You are somebody that people look to for expert advice on this. And we've talked a lot about nature. But nature is combating what has become the reality for all of us, which is we spend most of our waking hours staring at a screen.

Yeah, that's right. So the way I think about it is when you sit in today's age and you look out at whatever you're looking at, almost all the time, you can tell that this year, it's 2024 or roughly 2024, you see screens, you see all sorts of signs that we live in this particular modern age that we live in. I think one really useful thing and why nature is so great is because it's timeless. That I think one way to measure how well you're living What you're seeing is, are you spending at least some of your day in an environment that is timeless, that is not attached and tethered to the here and now, that is not about the latest screen, the latest device, the latest tech, the latest gadget? So when you are sitting in a forest, you I could have been doing that a thousand years ago and seeing exactly the same thing. And I think there's some value to living at least part of our lives every day in an environment that is timeless.

What are some examples of how I can step into a timeless environment if I can't get out into the forest today?

Yeah. So closing your eyes is really good for that, right? Because you can then think of anything you like, and people have been able to do that forever. That's what makes us human is our ability to imagine outside of the here and now. The other thing is, I think, just having a conversation with a loved one, which is, again, screens make that more and more difficult. We spend so much time in front of them that we spend less time with people we really connect to. But having a face to face conversation with someone, that's also timeless. That was going on thousands of years ago as well. Our species has been doing that forever. We do it less now than we ever have before. So I think timelessness doesn't have to be about nature or even the environment you're in. It can be the activity that you're doing. And so anything where you're connecting with another human being is timeless as well.

This is so important because so many of us, and I'm going to include myself, are searching for deeper meaning in life, searching for purpose, searching for a sense of being connected to self and connected to something beyond just that day to day autopilot mode onto the next headline, onto the next deadline, onto the next thing on your to-do list. And I love how you phrase this as, how do you take a break from modern life that is always going to pull you to the next thing and step back into these things that you have described that escape a sense of what decade you're in and what age you are and that have always been around. And so nature, conversations with somebody else, closing your eyes and escaping into your thoughts to remind you that there is something so much more important than the here and now. And is there anything else that you would recommend?

Yeah, I think physical activity is a big one, right? Because a lot of the time we spend in front of screens is sedentary. We're not moving, we're sitting. Maybe we're standing if you're at a standing desk, but it's very tethered to a particular place. It doesn't involve a lot of activity. So I think there's a timelessness to physical activity. Our ancestors had to do much more of it just to stay alive. And so they had to find food and they had to negotiate different landscapes. We don't have to do that anymore. It's easy for us to get by and not move. So I think exercise, picking up heavy things, moving our bodies for certain periods of time every day, all of that is also consistent with this timelessness that I think is important. And I just think it's a good rule of thumb I've realized this over time that when you're trying to figure out, am I living the way I'd like to live? A lot of it is those timeless activities that go back to things that we were doing a long time ago that were very good for us as a species that brought us to where we are today.

It's a lot of the things that are incredibly new and different. I love technology. I think it's wonderful in many ways, but a lot of the aspects of it that we've put as a gloss over our lives today, I think, leave us impoverished in some sense.

Very much so. And disconnected and distracted, and not feeling like you're doing something that's actually meaningful to you. So you've done extensive research on screens, on digital distraction, and Also just this constant need to be occupied. It's almost like the state of distraction that we've gotten used to. What's some of the most shocking things that you have come across in your research?

I've spoken to, I don't know how many dozens, hundreds of audiences of the kids themselves who use screens, the parents of those kids, teachers in schools, school district heads, people in policy, in government, people in all sorts of different areas about the effects of screens. The most striking thing to me is that when you speak to kids in particular, especially teenagers, you get this incredible difference between how much they feel they have to use these devices and how much they enjoy it, how much It is good for them. So when you eat candy, you might say to yourself, That's delicious. I know it's not great for me, but I'm going to do it anyway. With screens, it's like a different tone. It's this tone of, I wish I and all my friends stopped doing this thing. I wish we We didn't keep returning to the same social media platforms because I know it's not good for any of us. But if we don't, if I'm the only one who says I'm going to draw back, then I'm isolated. And so it's this very collective problem where unless you can get lots of people to do the same thing at the same time, it's not going to be easy to solve.

And you hear this from a lot of kids. They say, if only I could get everyone else in my class or at least a certain number of people not to do this, I'd feel better. And the parents say the same thing. They say, I wish I could be the parent who says we're going to be much We're not careful about exposing our kids to these devices and social media and so on. But we can't be the only ones because then our kids are just, that's a different problem. They're the only ones. So a lot of the work that I'm doing now is on trying to push not just individuals to change how they behave, but to work with, say, entire classrooms or entire schools or entire school districts so that the entire district pushes parents and the kids of those parents to delay how long it takes them to use these devices.

Well, it's interesting. I I remember reading a big write-up of Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, who you probably know have this new policy heads up, which is no phones on campus, period. They can be in your locker, they can be in your backpack, but they are not on your person.

Yeah. So there's a movement called Okay to Delay, for example. And there are some others as well that are trying to deal with this at that collective level for exactly the reason you mentioned. There are very few benefits to having phones at school. Maybe a flip phone so you can get in touch with someone in They can call the front office.

I'm personally one of these people. It's like, get the freaking phones out of the schools. Parents can call the front office if there is an emergency. It's a huge problem. There is no need to have a phone on your person when you're supposed to be at school. I mean, that's just my opinion. I think it's fascinating that a lot of parents who can afford to love sending their kids to summer camp because why? They take their phones away. They love giving their kids that break, and the kids love it. But I But I do think it's interesting that the shocking piece of research that's come out of it is we all know we need to do something. We all know it's bad for us, and we all wish there was an alternative. And yet my entire social life is on this thing.

The way I opened this book was talking about Now, years before the rest of us were aware of this, Steve Jobs, with his own kids, he wouldn't bring the iPad into his house. And then you look at other tech Titans, there's a school in the Bay Area that doesn't let kids near phones or use phones or use screens until about ninth grade until they learn to code. That school, 75% of the kids there are the kids of Silicon Valley tech execs. So they are sending their kids. The people who know the most about what this tech is doing are keeping their kids as far away from these products as possible, especially in the school environment.

I mean, it makes perfect sense. So do you think we're all addicted to the screen?

Yeah. So this term addiction is... I use it in the book as a shorthand to describe a lot of what I think is going on in this case, because the definition that I use is it's something that you want to do over and over again, you want to return to your screen, you want to keep using it despite recognizing that you're not enjoying it and that it's not very good for you on balance, and that it has negative effects in the long run for your social well-being. Your relationships are degraded for it. It means you're more sedentary, so it's not good for you physically. It exposes a lot of us to bullying, anxiety, aggression, loneliness, other negative psychological consequences. It's also a way to overspend. A lot of people spend too much money.

I feel It's like Instagram is turned into the Home Shopping Network. Exactly. Yeah.

It's a very powerful way to sell products.

Wow. You said earlier this interesting metaphor that, for example, we all know Candy's delicious.

Yeah. But if you just pound a gigantic five-pound chocolate bar, I love Tony's chocolate, and I also love Mr. Beast's New Line. I just love chocolate. And Halloween, go out trick or treating. I'd fill that pillowcase up, man. I would come home, sort all the candy, and I would just start munching. But then I would have a huge stomach ache, and I wouldn't want to look at candy again for another month. And it's almost as if that Halloween candy hangover is what's happening every single day, where we wake up, we know we don't want to spend nine hours. What is the average amount of time that people are spending on their phones?

It's hard to get really good definitive data, but it's many hours a day. I had a high school class that I was teaching at NYU for a while over summers. I'm not doing it at the moment, but I did it for several years. At the beginning of that six-week class, I would ask the students to download an app that would track their usage, which now most phones do anyway. The numbers I was getting were absolutely staggering. Some of the students were on their phones like 10, 12 hours a day. The average was something like six or seven or eight hours a day. And this was a number of years ago. I think it's only gone up since then. I've heard three, four, five hours described as the average for adults as well. So it's a huge amount of time. One of the things it's doing is it's changing your tolerance for spending a long time doing something that involves hard, deep work and thinking.

What does that mean with a simple brain like mine?

What do you mean it reduces tolerance? What it means is if you're getting 2,000 messages a day, each one lasting maybe a second or 2 seconds, that's how your brain starts to process information in these bite-sized chunks. And they're all also chosen to be maximally enjoyable They're interesting. They bombard you with interesting content. And so what happens is you assume the rest of the world is going to be like that. We get into an elevator for five seconds, and that's too much. That's hard. So we pull out our phones to be entertained in that moment. And that's how the rest of the world becomes. So if I say to a seven-year-old kid who's on a screen all day, it's time to learn to read, the amount of energy and intense concentration you're asking for there is so different from what that kid is used to. If it's been about scrolling through videos, that that's deeply problematic. You can't expect people to just suddenly turn on this muscle that they haven't been using. So it makes us less used to having to try really hard. And so that's, I think, one big problem. The other thing is if you look at how many hours a day we're doing this for, there's a huge amount of other stuff.

The opportunity cost there is so great that we're leaving this other stuff behind. So I could be spending that time having a conversation with a loved one or a friend. I could be spending that time in a natural environment, or I could be exercising. I could be doing lots of different things, but I I don't do any of that stuff because I'm spending time mindlessly scrolling. So there's a huge amount there.

Can you explain the mindlessly part? Why do we doomscroll? There's so many of us, Adam, that come home from work, you cook dinner, you've got kids, you're married, you know you're doing all the stuff, you're packing up the backpacks, you're cleaning up the dishes, you're letting the dog out. You're hopefully having a moment of quiet yourself, and you say to yourself, I'm going to go to bed early tonight, or I'm going to work on that project. And next thing you know, 2 hours have gone by, and you've just wasted your evening doing scrolling. Why do we do that?

Yeah, there's this interesting theory about gambling that I think a lot of people have this night I've idea that when people are gambling, they're just like, This is amazing, and this is so much fun, and I'm getting all this feedback, and then I hit a jackpot. People don't gamble because that's true. They gamble because they get into this trance. There's something about sitting in front of a slot machine that is deeply soothing and numbing. And that's what the screen does. At the end of a hard day, what you don't want is to be massively excited. Most of the time, you're exhausted. You just want to have this comfort, this lull. It's like taking a bath in the screen. And it brings this sense of comfort and reliability. And nothing is being asked of me. I don't have to do anything. I just move my phone, move my finger, and that's all I have to do.

It sounds so lovely.

It sounds lovely, right? And what else gives us that really uncomplicated dose of calm at the end of a long day? Very little. Alcohol. That's the other option. And so there aren't that many options. It's substances or it's screens, and many of us just turn to screens. So that's, I think, what's happening for most of us.

I hate that you put it like that.

Yeah, I don't love that it's true, but I think that's what's going on.

How do you stop?

It's very difficult. I think the biggest thing when we try to stop doing something is we don't replace it with something else. So the first thing to think about is If I want to stop doing this thing, whatever this thing is, whether it's drinking, using a substance, scrolling through TikTok, whatever it is, when you would have done that thing, there needs to be something else there, and preferably something else that you enjoy that's not bad for you, something that you feel better about doing. And that's going to be different for everyone. You've got to cultivate that habit, that change. Just saying, I'm going to not do this thing, and I'm going to use my willpower, no one has that much willpower. That's exhausting. You can't expect yourself to be superhuman, but figure out what else you could be doing that's more enriching, but that also makes you feel good and do that other thing. Plaster over that gap.

This is a pathetic question.

But given that you are the renowned guy that is doing the research on this, do you have some suggestions?

Because even my first thought was, well, I've been addicted to... I shouldn't say addicted. I've been loving this fantasy audiobook, Court of Thorn and Roses. I am living in a different land, and It's on my phone. I think about, oh, okay, well, I could just slump on the couch and watch something on TV. There's another screen. So in the research or in just really digging into this topic, Are there things that have come up that could offer just a spark of a suggestion for those of us that would really like to not have this be a habit and not be lulled every night into giving our evenings away to our phone?

Yeah. So I'll say one thing. I think this is a good moment to say that screens are not one thing, right? It's not like looking at a screen is automatically a bad thing. You could be reading a really enriching book on the screen, and that's great. It makes you feel good. Or you could be watching a show or a documentary or whatever. It doesn't matter. There's nothing wrong with spending hours in front of the TV at the end of the night if that's mindfully what you want to be doing with your time. There's also nothing wrong with briefly scrolling through a social media platform. The problem is none of us have the willpower to just do it for two minutes. So I don't think you have to find something that's not screen-based. You just have to find something that's not making you feel hollow and unhappy, that doesn't make you feel like you've been robbed of your self-control and your agency. So if that means you're going to watch an episode of your favorite show on Netflix, and then you're going to go and read five chapters of your favorite book, and then you're going to have a conversation, and then you're going to try a new recipe that you wanted to cook, whatever it is.

It doesn't really matter what it is. It just should be something that doesn't leave you feeling hollow. That's the only thing to ask yourself. Do I feel better, happier, like my life is more meaningful after this? Or do I feel worse off, like I'm empty? And that's what people say when they spend huge amounts of time scrolling. They feel empty. So just find something else, even if it's on a screen, that doesn't leave you feeling that way.

It's true. I do feel empty. Yeah. And it then makes you feel stupid for wasting that much time. And if you add it up cumulatively over the years, it's a large part of your life.

20 years.

Wait, what?

Yeah.

20 years of your life is spent just scrolling on your phone?

Looking at your phone. It'll be about, for most of us, 20 years on average, something like that. 15 to 20 years. We'll be doing this, just looking at 20 second videos. Yeah.

Dr. Alter, I mean, as a researcher, what do you think when you hear that figure?

Well, I think one thing to think is imagine it's the end of your life You've hopefully lived a very fulfilling long life. You get to that point, and then someone says, Would you like 20 extra years? And the answer is, No, I'd rather have spent 20 years scrolling mindlessly. No one's going to say that. So I think if the first step to fixing this problem is having people say, I really want to change this, that to me is a good place to begin. That idea that you are shortening your life effectively by 20 years or 15 years or however long it ends up being because you spend all this time consuming eye candy, mental candy by scrolling. I think almost everyone would say, when you zoom back, assuming you have the self control, I think there are better things I could be doing with that time. Maybe I'll save a year or two for the scrolling, but then that leaves me still 15, 18 years to do other things.

You just basically dropped a grenade on any excuse that somebody would have that they don't have time or it's too late or I couldn't possibly fit this thing in because you have all this found time. Is Is there a difference between the screen on your phone and the screen on the television in terms of the impact to your brain?

Yeah. Well, the way you interact with those screens is very different. When you watch TV content, it's just something that's being visited upon you. You're not interacting with it. So there are good and bad parts to interacting with a screen. If you're learning a language, you're going to learn it less well on a TV than on a phone because you can interact with the phone. If you are using a social media platform, no one uses that social media on a screen like a TV because you can't have that bi-directional relationship where you act on the thing and then it acts back on you. That's critical. That's what goes on on phones that make it so immersive. So a TV screen is less weaponized to draw our time and attention away from us. It gives us a little bit more agency. That doesn't mean it's perfect. If you're watching a show, there's a cliffhanger and someone says to you, just sit here for 10 seconds, the next episode will begin. That's where binge viewing comes from, and we almost all do that. But what we do with our screens when we're on phones is, I think, much more difficult for us to resist.

I think it just got something that I'd never thought about before, Dr. Alter, which is that your brain is getting so many fast signals and messages from the ads to the pop-ups to the notifications to you yourself switching between the texting and the email and search. And what is getting fused together is a brain that now is constantly suddenly expecting this go, go, go. I had not thought about the fact that because if you're using your phone and you can interact with it, so now you've also got your hands involved. And there's that whole body of research around neurobics and marrying the physical movement and particularly movements of your hands with new thought patterns and how that fires and wires your brain quicker. That, to me, makes so much sense that because you're actually typing and you're interacting with it, you're programming your brain faster, almost, to expect short form. I hear people also talking anecdotally, like there's a rise in ADHD, but it's actually a rise in your brain getting trained to be distracted.

Yeah. So I think what's happened is we live in an age of time contraction. Everything happens in really brief chunks. Everything's five seconds long, 10 seconds It's time is contracted. If you go on a vacation to a beach and you spend a week doing nothing, you get time dilation. Time suddenly works on a different scale. You think of five minutes as no time at all. Whereas in the way we live our lives, many of us, most of the time, five minutes, you could do 100 things. You could look at 100 videos. There are a million things you could do in five minutes. And that creates a sense of massive urgency. For what purpose? I don't know. Probably not a good one for most of us, most of the time. So I think there's some value in changing the scale of things, in going for a four-hour drive. I drove 12 hours there and back to see the eclipse.

Where'd you go?

I went to Northern Vermont. And it was incredible. I drove six hours with a friend. We got out of the car for five minutes, watched the eclipse, got back in and drove home. It was 12 hours of driving for three minutes of magic. But the one really interesting thing that did, that was several days ago now, was it changed how I feel about time. There's a hangover period where I'm like, a few hours, no problem. Not a problem at all. I can focus on things for a few hours. I did it for 12 hours the other day. When do we ever do one thing for 12 hours? It's just very rare. So I think doing things that are extended and protracted is really valuable because it resets what you think of as a meaningful chunk of time.

Well, and this goes back to something that you also talked about, which is I guarantee that those five minutes that you probably spent at Burke Mountain, right?

Up in that area. Yeah, exactly.

That There was something about those five minutes that felt like five hours. Yeah. And you use the word time dilation, which means that you're stretching your own perception of being in the moment. And you gave us a list of things like being in nature, having plants or some water element in your house, meditation, a conversation with somebody where you're really in the moment is a way for you to actually slow down time and get important time back. You also have this research. It's very interesting. It's this concept called stopping cues. What does that mean?

So stopping cues. If you think about how we consumed information in the 20th century and the early 21st, everything had a natural endpoint to it. These are known as stopping cues. So you'd read a book and you'd get to the end of a chapter or the whole book. You'd watch a TV show, the credits would roll. Yes. These were all gentle signals that you probably wanted to do something different. Move on to the next thing. And they were built into everything we did. Those are called stopping cues. Now, the thing about a lot of the tech we use is that tech companies have systematically eradicated those stopping cues. They've removed them, they've weeded them out. So the bottomless feed that you get on social media platforms, that is a good example of the absence of stopping cues. So because we are humans who are creatures of inertia, we just keep doing the same thing over and over until something pushes us to the next thing. In the absence of a cue that says, Hey, maybe you want to move on to the next thing, we just keep going. And that's a lot of why once we start using a social media platform, there's no cue to move on.

The same way when you're on a slot machine, there's no cue to move on, so we just keep going.

So some of my favorite cookies, Pepperage Farm, and they come in these stacks in these trays. And when I clean out a whole tray, the empty tray is a stopping queue. That is a stopping queue. Not to keep going. What is your What's your biggest takeaway after researching so much about how distracted we've become by our phones?

Yeah. So I think the biggest one is that the simplest solution to this problem is actually an analog one, which is to cultivate habits where there are certain parts of the day that are sacred and free of screens. I think that's very important. And it's different for different people. So it could be every day, dinner time, no screens. We all put our phones in a cookie jar. We put a Timer on. We're not allowed to go into that jar for 30 minutes, maybe. That's one example.

It seems psycho that we have to do this.

It's totally ridiculous that we are in this position as consumers of this tech to have to do it, but we do.

And it's because, though, and I think this is a really important piece of the research that you're explaining to us, this isn't because you're weak, it's because this technology is designed to keep you going. That emptyness that you described when somebody's sitting in front of the slot machine where you're just lulled into this state. That that's why you have to have these stopping cues and you have to have these boundaries. One of the things I'm curious about because you've researched this and you're also a father of two and you're married and you're teaching. And so you're seeing students of different ages and you've seen these platforms change since you have been writing all of these books and doing this research.

Dr. Alter, what does your morning routine look like?

So one thing I try very hard to do, and I'm better at this some mornings than others, is to spend as much time after I wake up not looking at a screen as possible. It's really useful to ease your way into the day by not immediately picking up the phone and looking at whatever's on the screen. So that's one important thing. There are different days where I'm doing different things, but usually the very beginning part of the day is with my kids and often my wife. And so that's obviously a deeply connected time where you're discussing we're going to have for breakfast. And there are little conversations that happen. They themselves are not necessarily full of meaning and philosophy and richness, but there's a richness just to the routine of connecting over that period of the day. I think that's really useful. If you live with someone else, that is a time when some of us need a little bit of time to wake up in a coffee. But once you get past that, to connect, I think is really important. I try to do that as much as possible in the morning.

Got it.

So if you could speak directly to the person who's been listening to this who's now panic-stricken. Yes. That they're going to lose 20 years of their life looking at their phone, and they're thinking about stopping cues, and they're thinking about all of the amazing things that you've made us think about and want to try. What do you think the one action, if you had to say, There's one thing I really want you to do, what would it be?

So I think the easiest thing you can do that will give you back years of your life is to take your device for an An hour a day. You pick the hour. It could be in the morning, could be in the afternoon, could be in the evening. Put it in a drawer or a cookie jar, put it somewhere. Make sure it's roughly the same time every day. So it's a habit. And if you do that for enough days, you will literally give yourself back years of your life where you would have spent that time mindlessly scrolling, you're going to be doing something more enriching. Just do that one small thing to start. It'll have a massive effect on your well-being.

Wow.

Dr. Adam Alter. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for being here with us.

Thank you for having me.

How do you know when it's a normal distressing emotion versus something that you should be concerned about in either yourself or somebody else?

So there's a few ways. I mean, part of it is there's no real right feeling, right? You have the feelings you have. I think that I would never want to say, we always expect to see this feeling under these circumstances because, of course, our feelings are informed by who we are, our histories, what's come before. So there's not always a perfect map of what we expect to see. And here Where, again, psychologists can just usually just take a much more curious, borderline anthropological stance towards emotion as opposed to judging or valuing. But here's what we don't want to see. We don't want to see emotions getting in the way of people's lives. That's where we start to be concerned. So we fully expect to see sadness under sad conditions. We don't expect to see depression, which is where mood becomes so low that it really casts a pall over everything in a person's life. We fully expect to see anxiety if there's something wrong, if there's danger around you or a lethal virus in the environment. We expect to see anxiety, but we don't expect anxiety to become paralyzing and get in the way of people's ability to do the things that really are safer or they can and should be able to do.

So for us, the index is really much more about functioning. And do emotions undermine the ability to function well in the world? Because they should be supporting our ability to navigate our lives and deepen our relationships. They shouldn't be getting in the way.

So the real takeaway here for all of us is that distressing emotion, it is part of being mentally well. But when you start opting out of seeing friends and you stop the hygiene protocol of taking showers and exercising and eating, or you start overmedicating your feelings with alcohol or weed or whatever, that's the red flag?

That's right. I'm going to even tease that apart a little bit more. So the emotions can either get in the way, so mood that actually disturbs the ability to live one's relief, or, and you moved in this direction, it's such a critically important direction, what I would call costly coping. So people are coping with moods, but they're doing it in ways that come at a cost. So either abusing substances or being incredibly hard on the people around them or turning it against themselves, whether they're running themselves down or even engaging in self-harm, those may be actually providing some relief. People only do things that actually work for them, but they come with a price tag. So that's the other two things we look for. So we look for a mood that gets in the way of the ability to live one's life or coping that is a costly way to go about things, if not immediately, certainly over time. Those are the flags that we keep an eye out for.

I got it. Two flags, mood and costly coping. I want to role play for a little bit, if that's cool, because I love to leave our audience in action and empowered, and everybody, you have got to go I took up this book. It is not only so enlightening, but it is hopeful. I wish I had this book three years ago, and I'm so happy that I have it now because I find that these tactics are incredible not only for our teenagers, all three of them, in our kids are 24 through 18, but also for adults and for people I work with. And so if you're in a situation where, let's just talk about the costly coping, stuff that you talked about. I can't tell you how many parents and friends were we would confide in one another during the last three years. My kids are completely off the rails. They're not even showing up for the Zoom classes. My son is hitting the vape, smoking weed, playing video games for six hours a day. I don't even care anymore. The stress level is so high. As long as they're waking up in the morning and they're not mean to me, how do you, as a parent or a friend or a partner of somebody, you see somebody smoking too much weed, playing video games for too long, those coping mechanisms that you write, let you escape.

How do you even begin to approach it? Because Every time we would approach it in our household, you get the big shove back.

So I think the first step is to really recognize that it is working for that person, that it is serving a purpose. And you described that, right? That substances can help numb distress. They're incredibly effective at that. That's the problem with them, right? Is that they work to make pain go away.

Oh my gosh. Hold on a second. Can I just stop there? I don't know that I've ever heard anybody ever hit the pause button and tell the truth that people engage in these behaviors because they work for them, which is why they become so damn defensive when you try to take them away from them.

Exactly. Wow. You know, this is where I just... I'm so glad I got the training I did when I did, because the premise of my whole training is that humans are rational actors. They don't do things that don't serve a purpose. Even if those things outwardly end up causing so much trouble, there's always a rationale. And that's actually the best part about my job, is that when people come my way clinically, my job is to figure out, you're doing this thing that is just damaging your life and getting in the way. We have to understand why so that you then can feel like you've got some choices.

Wow. I'm sorry. I'm just letting the profound nature of what you're asking us to do. Because I can think of several friends who had daughters in particular, self-harmed, cutting, very self-destructive behavior. And from the outside, you look at it and you panic, and then you make it wrong, and you'd want to do anything because you love this person to stop it. But Why? I think it means that we're missing this critical step in connecting, which helps us lead to the problem solving. Why is it so important, even though it's terrifying when your kid is hurting themselves or they're you're clearly escaping and addicted, why is it so important to say to yourself, This is a coping mechanism that's working for my kid, and I actually have to start there?

Here's why it's so important, because the alternative is a dead end. And what I mean by that is that if you come at a kid or anyone saying, You need to stop, and then fill in the blank, what you're going to run into is a part of them that is like, You don't get why this is working for me. And now you have a conflict. If you go the route of saying, You're a smart kid. You wouldn't be doing this if it wasn't working for you at some level. The conflict ends up in the kid or the adult that you're trying to help between the part of them that doesn't want to be cutting or abusing substances or playing video games eight hours a day.

Or running around and sleeping with the wrong people, which is what I was doing in high school, but Okay. Yeah.

I mean, whatever it takes to help yourself feel better. So there's a part of them that doesn't want to be doing those things, and there's a part of them that is doing those things. And the job of the helpful outsider is to try to get a conflict going I mean, those two parts of the person who is doing the thing and to stick up for the side that wants to be healthier. And I'll tell you the language that I remember when I learned this as a clinician around If a client comes in and is talking about suicide, which is, of course, terrifying.

Isn't it also normal to have suicidal ideation?

Let's come back to that. That's a really critical question. It's a really critical question. But sometimes Clients will come in and talk about suicide. I remember the day I learned the language from a senior clinician to say to someone, Listen, clearly, part of you is really thinking about hurting yourself, but part of you wants help, and that's the part that's telling me that you're having those thoughts, I'm going to stick up for the part of you that wants help. And that's how you don't turn it into a fight.

That's incredible. And you can probably hear me, everybody, I've got a pen in my hand. So this is one of those conversations where I'm having a conversation and furiously scribbling notes, which I don't know why I have to do that, given that I can listen to this again. There's a part of you that is really considering this, or there's a part of you that is in so much pain that you're resorting to cutting to feel alive, or you're in so much pain that you're smoking dope so that you can just numb out and forget about it. But there's a part of you that wants help, and that's the part of you that I'm speaking to. Did I get that right?

Yeah. You just said you wouldn't be letting me know if you didn't want help, there's a part of you that wants help.

What do you do if they didn't tell you or you don't? You know what I mean? Because a lot of times, particularly with these behaviors, people hide them.

It's true. So eventually, you find out or you smell smell the weed coming out of the room, or you notice that a young person has harmed themselves. So I think the first thing we want to do as the helpful people who are trying to step in is to get to a place with ourselves where we feel a bit centered. Reacting strongly in those moments does not go well. But then I think it does sometimes happen that you have to confront a person about their behavior. And again, I think teaming up with them and teaming up with what I know all teenagers have and all adults have, which is that growth-giving, health-seeking side, is the way to go. I think Let's just use marijuana as an example, and you can smell it.

I'll be the kid. So I'm sitting in my room. I've letting up a big duby. I'm smoking. I don't even know you're outside, mom, because I got my headphones on and I'm playing Minecraft, or I'm scrolling on Instagram. I don't think you're home. Didn't hear the garage doors open. There I am in my room.

Okay, then here I come. So knock, knock, knock on the door, no answer, so I let myself in. And I say, Oh, buddy, oh, buddy, you You and I both know that smoking weed like this is going to get in the way of the life you want to lead. We got to figure out what's getting in the way if you're making different choices.

Whoa. Like, you just spoke to a different part of me.

That's the goal, right?

Now, do you leave the room? Do you just drop it like a grenade and then let that settle for them? Or do you sit down on the bed? Because I think we just don't know what to do. And then we get so emotional, Lisa, that we react, which makes it worse.

Well, I think I'd see what the kid does. I take the cue from them because he just did say something. I think we also have to give kids room to come to where we are. I think it's so hard in parenting so often. I have two teenagers myself. So often in parenting, we have a full head of steam. They walk in the door and we're like, We need to talk about... Boom. And the kid's like, Whoa. I was going to go get a snack. I was not ready for this conversation.

So I think- Plus, now I'm high, mom, and my tongue feels like it's filled my mouth. I can't have a conversation with you. I can't have a conversation.

So then I think you may, let's just say for the sake of argument, this isn't a great time to have a conversation because the kid is not entirely available to it. And then I think you say, we're going to have to have a conversation about what's happening here. And my favorite phrase, and I also remember the moment I learned this in my training is, because what we're doing isn't working. What you're doing isn't working, right? And that's the thing about substances. They do get to a place where they start to undermine a person's life, that they're not showing up at school, or they're under functioning academically, or they aren't actually maintaining friendships, or they're not contributing to the home or the community. And so that becomes the thing. You can't keep doing this because what you're doing isn't working. We have to come up with something else. So if you're in so much pain that you're doing this, we're going to find another way for you to address that pain. But the goal, and you can hear this in every approach, is to not turn it into a showdown between the person who's trying to help and the person they want to help.

That's amazing. It's I just had this visual of that. You're right, it is a showdown, the knock on the door, the screaming, the shame, the this. And now you're putting your 40 or 50-year-old angst about this onto your 16-year-old, and it just compounds everything that they're trying to escape anyway. And I had this visual of if you don't have that, as you said, head full esteem, but you can center yourself and realize you're trying to get on the same page with the part of them that wants to do better. I had this visual, instead of pounding on the door, of literally putting your arm around them. Like, buddy, I love that you're like, Hey, buddy. I love this. I wish I had talked to you two years ago because that what you're doing isn't working. When my husband's depression came to a head, I was the bitch on the door knocking. And what I was trying to say is that... I was trying to say, what you're doing isn't working. And instead, of course, I'm like, thank God you're doing yoga and all this stuff because you'd probably be dead if you weren't, but you got to start that, that, that.

You're like, You got to get in therapy. You got to take... But what I wish I would have known, and what I hope everybody's taking away is that phrase, What you're doing isn't working. We got to do something else. We got to have a difference. We got to do something else.

And I'll tell you, Mel. So when I was in training, I had a really brilliant and terrifying supervisor, and she said to me, You get eight words and utterance. When you're listening and sitting with a client, they can say as much as they want to say, You can't go past eight words. And the reason for this is as soon as you're past eight words, you're into somebody's head, you've bypassed their heart, right? But if you can keep it tight, and if you can go to the core of it in eight words or fewer, it lands. And so what's interesting is that discipline of needing to find just the arrow and the through line. That's how I've ended up actually being able to translate over into writing and podcasting and all of the other forms of work I do. Because if you're doing good clinical work, you're just going for the central message as cleanly and as easily understood as possible.

I love how you've simplified this for us, that you have really drawn this highlighter and highlighted the notion that distress is a really important part of being mentally well. It's only when it becomes destructive to your mood and your daily functioning or you start having costly coping mechanisms that we got to sound the alarm, so to speak, Because what they're doing is working for them to escape or cope, but it's not helping. And so your role, and you've just made this, you are like an arrow hitting the target, Lisa. This is your genius. That your job is to appeal to the greater part of them. What you're doing isn't working. And I'm here to help you figure out what could work.

Exactly.

Wow. You also write in your latest bestseller, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, that there is a difference with how the different genders cope with stress. Can you walk us through that?

Sure. Let me say a whole bunch of caveats first. Sure. Anytime we're looking at gender findings, we're looking at huge numbers. There's tremendous overlap between the genders. And then, of course, we've only We've only studied conventional genders. We've only really studied male/female. We are slowed at the table to study kids who do not fit into one of the traditional categories. So everything I'm saying needs to be couched in that broader understanding of how we do the research and what we've studied. So having said that, when we look at traditional gender categories, a pretty consistent, broad finding is that when they are in distress, girls are more are more likely to discuss and boys are more likely to distract. And these are both actually acceptable forms of managing emotions. There's actually nothing wrong with either. But where we see trouble is if you veer to the extreme or you use that strategy all the time.

Can you give us an example of what you mean by discuss or distract? So we have a knowing, and then also what's within range of of helpful coping and what gets to be on the fringe.

Absolutely. So let's say a girl, someone's mean to her at school, and she goes and finds her best friend, and she's like, You're not going to believe what someone That's what she just did. She was such a jerk to me. And her friend says, Oh, man, she is such a jerk, and I love you, and you're fine, and you're cool. Okay. Yay. Good outcome. We like that. We could also have a boy where someone is a jerk to him at school, and he's upset it, and he doesn't want to talk about it. But he goes home and he plays basketball for a little while, blows off steam, gets it out of a system, gets past it, lets it go, moves on. Those are two perfectly reasonable outcomes of those two different strategies. What we don't want to see is, and I'll just stay with the boy/girl. Great. Stereotypes. We don't want to see is girls who then they discuss it with their friend, and then they end up in a three-hour conversation discussing it with their friend, and then they are doing the critical analysis of the text thread with the girl who was mean, and then four other girls hop in on this.

And there's two problems with this. One is, and this is a secondary finding, girls are more likely than boys to engage in vicarious distress, meaning if my friend's upset, now I'm upset too. So it has this widening swath of distress. The other thing is that it threaten to turn into what psychologists call rumination, which is basically a spinning of one's emotional wheels. And though it's gross, it's really helpful metaphor. It's like picking at an emotional wound, right? The more you talk about it, the worse it gets. It's not healing up. Better to just leave it alone. So we don't want to see that extreme. And if we go down the boy stereotype, what we don't want to see is that every time this kid has something that feels bad, he just shuts down, goes play his basketball, or hops on his video game, and stays in this distracted place until the feeling dies down enough that he can tolerate it. Because the cost to him is, number one, he's not getting the social support he deserves. Nobody knows he's in pain. Number two, he's not actually developing the fluency in verbalizing emotions that we'd like to see.

The part of what happens if we go down these boy/girl paths is that girls get better and better and better at talking about feelings because they practice it all the time. And boys can get worse and worse and worse at talking about feelings because they're not practicing it with one another, especially. And so the ideal management is somewhere in between, a little discussing, a little distracting, or any variety of other strategies that help to tame or express emotions. We just don't want to see anybody leaning too hard on one strategy.

I want to talk to you about three simple steps that you can take to create powerful changes in your life. And I'm I'm not talking really big changes. Yes, the steps are simple, but simple over time creates amazing results. And simple is important because if it's simple, you can do it. As I already said, these are the three They're the three steps that led me to launching this podcast. They're the three steps that I use to help me start working on my marriage and making my mental health stronger. They're also the three steps that helped me make the move from a very busy and stressful life outside of Massachusetts, where my husband Chris and I had raised our family for the last 26 years and make a major move and a major change to a simpler lifestyle by moving to a tiny town in Southern Vermont. Now, using these three steps, I not only changed my life, I have reinvented every aspect of my life over the past two years. And today, I'm going to share those steps with you. I'm going to tell you the whole story. And I want to help you. I want to inspire and empower you to make the changes that you You have been thinking about as you go about your day to day life.

Speaking of life, I think about life as one long road trip. Your past right now is behind you. It's in the rear view mirror. And the future, it's right out that windshield. That's why the windshield is bigger than the rear view mirror, because we're not going backwards, people. We're not doing that to ourselves. We're going ahead. And you know what's in front of you? An open road. Every single birthday, I believe, is a mile marker on this road trip called Life. It's a chance to pull over for a second and think about the open road ahead. Where do you want to go next? How fast you want to go? How slow? Who do you want to have in the car with you? There's endless metaphors around this, and it helps me think about this major topic of reinvention and change. Now, I love birthdays. I'm sure you do, too. I love them for so many reasons. Because every time you're celebrating a birthday, I mean, think about what you're actually celebrating. We're We're celebrating the fact that you're still here. We're celebrating your existence, that you're breathing, that you're alive. How cool is that? And you want to know what else we're celebrating when we celebrate your birthday?

We're celebrating the possibility and magic that your life and the future and that next year holds for you. Now, there's one part of celebrating your birthday that I want you to really think about, okay? You know that moment when the cake comes out, your mom or your dad, your spouse or your friends or the waiter, they bring out that cake and the candles are burning on top and everyone starts singing Happy birthday to you. And then they put You look at the cake down, you look at the candles, you close your eyes, and you make a wish. And for just a moment, time stops. Have you ever noticed that as that cake gets closer to you and you start going inside and thinking about the wish that you're going to make. You don't even hear anybody singing anymore. You hear something inside yourself. You hear something deep from within. You close your eyes, you grab that wish, and you blow out those candles as if it's going to magically make that wish come true. And when you open your eyes, you are present to the wish. You feel excited for the year, and you can almost see all the new possibility that you could tap into in the year ahead.

Well, researchers have a name for this exact moment. It's called the fresh start effect. When you make that birthday wish, you break from your past self, and this transformational window of time opens up. You think bigger, you feel hopeful inspired. There's some incredibly interesting research that explains why these moments are so powerful. I'm looking right now at a study from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, where they've studied the intrinsic motivational power of this fresh start effect. Researchers studied moments in our life where we feel motivated to make big changes, and birthdays are an example of that. It's as if a birthday hands you a blank slate, a clean page, a fresh start at a whole new year. And this feeling inside you ignites an intrinsic, motivational, aspirational force that's hardwired within you. It's this power to change. Now, You've experienced this fresh start effect at other times in your life, too. Just think about the new year, January first. Hello, fresh start effect. Now, January first is one of those moments where all of a sudden, last year ends. Boom, slam the door on that year, and something new opens up.

A whole new you. A clean slate, an open road. This is why, by the way, so many people start a diet on January first. Hello, Mel Robbins. So many people go to the gym for the first time on January first. It gives them a natural mental starting line to cross on a new leg of the journey called life. How cool is that? You also experience this fresh start motivation with every new semester in school. The the start of a new sports season. You feel like this could be our year, right? That's the fresh start effect. The birth of a child, a breakup, a wedding, a death. These are all moments in time where something ends and something else begins. And it's not only happening in the physical space, it's happening in the psychological and spiritual space. That's why so much stirs inside you, according to the research. I just realized, you know this fresh start effect? This is probably why I am addicted addicted to buying new journals. Every time I get a new journal, I crack it open, and I literally feel like a new Mel is about to pour out on all those open empty pages.

This phenomenon is so powerful that researchers have even created a label to describe anything that triggers that fresh start motivation that stirs inside you, like your birthday, January first, that new journal, a new semester at school. These things are called temporal landmarks. Now, let me explain explain what a temporal landmark is. A temporal landmark is a date or an experience or a physical thing that marks the passing of time. January first, for example, is a date. It marks the end of one year and the beginning of a new year. And when the new year begins, you cross that starting line mentally to think about a whole new you. Your birthday is the exact same thing. It's another year, another mile on the road of your life. And this creates all kinds of new possibilities about the stretch of open road ahead. A new semester is an experience that's always brimming with excitement. New friends, new experiences, a chance to think differently about who you are and how you're going to show up and what you want, a breakup or a divorce. Now, that's a major temporal landmark because it not only marks time, it also impacts your identity, your life as a couple before, and now your life as you after the breakup.

But here's what researchers have found that I think is fascinating about what happens to your psychology and motivation and thinking. Temporal landmarks not only mark the passing of time, they open up a whole new mental accounting period. Just like an accountant closes the books at the end of a fiscal year and opens up a fresh page to begin a whole new fiscal year, the event, whether it's January 1, the first of a month, a Monday, the end of a fiscal year, or making a wish on your birthday. This landmark creates a break from the past you. It separates you from the things that you feel are imperfect, and it silences all that judgment that you have about yourself. Here's the cool thing. When you shut that judge inside you down, you open the door to a whole new vision for yourself. It creates a break from your past self, the things that you feel are imperfect about you or your life, and the things that you judge your sofa. And here's what's really amazing. When you stop judging yourself and you stop focusing on what you think is wrong with your life, you open up the floodgates to what might be.

So let's go back to that moment when you make a wish on your birthday. As soon as you see that cake coming with those candles burning, You go in. You stop hearing everyone singing. You close your eyes. Why? Because mentally, a new accounting period is opening up. You stop caring about the song and the people around you and what's happening outside of you. You tune into what you're feeling on the inside, in your heart, in your soul, what you dream about. That thing that's calling from you deep inside that normally you can't hear because you're so focused on all all the stupid stuff that we all obsess about. No one even has to tell you to close your eyes. You see that cake coming. You know that you can make a wish. You just do it naturally. And when you go inward, you're disrupting the circuitry of your old thinking, your old judgments and your past habits. For just a moment, you're escaping the old you. And then, you make the wish, a wish for what could be. A wish for what will happen this year, in the next year of your life. And the same thing happens when you sit down at the end of the year and you create resolutions, not the one you share with people at a party.

I'm talking about the real ones that you write down in your journal. Here's another moment like that. You know that moment after a really painful breakup? This one takes a little bit of time because you basically need to cry and feel bad about your sofa about a month or two. Then one morning, you wake up and you realize, Oh my God, I'm happy that's over. I'm better off single. You let go of the relationship and the version of you who was holding onto it for so long. And more importantly, in that moment of acceptance, you stop judging yourself and you realize you'll be okay. No, you'll be more than okay. You're going to great because of this. And then you start to do the work to create a better life. These temporal landmarks are a big psychological deal because something really profound happens inside of you for a second. You snap out of all the stressful bullshit that's going on and the relentless self-criticism, and you have this mental freedom, this temporary break from your normal negative thinking, and you allow yourself to consider the bigger picture. You allow yourself to envision the future you. You tap into your deepest hopes, your wildest dreams, and your most exciting aspirations.

You see a vision for a better life. You see that, yes, you deserve to be happy. And that's exactly what I want you and I to experience today on episode one of the Mel Robbins podcast. Let's hold each other's hand and sit side by side And imagine what might be possible in the next year of our lives if we let go of the past and we hold on to our dreams. That's the invitation I'm giving to you. Allow yourself to have a fresh start. You don't have to wait for your birthday or January first to change your life. You can turn the page on the past and start writing that new chapter today. And in just a few minutes, I'm going to share the three simple steps that can use to create that powerful change that you've been wishing, wanting, or dreaming about. The fact is, change is possible, and you can't convince me otherwise. I know you might try, but I know that it's a fact. Change is possible. It's possible for everyone, and it's possible for you. Now, we're going to talk about this in-depth, but the bottom line is, if you can imagine that new chapter, there is a way to make it happen.

I guarantee you someone else on the planet has done I mean, there's about 8 billion people on this planet. Someone else has faced what you're going through right now. Someone else has built the company that you dream about building. Someone else has gone from where you are to where you envision yourself going. Someone else has improved their relationship, healed their mental illness. And if someone else has done it, you can do it, too. Start seeing people in the world around you as evidence of your own success being possible. I want you to start saying to yourself, If they can do it, then I can do it. Other people's success just proves that you're worthy of what you want, and more importantly, that you're capable of reverse engineering how they got there and doing the work to get it for yourself. Now, I get it. It might not happen the same way or look the same way. You might not be starting on the same starting line, and it might not take the same amount of time. But if you keep telling yourself, If they can do it, I can do it. You're going to change your mindset, and you're going to see that, yes, it's true.

There is limitless success, love, money, and happiness. There's enough for everyone, and there's enough for you. I want you to use me as an example from time to time. If Mel Robbins can do it, then I can do it. And honestly, I'm going to be looking to you for the same encouragement from time to time, because I'm sure there are things you've accomplished or experienced that I haven't. So let's agree. We're going to encourage one another through this thing, okay? I know how to create massive change because I just did this in my own life. Over the past two years, I've completely reinvented myself and every aspect of my life. And look, I'm not being dramatic. It's a fact. It wasn't easy, but it was worth it. The Mel Robbins that you're hearing right now is not the Mel Robbins that I was just two years ago. Two years ago to this exact birthday, on the day that I turned 52, I did not wake up and feel like a million bucks. I did not see an open road. I saw I saw a dead end. I was not kicking ass and taking names. Two years ago, when I turned 52, I was sucking wind.

I woke up all alone. I felt lost and stuck and scared. Here's what was going on in my life. I had just been fired for my dream job. And look, I'd been fired from other jobs in the past when I was younger, but boy, at 52, that really stings. Then with COVID, the speaking and event business came to a halt. And as a small business owner, I'm responsible for the livelihood and health care of 15 families, including my own. So I started to panic. As the income dried up, I had no idea how I was going to continue to make payroll. And to add to that, I had people in my inner circle that betrayed me. They lied to me. They stole from me. So I just felt rocked because people that I trusted, that I had counted on, had violated that trust. That's what made me feel so damn alone. Plus, then college was canceled. Remember that? So we were all under the same roof with our three kids, two of whom were in college, and they were all anxious and angry and sad and grieving. I mean, it was like living with caged animals.

I bet you felt a lot of these same things. And finally, my husband Chris, he had just been diagnosed with long-term depression. I mean, talk about a shit storm. I felt like absolutely everything was spiraling out of control. So here I am on my 52nd birthday with all this going on. I wake up in the bunker room at my mother-in-law's house where we're quarantining. I just started crying. The sadness that I had been trying to push down, it just poured out of me. I instinctually picked up my phone and I just started filming how I felt. I figured someone out there on the internet would relate. Maybe, just maybe, they might even be able to give me some encouragement back. Now, when we come back after a short word from our sponsors, I'm going to play that video that I made on my 52nd birthday, and you're going to hear that sad, lost Mel Robbins. And I want you to hear it because I want you to know I've been there, and I've been there recently. And clearly, if I'm where I'm at now, kicking ass, taking names, going after my dreams, doing better than ever, I know how to bridge the gap from where you are to where you want to go.

And later in the episode, I'm going to share those three steps with you that I took to make powerful changes and reinvent my whole life so that you can use those same proven simple steps to make whatever changes you want in the next year of your life. How does the ways in which we grew up impact how we deal with secrets as adults, Michael?

So children, as soon as they start learning how to keep secrets, they'll try to do so, not always successfully. When we're talking about three-year-olds, they're not very sophisticated secret keepers, but they'll try. They'll say, I didn't have any of the cookies despite having cookie crumbs on their lips, for example. It's a natural place for kids to be at that stage to use secrecy as a way of getting out of trouble. But that's not a problem. That's normal. Where the problems begin is if children or teenagers, young teenagers, are ashamed about something, or they feel like they're struggling with something. Maybe they're being bullied, something like this, something that needs to be addressed in some way. If they're keeping those kinds of secrets, now we're talking about the harmful secrets that we see in adults. What we want to do as parents is make kids feel comfortable bringing something difficult to talk about to you and feeling that maybe they've done something wrong Maybe they've broken some rules or they're getting in some trouble, and they know if they'll tell their parents that they're going to get in more trouble. So they might think, Well, I'll just not tell them.

The challenge for parents is, how can you How can you open that door for confession, and how can you keep it open? How can you express the disappointment that is natural to do so without making it harder for them? How can you make them feel comfortable coming to you with trouble, essentially?

Can we role play? Can we role play real quick? Why don't you be the parent and I'm the kid? Because I'm serious. We need scripts because I would love to have you coach us and give us scripts on, let's just start with the parent-child situation. You're reading in bed. I've gone to a party. I'm a junior in high school. Dad, I'm in trouble. I'm at this party. I was drinking. The police showed up. I'm sorry. I don't know what to do. What should the parents say, Michael?

The parents should say, I'm here to help you, essentially. Let me talk Let me walk you through this. Let me walk you through this. This is something that we can get through together, that this is going to be okay. And yes, I'm upset that you weren't honest with me, but I understand how you got here. I'm glad you could bring this to me. I'm bringing this to me because we can work on it together.

I literally just felt my shoulders drop. I love you, dad. Now, that was great. But when the kid comes home, I think we make the mistake where then we ground him.

Yeah. I think the other thing to think about is before we get to this moment, When you're really frustrated with your child or really annoyed or really angry, you probably need to communicate that. But what you want to try to avoid is like an angry outburst. Because when you're navigating these situations, you're modeling coping behaviors that your children will pick up on. If they learn that when I If I had something to you, you just lash out at me, they're going to learn, maybe that's not something I should do. Maybe next time I'm in this situation, I should just keep it to myself. That's when the harms of secrecy start.

Well, One of the two things that have made a difference, or at least I think they have, is that I've always thought to myself, if my kid's in trouble, I don't want their first thought to be, Oh, fuck, my mom's going to kill me. I want their first thought to be, I have to call my mom. She's going to help. I try not to express the disappointment in that moment because I know that we will be talking about this incident for weeks, months, maybe years to come.

One of the reasons why I love you is you have been a an expert on the brain and a psychiatrist for 40 years, and you do not focus on what's wrong with us.

You literally teach us how to bring out more awesomeness through brain health.

You call it elite brain training. What is that?

Well, a long time ago, I realized I hated the term mental illness. It shames people. It's stigmatizing, and it's wrong. There are brain health health issues. And if I can teach you to get your brain healthy, well, your mind is better. People often don't understand that. Your brain, physical functioning of your brain creates your mind. And so if you want to be elite, you're already elite. But the people I work with, everybody wants to be better. Nobody wants to be told they're mental. And so the mission I have on the planet is to end the whole concept of mental illness and create this revolution in brain health, Which is why I'm so grateful to hang out with you today.

I wasn't planning on asking you this, but I just was struck by the fact that you distinguished between the brain and the mind. What's the difference between your brain and your mind?

Well, your brain, the physical functioning of your brain, creates your mind. And people get this mixed up all the time, but you just have to think of someone who has Alzheimer's disease. And if you saw the scans of people with Alzheimer's disease, you see that they're wildly damaged. And then that person is no longer her fully that person because their brain has been damaged, or just take COVID. People who get COVID in the next four months have a 25 % chance of having a new onset psychiatric illness because COVID causes inflammation in the brain. And then I was on the Kardashian show recently, and Kendall came to see me, and she's like, after I got COVID, I'm so anxious. But if you look at the physical functioning of her brain, her emotional centers are on fire. And so people really need to know if you want a healthy mind, the first thing to have is a healthy brain.

When you say a healthy brain, so that makes sense to me, Dr. Innan, first of all, especially the Alzheimer's example. It makes sense to me that when the physical structure and functioning of your brain is impacted, of course, it has an impact on the state of your mind. And so are you saying that absolutely anybody can improve the physical health of their brain, and that will have an impact on your happiness, your performance, and your mental health?

Everything. And it happens quickly. So for example, if you get better sleep tonight, your mind can be better tomorrow. If you get drunk tonight, your mind is going to be worse tomorrow. And because those both have a direct impact on the physical functioning of your brain.

Wow. It's interesting because you're right. There is so much information and so many conversations out there about mental health, but you have this revolutionary approach of teaching all of us how to take better care of our brain, and how to improve our brain itself, and how that has a direct impact. So I want to start at the very beginning, because you've been doing this for 40 years. You are, in my opinion, the world's leading expert on the brain. And can you give us just a 101 on the brain and what you want anybody and everybody to know about the brain. And I want you to speak directly, Dr. Amen, to somebody who may be listening who's never thought about this topic before.

So your brain is involved in everything you do, how you think, how you feel, how you act, how you get along with other people. It's the organ of intelligence, character, and every single decision you make. And when your brain works right, you work right. And when your brain is troubled for whatever reason, you're sadder, sicker, poorer, because your decisions aren't as good. And the very first step in getting a healthy brain is developing a concept I call brain envy. I always say Freud was wrong. Penus envy is not the cause of anybody's I haven't seen it once in 40 years. It's brain envy. It's what you want. You want to love the three pounds of fat between your ears. Today, I'm in Miami, but I usually live in Newport Beach, where we have more plastic surgeons than almost anywhere in the world, because people care more about their faces, their breasts, their bellies, and their butts, than And they do their brain. And that's insane, because it's your brain that makes you attractive. It's your brain that makes you happy. It's your brain that keeps you purposeful, or it's your brain That is the organ of rage.

And so getting your brain right is critical. And it's these three steps: brain envy, got to care, avoid anything that hurts it, know the list. And quite frankly, most second-graders would get a 90 % if you gave them 100 things that hurt their brain. And then the third thing is, regularly do things that help it. And I worked with B. J. Fogg for six months. He runs a persuasive tech lab at Stanford on how people change. And we develop tiny habits. What's the smallest thing you can do today that will make the biggest difference? And the mother tiny habit is whenever you go to do something today, ask yourself. Takes three seconds. Ask yourself, is this good for my brain or bad for it? And if you can answer that with information and love, love of yourself, love of your family, love of your mission, you're going to just start making better decisions because you care about the organ that makes you, you.

Wow. All right, let me unpack this. So number one, brain envy is this idea of actually caring about the health of your brain. And so do you recommend that you have somebody in mind that you envy? Like, clearly, I envy you because you take incredible care of your brain. But is it just this concept that you just actually have to wake up and realize that what's in between your ears is the most important aspect of your health and wellness period? Is that what you're saying?

Yes.

Number two, you then said that there are these microhabits that you have developed, one of which is asking yourself, literally throughout the day, is this good or bad for my brain? Let me just role play that one real quick, because you said that what? Like, 90% of second graders can answer the question correctly Almost all of the time, but we adults get it terribly wrong. So let's just say it's breakfast time. So how do you use this to start to make better choices that help your brain? Do you literally go, okay, am I having a cup of coffee or a glass of water? Am I eating a big piece of toast with tons of butter and all this crap on it? Am I taking my supplements? How does this play out in somebody's day to day life, Dr. Amen?

So I used to play a game with my daughter when she was little. Her name is Chloe. And we called it Chloe's Game. And I would say, Blueberries. And she would say, Two Thumbs Up God's Candy. And then I would say, Frosted Flakes. She'd go, Way too much sugar. Or avocados, two thumbs up God's Butter. Or hitting a soccer ball with your head. And she would just roll her eyes like, Brain is soft, skull is hard. That would be so stupid. And so if you think of the standard American diet, sad, almost everything's bad for your brain, from the toast in the morning to the sugar cereals, to the donuts, to the pastries, to the coffee with sugar and milk in it. No, those things are not great for the health of your brain. But if If you did intermittent fasting and you skip breakfast, well, that's good for your brain.

Why is intermittent fasting good for the brain?

Because it helps your brain clean up the trash that builds up from the day before. There's a term called called Autophagy, which is cells start to eat the extra trash that built up the day before. And so if you don't sleep, you don't have enough enough time for the cleaning crew to come and clean up your brain. Intermittent fasting gives you a little bit more time to do that. So breakfast is marketing, and it's actually not essential. Now, for people who might have hypoglycemia or low blood sugar, then breakfast really is important. And kids who have ADD, for example, if they have protein in the morning, their medication lasts longer throughout the day. And when you and I were growing up, things like sausage and eggs were common for breakfast, where now, because everybody's on the run, it's sugar-laden cereal Bills juice. That was the only thing the second-graders got wrong when I tested them. So I gave them a list of 20 things, and I'm like, Good for your brain or bad for it. And the only thing they got wrong was orange juice, which they put in the good category But it's clearly in the bad category because when is it rational to have the sugar from four oranges?

It's not rational.

That's true.

It makes a lot of sense.

What are three micro habits that have the biggest impact on the health of your brain, other than asking yourself, is this good or bad for my brain?

So I start every day with today is going to be a great day, because once you get the physical functioning of your brain healthy, you then have to program it. And so I knew I was going to talk to you. It was the first thing that came up in my mind. So I start every day. And if you have children, It's really good to do this at breakfast, which is if you have breakfast. So why is today going to be a great day for you? Directing your mind, which for many people, because of evolution, They wake up in a negative state. It puts your brain in a positive state. And then my favorite of all the habits I do is when I go to bed at night, I say a prayer, and then I go, What went well today? And I go on a treasure hunt. And I actually start from the very moment I woke up looking for what was right about the day. And I've done this now seven or eight years. And even the night my dad died, about two and a half years ago, it was an awful, awful day. I did it because it was my habit, right?

The brain is lazy. It does what you nudge it to do. And so it really helped me, even in a really hard time. But it's almost my favorite time of the day, Because like you, I'm busy, and great things will happen, and I'll just not really focus on it. But it's that treasure hunt that is just so good. And then I take my supplements every day because we live in a nutrient defician society, and I always want to give my brain the nutrition it needs so it can serve me rather than derail me.

Is there one supplement that you believe everybody should take for better brain health?

Well, a couple, multiple vitamin, a really high-quality multiple vitamin I make one called NeuraVite Plus. Brand new study showed people with memory problems who are headed to darkness when they took a high-quality multiple vitamin within a matter of months their memory was better.

What?

Wait a minute. Hold on a second. So you're saying that a high-quality multivitamin can not only improve your memory, but if you're slightly Hiding on a slippery slope toward memory loss, research shows that it can actually bring memory back?

Yes. Brand new research just came out. They're actually comparing it to placebo and cocoa extract chocolate. And they were hoping the chocolate would do it. It wasn't the chocolate, it was the multiple vitamin. And why I developed NeuraBite like I did? It has the same dosages of B6, B12, and Foley that decrease the conversion of mild cognitive impairment to Alzheimer's disease. Now, I never make a disease claim with supplements, but If this level of B6, B12, and Foley did that, I'm going to put those levels in our supplements.

Wow. I'm going to start popping it like candy is what I'm going to do. I'm going to make sure that we link to that study and then we link to the supplements that you make as well, just so that people can check it out. That's incredible. So a multivitamin has a huge impact. I hear a lot about fish oil, too.

And that would be number two. I We did a study at Amen Clinics, and we found 98% of people had suboptimal levels of omega-3 fatty acids unless they were supplementing, because we don't have the same level of fish consumption we had before. Plus, fish is tricky. Brand new study out of Florida International University, so not very far from where I am today. They looked at bonefish off the Coast of Florida. On average, they had seven pharmaceutical medications in their tissues. And I'm like, no way. And the most common were antidepressants. So as humans, excrete the medications they take into waste plants that gets out into the ocean. And then the fish we eat are impacted by them in a negative way. So one reason I like high-quality fish oil because it's purified, especially ours, but also omega-3 fatty acids have been found to be good for your heart, good for your brain, good for your hair, good for your skin, good for your eyes.

Why is it good for the brain?

25 % of the nerve cell membranes in your brain are made up of omega-3 fatty acids. So if you're deficient, your brain is not going to work as fast and efficiently as it could. And low levels have been associated with all sorts of bad things, from depression to dementia to ADHD.

I'm going to sprint out of this interview. Go get these supplements.

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