Reclaim Your Brain: How to Calm Your Thoughts, Heal Your Mind, and Bring Your Life Back Under Control

261 Pages·2015·1.54 MB·English

by  Joseph A. Annibali

For Dianne, Chris, and Elizabeth
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword by Daniel G. Amen, M.D.
Acknowledgments
REINING IN THE BRAIN
Introduction
1. Balancing the Brain
MANAGING THE MIND
2. Conquering Negativity
3. Rewriting Your Stories
4. Becoming Mindful
5. Righting Relationships
ADDRESSING SPECIFIC ISSUES
6. Bored Brains, Excitable Brains: ADHD
7. Heart Matters: Anxiety
8. Mood Matters: Depression
9. Getting Unstuck: OCD
10. Branded in the Brain: Emotional Trauma and PTSD
11. Balance Your Brain, Boost Your Willpower: Addiction
12. Healing the Hurting Brain and Body: Brain Injury and Medical Problems
Conclusion: Beyond Mind and Brain
Appendix A: Nutritional Supplements
Appendix B: Medications
Annotated Bibliography
Index
Foreword
I
first met Dr. Joseph Annibali at a five-day conference I was teaching on
applying brain SPECT imaging, the brain-imaging tool we use at Amen Clinics.
A highly trained psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who had already spent decades
in clinical practice, Joe isn’t one to rest on his laurels. He continually seeks out
knowledge that will help his patients: people who are hurting, from all walks of
life, who come to see him from far and wide. I was so impressed by his broad
knowledge, kind heart, and open mind that I asked him to join our medical staff.
Within a short time Joe became the chief psychiatrist in our Reston, Virginia,
clinic, just outside of Washington, D.C., and is now a powerful leader and
mentor among our staff of thirty medical professionals.
Our story at Amen Clinics began in 1991 when I ordered my first brain
SPECT scans on patients with conditions like ADHD (attention
deficit/hyperactivity disorder), severe aggression, and unresponsive anxiety and
depression who had not improved with standard treatments. Over the years, with
Joe’s help, we have built the world’s largest database of brain SPECT scans,
now well over 115,000 scans on patients from 111 countries. These scans have
significantly changed how we help our patients at Amen Clinics. We’ve learned
that psychiatric illnesses are rarely single or simple disorders. Giving someone
the diagnosis of depression is exactly like giving them the diagnosis of chest
pain; the diagnosis does not tell you what the problem is and how serious it
might be. Treatment needs to be tailored to the underlying problems in
individual brains, not a cluster of symptoms. Significantly, with our approach
our patients understand that their problems are medical rather than moral, which
has increased their willingness to follow the treatment plans and decreased their
stigma about having a psychiatric disorder.
The most important lesson we’ve learned from our treasure trove of scans,
and the lesson that has kept Joe and me excited about this work each day, is that
you are not stuck with the brain you have. As Joe discusses in this crucial book,
if your brain is busy or racing out of control, if your brain is dysfunctional, you
can reclaim it. In many thousands of cases, we have seen that you can improve
brain function, even if you have been really bad to your brain. For example,
Amen Clinics did the world’s first and largest brain-imaging study on active and
retired NFL players, where we saw high levels of brain injury. That was not a
surprise. Your brain is soft, about the consistency of soft butter, and it is housed
in a really hard skull with multiple sharp bony ridges, so it is easily damaged.
All of the news about concussions in sports has been bad, with an increased
incidence of depression, suicide, and dementia. But what really excited us with
our NFL study was that on our program to help the players reclaim their brains,
the same one Joe will outline in this book, 80 percent of our 170 players showed
high levels of improvement, especially in their mood, memory, sleep, and brain
function.
When Joe and I were in medical school in the late 1970s and early 1980s,
we were taught that the brain doesn’t heal. But now we know that is wrong. If
you put the brain in a healing environment, often it can get better, much better,
but it requires forethought and a great plan. And this healing is not just for
football players. We have seen improvement in brain function for people with
attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), anxiety, depression, obsessive-
compulsive disorder (OCD), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Lyme
disease, addictions, and even improvement in some people with Alzheimer’s
disease.
In this book, Joe shares many of the important lessons we have learned,
while at the same time giving you his unique perspective on healing. I
encouraged Joe to write this book because of his extensive experiences and
perspective as a master psychiatrist who integrates the latest thinking about the
mind with our work on looking at and optimizing the brain. Reading this book
will be like sitting on the psychiatrist’s couch of the future.
In recent years Joe has also become an expert on the effects on the brain of
Lyme disease, in part because his own daughter has had it. Both Joe and I
believe infectious diseases, like Lyme, will play a significant role in how
psychiatrists will help people in the future, which you will learn about. Joe is
also an expert on Irlen syndrome, a visual processing disorder, which can be
associated with headaches, anxiety, learning challenges, and irritability.
One of the key ideas of this book is that you need first to heal (an injured
brain if present) and balance the brain before other interventions can work well.
Too often people see therapists to help their minds, when they first need to help
their brains work better. Readers will learn a lot about what they can do to help
themselves from the tools and approaches presented here. Most readers will not
need to come for a SPECT scan to benefit from the information given in Reclaim
Your Brain. The book is a great illustration of how much anyone can improve
and heal when we pay attention to the mind and brain at the same time.
Reclaim Your Brain is your road map to a better brain and a better life. It is
packed with useful information, powerful stories, and a completely new way of
thinking that can help you feel better quickly as you heal and balance your busy
brain, while at the same time teaching you how to protect the most important
part of you (your brain) for many years to come. I am excited for you as you
embark on reading and applying the principles in Reclaim Your Brain. They
have changed my life and the lives of many others. With Dr. Annibali’s expert
guidance, I know they will help you change your life for the better.
Daniel G. Amen, M.D.
Author of Change Your Brain, Change Your Life
June 2015
Acknowledgments
T
his book would not exist without the encouragement, support, friendship,
and advice given to me by Daniel Amen, M.D., to whom I am deeply
grateful. I have profound admiration for Dr. Amen’s trailblazing work, his
clinical genius, and his courage. Thank you, Daniel.
I am also grateful to the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, where I spent
five stimulating years becoming a psychoanalyst and a number of years
afterward as a faculty member. Freud may be dead, but many of his fundamental
ideas live on, nourishing those like me who wish to understand other human
beings most deeply.
Gary Moak, M.D., has been my devoted friend and sounding board for both
personal and professional matters for more than forty years. I am grateful for our
friendship, which started during our college days at Penn, and for his advice and
encouragement about this project that started long before my book proposal ever
saw the light of day. Gary reviewed many of the chapter drafts, giving useful
feedback that helped enormously to improve areas where my writing and
thinking were unclear.
Robert Licata, M.D., has been a colleague and dear friend for more than
twenty-five years. Bob’s pithy conceptualization of the relationship between the
prefrontal cortex and the limbic system gave birth to a number of the ideas I
explore in this book. He also graciously reviewed a number of chapter drafts.
For many years, Bob and I were members of a study group with our
colleagues Dave Gebara, M.D., and Larry Spoont, M.D. In this study group we
discussed a number of seminal books and papers and worked over many of the
ideas that I explore in this book.
I am grateful to Madame Renelle Gannon, my French tutor of more than a
decade, for far more than my reasonably proficient command of the French
language. I am indebted to Madame Gannon for her encouragement and support,
and for fascinating twice-weekly discussions about language, art, politics,
history, philosophy, religion, and spirituality, always in French, certainement.
My sincere thanks are due to my agent, Celeste Fine, who remarkably
obtained for me a book contract in no time flat, and her associate John Maas.
This work would not have seen the light of day if my editor, Caroline Sutton,
had not stuck with me through my early abortive attempts to learn how to write a
book. I am grateful for her confidence in me and in the ideas I wanted to write
about. Thank you as well to her associates Brittney Ross and Brianna Flaherty.
Whatever coherence and lucidity exist in this book are due in large part to
Dedi Felman, writer and editor extraordinaire. She, too, was encouraging as she
helped me wrestle my meandering ideas into a conceptual whole. During my
moments of discouragement when I came face-to-face with how little I knew
about writing a book that tells a clear story, Dedi told me to “trust the process,”
which I did. Thank you, Dedi.
In addition to Daniel Amen, M.D., many other individuals within Amen
Clinics have given me help and support. Dr. Rob Johnson reviewed the chapter
on addiction and gave helpful input on that chapter and on the spiritual themes I
discuss in the conclusion. Sue Johnston, M.S.W., L.C.S.W., our clinic’s mind-
body therapist, reviewed the manuscript and gave helpful feedback.
I have been wonderfully blessed by the devotion of my wife and children.
My wife, Dianne, has gifted me with her love and positivity, showing me how a
loving relationship can heal a wounded soul. A beautiful heart can bring things
into your life that all the money in the world couldn’t obtain. For her love,
encouragement, and support—both during the writing of this book and
throughout our long relationship—I am eternally grateful. Dianne sacrificed in
many ways so that I could have the time and energy to work on this book. My
son, Chris, and my daughter, Elizabeth, have also been enormously supportive of
me as I wrote this book. I have learned so much about life and love from them. It
is a wonderful thing to see your children turn out wiser and smarter than you
could ever be.
I have the most interesting job in the world. I get to talk to people about the
things that matter to them most, as we work to find ways to manage their minds,
balance their brains, and unleash their healing processes. I am grateful to the
thousands of patients with whom I have had the privilege to work during my
career of thirty-plus years. At times I’ve felt that I learned and benefited more
from our relationships than they did. There are many patient stories in Reclaim
Your Brain. In all cases, the patients I write about have been thoroughly
disguised and/or melded into composites to protect their privacy.