The Real Long-Term Effects Of Marijuana & Alcohol - Dr Daniel Amen

Why do you think that this is the unhappiest generation at the moment? What's contributing to that? Because they have brain problems. They think of alcohol as a health food. They think of marijuana as innocuous. They think of psilocybin as the cool new thing that I should do because it treats PTSD and depression and I think I should do it at the party I'm at Friday night. Uh I think there are a series of lies that are driving the problems we have. And then if you take on top of that social media where you think everyone else's life is better than yours, the negative news that is actually designed to hook you to keep watching even though it makes you angry um so that they can sell you more copper underwear. and then take 70% of the calories the young people consume are ultrarocessed. Uh so we're poisoning their food. We're putting toxic products on their bodies. Um we're feeding them negative news, negative comparisons on social media. It's a shitow. And the way out I believe is brain health. Cuz when you ask yourself this one question and this is really the one question to unpack. Whatever I do today, is this good for my brain or bad for it? And if I can answer that question with information and love, love of myself, love of my family, love of the reason God put me on earth, I just get better. dig into the effect of alcohol, marijuana, mushrooms on the brain. I think we're seeing a huge downturn in alcohol use and a huge uptick in THC use at the moment. In fact, Gen Z are more likely to smoke weed than they are to drink alcohol. And that's, you know, in the space of 50 years, a big pivot. Uh so I'm interested to know what even short-term and then slightly more protracted you know social normal normal use whatever normal recreational use of alcohol weed and mushroom see the disaster we have with our mental health teenagers who use marijuana in their 20s have an increased risk of anxiety depression suicide and psychosis I'm not a fan at all uh I published a study on a thous0 in marijuana users. Until recently, the largest imaging study ever. Every area of the brain is lower in blood flow and activity. Makes your brain look older than you are. Um, now I've known that for a long time. I'm also a child psychiatrist and parents would bring me their 16-year-old child and they go, I think he has ADD. I heard about your work with ADD or ADHD. I think he has it. And I'm like, well, did he have it when he was 10? Did he have it when he was eight? Did he have it when he was 12? No, no, no. I'm like, we're going to do a drug screen. And he came he had it when it started hanging around with little Johnny from from two doors down. That's exactly it. What's happening functionally with THC that's causing that effect in the brain? It's decreasing activity and blood flow in the brain. And then just recently another group has nothing to do with me published a study on a thousand marijuana users, young marijuana users, significant areas of their brain involved with learning and memory were underactive. And it's like that's not loving your brain. And it's like but I can't deal with the anxiety. It's like, well, have you tried diaphragmatic breathing or learning not to believe every stupid thought you have or theine? I'm like a huge fan of theine from green tea of all things decreases anxiety and helps you focus. It's interesting that the salve that some people are using acutely to try and treat a symptom is predisposing them to more of that symptom once they come out the other side of it. There's a poetic irony going on there. Yeah. I wrote a book called Feel Better Fast and Make It Last. And it's like, I want you to do things that help you feel good now and later as opposed to now but not later. Yeah. You don't want to be borrowing health and well-being from tomorrow to pay it today. No. What about alcohol? It makes your brain look older than you are. And when I first started scanning people, I was the director of a substance abuse treatment program. And their brains look so bad, I actually put them on a poster. And the poster hangs in a 100,000 schools around the world called which brand do you want? Alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, methampetamine, nicotine. Not good. None of them were pretty or no. Um and it was I was like so impressed. I was so impressed with the visuals um that actually for now I make my patients posters. It's like here's a healthy brain. Here's yours. Here's yours if you get it healthy. And here's yours if you don't five years from now. And the title is Which Brain Do You Want? Very motivating. Uh Jonathan Kaine did my show. He's the guitarist. Uh keyboardist for Journey, the band Journey, and he wrote many of their iconic songs. um he saw his brain and he was drinking like two bottles of wine a night and stopped and that was 9 months ago and hasn't drank since. I'm like so proud of him. It's a real motivator for people real if if you're smart and you realize your brain, the physical functioning of 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 every decision you make. If you're damaging it, you are damaging your present and your future. I think so much of it comes back to that tension I spoke about earlier on that our day-to-day conscious experience of our own minds is the most salient thing. And yet the structure that's underpinning them is so opaque because we don't get to know why am I feeling a little bit worse this month versus last month. Yeah, maybe, you know, I had to send it a bit too hard at a few parties and yeah, maybe I didn't get that much sleep and yeah, maybe I've been eating a lot of sugar, but like who's to say? Sometimes I eat sugar and I feel fine the next day. So, there's always the it's very slippery, you know, not in the same way I think that if you eat a calorie surplus for a couple of months and then you look in the mirror and you go, I'm I'm a bit fluffy, you know, I kind of I can see what's going on. Now, if there was an external representation of structurally what was happening to our brains beyond our conscious experience, which is so slippery, and you can't draw those uh lines, um the the the trend between what I did and the impact that it had, and I'm going to guess that a lot of this stuff's lagged as well. It's not going to be immediately, I smoke weed one day, my brain immediately starts functioning more differently. It's going to be cumulative. It's going to build up over time. It's going to be to do with acute changes but turning into chronic like uh state changes turning into trait changes over time. So everybody can just no well you know like I'll just it's another well and nobody cares about their brain because you can't see it right just like you're saying you can see the wrinkles in your skin or the fat around your belly and you do something when you're unhappy with it. And in 1991 when I looked at my brain for the first time, I'm a double board certified psychiatrist by then. I was the top neuroscience student in medical school. Um, I didn't care about my own brain. But when I saw it and then I saw my mom's brain, so I saw my mom's brain the week before and her brain was stunningly beautiful, which reflected her life. And still 93, she's got 55 grandchildren, great-grandchildren. She knows everybody's name, everybody's birthday, what's going on in everybody's life. I was unbelievable how it reflected her brain. And then I looked at mine and it wasn't healthy because I played football in high school. I had menitis when I was a young soldier. I had bad habits. But when I saw it, I'm like, "No, I'm not going to have my six-year-old mother having a better looking brain than wiping the floor with me neurologically." Yeah. So, I've came up with this term called brain envy. I always say Freud was wrong. Penis envy is not the cause of anybody's problem. I've not seen it once in 45 years. Brain envy. You want to learn to You want to want a better brain. And as I develop brain envy, I'm like, "Okay, what do I do to have a better brain?" This episode is brought to you by Nomatic. 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