Your brain is involved in everything you do, including how you think, how you feel, how you act, and how well you get along with other people. It’s the organ of personality, character, intelligence, and every decision you make. From my brain-imaging work with tens of thousands of patients worldwide over the past 20 years, it is very clear to me that when your brain works right, you work right, and when your brain is troubled, you are much more likely to have trouble in your life.
With a healthier brain, you are happier, physically healthier, wealthier, wiser, and just make better decisions, which helps you be more successful and live longer. When the brain is not healthy for whatever reason—such as a head injury or past emotional trauma—people are sadder, sicker, poorer, less wise, and less successful.
It is easy to understand how trauma can hurt the brain, but researchers have also seen how negative thinking and bad programming from our past can also affect it.
For example, I grew up with an older brother who was intent on shoving me around. The constant tension and fear I felt then led to a higher level of anxiety, anxious thinking patterns, and always being on guard, never knowing when something bad was about to happen. This fear caused long-term overactivity in my brain’s fear centers, until I was able to work through it later on in life.
In Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, my colleague Dr. Joe Dispenza is your guide to optimize both the hardware and software of your brain to help you reach a new state of mind. His new book is based on solid science, and he continues to speak with kindness and wisdom, as he did in the award-winning film What the BLEEP Do We Know!? and in his first book, Evolve Your Brain.
Even though I think of the brain like a computer, with both hardware and software, the hardware (the actual physical functioning of the brain) is not separate from the software or the constant programming and reshaping that occurs throughout our lives. They have a dramatic impact on each other.
Most of us have had trauma of some kind in our lives and live with the day-to-day scars that have resulted. Cleaning out those experiences that have become part of the brain’s structure can be incredibly healing. Of course, engaging in brain-healthy habits, such as a proper diet and exercise and certain brain nutrients, is critical to the brain working right. But in addition, your moment-by-moment thoughts exert a powerful healing effect on the brain … or they can work to your detriment. The same is true for past experiences that can become wired in the brain.
The study we do at the Amen Clinics is called “brain SPECT imaging.” SPECT (single-photon emission computed tomography) is a nuclear-medicine study that looks at blood flow and activity patterns. It is different from CT scans or MRI, which examine the brain’s anatomy, because SPECT looks at how the brain functions. Our SPECT work, now over 70,000 scans, has taught us so many important life lessons about the brain, such as:
SPECT scans have also taught us that as a society, we need to have much more love and respect for the brain, and that allowing children to play contact sports, like football and hockey, is not a smart idea.
One of the most exciting lessons I have learned is that people can literally change their brains and change their lives by engaging in regular brain-healthy habits, such as correcting negative beliefs and using meditative processes such as those discussed by Dr. Dispenza.
In one series of studies we published, the practice of meditation, such as what Dr. Dispenza recommends, boosted blood flow to the prefrontal cortex, the most thoughtful part of the human brain. After eight weeks of daily meditation, the prefrontal cortex at rest was stronger, and the memories of our subjects were better, too. There are so many ways to heal and optimize the brain.
My hope is that, like me, you will develop “brain envy” and want a better-functioning brain. The brain-imaging work we do has changed everything in my own life. Shortly after I started ordering SPECT scans in 1991, I decided to look at my own brain. I was 37 years old. When I saw the toxic, bumpy appearance, I knew it was not healthy. All of my life I have been someone who rarely drank alcohol, never smoked, and never used an illegal drug. Then why did my brain look so bad? Before I really understood about brain health, I’d had many bad brain habits. I ate lots of fast food, drank diet soda like she was my best friend, often slept only four to five hours at night, and carried unexamined hurts from the past. I didn’t exercise, felt chronically stressed, and carried an extra 30 pounds. What I didn’t know was hurting me … and not just a little.
My last scan looks healthier and much younger than it did 20 years earlier. My brain has literally aged backward—that’s how changeable your brain is, too, when you make up your mind to take care of it properly. After seeing my original scan, I wanted my brain to be better. This book will help yours be better, too.
I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did.
— Daniel G. Amen, M.D.,
author of Change Your Brain, Change Your Life
