Dr. Daniel Amen: Struggling to focus, Stay Organized, or Feeling Overwhelmed by Your to-do List? ADHD Could Be Quietly Running Your Life (THIS is what to DO!)

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
How do I know the difference between whether I have
ADHD or I'm just distracted? Because we're living in an
overwhelming time.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
Short attention span, distractability, disorganization, impulsivity, and hyperactivity. They can't
sit still. Psychiatrist and clinical neuroscientist, doctor Daniel Amen.

Speaker 1 (00:20):
Fourth pioneered psychiatrist, says the feeling better starts with understanding
your brain.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
And ninety percent of mothers work outside the house. When
they have untreated add they often look depressed and they
get on something like buxapro, which actually makes them more
add happier, but more distracted, happier, less focused, happier, more impulsive.

(00:47):
To eliminate gluten, dairy, corn, soy, artificial dies and sweeteners,
seventy percent of the kids lost their ADP.

Speaker 1 (00:56):
No way, someone's sitting here thinking I'm not gonna achieve
anything with my life because I've got ADHD. What would
you say to them?

Speaker 2 (01:06):
The number one health and wellness podcast Jay Seti, J.

Speaker 1 (01:09):
Sheddy Sews only Jet. Hey, everyone, welcome back to on Purpose,
the place you come to become the happier, healthier, and
more healed. Today's guest is someone who has frequented the
podcast more than any other guest, the most requested, the
most often, and someone that I'm grateful to have known

(01:31):
for the last few years and become friends with. He's
the person that I reach out to when I have
a question around something I'm unsure about, when I'm testing something,
when I'm experimenting something. This is the person that I
write to and say, Hey, what do you think about this?
I'm talking about none other than doctor Daniel Aman, physician,
adult and child psychiatrist and founder of Aiman Clinics, which

(01:53):
has eleven US locations and the world's largest database of
brain scans for psychiatry with over two hundred and fifty
thousand spec scans from one hundred and fifty five countries.
Committed to revolutionizing brain health, Doctor Amen also founded brain MD,
the Change Your Brain Foundation, and Aiman University, which has

(02:16):
trained thousands of medical and mental health professionals. A leading
expert in brain and mental health, Doctor Amen has millions
of followers, produced seventeen national public television shows, garnered three
hundred plus million video views, and hosts that Change Your
Brain every Day podcast. If you haven't subscribed, I highly

(02:37):
recommend it. He's a twelve time New York Times bestselling
author and doctor Amen's highly anticipated new book, Change Your Brain,
Change Your Pain, will be released in twenty twenty six.
Please welcome back to On Purpose one of our dearest
friends of the show, doctor Daniel Aman Daniel. It's great
to have you here. As always, I still remember all

(02:58):
the years ago when I launched my podcast. You came
on the first ever year. We used to record from
my apartment in Hollywood, if you remember, and I'm just
so grateful that you did such a consistent guest.

Speaker 2 (03:11):
I opened one of my books with an experience on
the way to the podcast seeing a homeless person and
I'm like, I wonder what his brain looks like. I
love you, thank you, I'm honored to be back. I
always love our conversations.

Speaker 1 (03:30):
I want to start pretty direct. Why does it seem
like everyone today has a DHD?

Speaker 2 (03:36):
A lot of people do, but our society is dramatically
elevating it. When you think of the gadgets that steal
our attention, the ultra process foods that our brain really
doesn't like, the chronic stress, it's like, that's the simple answer,

(04:02):
and the simple answer is, let me medicate you and
you'll focus better, but not for long. And so as
our society has taken more medication, we have not gotten healthier.
So I think for people who really have ADD or ADHD,

(04:24):
and I use those terms interchangeably because the way we
diagnose people, it used to be ADD, and by a
vote of people they changed it to ADHD, which I
think was actually a big mistake. It's always been there, right.
You can actually look in the Old Testament and you go,
these people had add The real ADD is genetic. You

(04:47):
get it from your mom or dad. You can see
it in your people, you can see it in your ancestors,
and left untreated, they're very serious problems. So if I
think somebody really has ADD and that medicine would help them,
they always go what are the side effects? Always tell

(05:08):
them your appetitle be less. Take too late in the day,
You may have trouble sleeping. Sometimes people get headaches or
tummy aches, so it's almost always go away. If you're
prone to tics, you may have more tics. But I
want them to ask. The other question is what are
the side effects of not taking appropriate treatment for ADD?

(05:32):
And it's things like school failure and drug abuse and incarceration, divorce, bankruptcy.
I'm so happy we're talking about it because this is
a really serious issue because if you go to places
like prison, there's a high percentage of people who have

(05:53):
untreated ADD that did not have proper focus or impulse
can So.

Speaker 1 (06:00):
Would you say that is ADHD being overdiagnosed.

Speaker 2 (06:04):
I think it's overdiagnosed and underdiagnosed or overdiagnosed overall, because
people see this as this simple answer, underdiagnosed, especially in
people who are not hyperactive or females, because we still

(06:25):
have gender bias in this country. If you have a
little boy and he's not doing well in school, you
get really worried because you realize he's going to have
to take care of her family someday. For a girl
she's not doing as well well, you think maybe she's
not that smart, and you hope she marries somebody nice,
which is completely irrational given that we now have three

(06:49):
generations of women who are in the workforce. Here in California,
ninety percent of mothers work outside the house. And when
they have untreated add they often look depressed and they
get on something like lexapro on an SSRI, which actually

(07:12):
makes them more add but now they don't care that
they're more aded, because serotonin will talk about it. They
counterbalance each other. So serotonin is the neurotransmitter happiness, of flexibility,
Dopamine more than neurotransmitter focus motivation. Let's follow through and

(07:36):
get this done. And when one goes up, so serotonin
goes up, someone puts you on an SSRI, dopamine goes down,
and so happier but more distracted, happier, less focused, happier,
more impulsive.

Speaker 1 (07:53):
Yeah, and I think that's what so many people are
feeling today, where they naturally feel a sense of brain fog.
They are overwhelmed with information. I was reading somewhere that
we now consume seventy two gigabytes of information per day,
which someone had translated to reading one hundred thousand words

(08:14):
every single day, which when you think about that, that
is so overwhelming. So how do I know the difference
between whether I have ADHD or I'm just distracted? Because
we're living in an overwhelming time.

Speaker 2 (08:29):
So you look for patterns of behavior over time. So
the hallmark features of ADD or ADHD. The first one
is short attention span. It's really hard to focus, but
not for everything, and this is what fools people. It's
short attention span for regular routine everyday things, school work, homework,

(08:56):
paper work, chores, the things that make life work. And
if you have a half an hour of homework, parents
will often say it takes him or her two hours
to do and I have to structure their time. That's
very common. But for things that are new, novel, highly stimulating,

(09:21):
or frightening, people with add can pay attention just fine
because they have their own intrinsic dopamine. And what I
find is love is a drug. Love is dopamine. So
say you're getting all c's and d's except one A
and the AA, whether it's in history or whatever, it's

(09:44):
because you love the teacher or you love the subject.
But it's not this one thing we should be looking at.
It's the pattern of your attention span over time. The
second is they're easily distracted. And what that means is
they see too much, they hear too much, they taste

(10:04):
too much, they smell too much, so they're constantly distracted
by the world coming at them. The brain is really
good at suppressing unnecessary noises or unnecessary thoughts. But when
your prefrontal cortex, so we'll talk about that, the front

(10:27):
part of your brain, the front third of your brain,
largest in humans in any other animal by far. When
it's sleepy, it can't sort of suppress the noise. I
grew up three houses from the freeway in southern California
at lots of noise, but I never heard it because

(10:48):
my brain went, oh, you don't need to listen to that,
so it would suppress it.

Speaker 1 (10:54):
To someone who has ADHD, it can't suppress it.

Speaker 2 (10:57):
Interesting, and so the world comes at them too much.
And you see it with the clothes they wear. They
hate seams and they hate tags because their body feels it.
So I've been married twice. Both of my wives have
add of one form or another. And the first time,

(11:18):
when I got married, I went, it's like, right after
I got married, I went to my closet to get
a shirt and I noticed the tag was cut out
of my shirt, and I'm like, that's weird. And then
I looked at all of my shirts and all of
the tags were out, and I felt violated. And I
went into the living room with the shirt and I'm like,

(11:40):
why is my shirt missing the tag? She goes, oh,
don't you hate tags like I hate tags. I thought
you'd really like that I cut them all out for
you and I'm like, I've never felt a tag in
my life. Please don't damage my clothes.

Speaker 1 (11:56):
That's yeah, that's fascinating to me. So because I can
relate to what you said, I'm very unaffected by outside noise.
And definitely my brain creates the same boundary that you
said yours does, where I could be in a really
noisy environment, but I can go totally internal if I'm
focused on something. Now, does that mean that we're born

(12:18):
with ADHD or can we train attention?

Speaker 2 (12:22):
Well, we can train attention, but ADHD I'm talking about
is what you're born with. What you see it in
your mom, you see it in your dad. I have
I told you my first wife had add which means
three of my children have it. So I know more

(12:44):
about this than I want to. And if you think
of distractability, what does an orgasm require focus? You have
to pay attention to the feeling long enough in order
to have an organ And so if that becomes really hard,
well that's a problem for both the person and their

(13:07):
partner because their partner will like, oh, she doesn't love
me or I'm not enough, when it has nothing to
do with that. It's just they are easily distracted people
with the real ADD they need white noise at night,
and I'm like, it's the middle of winter, it's Washington,
d C. The fan is on, Like why is the

(13:32):
fan on. It's like, Oh, I need the noise or
I won't be able to sleep because I hear everything
that's in the house so short attention span enough for
everything easily distracted, disorganized, So it's hard for them. It's
not natural for them. If you look at their rooms,
their desks, their book bags, their filing cabinets and time,

(13:55):
they're often late and I like to be early. I'm like,
if I have a flight, I'm there two hours early
because my brain thinks of all the things that could
go wrong on the way to the airport, and the
flight's important to me. People with add's last minute, last minute,
And I used to fight, I'm like, no, we need

(14:19):
to go, and then I just started lying, it's like
a flight, the flight is at noon, when really it
was at one o'clock. And because our organization wasn't such,
she didn't really catch on the other.

Speaker 1 (14:34):
How much of that is training? Like I feel like
I grew up with a mom who is very meticulous
with time. So my mom trained me to always believe
that if you're not early, you're late. And so I
also live in a world that you do, which is
I'm always at the airport early. I'm always making sure
of anything that could go wrong, security could take a
bit longer. There's so many other things that to me,

(14:57):
I've always felt came because I had a mom who
are super organized, and I've inherited that by watching her.
Even now, like my mom trained me how to make
sure we locked all the doors that night, and you know,
we didn't grow up in a really safe area, so
there was this very hyper attention to make sure. So
I'm very good at.

Speaker 2 (15:15):
That, and it could have been because her brain was
busy in the front. And she also gave that to you, right,
So some of it is training. But if she had
add she wouldn't give that to you, and you would
often be chronically stressed because she wouldn't get you to

(15:37):
school on time, or she wouldn't be there on time
to pick you up, or it's really important you have
soccer's practice and you're late. The level of stress in
add ADHD families is very high because of the distractability,

(15:59):
the disorganization, and the fourth one is procrastination. They don't
do things until someone's mad at them to get it done.
They need stress in order to get stuff done, and
that just makes everybody around them stressed, and it makes
them stress because you know, they're often late because they

(16:20):
actually don't start getting ready until it's like, oh my god,
I'm late, and then they always show up like either
right on time, flustered or ten minutes late, always apologizing.

Speaker 1 (16:32):
And that's different from people who perform well under stress.
This is someone who needs stress.

Speaker 2 (16:38):
In order to perform, in order to perform. Right when
I first started imaging, it was on an add woman.
So I went into a lecture on brain spect imaging
in my hospital in April nineteen ninety one, and I
walked out and I had a new patient. Her name
was Sandy and she was forty four, and she was
beautiful and under employed jenn IQ of one hundred and

(16:59):
forty four, and she was a lapteck and she was
in the hospital because she had a suicide attempt the
night before in an impulsive act when she and her
husband had a fight. And I'm like, add add add.
She had an eight year old son that had add
and I'm like, I think you have ADD and she's like, oh,
adults can't have it, thinking to myself but not saying

(17:21):
it because I don't have ADD. It's like, I'm the doctor.
Adults totally can have ADD. And I said, can I
scan you? Because I've just learned about this new technology.
And I scanned her twice, once at rest, once when
she did a concentration task, and when she tried to concentrate,
the front part of her brain shut down rather than

(17:46):
what it should have done was turn on. And I
put the this is why I love imaging. I put
the scans on her hospital table and I was explaining
to them and she started to cry and she said,
you mean it. It's not my fault. And that's the
moment I got hooked on imaging because I already knew

(18:06):
the diagnosis. She it immediately evaporated shame and then she's like,
all right, let's talk about adult ADD And she had
all of the things, including the impulse control issues, but
because she was so bright, she didn't bring enough negative

(18:28):
attention to herself and never gotten the help. And after
I treated her she finished college, she stopped picking on
her husband because another trait that a lot of people
don't understand is they become negative seeking, conflict seeking, and
excitement seeking, and those are all dopamine driven behavior. So

(18:50):
if you have a low level of dopamine, well, if
you pick a fight with someone, now all of a sudden,
there's some excitement going on. If you jump out of
an airplane that has a whole bunch of dopamine associated
with it, and I experienced this, it is that poking.
It's like we're going on vacation. Why are we having

(19:10):
a problem and activating their frontal lobes, they're less negative
and I'm just publishing a study on negativity bias, so
I'm very interested in are you positive? Are you negative? Now?
Unbridled positive thinking is a disaster you diarly, but negative

(19:32):
thinking you actually have low function in your frontal lobes.
And many of the add people I see tend to
see the glass as half empty, and that wears on them.
So if we highlight the short attention span on for everything, disorganization, procrastination,

(19:56):
impulse control, it's like the break in the brain is vulnerable,
and they say things often that you shouldn't say. It's
like the inside voice gets out. They do things that
it's like, I wish I hadn't done that, so they

(20:17):
actually live with a lot of regrant. And your prefrontal
cortex is called the executive part of the brain because
it's like the boss at work. It's involved in focus, forethought, judgment,
impulse control, organization, planning, empathy, learning from the mistakes you make,

(20:42):
and when it's sleepy, you have all those problems, which
just describes ADD and strengthening. It is critical to your humanity.
Did you know that sociopaths have ten percent less volume

(21:04):
in their prefrontal cortex, so they're a little less human
if you will even has that ten percent, it's huge.
And this is why you should never let a child
hit a soccer ball with their forehead. It's just so stupid.
And like, I'm not a huge fan of allowing kids

(21:27):
to play tackle football because it's more likely to damage
the part of them that is the boss. And people
who have ADD are often executives of their own companies
because they don't work well often with other people, and

(21:49):
so they're entrepreneurial. And some wildly famous people have said
they had ADD, like the person who started jet Blue.
He was public with that. It can look false, it
can be masquerade. You have add because your parents gave
you an iPhone when you were a year old, and

(22:10):
I think we're wising up. That's not a good thing
to do. But still, children should not have smartphones until
they're fifteen sixteen social media. Australia banned social media under sixteen.
I think that's so great, right, taking the neuroscience and

(22:30):
making it public policy. California, you can't start school in
the morning before eight o'clock. Taking what we know with neuroscience,
kids who get just an hour less sleep have a
higher incidence of depression and suicide. So all right, cut
out the zero periods. I love that neuroscience and then

(22:50):
public policy.

Speaker 1 (22:52):
Before we dive into the next moment, let's hear from
our sponsors. Thanks for taking a moment for that. Now
back to the discussion. Do we know what causes ADHD?

Speaker 2 (23:03):
It's genetic People are not producing enough dopamine, and the
medicines we use, like ritalin or adderall they increase the
availability of dopamine. Now, the problem is is if you
don't really have it, what you have is societally induced ADHD.

(23:24):
The medicine will disrupt you and make you worse and
early on, I realize when I scan people, because I've
scanned thirty or forty thousand people who have add of
one type or another, it's not one thing. Early on,
I'm like, oh, it's seven different things. And so my

(23:45):
book Healing add I talk about see and heal the
seven types, and so can I talk about the type?

Speaker 1 (23:53):
I was just about to ask my next question, you
are you already? You're already one step ahead of me.

Speaker 2 (23:57):
So let me also Type one is the class because
most people think of ADHD short attention span, distractability, disorganization, impulsivity,
and hyperactivity. They can't sit still. And one of my kids,
when she was born, we thought she was going to
be a boy because in her mother's womb she was

(24:18):
so active. And the law is the more active a
baby is inside their mother, more likely they are to
be a boy. She wasn't. When I held her older sister,
we could watch movies, she'd sit on my lap. She
was just calm. Her sister. We tried to hold her,
was like trying to hold a live salmon. She's so wiggly.

(24:39):
And then I take her to the mall. She would
have been one of those children on the little yellow leashes.
The big bird leashes in the mall. But I wrote
a column in the local newspaper, so when I went
to the mall, people recognize me. It's like doctor Aamon,
I loved your column. Why is your child on a leash?
So what I used to do with Caitlon is put
her in her stroller and and tie her shoes together

(25:02):
so she couldn't get out because she's like, where are
you going? And I remember just holding her hand. I
take my little pinky and wrap it around her wrist
because and I had spiritual problems because of this child.
We would go to church and I don't know why
Catholics take children into church rather than you know, send
them to children's church. But anyways, she was so active

(25:26):
and blurting out. And I'm like the only child psychiatrist
in the county. And if my child is the worst one,
that's bad for business. So I used to take her
out and threaten her life and not worried about her
eternal stule and I adore and she's thirty seven now

(25:48):
and have then is just like her, which is you know,
my six year old granddaughter. It's just like her. It's genetic.
And when we've scott her diagnosed. The doctor, who was
really great, looked at me and then looked at her
mother and goes, so, who has this because it's genetic.

(26:10):
And I'm like, it's not me. I do everything early.
Now we're written forty two books, every one of them
has been handed in early. And her mom goes, it's
not me, but that I was so grateful because it
took her like twelve years to get through college, and
she just she asked her this one question, This is
a great adult add question because she was still in

(26:31):
college at the time. She goes, how do you study?
She goes, oh, I can never study at home. I
get so distracted. I go inside my little car underneath
the street lamp, no kids, no noise, nothing there. I
can study. And the doctor goes, you have add It
was very helpful for me and for her.

Speaker 1 (26:51):
Type one.

Speaker 2 (26:52):
That's type one. Classic Type two is inattentive add short
attention and span, destractability, disorganized, procrastinate. But they're not impulsive,
and more common in girls. They're not hyperactive. In fact,
they can be a little bit hypo active. And those

(27:16):
first two types were described in the DSM when they
first created this diagnostic category. In nineteen eighty I describe
the next five types. The third one is over focused ADD,
where the problem is not so much you can't concentrate,
it's you can't shift your attention that you get stuck.

(27:39):
And if you can't shift your attention, you cannot pay attention.
But it's a different mechanism, and I found this to
be particularly true in children and grandchildren of alcoholics, and
they tend to be argumentative, oppositional, worry. If things don't
go there way, they get upset and on the surface

(28:03):
they appear selfish. They're really not selfish. They're just not flexible,
and stimulants tend to make them more worried and more upset.
Type four is called limbic ADD. It's where their emotional
brain is too busy, and it's sort of like ADD

(28:25):
plus mild depression, and the glasses always half empty for them.
Type five I think such an interesting one as temporal
low ADD. They have problems in one or both of
their temporal lobes. Often goes with learning problems, but mood, instability, irritability,
temper problems. One of my first great cases was Chris.

(28:48):
He's his third psychiatric hospitalization this time, he took a
pencil and put it in the neck of one of
his classmates. Stimulants made him hallucinate. All the other medicines
and I'm like, I'm scanning you, and he had left
temper low. Problem goes with violence. I put them on
an anti convulsant and anti seizure medicine. Became the sweetest kid,

(29:13):
and then he still had trouble concentrating. So then after
I got the temporal opright, I gave him a stimulant. Masterful,
I mean, the kid just did phenomenally well and then
the ring of fire. That's what I may be most
known for. The problem is not low activity, it's too
much activity. Please don't give them a stimulant because they

(29:35):
can become violent and aggressive. Actually use the supplement to
calm things down in their brain, very effective. And then
the last one's anxious. Add they're really anxious, and so
they tend to be early to things, but disorganized, distructed,
so on. So knowing the type, and that's why Riddlin

(29:57):
has a bad reputation. For the right brain, it's miraculous.
For the wrong brain, it's a nightmare.

Speaker 1 (30:05):
A lot of people who have ADSD You say, they
feel emotions much more strongly and deeply. Can they start
to regulate their emotions? Is there a way to do
that or is that medication? Well?

Speaker 2 (30:16):
And sometimes with the medicine they don't like it because
it feels like it suppresses their emotion. Interesting and my
daughter Caitlin, when I put her on Riddlin because she
was hyperactive, and then she was dramatically less hyperactive. But
I found I had to titrate the dose down because

(30:39):
I could see it put in a lid on her personality,
which is not what you want to do. And so
often you want to work with someone who's really knowledgeable
to titrate the dose up and down effectively. If you're
a baseball player, so just thinking of athletes, the medicine

(31:00):
gives you a better batting average. If you're a linebacker
in football, you might be a little bit less aggressive
because you're more thoughtful. Right, So if you want to
play with abandon, you probably don't want to stimulant on board.
But I find for some of my professional athletes, they're

(31:20):
just much more focused and less likely to get technical
fouls because they're not a hothead. And when you see
the world like I see it and you're watching, you know,
someone have a meltdown on the court, I'm like, I
wonder what's going on in that person's brain, right, rather
than just judge them as bad. I haven't scanned Draymond Green,
but I want to.

Speaker 1 (31:40):
I saw a study that found that children with untreated
ADHD are nearly twice as likely to develop an alcohol
use disorder or other substance abuse problem.

Speaker 2 (31:52):
Why is that because of the lack of impulse control
and they don't like how they feel. Right, if you've
been told every to settle down, or you brought negative
attention to yourself over time, it activates your emotional brain
and you want to settle it down, and you don't

(32:15):
have good forethought or good impulse control, and you're more
likely to drink. And it's just so prevalent plus with society.
During the Super Bowl there were thirty beer commercials and
the rest of them were jack in the boxes. Right,
So it's like we're just being flooded with these awful

(32:36):
messages that take people have add make them more add
and then they engage in habits that aren't helpful.

Speaker 1 (32:43):
Do you think there should be a ban on alcohol
adveisements as much as there is obviously on smoking, Like.

Speaker 2 (32:49):
Yeah, it's not health food. I mean, the American Cancer
Society came out three years ago and said you shouldn't
drink because it increases your risk of seven different types
of cancer. The Surgeon General last year said we should
put alcohol cancer warning label signs on alcohol. I think

(33:10):
when you just look at our society, from the digital
addictions and social media and technology, to the bad food,
the ultra process food that so many people that's eighty
or ninety percent of their diet, to marijuana's innocuous, which
is a complete lie. Alcohols a health food. No. And

(33:33):
now the big new thing is psilocybin. It's great medicine.
It's an antidepressant, it'll treat your PTSD, and it's increased
psychosis to emergency rooms three hundred percent. It is not innocuous.
Now might it become a good treatment. I don't know,

(33:56):
but I feel like I've seen this party before, right,
the big benefits of being seventies, You've seen lots of
things the early eighties. Benzos are innocuous, their Mommy little helper.
We know benzos are highly addictive and increase the risk
of dementia. The early nineties. Alcohol's good for your heart.

(34:17):
You should drink. It's a lie. You shouldn't drink. It
increases your risk of stupidity and cancer. Right, if you're
add and you have sleepy frontalobes, now you drink, you
have sleepier frontallobes. Still not a good thing. And then
pain is the fifth fvital sign.

Speaker 1 (34:35):
Right.

Speaker 2 (34:36):
Purdue Pharmaceuticals came out with let's get more people to
take opiates and came out with these campaigns and spent
billions of dollars on marketing, and it was a disaster.
And then the whole marijuana is innocuous. During not this
presidential campaign, the last one, Joe Biden was debating and

(35:00):
they asked him should the federal government legalize marijuana? And
he said no, I don't think there's enough research. And
Corey Booker, the senator from New Jersey, shames him on
national television and he said, man, are you high? Like
the science is settled. Well, as more places legalize it,

(35:25):
the science is getting settled. It's bad for us. Right,
if you use as a teenager, it increases anxiety, depression, psychosis,
and suicide in your twenties. I published a study on
one thousand marijuana users, every area of the brain is
lower and blood flow and I got so much grief

(35:47):
for it. And two months ago in jama psychiatry on
one thousand marijuana users, the memory and learning centers are
lower in blood flow and activity. This is not in as.
It's all these lies that then increase the expression of ADD.

(36:07):
And so you know, how do you know you look
at someone's history over time, right, all of us have
ADD moments, but that's not ADD. Having ADD is these
hallmark symptoms have followed you most of your life.

Speaker 1 (36:25):
So for parents who are listening right now and they're
starting to see a young child maybe have one of
the types or some of the symptoms, what would you
encourage them to do?

Speaker 2 (36:35):
You know, I have a free online test called addtype
test dot com. They could take that for people. If
you've been struggling and it's like you really believe it's
not just environmental, right, I mean, the first thing, if
your child struggling in school, make sure they're not taking
their iPad to bed so often it's because kids are

(36:59):
sleep deprived. They look like they have ADD because parents
are really not properly supervising the kids. Do a digital detox.
And then I have to say this because there's this
great study published in The Lancet replicated that when you
put kids on an elimination diet, So what does that mean?

(37:20):
You eliminate gluten, dairy, corn, soy, artificial dyes and sweeteners,
seventy percent of the kid's less their add No way,
So the first thing is not let me give you
this drug. In my mind, the first thing is do
a digital detox and do an elimination diet and do

(37:41):
it for a month. And it's like, oh, I can't
do that. It's like, it's not that hard. My wife
Tanner wrote a cookbook, Healing add at Home through Food
or the Brain Warrior's Way. That's her big cookbook. It's
been reprinted like fifty three times. I'm so proud of her.
And fine foods. The kids love that, love them bad

(38:03):
food is so important. Do that first. And I always
tell them like, look, if they really have ADD or ADHD,
they're going to have it three months from now or
four months from now. Let's do this and see. I
have an online course called Healing add at Home in

(38:24):
thirty Days and it's basically, before you give them medicine,
do these things first, and it's so helpful.

Speaker 1 (38:34):
Why does changing our diet affect ADHD. Why does removing gluten,
removing processed foods, et cetera. Why does that impact it.

Speaker 2 (38:44):
Your brain's two percent about your body's weight. It uses
twenty to thirty percent of the calories you consume, and
so if you have a fast food diet, you're likely
to have a fast food mind. And both gluten and
dairy when they go to your stomach, when it mixes

(39:07):
with stomach acid, it turns into something called gluteomorphins, which
work on the heroin centers or the opiate centers of
your brain, and it just sort of spaces you out
for milk. It's casio morphins. And it's why we love pizza.
If you think of gluten and dairy, right, it's pizza.

(39:31):
But it's also why you feel spacey afterwards. And too often,
what do we feed kids Like when I was growing up,
it was frosted flakes or pop tarts or a muffin
or doughnuts. And if you get a sugar burst, well
half an hour later, your brain is walking in mud.

(39:53):
And yet that's what we feed children in the morning.
Add kids who have protein in the morning, their medicine
works longer throughout the day. And so in the fifties,
you know, we grew up with bacon and eggs and
much better than the processed cereals.

Speaker 1 (40:16):
I love your thoughts on how to do it before
we get to medicine, before we get to medication, looking
at technology, looking at our diet, and that way you
could potentially save yourself from having to go down the
medicine room. Right.

Speaker 2 (40:31):
And then parents who are generally resistant to the idea
of medicine, and perhaps more so than they should be,
because I think if someone really has add withholding medicine
is like withholding glasses from someone who can't see, and

(40:53):
that's neglect. And we're in this society, right. The more
educated you are, it's like, oh no, I'd never give
my child medicine. And then all of a sudden, you
see they're failing in school. And if you struggle in school,
you begin to hang out with the other kids who
are struggling, which may not be ultimately in their best interest.

(41:18):
If you haven't been diagnosed by the time year ten,
odds are your self esteem has been negatively impacted because
people have said repeatedly to you you're smarter than this,
You could do better than this. Try harder. But what
I showed on the scans when they try to concentrate,

(41:40):
their brain drops in activity. In fact, the harder they try,
the worse it gets.

Speaker 1 (41:48):
Why is that.

Speaker 2 (41:49):
Because their brain is turning off when it should be
off their frontal lobe. If you don't have enough dopamine
to keep your frontal lobe engaged, it sort of withers
with effort. And what does that teach you to give up?
It's this idea of learned helplessness. There's a psychologist who's

(42:13):
really famous, Marty Seligman. You probably know of him because
he's famous for positive psychology. He helps start that movement,
but he was way famous before then because he coined
this term learned helplessness. With depression. It's like you try
and it doesn't work. You try and it doesn't work,
You try and it doesn't work, and then you say

(42:34):
to hell with it, and you stop trying. And that
happens with so many people who have add In fact,
when I diagnose and treating an adult woman a common scenario,
she brings her hyperactive son to me and I'm like,
where did this come from? And say it comes from

(42:54):
the mom, and then I treat her, she gets dramatically better,
and then she gets depressed because she starts thinking about
what would my life have been like if someone would
have noticed this, if I would have been treated. Now
that's you don't give her an antidepressant for that, You like,

(43:16):
do grief work with her, and like, okay, but now
you know so your son doesn't have to go through this,
and you don't want to argue with the past. You
want to look forward.

Speaker 1 (43:28):
Have you seen people break the cycle? As we're talking about,
it's genetically passed down? If you saw in your parents,
have you seen that be possible? Is it possible to
break the cycle completely so that you don't pass it on?

Speaker 2 (43:41):
You know, I think so, But we're starting at such
a disadvantage. And you know as I think, because you know,
my real passion in life is to create a brain
health revolution. And where would that start. It has to
start with kids before they have babies. Because when that

(44:02):
mother was born, she was born with all of the
eggs in her ovaries she will ever have, and so
if we're going to help her children be healthier, we
have to get to her when she's a child. And
help her make really good decisions when she's a teenager.

(44:27):
And too often parents go, oh, I don't have control,
and they abdicate their parental role over teenagers on who
they hang out with and what they eat, and you know,
we're not drinking together, and we're not smoking pot together,
and you know, like all the insanity that's going on
in our society today. I think we have to get

(44:50):
to their ovaries early, because if you're born with all
of the eggs, you'll ever have. Whatever you do in
life turns on on or off certain genes, making illness
more or less likely in you, yes, but also your
babies and grand babies. So that's how we decrease the incidents,

(45:15):
is we get mom and dad, because this sperm really
matters to be as healthy as possible.

Speaker 1 (45:23):
I read in the National Institute of Mental Health. They
found that five point four percent of adult men and
three point two percent of adult women have ADHD. Why
do you believe that ADHD is more common in men.

Speaker 2 (45:36):
But is more common because men have sleepier frontal lobes
than women. So I published the world's largest imaging study
on gender and looked at the difference. In forty six
thousand patients. Difference between male brains and female brains. Females
have much stronger, much more active prefrontal cortex. Men have

(46:02):
sleep here prefrontal cortex. And what's the one statistic that
identifies that who goes to jail? Men fourteen times more
than females. So they have a relative dopamine deficit compared
to females. But girls still have it, and when left untreated,

(46:28):
it just devastates their lives. And how you can diagnose
it in a teenage girl is just look at their
love pattern. They get all excited about falling in love,
dopamine burst. After it wears off, right, it's like, don't
get married in the next two months because you never
really know. After the dopamine wears off, the cocaine effect

(46:51):
wears off, they start picking on their partner and they
start fighting, and so new love fighting and then they
break up and there's lots of drama around breaking up,
and they get suicidal sometimes, and then they fall in
love again and then they pick on their new person
and then they break up and they lots of drama

(47:13):
around it. And if you see that pattern repeatedly, screen
them for add very important.

Speaker 1 (47:21):
How does ADHD show up differently for men and women.

Speaker 2 (47:24):
So men tend to be more hyperactive, women tend to
have more the inattentive type. Women also tend to have
the over focused type more men the temporal lobe type,
because the temporal lobe type can be in part born
out of a concussion or a head injury. And you

(47:45):
know people have add have way more concussions and accidents,
and the reason for that is the shorter attention span
and impulse control issues.

Speaker 1 (47:57):
I think it's sitting here listening to you and trying
to understand your how even the way you broke down
the seven types of ADHD, you start to think about
how ADHD doesn't just affect an individual's focus and attention
and performance at school, as you rightly said earlier, it
starts to affect your relationships. Right If you have a parent,

(48:19):
and I want to talk about all of these independently.
If you have a parent that has ADHD and they
have passed or haven't passed it on to you, that
has an impact on you. If you're dating someone. You
were talking about your first two wives, when you're dating
someone who has ADHD, that has an impact on you.
If you have ADHD and you're dating someone who doesn't.

(48:39):
That has an impact on you and them. It starts
to impact all areas of life. And because we have
such a limited understanding of it, we can get frustrated
when someone clips out our labels, or we can get
upset when someone is always late and we say, oh,
you don't care about me, you're always late, like it
can actually start to become more emotional. And it is

(49:00):
just biological, chemical, and physical.

Speaker 2 (49:02):
It's biological for sure that gives you psychological effects, and
the chronic stress damages your immune system for you and
the people who love you, clearly social, I think one
of the reasons for divorce is untreated add I think

(49:23):
it's often the hidden cause, and it's spiritual because you
just believe you're less than that God who you see
that doesn't care about you.

Speaker 1 (49:36):
What do we do with that feeling? Because that's the
feeling for people who have ADHD, and they feel that
failing at life, they feel that underperforming, they feel like
they're not going to succeed. But earlier you were saying
to me, actually, some of the great CEOs of big
companies of people with ADHD. But first, here's a quick
word from the brands that support the show. All right,

(49:59):
thank you, do you to our responses. Now let's dive
back in. So walk me through. If someone's sitting here thinking, well,
I'm not going to achieve anything in my life because
I've got ADHD, what would you say to them?

Speaker 2 (50:09):
You're responsible to get it treated, because with treatment you
can be amazing because you often have the ability to
see things other people don't see. And it's the undisciplined
mind that creates so much trouble. So you know, at

(50:32):
Aiman Clinics, we want to look at your brain. Of course,
we want to get it healthy, and we get it healthy,
whether it's diet, supplements, exercise, medicine, whatever tools we have
a lot of people do really well with nerve feedback,
where you can actually measure the electrical activity in your
brain and then through exercises, strengthen it. So I like

(50:54):
nerve feedback a lot. But then you also have to
reprogram your mind. And I talk about killing the ants,
the automatic negative thoughts that steal your happiness, and people
who have add often have a high negativity bias, and
so learning to direct your thoughts in a positive and

(51:16):
a helpful and a hopeful way absolutely critical to overcome it.
The first exercise I do with all of my patients,
but particularly my add patients, is called the one page miracle.
On one piece of paper, write down what you want relationships?
What do you want? Like with ten, I want a kind, caring, loving, supportive,

(51:38):
passionate relationship. Don't always feel it. I get rude thoughts
that show up, but I don't say them. Why because
I inhibit them because they don't fit. Most people in
life don't do this exercise, which I find crazy. What
do you want your work or school? What do you

(52:00):
want for your money? What do you want for your
physical health, your emotional health, your spiritual What do you want?
We put it on one paper, and then the question
always becomes does it fit? Does my behavior fit the
goals I have for my life? So that's what your
prefrontal cortex does, right, It sets goals and helps you

(52:23):
continue to achieve them despite the obstacles that you have.
So I remember, I'm in college and I want to
go to medical school, and I took organic chemistry and
I got a forty two on my first desk, and
I'm like, Okay, this is going to be an obstacle.
Get a tutor, and I ended up obviously going to

(52:44):
medical school. But it's your If it's low, you get
a forty two and then you give up. You don't
have that persistence. But the first step always is what
do you want? Is my behavior in me what I want?
And they often come into my office and they go

(53:05):
doctor em and I'm brutally honest, and in my mind
I'm like, oh, they have ADD And then I'm like,
but that's usually not helpful relationships re tact. They require forethought.
Jerry Seinfeld once said the brain is a sneaky organ.
We all have weird, crazy, stupid, sexual, violent thoughts that

(53:29):
nobody should ever hear. But when you have ADD your
inside voice gets out when it can be hurtful. So
that's the first step. I know what you want? And
then is my behavior getting me what I want? And
if my behavior is not getting me what I want?
Is my brain? Could my brain be better?

Speaker 1 (53:51):
And therefore that leads to the treatment. Because I think
a lot of people are waking up every day and
they're thinking kind of like what you said that lend helplessness.
They're like, well, I'm eating right and I am working out,
and i am trying to be motivated or maybe even
I don't make it to the workout every day. I'm
really trying, but every time I try it, just lose
motivation and I lose energy. Is that something you hear

(54:12):
quite often?

Speaker 2 (54:13):
I do, And that's why we scan people twice, once
at rest, once when they concentrate, and if their brain
drops with activity, it's like, Okay, we have to treat this,
and you know, we can try to treat it with supplements,
and I like them a lot. I own brain MD
and I want to support you people who take EPA

(54:34):
fish oil. Omega three fatty acids helps with add also
helps with mood. There are five studies with saffron spice.
Saffron as effective as ritulent in some studies.

Speaker 1 (54:48):
That's amazing and.

Speaker 2 (54:50):
It helps twenty five randomized controlled trials that saffron helps
with depression compare to antidepressants. So I love saffron. Sfron.

Speaker 1 (55:02):
It tells a kid because it's it's in the Indian
diet as a very staple thing.

Speaker 2 (55:06):
Right, And there's law in India if you're too happy,
you must have had saffron. Omega three fatty acids, B
vitamins pechnogenol, which is from pinebark. It's been found to
be helpful. So I start based on your type. Okay,
here are the supplements. Let's get your diet right, and

(55:27):
then if those things don't work, then I think, well
we should consider medication.

Speaker 1 (55:32):
Yeah, I'm so glad that you're so clear on that.
I know whenever there's a new discovery, I'm always texting
you going what do you think about this? And what
do you think about that? Because I appreciate your perspective
because it's not coming from an opinion and it's not
coming from a single case. And as I'm listening to
you today, what I really take away is that everything
is so specific and everything is so individual and personal.

(55:55):
It's not like like you were saying, like some medication
could actually be brilliant, and you said even miraculous for
someone's brain, but if it's a different type of brain,
it doesn't work that well. But we have this one
size fits all model that we keep rolling out. Why
do we even get to make these big claims off
something being innocuous, or something being the perfect cure, or

(56:17):
alcohol is good for your heart or everything that you've
been mentioning.

Speaker 2 (56:20):
Well, you just have to follow the money. How's it
legal to say out of it is driven by the
alcohol industry, the marijuana industry, and now you know all
of these billionaires investing in mushrooms in psilocybin. And I'm
like a huge fan of Lion's main and we make
something called smart mushrooms. But you have to be very

(56:44):
careful with something that disrupts someone's brain and someone's mind.
And for some people it can be helpful. For other
people it's a nightmare. And I'm like, first, do no harm, right,
So the first thing if you're depressed or you have
PTSD is let's get your diet right. Then let's get

(57:07):
you to exercise and not believe every stupid thing you
think and take Omega three fatty acids. Or if you
have PTSD EMDR. I'm a huge fan of psychotherapy called
eye movement, desensitization and reprocessing. It's like, first, do no harm.
Let's make sure we're doing the simple things first.

Speaker 1 (57:30):
I really wanted to talk to you today about dating
someone with ADHD. Our community asks us so many questions
about dating, marriage, being in a relationship, and as I'm
listening to you today, it's very evident that sometimes our
issue with our partners is because of their ADHD. And
if you're coming from a family where you didn't have that,

(57:51):
now someone being late, or now someone being disorganized, or
now someone overthinking kind of causes you an issue with
how you like life to function. The amount of people
that say to me like, well, you know he just
never wants to organize a trip, or you know she's
always late, or whatever it may be, that's very common
to hear if you're dating someone all in your case,
married to someone with ADHD, what should you be prepared

(58:14):
for and what you should you be thinking about?

Speaker 2 (58:18):
So Tanna has said publicly she has ADHD. We actually
had a PBS show healing ADD and she talked about
it and our first date, like, I had no idea
she had ADD. But when she described her mom, she's
classic ADHD, and Tanna just thought it was an excuse
to fail. Oh this person has ADD and then she

(58:40):
realized her over exercising the pot of coffee every day.
That's like, oh, no, I do have this, and she's
not as organized as I am and never met a
rapper she actually wanted to throw away. And I remember
being irritated about the rap her, and then I thought,

(59:02):
I had this very interesting vision is I saw the
counter clean without her there, and I got really sad.
And so I'm like, that's just not worth the fight.
Throw the wrapper away and what She's so awesome in

(59:23):
so many ways, and she has the anxious add type.
So she's always on time, so that's not an issue,
and we hire people that organize her and it just
as fine. But if she wasn't as kind as she was,
if she didn't love me, yeah, I wouldn't be with her.

(59:45):
I was with Dean Ornish. Do you know Dean Ornish.
He's a internest but he's written a lot of work
on diet and health, and he wrote this one book
called Love and Survival and it's one of my favorite
books I ever read. And as I was with him,
I was like a little kid excited to talk to him.

(01:00:07):
And because with my first wife, I mean, you can
have all the add things, but if there's not love,
it's not worth it. And I've read in his book
he said he talked. There was a study from the
Cleveland Clinic and they asked ten thousand men one question,
does your wife show you her love? Right? And you

(01:00:28):
can interpret it anyway, And I remember reading it at
like ten o'clock at night because he's reading myself to sleep,
and I woke up with crushing chest pain, and I'm like,
this relationship is killing me. This is so important. When
you're with someone, the issues really not do they have
add or not, It's do they fit or not? And

(01:00:51):
are they willing to get help or not? Like if
you date one of my kids for more than six
I'm scanning you. It's just like you're not in my mind,
you're not even dating until I.

Speaker 3 (01:01:06):
See your bright That's amazing because if you have a
d D or you played football and you have concussions,
I want you to be serious about taking care of it.

Speaker 1 (01:01:19):
Before we dive into the next moment, let's hear from
our sponsors and back to our episode. So it's the
way they come over to dinner, you press a button,
the wall opens up.

Speaker 2 (01:01:30):
There's like this.

Speaker 1 (01:01:33):
Them to the clinic. I thought you might have an
undercover clinic like a bat cave in your house, and
like you just sort of like the movie Meet the
Parents exactly exactly. That's brilliant. I've heard a lot of
people say to me, and I love your example that
you just gave about the rapper because I think I've
had friends you've gone through that where they're like, I
believe you love me, but I just feel like you

(01:01:55):
don't care because you aren't on time, because you don't
do the dishes. But Dan, you do it sometimes, you
do it when it suits you. Well, you do it
for your friends, but.

Speaker 2 (01:02:04):
Not me because they have more dopamine.

Speaker 1 (01:02:06):
Right, So yeah, talk to me about that, because you
could see your partner who's like able to organize dinner
for your friends, but then when it comes to you,
they can't a date.

Speaker 2 (01:02:16):
In a way, it almost sounds like they're pushing on
a wound. And one of the things I learned, and
I actually learned it from Tanna. She grew up in
a crazy home, so her aescort. Do you know the
ace adverse childhood experiences, So on a scale of zero
to ten, how many bad things happen to you as

(01:02:36):
a kid, And if you have four or more, it's
like physical, emotional, sexual abuse, neglect, watching your mother being abused,
being raised with someone who goes to jail, has a
mental illness and addiction. So you have four more, you
have an increased risk of seven of the ten top

(01:02:57):
ten leading causes of death if you have SI so
more you die twenty years earlier. Ten is in eight.
And we adopted both of our nieces who are nines.
And when you see untreated ADD you see it throughout
both of their families. Right, untreated ADD can go with trauma.

(01:03:20):
And her earliest memory, or one of them, is her
mom and grandmother falling to the floor because her uncle
was murdered and a drug deal gone wrong, and so
it was because her other uncle was involved in the
drug deal. So anyways, he goes to jail, gets clean,

(01:03:42):
and she goes to a seminar. She had thyroid cancer
in her twenties. So chronic stress from untreated ADD and
childhood trauma increases your cancerest. So she is cancer. When
she's twenty five, she goes to Hawaii. He's teaching a
se are for Jack Canfield, and he asks her how

(01:04:04):
much responsibility do you want for your station in life
right now? And she goes, I have cancer. It's not
my fault. He goes, I didn't ask you about fault.
I asked you about responsibility, which is just your ability
to respond to the situation. And in that moment she

(01:04:27):
got clarity. It's like, I want one hundred percent responsibility.
And often when I'm with Tanna, if we're fussing, which
is very rare for us, I'm like, what can I
do to make this better? Because as soon as I go,
you're not doing this, and you're not doing that. I

(01:04:49):
think it's touching on a wound I have. But I
want to be powerful and being powerful is so what
can I do to make this better? Because I know
and I ask all my patients this, I'm like, like,
they're fighting with their wife and I'm like, or their mom.
I'm like, so, what do you do to make your
mom crazy? And they're like what? Because you know they

(01:05:12):
expect me to just listen and buy into the bullshit.
I'm like, so, what do you do to make your
mom crazy? What do you do that makes your wife
yell at you? And I do that purposefully because the
next question is what do you do to make your
mom smile? And I know if I become condescending, if

(01:05:35):
I become critical, if I notice what's wrong, I'm not
going to get back what I want. And I collect penguins.
To ever tell you why I collect penguins. No, it's crazy, actually,
it's good to know. I have like a thousand of them,
and I live my life with why I collect penguins.
So I adopted three of my kids. My oldest was

(01:05:57):
hard for me, argumentative, oppositional, so he has the over
focused add like classic. And I was in training at
the time to be a child skiatrist and I went
to my mentor and I'm like, I am not having
any fun as a dad. So he was the first
child I had, and she goes, you need to spend

(01:06:19):
more time with him, and so I took him to
a place called Sea Life Park, which is in Hawaii.
It's like SeaWorld or Marine World Northern California, and we
had a great day. I took him to the whale
show and that was fun, and the dolphins and the
sea lions, and at the end of the day, grabs
my shirt and he goes, I want to see Fat

(01:06:40):
Freddy and I'm like, who's Fat Freddy. He's like, penguin dad,
don't you know anything? And that was our interactions. And
so at the end of the day, I went to
the last show, the Fat Freddy Show. He's a tiny,
humble penguin, chubby fat Freddy, and he comes out onto
the stage, climbs the ladder to a high dive, goes

(01:07:05):
to the end of the board, bounces and jumps in
the water, and I'm like, whoa. And he gets out
bowls with his nose, counts with his flipper, jumps through
a hoop of fire, and I'm just mesmerized by this
little bird. And then at the end of the show,
the trainer asked Freddy to go get something, and he
went and got it and brought it right back, and

(01:07:27):
in my mind, I went, damn, I asked this kid
to get something for me, he wants to have a
discussion for like twenty minutes, and then he doesn't want
to do it. I knew my son was smarter than
the penguin, so I went up to the trainer. I said,
did you get Freddy to do all these really cool things?
And she said, unlike parents. She looked at my son
and then looked at me, unlike parents. Whenever Freddy does

(01:07:51):
anything like what I want him to do, I notice him,
I give him a hug, and I give him a fish.
And even though my son didn't like raw fish, but
it totally worked with my daughter Chloe. She loved sushi,
from the time she was six months old. I realized
that whenever he did what I wanted him to do,

(01:08:13):
I didn't pay any attention to him at all because
I was busy. But when he didn't do what I
wanted him to do, I gave him a ton of
attention because I didn't want to raise bad kids, So
I was inadvertently teaching him to be bad in order
to get my attention. So I collect penguins as a
way to remind myself. Notice what you like more than

(01:08:37):
what you don't. Notice what you like more than what
you don't. And so if you're only noticing what you
don't like, well, if you're with a partner who has
add that's the story of their life that people have
noticed what they haven't liked. If you love someone and
I love my kids, said he I love my wife.

(01:09:03):
Notice what you if it feeds so good?

Speaker 1 (01:09:06):
Yeah, that's so good. What a great story, and what
a what a great lesson. I mean that resonates so strongly,
and it's so different to positive thinking because I think
people think, well, that means I'm just letting them get
away with all the bad stuff, and it's like, no,
it's just you're also making really clear that I notice,

(01:09:26):
I validate, I acknowledge all this amazing behavior, because the
truth is, what we're more often than not doing is
we're keeping a scorecard, but it's of all their mistakes
and all of our wins. So whenever we do do
the dishes, we get a point. When that person doesn't
do the dishes, they lose a point, as opposed to
if we are going to keep score, we've got to

(01:09:48):
really take account of all the amazing things that person
does and be open to the fact that we also
make mistakes. Because I think it's really easy to think,
like I was giving that example to you, that I've
always been a stickler for time, But at one point
I had to ask myself, why am I making time
the most important currency, because that's also my obsession. Time

(01:10:10):
is not always the most important thing like it is
sometimes if I'm presenting at an event, if I'm going
to be on stage, if I've got to meet a
guest for a podcast a client, time is of utmost importance.
But when me and my wife are just going out
to a friend's event that is a bit more casual.
People are going to show up between seven and eight
pm and I'm the guy trying to be there at

(01:10:31):
six fifty nine, and I'm putting so much pressure on
both of us. It's almost like it didn't really matter
whether we turned up at seven or seven fifteen or
seven point thirty. And I also had to give that up, right,
So it's also like an acceptance that it's not like
I'm perfect and that person's the one who's the wrong one.

Speaker 2 (01:10:48):
All that and what has eternal value? And you never
want to have to win an argument. If you have
to win an argument, it's because you have low self esteem.
It's why do I have to beat my partner who
I love, who you know, when something good happens, I
call her, or something bad happens, I call her. I

(01:11:10):
need to nurture that, And the winning comes from a
low self esteem place or it comes from an earlier
gladiator place that just has no business. I want Tanna
to win. If I have to win, then there's a

(01:11:31):
deficit somewhere in me.

Speaker 1 (01:11:33):
Yeah. And I always say to people, if you're fine
with your partner and you win, it means they lose.
And because you're on the same team, that means you
both just lost. And if you lost and they won,
you're on the same team. You both just lost, so
you either win together or you lose together because you're
on the same team. So there is no win lose

(01:11:55):
scenario because you go to sleep with that person, you
wake up next to that person, you have dinner and
breakfast in lunch with that person. If you just won,
you lost because you're sharing all the other time of
the day with them. I want to flip it to
the other side. What about someone who has ADHD and
they're dating someone who doesn't. What advice would you give them?

(01:12:18):
Two help because they might be being really harsh on themselves,
they might feel misunderstood. What would you say to them?

Speaker 2 (01:12:25):
Well, I think communications probably the most important thing. Make
sure you develop rituals of time so because often people
get so busy and they're behind that they don't make time.

(01:12:47):
And I think bonding requires two things, time and willingness
to listen. And often the other person who doesn't have
add feels like they're not being heard because the add
person forgets things and it's like, no, I have to
say this, and the other person feels diminished. And so

(01:13:13):
having both people practice active listening, it's so magical when
they say something don't say anything or repeat back what
you hear and then be quiet. Too often people just
use too many words. And if you can practice silence

(01:13:35):
and giving when someone says something, give it space so
if they want to say more, they will, as opposed
to jumping into quickly. Communication is so important and get
dopamine from going what do you need? How can I help?
And often with ADD because of the chaos that's in

(01:13:57):
your head, you might not know what do.

Speaker 1 (01:14:00):
You say to someone who has a parent with ADHD
and they're struggling with and you know they're an adult,
they have a parent who's got ADHD, then maybe well
they're caring for them.

Speaker 2 (01:14:11):
They embarrassed a lot, right because you go to the
restaurant and the person just say the first thing that
comes to their mind, which can be horrifying. My oldest
patient with ADD is ninety four, and I'm like, why
are you in my office? And she goes, you help
my great grandson, you help my granddaughter, you help my son.

(01:14:35):
I've never been able to finish the paper in the morning.
I want to finish the paper, so that was our goal,
and so I scanned her. She clearly had ADHD and
age doesn't make it better. I think that's a important point.
Age doesn't make it better. And I treated her and

(01:14:57):
she came back a month later and she had this
beautiful smile and she said, I read my first book.

Speaker 1 (01:15:04):
That's amazing.

Speaker 2 (01:15:05):
And I would just be encouraging and go, we've learned
so much about this. It's not a childhood disorder. It
starts in childhood, but it can impact the rest of
your life.

Speaker 1 (01:15:19):
How should people talk to their bosses or their teachers
if parents are talking to teachers about having ADHD, Because
I imagine that's a tough conversation in the workplace where
your performance is being judged, your output's being judged, your
productivity is being measured. How do you have that conversation
in an effective way?

Speaker 2 (01:15:38):
So I think I'm not sure I would have that
conversation because it might make them look at you differently.

Speaker 1 (01:15:45):
But there's still.

Speaker 2 (01:15:45):
That There is still that now if you need accommodation,
so it is federal law. If you have a disability
and ADHD is considered a disability under federal law, your
employer can give you accommodations, is required to give you accommodations.
I think my first suggestion is, see if you can

(01:16:08):
get it treated without just so you don't really have
to have the conversation I have to have them look
at you differently. But if you need it in order
to keep that job, I'd actulutely talk about that. You'll
need to get your doctor to write a note and
request those accommodations. Happens all the time in colleges. All

(01:16:29):
major colleges have disability resource centers. One of my nieces
is at UCLA. She gets extra time on tests, she
gets notes, she gets a lot of help, which is rational.

Speaker 1 (01:16:43):
That's great inside, that's so helpful. Does ADHD ever go away?
Or is it only my great question?

Speaker 2 (01:16:50):
In about half the cases, the kids who had ADHD
so the hyperactive form were not in their later teens.
I often worry they've outgrown the hyperactivity but not the
short attention span and impulsivity. But sometimes it's a maturational

(01:17:11):
lag in brain development, and you can encourage it to
go away, or you can discourage it to go away.
So you can encourage it to go away if there's
regular exercise, if you teach kids not to believe every
stupid thing they think, if you support them with Omega
three fatty acids, and a healthy diet. And you don't

(01:17:35):
just give them devices they want, right if you want
to discourage it. So if you want them to make
sure they have the add as they age, then feed
them bad food, give them all the devices they want,
let them watch on less hours of TV and play
video games.

Speaker 1 (01:17:53):
Yeah, that's a great, great summary to help people set
them up for what to do before medication and what
are some of the long term effects of leaving ADHD untreated.

Speaker 2 (01:18:03):
It's so sad because it's basically the big issues in
our society from school failure, drug abuse, divorce, bankruptcy, incarceration, homelessness,
And if we've looked more at the brain, we'd go
we can do a lot better.

Speaker 1 (01:18:21):
Yeah, And I think that's what the real hope is
that the world can start to take it seriously and
take brain health seriously. Right, If you had a hope
for how we would shift the way we look at
ADHD in the brain, what would that be?

Speaker 2 (01:18:36):
So I have big ideas. When I went to the
White House, my friend there said, how big can you think?
The first thing I would do is rename the National
Institute of Mental Health to the National Institute of Brain
and Mental Health. I get the brain involved, like stop
calling people mental shames people at stigmatizing. It's wrong. I
declare the next ten years the Decade of Brain Health,

(01:19:00):
and get really serious about what goes into children's minds.
It needs to be curated to be appropriate and to
be helpful.

Speaker 1 (01:19:14):
Who else his brain?

Speaker 2 (01:19:15):
Have you not scanned that you'd love to scan the president's?
I wrote an op ed piece in the La Times
in two thousand and eight unscanning presidential candidates. You know
someone has the nuclear codes, don't we at least want
to know about the health of their brain? Like the
last election, I would have loved to scan both President

(01:19:37):
Biden and now President Trump.

Speaker 1 (01:19:39):
What would you expect to see in both of this?

Speaker 2 (01:19:42):
From your perception, I think with President Biden there were
clear cognitive issues. Well, I don't think i'd see a
healthy brain. President Trump, I'm much more curious now. I
know I'll get a lot of hate for this, but
I'm very interested in resilience for someone who is the
most popular person or one of them in the world.

(01:20:04):
Before he ran for president, right, the Apprentice had gone
for fourteen seasons and he was beloved by so many people,
and then he was demonized and then he was falsely accused,
he was impeached, he was tempted, assassination, indictments, convictions, and

(01:20:25):
it's like, how do you show up every day? Right?
You and I off the podcast we're talking about worldwide
shame and how some people just causes them to disappear. Well,
he didn't disappear, and you know, he's still fighting every day.
So I'm really interesting. Seriously, I'm not sure I've seen
a brain quite like.

Speaker 1 (01:20:47):
That.

Speaker 2 (01:20:48):
Elon Muss would be interesting. And I've scanned many high
profile geniuses. I got to scan Muhammad Ali, which.

Speaker 1 (01:20:57):
At what point on his journey was that.

Speaker 2 (01:20:59):
Later and so you could clearly see the damage. I
have lots of really fascinating scans.

Speaker 1 (01:21:06):
Doctor D lame. And I've got a few more questions
that I want to leave people with to summarize some
of our conversation today, to really leave them feeling energized, positive,
hopeful about their journey with ADHD, whether they have it
individually or they have it through someone that they love
in their life. And the first question is, for those

(01:21:27):
who do have ADHD, what are some great hacks for
someone struggling with ADHD to be more organized, to be better.
What would you suggest for them? What can they do?

Speaker 2 (01:21:37):
So the first thing when you get up, try to
do some form of exercise because that will help turn
your brain on.

Speaker 1 (01:21:45):
Why does exercise help turn the brain does?

Speaker 2 (01:21:47):
It increases serotonum but also increases dopamine, and it increases
blood flow to your prefrontal cortex. For those people who
live in colder climates, get a light box. A light
box with ten thousand lucks, so that's the intensity has
been found not only to help seasonal depression, it helps

(01:22:09):
with focus, memory, energy, and it will help promote sleep.
Make sleep a priority. Too often when you have ADHD,
you're more awake at night. You know, our society we
have bias against night owls, so morning larks. Our society

(01:22:29):
is geared to praise them and often find a job
that fits your circadian rhythm. But sleep is a priority.
And if you snore, get checked for sleep apnea. So
kids who snore sleep apnia maybe the cause of their ADHD.

(01:22:51):
That is treatable.

Speaker 1 (01:22:52):
And what's the most important thing that someone with ADHD
needs to hear?

Speaker 2 (01:22:58):
You are not stuck with the brand new You can
make it better. Think of it like glasses, right, people,
you remember I told you about Sandy and joining her
scans and she starts to cry, and I'm like, having
ADD is like people need glasses. They're not dumb, crazier, stupid.
Their eyeballs are shape funny. We wear glasses to focus.

(01:23:19):
People have add are not dumb, grazier, stupid. Their frontal
lobes just don't turn on when they need to, and
the medicine or supplements or neurve feedback helps turn it
on so you can focus and be who you really
are when your brain works right. People go, I don't
want to take medicine because I don't want to be

(01:23:40):
someone different. It's like, but don't do you want to
be who you are when your brain is fully functioning.
I want to be who I am when my brain
is fully online.

Speaker 1 (01:23:52):
As always, doctor Danny name and I appreciate conversations so
much I get I feel like, whenever I'm with you,
I learned to see everything so differently and deeply and
as a three sixty degree view. I think we're so
used to in our society to see one aspect of
something or have a very limited understanding of the different

(01:24:12):
issues that we see. And whenever I speak to you,
I feel like, oh wow, I have the much more
broader contextual view of it, and whenevery I'm at home,
who's listening or watching, whether you're on a walk, whether
you're at the gym. Doctor Danielaman has one of his
books which is called Healing add the breakthrough program that
allows you to see and heal the seven types of
add that we discussed in today's episode. So I highly

(01:24:35):
recommend the book if you don't already have it, and
of course, if you don't follow doctor Daniel Laman on
all forms of social media TikTok, Instagram, the podcast as
I mentioned earlier, make sure you do subscribe and doctor Danielaman,
we are so happy that you came on for a
fifth time. If you haven't seen the episodes before, make
sure you go back and listen and watch. You can
search doctor Daniel Layman and Jay Sheddy or doctor Daniel

(01:24:57):
Laman on Purpose and any last words, Doctor Nanaman, anything
you wanted to share that I didn't ask you about,
or anything that is on your mind or heart right now.

Speaker 2 (01:25:07):
I'm just so grateful for you, you know. I love
the idea that we can train our brains that focus
on what you want way more than what you don't want.

Speaker 1 (01:25:22):
Yeah, I love that. Thank you. If you love this episode,
you'll enjoy my interview with doctor Daniel Ahman on how
to change your life by changing your brain.

Speaker 2 (01:25:31):
If we want a healthy mind, it actually starts with
a healthy brain. You know. I've had the blessing or
the curse to scam over one thousand convicted felons and
over one hundred murderers, and their brains are very damaged.

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