008: Dr. Austin Perlmutter - Covid-19 and Mental Health: How This Pandemic Exacerbated a Bad Situation

Dr. Austin Perlmutter is a Board-Certified Internal Medicine Physician, a New York Times best-selling author, educator, and consultant who focuses on helping people identify and resolve their biological basis for stuckness in the body and brain and around decision making.

He comes on the show to dive into how the Covid-19 virus and pandemic affected our mental health, what it’s going to take to improve our brain and mental health starting today, and he shares strategies for how we can limit our exposure to stressful media in this episode.

Here’s a list of the topics that Dr. Perlmutter and Chris Irvin cover:

00:00 Introduction to Dr. Austin Perlmutter and his background

2:58 Dr. Perlmutter’s latest paper on how the Covid-19 pandemic is impacting rates of depression

3:46 Cognitive and mental health complications with Covid-19

7:32 For those people who get Covid, what’s it doing to the brain to cause mental health issues?

12:00 The symptoms to watch out for that are related to brain function

20:12 Are there any proposed mechanisms for how inflammation and the immune system can cause things like depression and anxiety?

27:05 Are there any factors we know that will determine the fate of tryptophan going down that different pathway and turning into a harmful metabolite versus a potentially beneficial one?

30:02 Is targeting inflammation and the immune system a great way to get at the root cause?

30:24 What role do drugs like SSRIs have here?

39:49 Why we can’t just “get out in nature” and use natural remedies to fix mental health issues

41:49 Western medicine isn’t designed to address root cause problems

48:08 What about preventing mental health issues from happening?

48:25 Are health care providers responsible?

53:10 How Covid has accelerated problems that have already existed

57:32 The top strategies Dr. Perlmutter recommends starting with today to improve mental health

1:02:02 Tips for improving quantity and quality of sleep

1:11:21 What you can do to limit or reduce your exposure to unhealthy stimuli

1:12:02 Looking at other factors that affect your brain health

1:14:30 Changes in brain neuroplasticity and why this is happening

1:14:56 How high levels of stress affect the brain

1:15:30 Rewiring neurons

1:18:15 Is it repeated exposure or just one simple exposure to something stressful that changes our brain health?

1:19:00 The dopamine learning mechanism involved with social media, including gamification

1:20:13 We’re spending 11 hours a day on media and how this negatively affects us

1:21:12 Social media use in kids and the concerns this brings up

1:22:30 Pornography exposure in kids

1:24:18 Strategies to reduce your exposure to stressful media

1:24:37 How to structure your child’s day to avoid stressful media and internet addiction

1:25:25 Tool to use to check in with your social media usage

Episode Resources:

Dr. Austin Perlmutter’s website

Dr. Perlmutter’s Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook

Dr. Perlmutter’s book, Brain Wash

Dr. Perlmutter’s podcast Get the STUCK Out

Dr. Perlmutter’s podcast episode on the Covid-19 pandemic and depression

The podcast episode Dr. Perlmutter did with Dr. Wendy Wood on Good Habits, Bad Habits

Dr. Perlmutter’s Medium article, The Coronavirus Took Advantage of Our Weaknesses

The Role of Inflammation in Depression, Charles Raison

The book, Noise, by Daniel Kahneman

The book, Tiny Habits, by BJ Fogg