Understanding Anxiety and Brain Health: Tips for Improvement

Doctor Daniel Amen emphasizes that brain health is crucial for overcoming mental health issues and improving overall well-being.

### Understanding Anxiety and Brain Health: Insights from Dr. Daniel Amen
* 🧠 Dr. Daniel Amen, a double board-certified psychiatrist, addresses common concerns about anxiety and brain health, emphasizing the **importance of understanding the brain's function** in mental health.
* 💡 Interrupt signals in the brain, which can cause **forgetfulness or anxiety**, may stem from factors like **lack of sleep, poor diet, or negative thoughts**, and should be monitored if they occur **frequently**.
* 🏃 To improve blood flow to the brain, **regular exercise** and certain foods like **beets and cayenne pepper**, as well as supplements like **ginkgo biloba**, are recommended.
* 😴 Dr. Amen explains that anxiety can heighten during the night as the **emotional brain becomes more active** when the frontal lobes quiet down, suggesting that **writing down repetitive thoughts** can help manage this.
* 🌍 He discusses the concept of "**global amygdala hijacking**," where heightened anxiety levels during stressful times can lead to **panic attacks and intrusive thoughts**, stressing the importance of **mental hygiene**.
* 🧘 Daily relaxation practices, such as meditation or engaging in hobbies, can help **control anxiety**, while diaphragmatic breathing techniques can **activate the frontal lobe** and **reduce stress**.
* 🔍 Dr. Amen introduces the **BRIGHT MINDS** mnemonic, which outlines 11 risk factors affecting brain health, including **blood flow, inflammation, and sleep**, emphasizing that **mental health issues often stem from brain health**.
* 📚 He concludes by encouraging **proactive steps for brain care** and shares a personal success story with Justin Bieber, reinforcing that **improvement is possible with the right approach to brain health**.

- Why the heck is my anxiety through the roof today? What do you want from me, brain? There's a lot of that going on. Hi, this is Doctor Daniel Amen. I'm a double board-certified psychiatrist,

founder of Amen Clinics, and the author of "The End of Mental Illness". This is Brain Support. [rhythmic music] Rory Banwell, "Why does your brain sometimes completely forget common words? "I just couldn't remember 'drawer,' like what?"

Interrupt signals that happen in your brain; it can be due to a lack of sleep, not eating, negative thoughts, or low blood sugar. If it happens once a week, I wouldn't worry about it, but if it's beginning to happen two, three, four

times a week, and if it's worse than it was 10 years ago, it actually could be a sign of impending trouble, and that's where you want to really begin to look at your brain habits. If you have hypertension,

high blood pressure, as blood pressure goes up, blood flow to the brain goes down. If you have any form of heart disease or vascular disease, like a heart arrhythmia, if you had general anesthesia at some point in the past, that can lower blood flow,

if you don't exercise. The simple way for each of these risk factors is: okay, what is it, how do you know if you have it, and what to do about it, and what to do about low blood flow,

Exercise boosts blood flow to the brain. There are simple things like eating beets, cayenne pepper, oregano, rosemary; all of those things have been found to increase blood flow, as have simple supplements like ginkgo biloba.

Dylan_Saunders, "Right-brained people, how do you turn off your left brains?" Well, we really can't turn off a part of our brain. Dolphins can; dolphins actually sleep with one hemisphere asleep at a time,

but humans can't do that. You would literally have to cut this area of the brain called the corpus callosum, and it's like so many wires connecting the left and right hemispheres of the brain that it's just not possible to turn it off.

There are some people who are born without a corpus callosum, so then the sides of the brain are not talking to each other, and they have some very interesting neuropsychological findings. But ultimately, you want both sides connected to each other.

Dayaawarrior, "Why does my brain start to go 60 miles an hour when I'm trying to go to sleep?" As you start to sleep, your frontal lobes, the front part of your brain, start to get quiet,

which unfortunately takes the brakes off your emotional brain. And so, if this is happening, you need a routine and habits to get your emotional brain back under control. If the thoughts are repetitive, they just circle; have a little journal by your bed and write them down.

and then ask yourself, so what can I do about it and what can I not do about it? But the act of writing it down helps to get it out of your head. When I go to bed, I say a prayer, very intentionally, specifically,

I review what went well today, and I'm looking for at least three things. I love it because, you know, like you, I'm busy. I often don't take time during the day to just go, 'That was awesome!' How many special moments are in your day,

even during a pandemic? You just don't think about it, and when you do it right before bed, it sets your dreams up to actually be more positive. REM sleep, dream sleep, is one of the most important healing parts of sleep.

@Coywolfy, "Anybody else having some severe PTSD attacks during quarantine? I feel like my overall mental health has tanked over the past two months. I'm losing my appetite, massive anxiety attacks, and I'm having some intense intrusive thoughts."

I feel for you. The term I use is we are now experiencing a global amygdala hijacking. So the amygdala, deep in your brain, is a structure; it's in the shape of an almond, that responds to fear.

What's happening in the world is activating our amygdala, and it's making many people feel anxious and stressed. I think our baseline stress levels went up about 30%. So if yours were already heightened, now you can be having massive panic attacks.

and intrusive thoughts. Mental hygiene is just as important as washing your hands. We have to disinfect our thoughts and kill the ANTs, the automatic negative thoughts, that steal our happiness. You want to become masterful at diaphragmatic breathing,

and there's actually a very specific pattern that will calm down your amygdala and activate your frontal lobe so you make better decisions. Three seconds in, so big breath, hold it for a second, and then take six seconds out and hold it for a second.

So it's an 11-second breath, but if you do that 10 times it'll actually trigger a relaxation response in your brain and begin to give you some control. You know, I think it's something they should actually teach second graders.

Do this breathing. It's the first step in getting control of your anxiety. Jeff Golenski, "As I'm getting older I'm noticing that if I spend 10 or more hours working on my computer on a given day, not typical, I often have difficulty

"shutting my brain down at night to sleep. When I wake the next day I'm often plagued by a sort of hangover from the day before, anyone else?" This is actually common. The lights from the computer may

be sending interrupt signals to your brain. Before they unleashed digital technology onto the world, there's actually no neuroscience study on the impact of being flooded with the blue light from screens. Many of my colleagues and I recommend blue light blockers,

especially if you have any screen on after dark. Blue light in the late afternoon and evening begins to turn off the production of melatonin, which naturally helps us go to sleep. Plus, if you're 10 hours plus on a computer screen,

you're not getting enough exercise. You know, the best natural treatment for depression and cognitive impairment actually seems to be exercise. @hog_mild, "So I got enough sleep, ate breakfast, took my meds, am hydrated, don't have a crazy busy day,

"am stable in my relationships. So why the [bleep] is my anxiety through the [bleep] roof today? I can feel my heartbeat in my eyes. What do you want from me, brain?" Anxiety disorders are still

the most common mental health issue in the world. Begin to put a daily stress reduction practice in your life. For me, I love table tennis. It's exercise, it's distracting, it's good for me.

A lot of people love meditation. There's a kind of meditation I really like that we've studied called loving-kindness meditation. I'm a huge fan of hypnosis, self-hypnosis. Certain music will activate you and make you anxious.

A lot of other music will actually calm and soothe you. So I'm a huge fan of having a daily relaxation practice to get control, and then what I teach my patients is whenever you feel sad, mad, or nervous,

Or out of control, write down what you're thinking, then ask yourself if it's true. Thoughts are automatic; they just happen. And what most people don't know is that the thoughts in your head often lie to you; they often terrorize you.

I teach my patients how to kill the ANTs—the automatic negative thoughts. You have to develop an internal anteater patrolling the streets of your mind, and just learning this technique is so helpful. Rylee B. writes, "Why does my brain provide

"only wonderful dialogue when I shower," and why is it always when there's shampoo in my hair so I can't get out to write it down?" I like this a lot. When you're in the shower and you're doing something you know how to do,

then basically your cerebellum's doing it. It's sort of an automatic process. The rest of your brain can relax, and you're distracted, which is often when creativity flows. It's happened to me a lot over the years.

I just have something that I can get out of the shower, quickly write it down, and then get back in and finish. Just have some mechanism to capture it, and you'll be able to remember it as you rinse your hair and then write down your thought,

and if you can't, then we have to boost your brain's health. @aishakhvnx, "Y'all ever forget what you're talking about while you're talking? It happens to me so often that I swear I'm getting amnesia."

I hear this actually a lot in my patients who have ADD or ADHD. Because they have so many thoughts, while they're talking, they actually get lost. Do you notice you have a short attention span, you're easily distracted, you tend to be late,

you're disorganized, you procrastinate, and you might say or do things impulsively? When I first read that question, I go, huh, I wonder if she has ADD. If it's not that and it's happening so often,

I worry that your brain might not be as healthy as it could be, and that's where I would begin to explore those 11 major risk factors that steal people's minds, and the pneumonic is called BRIGHT MINDS.

The B we talked about is blood flow. R is retirement and aging. When people stop learning, their brain starts dying. I is inflammation. If you have low omega-3 fatty acid levels, if you have an unhealthy gut, if you have periodontal disease,

you're not really good at taking care of your teeth, all of those things can actually increase inflammation and negatively impact your memory and your brain.  Somebody says, "Why doesn't anybody talk about the brain fog that comes along with anxiety and depression?

"It makes me feel like I can't function normally," and I thought I was going crazy until I looked it up and realized that it happens to a lot of people. "Can we start talking about these things more?"

So brain fog is when you feel like your brain is in mud; it just takes more effort to think and respond than you think is reasonable. It is very common. Anxiety, because your brain is so focused on negativity,

or depression, where you don't have enough activity in your brain—there's one type of depression I call 'unfocus,' where they have really low activity in the brain, commonly associated with brain fog. Again, you want to keep your brain healthy

or rescue it if it's headed to a dark place. You have to prevent or treat these risk factors I've been talking about. So BRIGHT MINDS: B is for blood flow, R is retirement and aging, I is inflammation,

G is genetics—stuff like anxiety and depression run in families, but also the negative thinking, the dysfunctional thinking patterns can also be modeled in families. I often say genes are not a death sentence. What they should be is a wake-up call.

Genes load the gun; it's what happened to us and our behavior that pulls the trigger. So if I know I have anxiety in my family, then I'm going to work even harder to prevent it. The H in BRIGHT MINDS is head trauma,

a major cause of psychiatric problems that nobody knows about because most psychiatrists actually never look at the brain. I actually have a database of 160,000 scans on patients from 155 countries, and if you said, 'Hey, Daniel,'

The single most important thing I learned from the world's largest brain imaging database related to psychiatry is that mild traumatic brain injury is a major cause of psychiatric problems. If you don't get the right diagnosis, you'll never get the right treatment plan.

The 'T' in BRIGHT MINDS stands for toxins. If you have brain fog, anxiety, and depression, I want to make sure you don't have mold in your house. Mold is a very common cause of brain fog, anxiety, and depression.

It's one of the toxins; marijuana is a toxin, alcohol can be toxic. Of all the firefighters I've treated, over 90% have toxic-looking brains because of the carbon monoxide or cyanide they breathe from burning furniture

or burning buildings and fires. Anxiety and depression are not single or simple disorders, and if you want to take care of brain fog, you have to become serious about brain health. The bottom line is this: after looking at all these scans,

most psychiatric problems are not mental health issues, but brain health issues, and this one idea changes everything. Get your brain right, and your mind will follow. I'm convinced that the end of mental illness will begin with a revolution in brain health.

Needysabs: "My mental health really does be like," arrows up, arrows down, arrows up, arrows down. "How do you fix a broken brain, please?" I've been talking about that. This gives me an opportunity

To finish our BRIGHT MINDS mnemonic. If you want to keep your brain healthy or fix a broken brain, you have to prevent or treat the 11 major risk factors that steal your mind. BRIGHT MINDS is the mnemonic.

Blood flow, retirement and aging, inflammation, genetics, head trauma, toxins. M is something I call mind storms, which is abnormal electrical activity, especially in the temporal lobes, and it can come from a head injury; you could be born with it.

It causes people to be up and down, just like the icons you used. Sometimes anti-seizure medications can actually be really helpful to stabilize things. Sometimes a ketogenic diet can actually help. I found that can be really helpful in balancing the brain.

There are treatments like neurofeedback to help reset the brain. The second I in BRIGHT MINDS is immunity and infections, and I had no idea how prophetic that would be right before a pandemic, and let me be really clear about this,

your best defense against COVID-19 is not going to be a drug or a vaccine. Your best defense is your immune system. So keeping it healthy is critical. You do that by what you eat, by keeping your gut healthy, by making sure you have healthy vitamin D levels,

vitamin C levels, zinc, magnesium, selenium. All of those are nutrients to support your immune system, but this is why you need to stay away from sugar and foods that quickly turn to sugar because all of those are pro-inflammatory.

and can damage your immune system, as can gluten and dairy. The N in BRIGHT MINDS is neurohormone disorders. If your thyroid is high or low, you're going to be anxious or depressed. If your testosterone is low, odds are you're going to be sad

and have no motivation and no libido for a girl or a guy. The D is diabesity; it's this combination of high blood sugar, being pre-diabetic or diabetic, and overweight or obese. As your weight goes up, the actual physical size

and function of your brain goes down, which should scare the fat off anyone. And then the S in BRIGHT MINDS is sleep. Getting enough sleep is so important. So if you want to fix a broken brain, you can,

that's the exciting news that comes out of our imaging. You are not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better, but you have to love it; you have to treat it right. I'm in a new docuseries with Justin Bieber.

I've been Justin's doctor for the last five years. He would come, then go, then come, then go, and finally, he married Hailey, and he kept coming because she made him.

More than a year ago, he walked into my office and said, "My brain can have problems just like my heart can have problems. If you told me I had heart problems, I'd do everything you said. I'm going to start doing everything you say."

And then he got remarkably better. You can be better. This is Doctor Daniel Amen for Brain Support. To learn more about my work, you can get my book "The End of Mental Illness" or go to amenclinics.com

and learn about our clinics around the world. And a big thank you to WIRED, and I hope all of you stay safe.

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

WIRED

Introduction and initial questions about brain health

Dr. Daniel Amen introduces himself and the topic of brain health.

Question about forgetting common words and potential causes (lack of sleep, negative thoughts, low blood sugar).

Frequency of word forgetting as an indicator of potential problems.

Hypertension, heart disease, and anesthesia as factors affecting blood flow to the brain.

Lack of exercise as a risk factor for reduced blood flow.

Discussion on the impossibility of turning off parts of the human brain, unlike dolphins.

Consequences of a missing corpus callosum.

Importance of brain hemisphere connectivity.

Explanation of racing thoughts during sleep onset due to frontal lobe quieting.

Suggestion of journaling to manage racing thoughts.

Dr. Amen's personal bedtime routine including prayer and reviewing positive aspects of the day.

Importance of acknowledging positive moments to improve dream quality.

Viewer's experience of severe PTSD attacks, loss of appetite, anxiety, and intrusive thoughts.

Concept of global amygdala hijacking due to world events.

Increased baseline stress levels and potential for panic attacks and intrusive thoughts.

Importance of mental hygiene and managing automatic negative thoughts (ANTs).

Diaphragmatic breathing technique to calm the amygdala and activate the frontal lobe.

Impact of prolonged computer use on sleep

Viewer's experience of sleep difficulties after prolonged computer work.

Potential impact of computer screen light on sleep.

Recommendation of blue light blockers for nighttime screen use.

Importance of exercise to counteract the negative effects of prolonged computer use.

Persistent anxiety despite healthy habits

Viewer's question about persistent anxiety despite healthy lifestyle choices.

Prevalence of anxiety disorders and the need for daily stress reduction practices.

Suggestions for stress reduction: table tennis, meditation, hypnosis, and calming music.

Importance of daily relaxation practices.

Technique to challenge negative thoughts and develop an 'internal anteater'.

Creativity and brain function during showering

Viewer's experience of increased creativity and insightful thoughts during showering.

Explanation of how automatic processes free up brain capacity for creativity.

Dr. Amen's personal experience with creative insights during showering.

Importance of capturing creative thoughts to prevent forgetting them.

Viewer's experience of forgetting what they are talking about mid-conversation.

Concern about underlying brain health issues if not related to ADD/ADHD.

Introduction of the BRIGHT MINDS mnemonic for major risk factors affecting brain health.

Explanation of BRIGHT MINDS: Blood flow, Retirement/aging, Inflammation, Genetics, Head trauma, Toxins, Mind storms, Immunity/infections, Neurohormone disorders, Diabesity, Sleep.

Discussion on brain fog associated with anxiety and depression.

Explanation of brain fog as a common symptom of anxiety and depression.

Importance of maintaining brain health to prevent or treat brain fog.

Further explanation of the BRIGHT MINDS mnemonic and its components.

Toxins as a risk factor for brain fog, anxiety, and depression.

Conclusion: Most psychiatric problems are brain health issues.

Fixing a broken brain and concluding remarks

Viewer's question about fixing a broken brain.

Reiteration of BRIGHT MINDS mnemonic for maintaining or improving brain health.

Explanation of 'Mind storms' as a component of BRIGHT MINDS.

Importance of immunity and infections, especially in the context of a pandemic.

Personal anecdote about Justin Bieber's journey to better brain health.