like, is anybody hurting you? Is anybody teasing you? No. Is anybody touching you in places that shouldn't be touching you? No. And 999 child psychiatrists out of a thousand would put him on medicine and therapy.

and because of my experience I already scanned a thousand people at that point I'm like he's got a left temporal lobe problem and so I'm like I held his hand while he held his teddy bear and got scanned and he was missing the function of his left temporal lobe I'd never seen it I've seen it a hundred times since then

turned out he had a cyst the size of a golf ball occupied in the space of his left temporal lobe. And I told his pediatrician, I said, you find somebody to take it out because he wasn't in my neighborhood. And he talked to three neurologists. All of them said they wouldn't touch the cyst until he had real symptoms. At which point I lost my mind and I started screaming at the pediatrician of a homicidal, suicidal child who attacks people for no reason. What do you mean real symptoms?

And he got anxious and said, I think they mean like seizures or he loses consciousness. I'm like, serious? And in my head, I'm like, neurologist, neurologist, neurosurgeons. Neurosurgeons will do stuff. So I called UCLA, talked to the head of the pediatric neurosurgery department, Jorge Lazaro. And he said, Dr. Raymond, when these cysts are symptomatic, we drain them. He's obviously symptomatic. And after the surgery, I got two calls back.

one from my sister-in-law who said the surgery went really well and when Andrew woke up he smiled at her she said Danny he's not smiled for a year and then I got a call from Dr. Lazarev who said oh my god Dr. Amen that cyst was so aggressive that put so much pressure on Andrew's brain

that thinned the bone over his left temporal lobe. So his skull had been thinned. He said he would have been hit in the head with the basketball, would have killed him instantly. Either way, would have been dead in six months. That's an amazing story. What's so interesting is the idea that our personalities are not static, that

Something amiss with the brain could completely change a person's outlook on life, how they show up in the world, the thoughts that they're entertaining. And in the case of that example, like a simple procedure, not a simple procedure, but a procedure could completely change that. Good or bad, right? It could go the other way. But after...

Andrew, and you know, it's now 30 years later, 29 years later, Andrew's married, has two children, has his own business. I mean, he's normal.

And it was that moment I lost my anxiety and my need for you to like me. That's when the war began to try to change psychiatry to become, it's like, come on, we need to get into the 21st century. And 1979, when I told my dad I wanted to be a psychiatrist, he asked me why I didn't want to be a real doctor. Yeah, he wasn't happy about it. Why I wanted to be a nut doctor and hang out with nuts all day long.

But he was just reflecting what society believes, that you're weak if you have mental health problems, you're bad if you have a behavioral problem. And the images clearly taught me free will is not zero or 100, that free will is gray. And I ended up testifying in some death penalty cases.

So if I'm right, and I am, that means 40,000 psychiatrists and hundreds of thousands, family practice doctors, OBGYN internists, that they're practicing witchcraft by making diagnoses based on symptom clusters with no biological data. Last year, 337 million prescriptions for antidepressants. That's insane.

What's happening in our society is just tragic. And we need a different way. And the mission I have in my life is crazy. But the mission is to end mental illness by creating.

a revolution in brain health, which is why I'm so excited about brain health. It's a bold statement. It's a great mission. I love it. I think ancillary to what you just shared is there's a lot of misnomers when it comes to mental health, like language is important and the words that we associate with some of the things that people experience are perhaps not in the best interest of healing and welfare. Can you talk a little bit about that, like the idea of just talking about

disease in general with respect to mental health so of the 337 million prescriptions written for antidepressants virtually no one was talked to about their diet about their sleep habits about if they turn on the news first thing in the morning

I love the idea of getting my patients excited about making their brains better rather than you have borderline personality disorder and you're probably not going to get better but here are the things to do or you're bipolar you're going to need to take this medication

for the rest of

and people saying you have a mental illness you're always going to have this mental illness you need to be on this medicine for the rest of your life that's insane with no biological data or

One of my favorite stories is Adriana, who I just dearly love. Normal 16-year-old, beautiful, goes to Yosemite. They think it's a magic moment when they're surrounded by six deer. Ten days later, she becomes aggressive. She starts to hallucinate. She's paranoid. She's hospitalized, given a diagnosis of schizophrenia. And after three hospitalizations, multiple medications, the family spent $100,000.

Adriana is a shell. She comes to our clinic, sees one of our doctors. Her brain's on fire. Why is her brain on fire? You know, we see inflammation. Turned out she had Lyme disease on an antibiotic. Within a year, she's normal. She graduated from Pepperdine. She's got a master's degree from the University of London. She's normal.

I think infectious disease, and we can talk about COVID because it's part of it, is a major cause of psychiatric problems. And nobody knows about it because people aren't looking at the brain. And so you ask me, you know, what are sort of the big lessons I've learned? Mild traumatic brain injury is a major cause of psychiatric illness. And nobody knows it because they don't look.

One of my friends was mountain biking and had an accident. He fell, broke his helmet, didn't lose consciousness, never had an anxiety disorder, panic attack, depression, never in his whole life. He's in his 50s. All of a sudden, he's having panic attacks. Doctor put him on Prozac and Xanax, very common combination, and for the wrong brain,

It's big trouble. He became suicidal. He saw me on TV and I came to see him. He had a dent in the left front side of his brain. His left frontal lobe, his left temporal lobe. I'm like, do you have a brain injury? No. Are you sure? What I found is you got to ask people multiple times, do you ever have a brain injury? When I see it on the scan, I'll generally find it. Do you ever fall out of a tree, off a fence, dive into a shallow pool, car accidents?

because I didn't lose consciousness. Consciousness is a brain stem phenomenon. So you can really do damage to your brain and not lose consciousness because you don't damage your brain stem. Yeah, Phineas Gage, the famous case in neurosurgical research,

history was a railroad construction worker in 1848 and his job was in explosions he'd explode out the rock so they could lay the railroad tracks and one day there was an accident that happened his three foot tamping iron he was tamping down the fuse and sand and gunpowder and he dropped the rod

caused a spark, then an explosion. It went through a missile underneath his left cheekbone, took out the left front side of his brain, landed 30 yards away. And he looked to his friend and said, did you see that? And then he looked to another friend. Did you see that? He didn't lose consciousness, but obviously damaged his brain, changed his personality.

he was conscientious and a man of good character before that and then he got fired because he couldn't stop swearing and he didn't show up and he had these crazy ideas and was a stagecoach driver and that moved where all these people moved which is California every athlete I know is going to tell you that having the right gear is key to performance

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In the case of somebody who suffered a CTE, some kind of brain injury, or in the case of someone like Justin Bieber, who's being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I mean, not for nothing. How about just the fact that he's so young and so famous and so wealthy? How do you not have some kind of dysfunction being so young with a young brain trying to navigate that type of world? Yeah, they almost killed that boy. He was...

pretty out of control for a while and he seems to be great now that's all i know i don't know him personally and if you read his mom's book i mean it's public knowledge he grew up with a lot of uncertainty and trauma and anxiety her parents didn't want her to have justin and she ended up going in the salvation army home from wed mother oh wow

there's a lot there's some childhood trauma stuff there childhood trauma and then you think early fame which is one of the worst things

for brain because you wear out your pleasure centers in the brain. All of that excitement and then unlimited money with very poor supervision in a brain that doesn't finish developing until 25. I mean, just see sort of... Yeah, it's a recipe for some kind of dysfunction. And, you know, one of my other sort of patients I dearly love, Miley Cyrus, got the Grammy this year for Song of the Year.

makes me emotional because the song's really about love and loving yourself but it was a shit show for a long time she's been on a journey she's been on a journey i'm just so proud of her because she's in charge of her life

rather than fame's in charge or drugs are in charge or other people are in charge. I mean, I work really hard with my patients for them to become good CEOs of their life, but you have to take care of the executive center in your life, which is your prefrontal cortex, largest in humans and any other animal by far. If you damage it with head trauma, drugs, alcohol, bad food, not sleeping, social media,

It's not a good prescription. What are some of the top line most important lifestyle protocols or interventions that you recommend when your patients come through and you see something lighting up or not lighting up in these scans and realize that there's work that can be done to course correct? So it depends on your brain. I mean, you know, there are things everybody does.

should do like love your brain and i horrified myself i don't know it's about 10 years ago when i went brain health is three things brain envy gotta care about it nobody cares about their brain why because you can't see it you can see the wrinkles in your skin or the fat around your belly and you can do something when you're unhappy with it

I also think we're just not taught to care for it. It's not something that we think about. We know we should eat better and all the like, and we know we can learn things with our brain, but there isn't a broad sense that we can improve our brain health through certain lifestyle choices that we're making. Immediately your brain's worse if you're drinking alcohol or if you're smoking pot. Immediately your brain's worse if you've

Don't prioritize sleep if you eat crappy food. You know, going back to these 11 major risk factors. But it's three things. Brain envy. So when I started 1991, I scanned everybody I knew. I'm like so excited. And I scanned my mom. She was 60. She had a beautiful brain, which really reflected her life.

She has seven children, 54 grandchildren, great-grandchildren. She knows everybody, still 92. She knows everybody's name. She knows what's going on in their lives. And she's just someone that she brings people to her. I scanned myself a week later, and it wasn't nearly as good as my 60-year-old mother. And that just irritated me.

but I played football in high school I had meningitis twice as a young soldier bad for the brain and I had bad habits you know I never drank I never smoked but I wasn't sleeping I thought I was special like I could get by on four hours of sleep and I'm not special I'm stupid because sleep is critical I was overweight I was I didn't care I'm a double board certified psychiatrist top neuroscience student in medical school and I don't care about my own brain I saw it and I cared

I have envy. I want my mom's brain. And so I always say Freud was wrong. Penis envy is not the cause of anybody's problem. You need brain envy. You need to love your brain. And that's where brain health starts. It's like, oh, I have this organ that creates me. Let me love it. And then avoid things that hurt it. Just got to know the list.

and do things that help it. And again, you just have to know the list. And if we do the bright minds, it says what to avoid and what to do. Yeah, those 11 sort of principles, right, that are built into that acronym.

blood flow and mitochondrial activity 49% of the tracer is taken up in the mitochondria so we're going to look at blood flow

and energy. And if it's low, we're going to go, why? You know, head traumas, drugs, alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, not sleeping, having high blood pressure, being overweight. And we're going to target the reasons why it's low. And then we're going to do exercise, increases blood flow. I love exercise. Ginkgo.

is one of my favorite supplements because the best brands I ever see have taken Genco. Oregano, cayenne pepper, beets increase blood flow. So know your risk factor and then know what to do. And the trick with exercise is coordination exercises. People who play rocket sports live longer than everybody else. This is a replicated study on like 90,000 people

because what coordination does is it activates your cerebellum, little brain, 10% of the brain's volume in the back is half the brain's neurons. And if you activate that, it turns on the rest of your brain. So I'm a huge fan of table tennis and pickleball, tennis. It's bad news for me.

I'm very athletic, but when it comes to anything involving eye-hand coordination, I'm terrible at it, and so I've avoided it my whole life. But that's good news for you if you can get over yourself. Because there's more to be gained, right? Yeah, get a really good ping-pong coach. And don't judge yourself. Just go and learn to be good. And don't have to beat people if you spend a half an hour twice a week

it'll have a major impact on your ability to think. Because you've got to get your eyes, hands, and feet all working together while you think about the spin on the ball. I think of it as aerobic chess. I have this thing, which I think might be fairly common, which is this idea that perhaps I'm past the point of no return. So let me explain. I was a competitive swimmer growing up.

So between the ages of like 14 and 21, I was training four to five hours a day, waking up at 4.30 in the morning and walking around over-trained like a zombie. So I wasn't getting good sleep. I never felt rested. I always felt fatigued during that period of time. Alcohol became quite the thing around age 18. And from 18 to 31, a progression into alcoholism,

and during that period of time, you know, maybe getting one good night of sleep while the rest of the nights were blackouts or recovering from blackouts. I get sober at 31, but from 31 to 40, I transfer a lot of that addictive energy into my lifestyle choices. So I was basically sedentary and subsisting on hot dogs, French fries,

pizza, McDonald's, Jack in the Box, while not exercising. At around 40, I have a come-to-Jesus moment. I change my lifestyle habits and many things about my life, and I'm a much healthier person now. I eat a plant-based diet. I'm very fit and active. I'm engaged mentally through the process of doing this podcast and other things that I do, and my life is good, but I can't shake this sense that

I have done so much damage over the course of my lifetime that no matter how many good things I do now, that at some point I'm not going to be able to overcome that damage. It's going to catch up to me. And so what's the point in doubling down and really investing in all of the things that you're saying? And I think on some level that might be common. People are thinking, well, I've treated myself terribly.

that song has been sung so you know mutability is your whole thing like we can't but is there a period at which i mean i would suspect it's more difficult than it is for others but what would you tell someone like myself or someone who's of a similar mindset or a similar type past history well one we should look right how do you know

unless you look. And so many people go, oh, no, I don't want to know. Yeah, I'm scared. I'm a little scared. If you knew a train was going to hit you, wouldn't you at least try to get out of the way? As long as there was a possibility to get out of the way. Of course. If I couldn't get out of the way, just let it hit me. And I'm none the wiser. So I do a show. Actually, I want you to be on it. Scan my brain on YouTube and Instagram. And

One of my favorite guys, Troy Gloss, 2002 World Series MVP, played third base for the Angels. Love him dearly, drinking way too much, four concussions, depressed, suicidal. I mean, he was in a dark place, didn't think there was any hope. And I got him to do my show. I don't know how that happened. His brain was awful, like awful. But he did what I asked him to do.

and his wife, Anne, who I dearly love, she was a good partner. He stopped drinking. He ate better, exercised, took the supplements, lost 15 pounds in two months. And I'm like, let's look again because I could just tell he was better. His brain significantly better. In a two-month period. Two months. And then I scanned him 16 months later. How old is he?

47 now and you know there were ups and downs right when you're an alcoholic it does you just don't stop i mean some people do but you know there was some bumps for us but you know we're in the fight together and 16 months later his brain is so good and i know five years from now if he continues on and he has brain envy his brain's gonna be freaking normal

you have a choice but if you don't know if you don't look you don't know and why would you ever be in that position i want to know which is why you know every couple of years i'll get a whole body scan because if trouble's coming i want to get it early i don't want to wait until late

So many of the lifestyle illnesses that we're seeing now are tracked to chronic inflammation. So what are some of the things that we can do to ameliorate that that have implications in terms of brain health? So in Bright Minds, the first diet is inflammation. And

Some surprising things, it's like 98% of us have low levels of omega-3 fatty acids. If you're not taking an omega-3 supplement or focused on eating low mercury, high omega-3 fish, that's a problem because low omega-3 increases inflammation.

if you're not a bit obsessed with your gums and your teeth you have gum disease you're more likely to have brain disease and heart disease and like i didn't really drill down on that a little bit it's always amazing to me that that doesn't get enough bandwidth in terms of our overall health because i know i've had periodontal disease and gum problems my whole life and

I was educated early about the implications of not treating that well because that tends to lead to arthrosclerotic issues.

and brain health, obviously, it's a circulatory situation. It has to have implications in terms of brain health. Absolutely, because your brain is 2% of your body's weight, but uses 20% of the blood flow in your body. 20% of the oxygen in your body goes to your brain. And if you have gum disease, infections in your gums...

periodontal issues abscesses and the like how does that translate into circulatory issues like what does it have a higher risk of alzheimer's disease so it increases inflammation which you know many people think is the mother of all illness i don't know about that but i don't want to have inflammation and for a long time i didn't really care

about my own gums until study after study, gum disease, heart disease, gum disease, brain disease. I'm like, no, got to take care of it. So become a flossing fool. In terms of

Blood work, what should people be paying attention to? I mean, you mentioned omega-3s, but if someone's doing a blood panel and they get the results, what are some things that would jump out to you? So if we look at some of the important numbers for bright minds, like blood pressure would be for blood flow, retirement and aging, you don't want high iron levels. Iron accelerates aging.

You don't want low iron because that'll make you not sleep and be anxious. And I tend to accumulate iron, so I go donate blood twice a year, and that seems to help. Good for other people, good for me. For inflammation, you want to know your C-reactive protein. For genetics, you probably should know your ApoE4 gene type. I'm a 2-3. Is that the gene that's connected to dementia? That increases the risk. Chris Hemsworth.

situation where he's a double four double allele or whatever yeah yeah he's a e44 which means he has a tenfold risk but a tenfold risk means about 25 percent and so it just means be serious and exercise the kind of exercise you're doing decreases the risk if you have one or two e4 genes for head trauma is the number of head traumas you have toxins house your liver

function. So liver function tests, mental health, it's your ACE score, adverse childhood experiences, zero to 10. How many do you have? My wife wrote a book called The Relentless Courage of a Scared Child. She's an eight out of 10. My nieces, who I adopted, are both nines. I mean, if you have four or more, it increases your risk of seven of the top 10 leading causes of death. If you have six or more, you die 20 years early.

Now, my nieces and my wife aren't dying 20 years early because there are things you can do to extract the past trauma, which is super important. The second I is immunity and infection. So know your vitamin D level and get it above 40. People who are above 40 have half the risk of cancer of those who are under 20. And when I first tested mine, when I sort of figured this out,

20 years ago, I was 17. I'm like, how am I 17? Because I exercise, but I exercise at night because I'm working during the day. And I realized I need more sun and I need to supplement to have a healthy level. Not too much, but a healthy level. And then is neurohormones, get them tested every year. We're living in a society where low testosterone levels are rampant.

in young males. And I've just never seen anything quite like it. What is contributing to that? Head trauma and toxins. Are more young males having head trauma than they used to be? Well, with football and soccer and skateboarding, maybe. The other thing is toxins on their body. The products you put on their body. So I have all my patients download the app Think Dirty.

and scan all of your personal products to see how quickly... Is that an EWG thing? Like it. It's similar to it. So, for example, I used to shave with Barbasol. 50 years. And on a scale of 0 is live long, 10 is kill you early, it's a 9. And now I shave with something called Kiss My Face, which is a 2. It's insane the extent to which there are so many chemicals in our everyday life

products that we're unaware of and the lack of regulation on this. I've had plenty of guests in the past come on to talk about it. Ken Cook from EWG, my friend Darren O'Lean wrote a book called Fatal Conveniences, and you read it. It's very solution-oriented, but it's quite an eye-opener to realize the amount of toxicity in our personal care products and things that we sort of take for granted and assume are safe. And what happened during COVID?

it's all of a sudden these toxic hand sanitizers that have parabens and phthalates and fragrance that are just bad for you people are lathering themselves their children with this stuff which is

I'm a fan of Earth Friendly Products because they make these cleaning products that I have no interest in them except I love them. You need to be thoughtful, you know, what you clean your clothes with, what deodorant you use, what sunscreen you use.

read the label. And it's like, oh, I can't understand it. Then you need to like understand or get EWG or think dirty and just scan it. And it'll tell you good for your brain and body or bad for it. And people go, oh, but that's so expensive. I'm like, no, being sick is expensive. This is just about love. Why would you put something on your body or your child's body?

that is pleasing. You get your hormones checked and then your hemoglobin A1C, obviously, and your BMI. They're very important numbers to know. 72% of Americans are overweight. 42% are obese. It's the biggest brain drain in the history of the world. I published three studies that say as your weight goes up,

the size and function of your brain goes down. And I learned that connection 2009, Cyrus Raji from the University of Pittsburgh published MRI study that if you're overweight, you have 4% less volume in your brain and your brain looks eight years older than healthy people. If you're obese, you have 8% less volume in your brain

and your brain looks 16 years older. And I have a normal database of scans, but we never, I mean, we ask them about weight, but we never use that as an exclusion criteria. Healthy weight versus overweight or obese, significantly less blood flow. And then I did an NFL study, healthy weight NFL players versus overweight NFL players love frontal lobe function. And I'm like, oh no.

and can you talk about it without somebody being mad at you? So I've had lots of people mad at me, but it's just science, right? I'm just making the connection. If you are overweight, of these 11 risk factors, you have seven of them because it decreases blood flow, promotes aging, increases inflammation, changes healthy testosterone into unhealthy cancer-promoting forms of estrogen, and you've got to get serious.

now being underweight is bad for your brain being overweight is bad for your brain you mentioned the importance of loving your brain and I would imagine showing your patients these images these scans helps to create that connection because you see what's actually happening and perhaps that opens the door to loving your brain a little bit more I think a lot about what the difference is between people who are able to

absorb information and then make a change in their life versus people who absorb the same information and either choose not to or struggle to make that change or struggle to make that change last or sustain. Because if you have low self-esteem, if you are somebody who is of a negative disposition or just see the world through the lens of lack as opposed to opportunity,

Those people, I would suspect, are more difficult cases in terms of trying to get them excited about the possibility. If you don't love yourself, it's pretty hard to get that person to invest in healthier lifestyle habits. It's a mental health thing as much as it is a rational, logical information thing.

no question and there are many people who had early childhood trauma for example who developed real rage about what happened but then guilt about the rage because I still have to be with these people they still house me and feed me and so it goes unconscious they start attacking themselves and I'm bad

it's hard for me if I believe at my core I'm bad to do the right things out of love because you don't love yourself and that is a brain problem because trauma gets stuck in your brain but it's also a psychological problem I think of all my patients in four big circles it's what's the biology which is brain health why we got to look at your brain and those important numbers we talked about

How's your psychological health, right? It's your mind. What's the quality of your thoughts, the level of the trauma you have? What's the chatter in your head? There's also a social circle. What's going on in your life now with your kids, with your spouse, with work?

and there's a spiritual circle. So why the heck do you care? You know, what is your deepest sense of meaning and purpose? And so in my mind, when I evaluate my patients, all four circles, all the time,

I want to have an exercise called the One Page Miracle. I want you to know, what do you want? Relationships, work, money, physical, emotional, spiritual. What do you want? Let's define it so you can look at it on a regular basis. Are you noticing what you like about the other people in your life more than what you don't? And whenever you feel sad, mad, nervous, or out of control,

write down what you're thinking and i have this great process thinking in honest accurate ways so i'm not a huge fan of positive thinking i'm a fan of accurate thinking with a positive spin that'd be worth chatting about now get your brain healthy so if i give you these strategies and you don't do it i want to bond with you so you come back and trust me

and then I want to work on perhaps the past trauma. I love a therapy called EMDR, Specific Psychological Treatment for Trauma. It stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. And I love another one called ISTDP, Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Therapy. And the foundation of that therapy is people really struggling. They won't do the things they could do to be healthy. It's...

attachment problems that led to rage and then guilt about the rage and self-attack it's like they're living that i did something wrong even though everybody's done things wrong and you know most people forgive themselves they're living with this self-attack and that takes sometimes

intense therapy but doesn't have to be long that's why they call it intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy you've had success with that great success with that yes yeah it's so interesting i mean because you can show that person is not as many scans as you want but until you untie that knot and get to the root of what's driving that you know disposition that's preventing them from making changes it's not going to matter

I've never seen anything as powerful as showing somebody their brain like with addiction when I first started ordering scans I was the director of a dual diagnosis unit so a psychiatric hospital unit that takes care of substance abusers their brains were so bad and I was like here's a healthy brain here's your brain your brain controls everything you do which brain do you want I mean I think anybody with an addiction should get their brain scanned and I came up with I wrote a book with

David Smith called Unchain Your Brain, Breaking the Addictions that Steal Your Life. And like giving everybody Prozac's insane, right? There are many different ways to get depressed. Give everybody a 12-step program's a bit insane because they're impulsive addicts, they're compulsive addicts, they're impulsive compulsive addicts, they're sad addicts, they're head trauma addicts. It's like, no, the type you had, and if somebody diagnosed you with ADD, which we've

We'll talk about, well, that's our impulsive addicts group. It's like you want to do the right things, but you just don't have enough of a break to stop. And that could go with low frontal lobe activity. Our compulsive addicts, they just get the same thought in their head over and over again. And sometimes clinically, it's hard to tell the difference.

because they go, I'm impulsive. But what they really mean is they're compulsive. So they get a thought. The impulsive person gets a thought and does it without thinking. The compulsive person gets a thought over and over again and has to do it. And so one is a dopamine intervention. The other is a serotonin intervention. And how would you know unless you really looked? Interesting.

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hit the link in the description below to visit seed.com slash richroll and use code richroll25. Get on it. A little over a year ago, I did a week-long, intensive, therapeutic process that was intended to be trauma-oriented, childhood trauma-oriented, and it was incredible.

And over the course of that week, I spent time with a wide variety of psychiatrists. And at the end of that week, there was a consensus among all of these psychiatrists that I had ADHD. As I said at the beginning, that was news to me because I had always thought of this as a condition associated with hyperactivity. I was not a hyperactive kid.

I didn't feel like I had any of the symptomology that at least in my mind was associated with that condition. But through the process of being diagnosed and kind of working through it, I've developed a whole new perspective on this. And I realized the extent to which I developed coping strategies to deal with this that allowed me to kind of overcome that predisposition. I would have never known. I just didn't think that I was, you know, that person.

Swimming will treat it. Yeah, that's how I did it. I would just exhaust myself through exercise and then I could calm down and sit. So I didn't have that experience of not being able to focus because the exercise gave me a different baseline. So can I talk about the five homework symptoms of ADD and you tell me which ones you have? I mean, there are more. The diagnostic criteria includes 18, but I think of one short attention span.

but not for everything. It's short attention span for regular routine, everyday things, schoolwork, homework, paperwork, chores. For things that are new, novel, highly stimulating or frightening, people with ADD can pay attention just fine because they have their own intrinsic dopamine. Love is a drug, especially new love is a dopamine.

so if you love your teacher you don't want to please them and so you do fine in that class but your attention span is erratic and that's what fools people because they're like no I'm interested I heard President George W. Bush say this

and he said, no, I did well in the classes I was interested in. And I'm like, not another ADD president, right? We just came off of Bill Clinton, who clearly had impulse control issues. So does that resonate with you? Sure. The things that I'm interested in, I can be completely obsessed by. The things I'm not interested in are more challenging. But to me, isn't that everybody? And I think...

in reflecting on that like I've made some pretty big life decisions about career in the past where I was choosing a career path that that really wasn't what I should have been doing and I have a huge capacity for persevering and determination and I could force myself to you know do the work that I wasn't interested in but it becomes very exhausting and I was a lawyer for a long time and I have

many memories of being in the law firm and trying to force myself to write these briefs and motions and do discovery and all the stuff that you do as a litigator and looking around and realizing that my colleagues seem much more interested in this than me. And I just thought everybody was suffering through this in the same way that I was rather than the truth, which was I was this round peg trying to jam myself into a square hole. Yeah, that you didn't love it. And if you have ADD,

One of the things I tell my ADD patients is find something you love that you can make money at.

right I mean too often oh find things you love that you then dependent on other people that's prescription for misery the second symptom is distractibility you see too much you feel too much you sense too much it's like the world comes at you quickly and so you want to sit down and read a book but then you get distracted by the email or by your phone or because you're hungry or something

But also, isn't that everybody? No. My best friend in medical school had ADD. And I loved him dearly. He graduated top of our class. I was second. He was first. But he was my partner, so I was proud of him. And just so distracted. And it was funny to sort of watch it. I don't feel like I'm a distracted person, but I do feel like

I need to be doing one thing at a time and as long as I just have this one thing that I'm doing like I'm okay I can focus I can even when I don't feel like like doing it I can kind of overcome that override it and do it where I get into trouble is when I wake up and now my life is very full there's lots of things happening and I start to think about all the things that I have to do and it becomes very overwhelming very quickly and I get stressed and anxious and that gets translated into just being an aggravated person and

being unpleasant to be around. But it's left to my own devices. I like to go all in on one thing, disappear, complete it, and then I'm open for the next thing. The third one is organization. It's hard for people who have ADD organization for time and space. Now, I think there's seven different types of ADD. I was going to say, what's the difference between ADD, ADHD? What are we talking about?

Well, I think there's seven types. That's what I learned from imaging. But ADD, attention deficit disorder, was a name given to this thing. It used to be called minimal brain dysfunction before then.

by the American Psychiatric Association with DSM-III Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 1980. That's what I trained on. 1987, for God knows what reason, they changed the name to ADHD. So it used to be ADD with hyperactivity or ADD without hyperactivity. And they changed the name to ADHD to sort of lump everybody together. The problem is half the people who have this disorder

are never hyperactive. And so it was very confusing. And then 1994, they changed the name again to AD slash HD, highlighting half the people who have this are never hyperactive. So, you know, the names are not scientific. Let's just be super clear about this. There's no biology to this. A group of psychiatrists get together and they

based on what they think is the best evidence, often it's sort of silly. Like, we lost Asperger's this time. Everybody now, whether you're Elon Musk and high-functioning autistic, gets the same diagnosis as someone who's in a developmental center that can never live. I mean, it's just bizarre. When I first started imaging, I'm like, oh.

it's not one thing based on imaging if we look at your brain I'll be able to tell you so type 1 is classic ADHD short attention span, distractibility disorganized for time and space we didn't talk much about that one but your room, your desk your book bag trouble with organization I'm not that guy if anything I'm OCD so you might be type 3 we'll get to that

People with ADD tend to be late or just right on time because they actually don't start getting ready to go until, oh my God, I'm late. That's not me either. Okay. I'm generally timely. This is why I want to go and get a brain test. I'm not convinced that I have this. So one, sort of. Two, not that much. The not being able to multitask is very male-oriented.

brain thing as opposed to an ADD thing. Disorganization, forced procrastination, you put things off, put things off, put things off. I do that until you're mad or somebody else is mad at you. And then five is impulse control. You say things you probably shouldn't say or do things you probably shouldn't do. And it's like the break in your brain is vulnerable.

and I think those are the five things if you have three out of five you probably do have it and it sounds like for you somebody should look at your brain right and what would you see was it the interrupting at the conference you went to or at the treatment you went to where all the psychiatrists said you have ADD the interrupting what do you mean like were you interrupting people in conversations or no I don't think so it wasn't that am I interrupting you now is that why you're saying that

i get accused of that on the podcast interrupting people too much if i was interrupting they didn't tell me that i was and if i was doing it i was probably not consciously aware of doing it so why did they want to drug you what did they see that they went do you have adhd related to

to addiction issues perhaps I don't know or coping mechanisms that I've developed to focus or the way in which I can use excessive exercise to calm myself down I'm not sure well we'll look at it and it's like how do we know unless we look it's like one of the themes what would you see in a brain scan of a brain with ADHD versus a healthy brain

so often healthy at rest and drops with concentration especially in your prefrontal cortex one third of your brain an area called the basal ganglia where dopamine works and your cerebellum so healthy at rest drops when you concentrate

we need to fix that and you can fix it with exercise you can fix it with certain stimulating supplements and sometimes medication can be incredibly helpful but the problem is what I saw because I'm a child psychiatrist and an adult psychiatrist but about half the patients we have at Amen Clinics have ADD of one form or another and what I found there's classic short attention span distractibility

hyperactivity, impulse control issues. There's inattentive ADD, never really hyperactive or terribly impulsive, but trouble performing, trouble with focus. I have a child with both of those types.

type 3 is over focused ADD the problem is not that you can't pay attention it's you can't shift your attention you end up to get stuck on things and because you are organized that tends to be the one exception is type 3 but

These people also tend to be argumentative, oppositional. If things don't go their way, they get upset and they can hold on to grudges. And their addiction of choice tends to be things that calm their brain down, whether it's alcohol or marijuana. Type four is limbic ADD. Their emotional brain works too hard and they tend to see the world differently.

through dark glasses they have eight hallmark add traits plus sort of mild depression type five is temporal lobe add often from a head injury one or both of their temporal lobes hurt so mood instability irritability temper stuff the six famous for it's made it to movies it's called the ring of fire where the brain is not low in activity it's high in activity it's working

way too hard, often due to inflammation. And type seven is anxious ADD. And it's their level of anxiety that gets them places on time, but they have to work so much harder than their colleagues. And all of these are rooted in genetics? Some is rooted in trauma, but ADD is very genetic.

It's so genetic that if I see an ADHD child and I don't see it at all in their mom's side or their dad's side, I'm looking at the kid to see if he looks like their parents. I mean, it's literally that genetic. Interesting. Yeah, I don't know if I could identify it in my family tree. I mean, I'm not qualified to. But it can also be caused by a concussion.

And so, you know, if you come to see me, one of the things we're going to ask you five or six, seven, ten times, have you ever had a brain injury? Have you ever fallen out of a tree, off a fence, dove into a shallow pool? Have you ever had a concussion playing sports, a car accident? I look forward to getting my brain scanned.

it'll be super interesting you'll have me right we can do this i'm so excited yeah good let's talk about raising mentally strong kids i apologize you just handed me this book i haven't read it yet so perhaps you can kind of give us the thesis like why did you write this book and what is it that you're trying to say here so children are at the worst

In recorded history as far as mental health problems, the levels of anxiety, depression, ADHD, self-harming behaviors is out of control. Brand new study. 54% of teenage girls report being persistently sad. 32% have thought of killing themselves. 24% have planned to kill themselves. And 13% have tried to kill themselves. Schools...

are overwhelmed by the incidents of kids on medication and the kids suffering with panic attacks and other mental health problems. It's awful what's happening. And what I learned really early in my career

is the most effective intervention to raise mentally healthy kids is parenting strategies. And the first one, obviously, if you want mentally healthy children, you have to be mentally strong yourself. I talk about how important that is. And then there's this system that I've become attached to that I just think is so effective. And I wrote the book with my friend, Dr. Charles Fay, who's the president

of the Love and Logic Institute. And that program is actually very important to me personally, because when we brought that into our home, it just became so much happier. And so in the book, we mixed neuroscience and the program I've been using for years with Love and Logic,

So we combine these two programs to really do what we think of as the latest innovations in parenting. Every parent wants mentally strong kids. We want our kids to be confident, kind, responsible, all of these things. And obviously...

kids intuit how you're behaving. That's much more important than what's coming out of your mouth. If your behavior doesn't match what you're saying, they're paying attention to the behavior much more than the words. But where are even the best intentions going wrong? I mean, the statistics that you quoted are devastating. There's a lot of things contributing to that, of course. But

Where is it where we think we're doing the right thing and perhaps we're misguided? We're rescuing children way too much. We're solving their problems because of our low self-esteem. And I'm guilty of this, I think, for the first three. And I love all my children. And if you don't feel really great about yourself, you get self-esteem by doing for your children when they could do for themselves. Sure.

and then what you do is you create incompetent people so when a child comes to you and says I'm bored too often parents then scramble to get them the latest video game or take them someplace rather than just give them the problem back oh I wonder what you're going to do about that and then be loving enough to not fix it so my wife

And Chloe, our 20-year-old, when she was like seven, they'd have these monster homework battles. And I'm a child psychiatrist, and I look at Tana and go, you've done second grade. Get out of this fight.

she wouldn't listen to me but three of her friends recommended parenting with love and logic and that's the foundational principle let kids solve their own problems be a good coach, be a resource don't solve it and so when Tana really understood it she announced to Chloe sweetheart I've done second grade I'm never ever again going to ask you to do your homework it's on you and if you don't do it

you like just have to be okay with the consequences and Chloe had fed and said I never said I was gonna do my homework I'm just not gonna do it now stormed off came back 20 minutes later she's now a junior a Chapman no one's ever asked her to do her homework again and she had a 4.2 out of high school she's responsible she competent and consult her own problems we go wrong

when we steal their self-esteem by solving their problems. So, for example, Chloe knew it. If she forgot her homework, nobody's bringing it to her. If she forgot her sweater on a cold day, nobody's bringing it to her. If she forgot her lunch, it takes 24 hours to starve. Nobody's bringing it to her. And she only forgot those things like twice. And now she doesn't forget anything. Yeah, you become self-directed.

you develop that self-efficacy that will serve you later in life. Self-esteem comes from performing esteemable acts on behalf of yourself. And if you're always rushing in to solve the problem or rescue, you're depriving your child of the opportunity to learn those things. It's a short-term gain, long-term pain situation. And I think a lot of time crunched parents are like,

Okay, let me just solve the problem because I just, you know, I have other things to do and I can fix this rather than allow the child to scramble and mess up and figure it out on their own because sometimes that's not convenient. Right. And it's also not goal directed. So principle number one, isn't that what you want? What kind of parent do you want to be? And what kind of child do you want to raise? Ask yourself that question. Ask the other parent that question.

kind of parents do we want to be and what kind of child do we want to raise because then your behavior stems from whatever mission statement you create and then the second thing is attachment it's bonding and that requires two things time actual physical time and listening parents talk way too much and we have all this great knowledge and all these great experiences we just want to pour it into their little heads

and they tune us out. If you do active listening with them, they'll be so close to you. But if you tell them how to think and you interrupt them, it's very bad for the relationship, for the attachment. And then I have an exercise in the book that's just gold. I mean, it works. It's worked every time, I think. Parents who actually do it the way I ask. It's 20 minutes a day with the kids.

do something with them. They want to do. And during that time, no commands, no questions, no direction. And when I first figured it out, and then I just saw it work and it worked and it worked. My literary agent at the time, Carl, he called me up and he said, I'm having trouble with my two-year-old. So he had a child later in life and Laura was two and she never wants anything to do with me.

And I'm like, you're ignoring her. I'm like, what do you mean? I'm like, do this. And I told him a special time, 20 minutes a day, do something with her that she wants to do, which means basically sit on the floor and play with her blocks. And no questions, no commands, no directions. And he's like, that won't work. He tended to be oppositional. And I'm like, oh, great, you represent an idiot. I said, you need to do this. I'm going to call you in three weeks. Get the party started.

And three weeks later, I called him up. And I'm like, hey, Carl, it's Daniel. Daniel, she won't leave me alone. All she wants to do is be with me. I walk in the door. She grabs my leg. She wants her time. Right. Because isn't that what we all wanted? I mean, unless our parent was awful, we all wanted their attention. And, you know, I'm one of seven, so...

you know my mother had to be judicious about how she did it but because my dad was never home we didn't have a relationship and 1972 turned 18 he told me if I voted for McGovern the country would go to hell and because we didn't have a relationship I voted for McGovern and the country went to hell but it had nothing to do with McGovern it was because of Nixon and Watergate and I like having influence

with my kids, but there's no influence without connection. There's different kinds of attachment also. I think that's very wise, and it's also very straightforward and doable, like invest your time in your children. Be interested in what they're interested in. When they tell you something, don't lecture them or tell them why they're wrong. Just say, tell me more, and be on their level where

they don't feel judged or like you're going to basically explain something to them, right? I think that's great advice. On the opposite end of the spectrum from someone like your father is the very enmeshed parent. That's a different kind of attachment disorder where they're overly invested in their child's wellbeing and the child becomes a vehicle for their own self-esteem. So they're projecting all of this emotional baggage

on their child and the child then is shouldering this responsibility to make their parent feel okay. And whether that projection is ambition or their own insecurities or their own dreams that were never realized, the child on an unconscious level is subsuming all of that and that becomes problematic. Another question. I like to think of good parents like good coaches.

and I've been blessed to work with some amazing coaches and good coaches notice what you do right and they teach bad coaches notice what you do wrong and focus on it and in the book there's a whole section on why I collect penguins so I have like

2,000 penguins. It's a little weird. Not realized penguins. No. Penguin pens, cups, dolls, tie. I have a penguin weather vane, a penguin vacuum. It's bizarre. But my oldest child, Anton, who I adopted, he was hard for me. He was argumentative, oppositional, thinks things go his way, got upset. And I talked to my supervisor and she said,

you need more one-on-one time with him and i took him to a place called sea life park which is in hawaii it's on oahu sort of like sea world they had sea animal shows and we had a great day whale show sea lion show dolphin show and at the end of the day i took him to the fat freddy show he was a humble penguin chubby but he's amazing he climbed

20 foot diving board went to the end would bounce and jump in the water bowled with his nose countered with his flippers jumped through a fire and at the end of the show the trainer asked him to go get something he went and got it and he brought it right back and time stood still for me because in my head I'm like damn I asked my kid to get something and he wants to have a discussion for like 20 minutes and then he doesn't want to do it and I knew my son was

smarter than the penguin and I realized