Name: The 11 Risk Factors That Are Destroying Your Brain - Dr Daniel Amen
Uploaded: 2025-07-16T10:56:22.000Z
Duration: 1 h 48 min 34 s
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Is it right that your clinics have got the world's largest database of brain scans for psychiatry?

Nearly a quarter of a million spec scans. More. Yeah.

How does that level of data and information change the way that you approach mental health treatment?

Most psychiatric problems are not mental health issues.

They're brain health issues. Get your brain healthy and your mind will follow.

And when I first got scanned, ultimately it changed everything in my life.

Changes the time I go to bed. Changes what I eat. Changes how I think about other people.

It was liberating because it took psychiatry, which I think many people would agree is a soft science, in that it's the only medical profession that virtually never looks at the organ it treats.

And it turns it into hard science because now I have data on your brain and I'm going to make it better.

Right. If you work with me, we are going to make it better.

It completely upends psychiatry, whose outcomes are actually no better than they were in the 1950s, which is shameful and horrifying.

So mental health as a term being the manifestation, behavior, thought patterns, etc.

Brain health being the structural underpinnings that are sort of causing that to grow out of it.

Is that the distinction that we've got here?

When you call someone mental, you shame them. When you call them a brain, you elevate them.

And it's very clear to me that your brain, the physical functioning of your brain, the moment by moment function of your brain creates your mind.

And when your brain is healthy, your mind is better.

Now, you still have to program the mind, but if you think of it like hardware and software, if the hardware is not working right, the software will never run properly.

And then when it comes to relationships, I think about network connections.

It's how's this hardware and software connecting with this hardware and software.

And so you can see if a couple is having trouble, maybe you should look at their brain because it could be one or both of them are having hardware problems.

It's interesting that because our conscious experience is so salient to all of us, right?

The front and center of our daily, the way that we interact with the world, the way that we just interact with ourselves.

It doesn't surprise me that the focus in psychiatry and psychology and talk therapy is on, okay, how are you showing up? How's this manifesting?

As opposed to structurally what's going on underneath because structurally what's going on underneath is completely opaque to us until we can use imaging to actually get down and in there.

And the alternative is, well, tell me about how it makes you feel or please explain to me about what these word associations are.

Which can re-traumatize you because if you just talk about the trauma in your life, it's just like you went and relived it as opposed to let me get the circuits right.

And it's not just structurally. It's also functionally, right?

If you took an MRI of the brain or a CT scan of the brain that's looking at the structure, we do a study called SPECT that looks at function, looks at how it works.

And most psychiatric problems are functional problems, right?

The hardware, the structure looks fine, but it's not functioning right.

So SPECT basically tells us three things, good activity, too little or too much.

And I was on the Kardashians. I scanned Kendall Jenner after she got COVID.

And when you look at her brain, she has inflammation in the anxiety centers of her brain.

You look at it and you go, whoa, that's working way too hard.

So if I would have scanned her before COVID, those areas would have been healthy.

And is that her mind or is that her brain that's inflamed that's disrupting her mind?

It's interesting sort of balance between bottom up and top down, I think, when it comes to how we manage mental health problems.

I always teach my patients to kill the ants, the automatic negative thoughts that steal their happiness.

Let's use your brain to help it think in more helpful, rational ways.

But if the hardware is not right, it's a lot harder to manage the ants.

In fact, I often tell my patients, for women, four or five days before their cycle, they have more ants.

If they haven't slept well, say they took a flight and crossed time zones, they didn't sleep.

If they haven't eaten in a longer period of time and they have this hangry, low blood sugar, more ants.

And so get your brain healthy, balanced, fewer ants.

But everybody's got automatic negative thoughts.

Learning how to manage them is really important.

What does happiness and well-being look like from a brain perspective?

And it was right as the pandemic was ending.

And whenever I write a book, I'm like, what do I really want to think about for the next six months or year?

And I'm like, let's talk about happiness.

So I gave 500 consecutive patients the Oxford happiness questionnaire.

And if your brain is healthy, you're much more likely to be happy.

If you have low activity in the front part of your brain, you're less happy.

Brand new study just got accepted two weeks ago on negativity bias.

If you have low activity in the front part of the brain, not only are you not happy, you're much more likely to be negative.

I always tell my patients, I don't want to be anxious anymore.

I'm like, is it OK if I take you from 80, 0 to 100, from 80 to 50?

You don't drive at 125 miles an hour down the freeway.

You don't get the idea you're going to go rob a store and then you do it.

The anxiety will say you don't like institutional food or you don't look that good in orange stripes.

How many of the issues you think that we're seeing from a mental health perspective are top down versus bottom up?

I think it's probably 70-30, 70% brain and 30% undisciplined minds.

And my mission in life, why I think I'm on the planet, is actually to end the concept of mental illness by creating a revolution in brain health.

And if I can create that revolution in brain health, we're actually working on a national brain health initiative.

I think 70% of the mental health problems will go down.

Why do you think that this is the unhappiest generation at the moment?

They think of psilocybin as the cool new thing that I should do because it treats PTSD and depression.

And I think I should do it at the party I'm at Friday night.

I think there are a series of lies that are driving the problems we have.

And then if you take on top of that social media where you think everyone else's life is better than yours, the negative news that is actually designed to hook you to keep watching even though it makes you angry so that they can sell you more copper underwear.

And then take 70% of the calories the young people consume are ultra-processed.

We're putting toxic products on their bodies.

We're feeding them negative news, negative comparisons on social media.

And the way out, I believe, is brain health.

Because when you ask yourself this one question, and this is really the one question to unpack.

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The 11 Risk Factors That Are Destroying Your Brain - Dr Daniel Amen

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anxiety

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chronic