The Brain Warrior's Way: Ignite Your Energy and Focus, Attack Illness and Aging, Transform Pain into Purpose - Hardcover

Amen M.D., Daniel G.; Amen BSN RN, Tana

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1101988479 ISBN 13: 9781101988473

Publisher: Berkley, 2016

Synopsis

New York Times bestselling authors Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen are ready to lead you to victory...The Brain Warrior’s Way is your arsenal to win the fight to live a better life. The Amens will guide you through the process, and give you the tools to take control. So if you’re serious about your health, either out of desire or necessity, it’s time to arm yourself and head into battle.
 
When trying to live a healthy lifestyle, every day can feel like a battle. Forces are destroying our bodies and our minds. The standard American diet we consume is making us sick; we are constantly bombarded by a fear-mongering news media; and we’re hypnotized by technical gadgets that keep us from our loved ones. Even our own genes can seem like they’re out to get us. But you can win the war. You can live your life to the fullest, be your best, and feel your greatest, and the key to victory rests between your ears.
 
Your brain runs your life. When it works right, your body works right, and your decisions tend to be thoughtful and goal directed. Bad choices, however, can lead to a myriad of problems in your body. Studies have shown that your habits turn on or off certain genes that make illness and early death more or less likely. But you can master your brain and body for the rest of your life with a scientifically-designed program: the Brain Warrior’s Way.
 
Master your brain and body for the rest of your life. This is not a program to lose 10 pounds, even though you will do that—and lose much more if needed. You can also prevent Alzheimer’s, reverse aging, and improve your:
 
-Overall health
-Focus
-Memory
-Energy
-Work
-Mood Stability
-Flexibility
-Inner Peace
-Relationships
 
The Amens have helped tens of thousands of clients over thirty years, and now they can help you. It is time to live a better life—right now!

About this title

About the Author:

Daniel G. Amen, MD, is a double board-certified psychiatrist, professor, and ten-time New York Times bestselling author. He is one of the world’s foremost experts on using brain-imaging tools to help optimize and treat his patients. Amen Clinics have one of the highest published success rates for patients. His research was listed as one of the Top 100 Stories in Science for 2015 by Discover magazine. He has written and hosted eleven highly popular shows about the brain for public television. His work has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, and Men’s Health and on The Dr. Oz Show and Dr. Phil.

 
Tana Amen, BSN, RN, and VP of Amen Clinics, is the author of 6 books, including the New York Times bestseller The Omni Diet. She is a highly respected health and fitness expert, and a nationally renowned speaker and media guest. She has appeared on The Doctors, Today, Good Day New York, and more. Additionally, Tana's appearances on public television promoting brain health have helped raise millions of dollars for local stations.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

INTRODUCTION

The Brain Warrior’s Way

A warrior is someone who is committed to master oneself

at all levels, who develops the courage to do the right

thing for yourself, others, and community.

—THE WAY OF THE SEAL BY MARK DIVINE

The war for your health is won or lost between your ears, in the moment-by-moment decisions your brain makes every day. When your brain works right your decisions are much more likely to be

effective and add laserlike focus, energy, and health to your life. When your brain is troubled, for whatever reason, you are much more likely to make bad decisions that steal your energy, focus, moods, memory, and health and lead to your early destruction and trouble in future generations.

Bushido (Japanese: “way of the warrior”) is the code of ethics for the samurai. It is a way of living that is required to be a warrior. Samurais ascribe to a culture focused on constant, never-ending self-improvement in an effort to protect themselves and those they love. The Brain Warrior’s Way is also a way of living, a clear path we have developed over three decades of helping tens of thousands of patients at Amen Clinics have better brains and better lives. In addition, we have used this path to help people in the military, businesses, churches, schools, and drug rehabilitation centers. Living the Brain Warrior’s Way will improve your decision-making ability and sense of personal power and help your

■ Energy

■ Focus

■ Moods

■ Memory

■ Weight

■ Relationships

■ Work

■ Overall health

The Brain Warrior’s Way is a unique and powerful program and the only one of its kind to improve the health of your brain and body. It is grounded in scientific research and designed to help you live with vitality, a clear mind and excellent health—even if you are struggling or are in pain right now—even if you’ve made unhealthy choices for many years. This program will help you turn your health around. Don’t you want to wake up feeling good inside and out every day?

By following the Brain Warrior’s Way, you will transform the health of not just your brain and body, but the brains and bodies of those you love and care for. The new science of epigenetics has taught us that your habits turn on or off certain genes that make illnesses and early death more or less likely in you, and also in your children and grandchildren. The war for the health of your brain and body is not just about you. It is about generations of you.

Step by step, this book will show you how to develop a Brain Warrior’s MASTERY over your physical and mental health. It will teach you:

Mind-set of a Brain Warrior—knowing your motivation to be healthy and focusing on abundance, never deprivation

Assessment of a Brain Warrior—having a clear strategy, brain health assessment, knowing and optimizing your important numbers, fighting the war on multiple fronts, and always being on the lookout to prevent future trouble

Sustenance of a Brain Warrior—knowing the food and supplements that fuel success and give you a competitive edge

Training of a Brain Warrior—engaging in the daily habits and routines that protect your health

Essence of a Brain Warrior—transforming your pain into passion and knowing why the world is a better place because you are here

Responsibilities of a Brain Warrior—taking the critical step of sharing information and creating your own tribe of Brain Warriors

Yearlong Basic Training of a Brain Warrior—making lasting changes with tools that will last a lifetime

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT: BRAIN WARRIORS ARE

■ Serious

■ Purposeful

■ Informed

■ Aware

■ Prepared

■ Nourished

■ Highly trained

■ Deeply honest

■ Passionate

■ Protective

■ Relentless

Along the way you will meet dozens of triumphant Brain Warriors who were once prisoners of the war for their health. Their stories will inspire and encourage you into a new way of living.

BRAIN WARRIOR BILL

Here is a note from the leader of an East Coast Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO) Pod whose group spent three days with us at Amen Clinics learning the principles of the Brain Warrior’s Way.

“The program dramatically changed my life, allowing me to lose weight, and to focus unlike I could ever remember. My depression faded away and my focus and productivity improved. As a group, we universally agreed that the visit to Amen Clinics had the greatest impact on our lives in over a decade of being together.”

Most people don’t want to think about wars and warriors, and we would prefer not to either, but if you open your eyes and tell yourself the truth about what is happening in our society it is painfully obvious: we are in a war for the health of our brains and bodies. Americans die younger and experience more illness than people in other wealthy nations, despite spending nearly twice as much on health care per person.1 Close to 75 percent of our health-care dollars are spent on chronic preventable illnesses, including Alzheimer’s disease, depression, ADD/ADHD, diabetes and prediabetes, and obesity.

WHY WE ARE IN A WAR FOR OUR HEALTH

And this is not just an adult war. Huge corporations are targeting your children and grandchildren. When a clown or a king with a billion-dollar bankroll can come into your living room and bribe your children with toys to get them to eat low-quality, nonnutritious foods that promote illness and early death it’s time to fight back. According to a recent study, the toys fast-food companies use to entice children are highly effective weapons in hooking their developing brains to want more of what will hurt their health.2 In addition, well-meaning organizations, such as the Girl Scouts, enlist young girls to sell unhealthful cookies as a way to fund their activities, and few people think twice about the sugar, vegetable oil, partially hydrogenated fats, and artificial preservatives that promote disease. You are in a war for your health. Nearly everywhere you go (schools, work, shopping malls, movie theaters, airports, ball parks, and so on), someone is trying to sell you food that will kill you early. The standard American diet (SAD) is filled with pro-inflammatory foods that increase your risk for diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, cancer, ADHD, depression, and dementia. It is also associated with a smaller hippocampus, one of the major memory structures in the brain.

The real weapons of mass destruction in our society are foods that are

■ Highly processed

■ Pesticide sprayed

■ Artificially colored and sweetened

■ High glycemic

■ Low fiber

■ Foodlike substances

■ Laden with hormones

■ Tainted with antibiotics

Plus the companies that produce these unhealthful foods not only use toys to hook tiny human brains but also use neuroscience tricks to hijack adult brains. They purposefully associate gorgeous, scantily clad women with poor-quality food to hook your pleasure centers, somehow getting you to make the illogical connection that if you eat those foods, either these women will want you or you will look like them. You must know there’s no way these beautiful women would look the way they do if their diet regularly consisted of cheeseburgers that dripped mayonnaise, mustard, and ketchup down their blouses.

In addition, many corporations brag about the addictive nature of their foods, “Bet you can’t eat just one.” They hire food scientists to combine fat, sugar, and salt with the perfect texture, crunchiness, meltiness, and aroma to overwhelm the brain with flavor to trigger the “bliss point” in your brain, which is akin to taking a hit of cocaine, making you literally fall in love with low-quality foods. This is one of the reasons people say they love candy, doughnuts, pastries, french fries, and bread and can’t ever conceive of giving them up. They are not eating to live; they are eating to feed addictions that were artificially created for a profit motive. We had one woman tell us she would rather get cancer than give up sugar. We wondered aloud if she dated the bad boys in high school. Being in love with something that hurts you is a position that needs some serious reexamination.

No food of any kind belongs in the same emotional place in your brain as the love you have for your spouse, children, or grandchildren. Many ancient warriors considered dependence on anything, especially food, a weakness, and totally unacceptable. They ate to win; their survival depended on it. We want you to do the same thing if you truly love yourself, your health, your loved ones, and future generations.

The war for your health is not just about our modern-day adulterated food. News outlets repeatedly pour toxic thoughts into our brains, making us see terror or disaster around every corner to boost their ratings. The constant frightening images activate our brains’ primitive fear circuits (amygdala) that once ensured our survival but are now obsolete. The news always highlights the sensational, evil, and most awful stories to keep you hooked to their channels or websites. Unless you purposefully monitor your news intake, these companies succeed in raising your stress hormones, which over time shrink the major memory centers in your brain and put excessive fat around your waist—and belly fat is particularly toxic, because it converts healthy testosterone into unhealthy, cancer-promoting forms of estrogen. Do you reach for your phone first thing in the morning to see what awful things have happened in the world overnight? You might not have known that this habit is adversely affecting your health, but now you do.

You are in a war for your health. It is further fueled by technology companies that are constantly creating addictive gadgets that hook our attention and distract us from meaningful relationships.5 Many people are on their phones at mealtimes, rather than interacting with family members. A 2015 study found that teens actually spend more time on social media (average 9 hours) than they do asleep. Tweens are online 6 hours a day.6 Technology has hijacked developing brains with potentially serious consequences for many.

At Amen Clinics we have treated many teens and adults with video game or pornography addictions. One teenager became violent whenever his parents limited his play. We scanned his brain while he played video games and then later after he had abstained from playing any games for a month. It was like we were looking at the brains of two different people. The video games caused abnormal firing in his left temporal lobe, an area of the brain often associated with violence. When he was off video games, he was one of the sweetest, most polite young men we had met; but when on them, it was a completely different story.

Daniel did a Tinder experiment for the Dr. Oz Show using brain scans to see the effect of the dating site on mood and focus. He demonstrated that, in some individuals, the dating site can make people more vulnerable to anxiety and depression.

As video game and technology usage goes up, so do obesity and depression. Ian Bogost, famous video game designer (Cow Clicker and Cruel 2 B Kind) and chair of media studies and professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, calls the wave of new habit-forming technologies “the cigarettes of this century” and warns of their equally addictive and potentially destructive side effects.

As part of the gadget revolution, disturbing new research from Microsoft reported that humans lose concentration after about 8 seconds, while the lowly goldfish loses its focus after about 9 seconds.9 It seems like evolution may be going in the wrong direction. In 2000, the human attention span average was estimated at 12 seconds, which is not great; but losing a third of our attention span in fifteen years is alarming!

According to an article in Harvard Business Review, “Beware of the Busy Manager,” our unhealthful lifestyles are diminishing our capacity at work.10 Only 10 percent of managers score high in both focus and energy, two of the main ingredients for success. The authors found that 20 percent of managers were disengaged, 30 percent scored high in procrastination, and 40 percent were easily distracted. This means that 90 percent of managers, and likely the rest of us, lack focus and/or energy.

These and other assaults on our brains and bodies have potentially devastating long-term consequences.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE WAR FOR OUR HEALTH

Genes play a more minor role than you might think, and many diseases are born out of unhealthful choices and behaviors, regardless of whether there is a genetic predisposition. Sadly, all around us we can see the devastating consequences of preventable illness.

Alzheimer’s disease is expected to triple by 2050, and there is no cure on the horizon. Alzheimer’s disease affects 50 percent of people age eightyfive and older. If you are fortunate to live until you are eighty-five or beyond you have a one-in-two chance of losing your mind along the way. To make matters worse, recent brain-imaging research has demonstrated that Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia actually start in the brain decades before you have any symptoms. Below is a brain SPECT scan, which measures blood flow and activity, of a fifty-nine-year-old woman diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease compared to someone with a healthy brain. You can see the back half of her brain is deteriorating. She likely had trouble in her brain in her thirties or forties.

Premature cognitive impairment leads to diminished work performance, which can lead to hardships among a workforce that grows older every year. With people working longer than ever before, even minor drops in brain function can jeopardize your productivity and job security. Since the 2008 recession, the average retirement age has risen from age fifty-seven to age sixty-two and by 2020 it is estimated that 25 percent of American workers will be fifty-five or older. The exciting news is that new research suggests that you can decrease your risk of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia by 60 percent or more, and those same strategies will help your mood, focus, and memory. The Brain Warrior’s Way will clearly lay out those strategies for you.

Depression is one of the greatest killers of our time. It affects 50 million Americans at some point in their lives and has increased 400 percent since 1987. Depression is associated with suicide, divorce, job failure, heart disease, obesity, and dementia. Depression doubles the risk of Alzheimer’s disease in women and quadruples it in men. A staggering 23 percent of women between the ages of twenty and sixty are taking antidepressant medications. The risk of depression also significantly increases after the age of sixty-five.

Attention deficit disorder (ADD), also called attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), is now being diagnosed more frequently than ever. Statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report that nearly one in five high-school-age boys ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Berkley
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1101988479
• ISBN 13: 9781101988473
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368