75. Amen Clinic's Dr. Jay Faber on Teenage Substance Use: Brain Impacts, Long-Term Effects, and Quitting Tips

Oct 19

This week's guest is Dr. Jay Faber. John A. “Jay” Faber, MD is a clinical and forensic double board-certified psychiatrist with more than three decades of experience in Child, Adolescent, and Adult Psychiatry. Currently, he is on the medical staff at the Amen Clinics in Encino, CA.

Dr. Faber's website: https://drjayfaber.com/

Dr. Faber's book: https://drjayfaber.com/escape-overview/

This week's DBT Skill is pros and cons. Learn more here.

Dr. Faber and I dive into the following topics…

+ What happens to the brain under the influence of alcohol, marijuana, and nicotine and long-term effects of usage

+ Is vaping 'better' than smoking cigarettes?—what the data shows so far

+ The difference between long-term, medium, and short-term goals and how to set these for yourself when trying to quit a substance

+ Exactly what resources to utilize when attempting to quit substance use and how to know when professional support could be beneficial

+ Red flags to be aware of if engaging in substance use

+ the difference THC vs. CBD usage

+ so much more!

Mentioned In The Episode…

+ dorm tour

+ healthy vs. long-term substance use brain imaging via Amen Clinics

+ Fast Times of Ridgemont High clip

+ Lost Connections by Johann Hari

SHOP GUEST RECOMMENDATIONS: https://amzn.to/3A69GOC

Episode Sponsors

🛋This week's episode is sponsored by Teen Counseling. Teen Counseling is an online therapy program with over 14,000 licensed therapists in their network offering support with depression, anxiety, relationships, trauma, and more via text, talk, and video counseling. Head to teencounseling.com/shepersisted to find a therapist today!

🍓This week's episode is brought to you by Sakara. Sakara is a nutrition company that focuses on overall wellness, starting with what you eat. Use code XOSADIE at checkout for 20% your first order!

About She Persisted (formerly Nevertheless, She Persisted)

After a year and a half of intensive treatment for severe depression and anxiety, 18-year-old Sadie recounts her journey by interviewing family members, professionals, and fellow teens to offer self-improvement tips, DBT education, and personal experiences. She Persisted is the reminder that someone else has been there too and your inspiration to live your life worth living.

Want to create a podcast video just like this? Check out veed.io! It streamlines the process of adding audio, subtitles, photos, and more!

a note: this is an automated transcription so please ignore any accidental misspellings!

Sadie: Welcome to she persisted. I'm your host Sadie Sutton. Every Friday, I post interviews about mental health dialectical behavioral therapy and teenage life. These episodes break down my mental health journey. Teach skills to help you cope with life and showcase testimonials from individuals, including teens.

Whether you've struggled yourself or just want to improve your mental fitness. This podcast is your inspiration to live a life you love and keep persisting

This week on she persisted.

Dr. Faber: the reality is you're going to go to a party and there's people smoking. What are you going to do? You know, are you going to walk under the mud with the barbed wire or are you going to succumb to the, to the moment? And so. Part of it is becoming more resilient, tough minded as well.

Sadie: This week's DBT skill is the pros and cons scale. I know this sounds self-explanatory, but I love the way the DBT outlines the scale. So I wanted to share it as it's so relevant to this week. So we use pros and cons to make decisions, and this skill can be super helpful when you may need to make a decision between two or more options.

So big picture, the objective of the skills for you to realize that accepting reality and tolerating distress leads to better outcomes versus rejecting reality and refusing to tolerate distress. However, you can use the pros and cons skill in any situation that you're navigating.

So here's what you do first you in detailed, describe the behavior you are trying to avoid do the who, what, when, where, how all of the objective details without adding judgments next, you're going to examine the pros and cons of engaging in the behavior or not engaging in the behavior.

This means the pros for engaging in the behavior, the cons for engaging in the behavior, the pros for not engaging in the behavior and the cons for not engaging in the behavior. Then you're going to examine the advantages and disadvantages of each viable option and decide how to move forward.

This isn't just a two-part list of what the good and bad parts are up by behavior. It is a lot more comprehensive and a full picture of all the different advantages and disadvantages of the situation. And I really loved the nuance.

This gifts now getting scenarios.

So I will link the DBT pros and cons worksheet in today's show notes. If you are interested in filling that out. Hello. Hello. And welcome back to another episode of she persisted. My name is Sadie satin. I'm your host. I'm an 18 year old freshman at the university of Pennsylvania. And I'm so glad you're here. And if you're new here, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review and follow along at, at she persisted podcast on Instagram and tech talk. So if you are a returning listener, you might notice a couple of things are different. One is that it's Monday.

It's not Friday. We have a new upload day. This is a, for a couple of reasons. One is that very consistently over the past six months, when my upload do's Friday, I wouldn't actually upload until like Saturday or Sunday, which was just not very effective. With my like workflow with schoolwork and homework and work work, it just, frilly was not very effective.

And also we talk about some pretty heavy things on She Persisted. Like these are not like conversations and it felt much more fitting as a Monday podcast rather than a Friday podcast. So it just kind of just like, oh, it makes us, did I just want to relax or laugh and not focus on anything crazy.

So we now are uploading on Mondays and I'm really excited about this. I hope you like it as well. And this is really with the intention that you start the week off, feeling inspired and supported and with a goal to tackle.

The next update is that we have new cover art, which is something that I'm so proud of. I had to teach myself Adobe illustrator to make this cover art, which was just such a whole freaking process, but I am very proud of it. I literally was going to hire a graphic designer because I wanted something that looked more professional.

But I like didn't think I could make it myself. And so I was so, so, so proud with how it came out and it's just perfect. We have a little brain on the P it's just, I'm obsessed, a hundred percent obsessed. If you want an apple podcasts and subscribe, and you did not notice that there's new cover art, you should unsubscribe and resubscribe against the it'll like upload the new cover art in your feed.

And so that you can fully have the new cover art experience. That is just such a vibe while you're listening.

And by last update in this intro is that the dorm tour photos finally went live six weeks or eight weeks into the school year. So I will link pose in today's show notes. If you want to see the dorm room, I am really proud of how it came out. It was such a fun project and it's just such a happy place.

And I just, I love it. It makes me so happy and I hope you enjoy it too. So that will be in today's show notes.

So today's episode is with Dr. Jay Faber. We really dive into adolescent substance use, specifically nicotine, marijuana, and alcohol. This is something that I became a lot more aware of. Once I came to college. especially smoking and nicotine use.

And so I felt like I just had a lot more of an awareness of how prevalent this was within the adolescent mental health space. Something that I thought would be beneficial to provide some really amazing education and information on.

And this is a conversation that I'm just really happy with and proud of. We talk all about what exactly happens when the adolescent brain consumes nicotine, marijuana and alcohol, we talk about, which is like the lesser of the evils. We talked about how you can quit smoking and drinking. If that is something that you want to do, we talked about for parents, how you can support your child, if you are hoping to decrease that behavior or they want to quit. So it's just such a well-rounded conversation. And Dr. Faber does have a very holistic approach here.

Like he acknowledges that it's something that is so prevalent in teenagers lives, and this is the information. This is what you can do with this. And this is how you can. Be most effective in navigating that, given the scenario you're given, if that makes sense. So today's guest is Dr. Jay Faber. He's a child psychiatrist at amen clinics. He has more than two decades of experience in child psychiatry, adolescent psychiatry, and adult psychiatry. in addition to his work at amen clinics, he is the president of brains horse, a corporation founded to teach adolescents how to build successful lives. he is double board certified in child, adolescent and adult psychiatry by the American board of psychiatry and neurology. And he also has a book escape, how to rehab your brain to stay out of the legal system, which I will link in today's show. So, again, this is just a phenomenal conversation that gives you the science on adolescent substance use gives you tips and tricks on how to decrease or quit substance use. If that is a decision you decide to make and we also offer resources and advice for parents and loved ones, hoping to support someone who has decided to quit substance use. So without further ado, let's dive into this week's episode.

Thank you so much, Dr. Faber for joining me on She Persisted today. I'm so excited to have you on the show.

Dr. Faber: Thank you for having

me Sadie.

Sadie: Of course. So today's episode, I really want to drive into adolescent substance use and substance use disorder. So kind of talking about the prevalence of that what the numbers are looking like there, and then the long-term impacts of using things like nicotine, drinking, marijuana, all of those things.

So let's start with nicotine and kind of talk about how prevalent of an issue that is, what you're seeing in your practice and what the negative effects are there.

Dr. Faber: Well, it depends who you read. Approximately 40% of adolescents are smoking. How many are smoking versus vaping?

That's kind of a good question. And. I don't have as much debt. I don't think anyone has as much study yet, but a that the likely, and it's probably much, much higher with it, the problem with nicotine it, which is in that, which is when you smoke, that's sort of the active ingredient is our brains get really addicted to it.

Quite quickly. So nicotine binds to nicotine receptors, which are located throughout our whole brain, which we sell in a release of a lot of different neurotransmitters, serotonin to dopamine norepinephrine. So what happens is feeling awake, you feel alert, you feel alive, and then your brain wants that experience more and more frequently.

The problem is so all the other ingredients in smoking that make it not so friendly to our lungs, probably the most notable organ, but there's also also carcinogens that can affect other parts of our body. It is by far the most addictive substance people who decide to quit smoking. Six months later, 90% of them are smoking again.

And so it's like, it's, it's, it's really, really, really difficult. And what normally happens is people will stop. They do two months and then they may have an, a, you know, a break, they smoke. And then at what the heck, I can't do anything. And they just restart the whole habit again, as opposed to working with a group or an understanding that, you know, smoking takes time in you're, you're probably going to have your, your, your breaks breakthroughs where you smoke again.

And it's a matter of getting resilient and pick up the pieces and going from there. So and then if you think about it, if you start smoking in, in say high school, 16 years old you know, by the time you're, you know, say 46 or 56, and if you're not be able to stop just the the effects, I mean, just.

Can you answer your lungs, just aging you know, people look and think much older from the, from the effects of it. So, yeah,

I, you talked about how it's the most addictive substance I'm wondering, is it something where you smoke one time and you immediately are already seeing those effects of the addiction?

Or is it something that takes time to become addicted to? Because I know people will say, oh, I'm just trying it once. Or I'm just going to only smoke one time. Is that something that people can truly do? Or the science just does not support that? Well,

I don't think we completely know. I think there's two facets to it.

I think the nicotine, we know it, you know, it's addictive. So in that sense was a once or twice or three times. You know we don't know, but it doesn't take that long, you know, a month, two months and you know, habits start to form. So there's that piece of it, you know, the nicotine withdrawal piece. And then there's just you know, learning habits your brain in the way it works.

It's, it's, it's sort of fascinating. It works the same for substances as well is you, look, you see, you hear, you feel things, everything that is externally sensed goes through our proper brain comma Fallows, which sends a message to our hippocampus, which is our memory center. And it could be anything from seeing a tree to being around people.

That memory center sends a message to our nucleus of Cubans that says, Hey, that reminds me of when you were at this party or when you were smoking and obviously got discouraged. Or use or whatever. And it's like, well, where the heck are these coming from? And so the long-term just retraining, you know, your brain.

It's, it's hard. And so you have these, all these unconscious messages going on that we're learning are externally driven and as we learn more, we're becoming more conscious of what's actually happened. It just makes it difficult to

stop.

Sadie: Do we know yet if vaping or smoking is worse, are we just waiting for the science to kind of play out there?

Dr. Faber: You know, I mean, th th th th we knew smoking. I mean, it's just, you know, besides tobacco in the cigarettes, I mean, there's, you know, hundreds of just other carcinogens that are being. Created by smoking. So when vaping came out, oh, hurray, you know, we're just giving you, you know, steam and nicotine and that's safe, but then we're starting to see all these people who get pulmonary infiltrations associated with pneumonia.

And sometimes it gets better. Sometimes it doesn't and now it's going on. So what are we doing? We're like taking apart the whole vaping pipe from its heaters to the ingredients, like oh God, what's the big one in there right now. I think ethylene glycol, I believe, which helps the smoke look nice, but what does that do to our body?

And so now we're having to ask more questions and do more research and become like better detectives to say, Hey this was sort of the, the new answer to smoking cigarettes, but is vaping really? Going to be that much safer. I think the jury is out, but we're seeing some concerning things.

Sadie: Yeah.

This week's episode is sponsored by teen counseling. Teen counseling is an online therapy program with over 14,000 licensed therapists in their network. They offer support on things like depression, anxiety, relationships, trauma, substance use, like this episode is all about and more teen counseling offers, tax talk and video counseling all from your home. So what you're going to do is you're going to go to teen counseling.com/she persisted. You're going to fill out a quick survey, what you want to focus on in therapy. Then you're going to send a consent link to your parents. And I tested this myself guys.

I sent myself an email, basically, all it says is Sadie or whatever your name is, is interested in meeting with a clinician from team. Please learn more here and give consent to treatment. None of your information about what you want to work on in therapy is disclosed. Your parent is just giving permission for you to work with a therapist.

From there you are matched with a therapist that meets your needs and your goals, and you start working via talk, text or video counseling. So, if you are looking for professional support again, on things like depression, anxiety, relationships, trauma, substance use, and so much more head to teen counseling.com/shepersisted again, that's teen counseling.com/shepersisted to get started today.

I want to talk about trying to quit smoking, trying to quit vaping from two perspectives. One from the perspective of a parent or a concerned adult community member who has a loved one that is struggling with smoking or vaping. And then as an individual, as a teen who themselves is trying to smoke and vape or trying to quit smoking and vaping for loved ones, community members, et cetera.

What is your advice there? Is it to express concern? Is it to direct them to resources? What do you advise?

Dr. Faber: Well, one is as, as a parent, you know, caregiver, the one you have to be really clear about what your expectation is. Okay. Which it sounds simple, but a lot of times it's not the expectation is if you're wanting your child to stop smoking, then we got to verbally let you know, your adolescent know that this is the goal.

If we're going to stop smoking. Okay. So that's part one. Now part two is just, I think just teaching general self-management skills to, to our teens and, and to be quite Frank to parents themselves. I think we, you know, this is going to be one chapter of a book I'm writing right now, but we, we have, like, we talked about long-term.

Medium term goals and short term goals. And in each of those, it's a nice terminology, but how do you think, and how should we think through each of those areas? So if we take, you know smoking for one, okay. So long-term goals say three, four years. You're not smoking. It's not going to be six months if you go by stats.

Okay. So you feed yourself inspirational. Self-management what does that mean? You see yourself not smoking. You see yourself 10 years down the line, your skin's healthy. You don't have wrinkles. You don't have a horrible breath. You're not shriveling up when you're age 40 or 50. So you start to see and feel inspired by just visualizing.

So that's sort of stage one. Okay. Long-term management, medium term goals is, you know, maybe you say, Hey over the next three months I'm going to set a goal, not to smoke more than three cigarettes a week. Okay. To, to try to taper up. And so with that, you use more strategic thinking. Okay. So what does that involve?

That means, you know, sitting down, you know, maybe having a meeting with your child on a weekly basis, not one where you're, you're being punitive, but it's like any other execution you see what's working. What's not, you know, Hey, we set a goal for three cigarettes just smoked six this week. So let's kind of look at this and see what happened.

What can we do better than this next week to try to cut down? And so you're using not so much in emotionally charged, you know stress, inducing, anger, provoking meeting to create change. You're utilizing self-management strategic skills and you're teaching your kids any. And to be honest, parents are probably teaching themselves how to do the same thing.

And then three, their short-term. Okay. Short term goal. It's the nitty gritty. It's nitty-gritty self-management, it's getting your, your, your feet dirty, your, your shoes wet. It's sort of like the, this, like the new runners that do these races, where you, you run under mud with barbed Boyer across your, your back.

I mean, part of it, the day by day churning out is you've got to learn how to manage discomfort and continue to move forward. The problem I find is most of us use nitty gritty management to set long-term goals. And what happens is people get burned out saying, this is what it's like day by day. Why even try it, it doesn't work, but, but it's part of the process.

I mean, the reality is you're going to go to a party and there's people smoking. What are you going to do? You know, are you going to walk under the mud with the barbed wire or are you going to succumb to the, to the moment? And so. Part of it is becoming more resilient, tough minded as well. So I'm giving you a sort of a long-winded answer, but

Sadie: that's love it.

Very helpful. Yeah. No, a hundred percent. If someone is working to quit smoking, is that a situation where you recommend working with a professional or it's more something that can be self guided with these short, medium and long-term

Dr. Faber: goals?

Well, I mean, I would start off with short, medium and long-term goals. Then if that doesn't work, you know, then I would look for other guidance you know, like smokers anonymous meetings. To me, I'd be looking at something like that. I would be looking up probably going to meet up, you know, in your local community.

See what's there, you could look at other assistance like nicotine replacement. You know, with a discussion with your family and how, and when to use that as well,

Sadie: a hundred percent. I think that those all are super helpful and make a ton of sense. I want to talk about adolescent alcohol use and drinking, because I think that's something that is a very big part of not only high school culture in a lot of places, but college culture as well.

And so I kind of want to first talk about what happens to an adolescent brain when you're, when you're under the influence and kind of long-term what that looks like, because we know your brain is not fully developed. You're not able to logically process through things as well as an adult. Can, what happens when adolescents started using alcohol at a young age?

Dr. Faber: Well, if you look at this one stats about 67, 2 thirds of adolescents have drank by the time they've graduated. So it's a lot, I don't think there's any surprises there. I, I think it's probably even maybe higher depending on certain communities. It's what. You go to party it's everywhere and that's not the only thing, but, but it's there.

Okay. So what happens is it becomes acceptable. It's just part of routine life. It's part of culture, you know, you do it. And, and then even from parents, I mean, how many parents have drank when they were in high school? I mean, it's sort of like, it's part of the culture you're kind of accepted. But our brains don't know that alcohol is that accepted.

They just know that it's toxic. Okay. So short-term use what typically ends up happening is the alcohol affects part of our brain called the frontal lobes. Okay. And for all of us are involved in decision-making making good choices, good decisions when we drink that part of our brain doesn't work as well.

Okay. And so what happens is we end up making decisions. We sometimes wouldn't make, if we weren't doing. Yeah. Okay. So, you know, we, we might end up with somebody, we typically aren't with, we might drive a car thinking I can drive a car. We might you know, think we can drink before the next one, taking a test and be okay.

And we're not okay. So that's the short term, but longterm alcohol is it's, it's toxic to the brain and someone can take a look at our website and we've got pictures of brains of people who've consumed alcohol. And over the long haul our brain surface starts to have global diffuse, profusion problems and wherever there's less blood flow, our brain doesn't work well.

So if the frontal lobes now have less blood flow all the time, we don't come up with good decisions. It's harder to work harder to get a good job. How do you hire to get good grades at school? You have a temporal lobes. Our memory might not be as good. We might get more angry than normal. We might get more irritable.

We're not able to tolerate frustration as well. So the long-term effects are fairly pronounced and we oftentimes because we can't see a brain we don't know with neuro imaging. Now, whether it be spec scan, what, which was why we used at the office pet scan, you can see things. I don't think the graphics are quite as, as detailed yet.

FMRs, I think we're starting to see that clearly alcohol is not our brain's best friend. Okay.

Sadie: Is there a connection to higher rates of addiction and alcoholism the earlier you start drinking? Or is that something that there's not a relationship between? Well,

Dr. Faber: the trajectory, if you look at the tree, if you start earlier, the likelihood is higher that you're going to have.

A drinking problem. It barely becomes a problem where in college, you know, because people, once, you know, hooray, we're away from mom and dad, you know, we're in the dormitory room and you know, you've got access and it's like, I'm just going through college, you know, get over this, you know, after college.

And then a lot of people do, but there is a large percentage who don't

Sadie: get over it.

This week's episode is brought to you by Sakara. Sakara is a nutrition company that focuses on overall wellness, starting with what you eat. So if you're familiar with she persisted in my view on mental health, you know, I think it's so important to make sure that you're taking care of your physical health to not add emotional vulnerability to your mental health.

This means getting enough sleep, having good nutrition, getting outside and moving. All of these things are crucial. So Sakara is organic ready meals that are made with powerful plant-based ingredients. And they're designed to boost your energy, improve digestion and get your skin glowing. Their meals are delivered all around the U S ready to eat at your door, they also have amazing wellness, essential oils, like your sleepy time tea, which is one of my all time favorites. It's my favorite parts of my night routine. And my other favorite that they have is their beauty chocolates. Basically you eat one or two of these a day. They contain your daily source of 70 milligrams of Phytoceramides, which increases moisture improves that elasticity of the skin enhances CLO.

And it's a chocolate, it tastes freaking delicious. I love it. So they have so many different supplements, teas, powders, granola, you name it in addition to their. If you want to get your hands on these amazing products, you can head to sakara.com and use code at checkout for 20% off your first order.

Again, that sakara.com and use code X at checkout for 20% off. What are, what's your advice for college students who are engaging and like socializing party life, and want to be safe and mindful and set them up for success? No

Dr. Faber: one. And I think this is really important. This is my opinion.

You're not going to be able to escape from it. The exposure to alcohol smoking or drugs, it's there, it's real, it's alive. And for someone to say Hey, you cannot go to any of these things. Well, you've probably just subtracted about 95%. Your college, social life, it's just a support. And so what you need, you need to learn effective what I call peer management.

Okay. And there's not much written on this. I think you're going to see more where, you know, how do you go into a situation where there's a party you choose not to drink, not to use drugs, not smoke and.dot, dot. You have four times more fun than they're having, and you're not under the influence. So then you become sort of a positive peer out a model on how to really have constructive, fun, and not need the availability and use of substances to do that for you.

You know, our brains, just the way, their minutes and people who abused. I talked to somebody who's a substance abuse counselor last week is if you stop, you better have something to replace. It that's just as enjoyable. And if you don't. It's just not going to work. It's not so much people going to meetings that helps it's going to meetings and being encouraged to find other activities that are just as enjoyable.

I mean, this person I spoke spoke with last week he's getting a high off exercise. He swims a mile and a half every day. Wow. And he gets the same high as dry. So you have to replace it with more constructive activity.

Sadie: I remember I had this friend in, in treatment and every single time she wanted to smoke, she would go and make like the largest cup of hot chocolate that you'd ever seen and kind of get that, that sugar spike.

But it was an effective switch between the two. So she'd be like sitting in group with her giant hot chocolate that she made. She was like, guys, it's okay. We're just getting through it today. And we're like, we go, we got you. We get it. For teenagers who drinking as part of their lifestyle, it's something that they've engaged in what are some things to be aware of where it kind of leans into the territory of where it's like, fun, fun with problems, and then it's just problems is kind of like the addiction language there. What are red flags for teens to be aware of?

Dr. Faber: Well, I think one is if you're using to self-medicate, if it's like, oh, I just can't be myself or my friends, but if I drank or I smoke weed, oh, all of a sudden I can just be spontaneous and myself. So you may have a social anxiety, but you're using substances as a means to cope if you're depressed all the time.

And you know, if you smoke weed, you're happy. That's a concern. You've got a mood related issue. That's that that's caused some prompts to is if you say, you know, you're using it just for fun, you're just going to have a good time. And you say, Hey this weekend with my friends. Yes, I'm going to stop.

I'm just going to find normal ways and you can't, that's a problem. It's saying, Hey, you don't have other ways to find fun besides that. And we need other ways to have fun.

Sadie: Yeah. A hundred percent for parents of teens, at what point do you recommend intervention or you think it's smart to kind of start keeping more of an eye on things, pursue treatment, all of those different options?

Well, you

Dr. Faber: begin from the start you know, you, you want to know who your, who your kids are hanging out with, you know, and you're not like being a spy. You're, you're doing this as an interactive way. Who you hanging out with what are your friends doing? And then how do we as parents help you as a teen experience, all the wonders of adolescents and, and still keep a sane mind.

You know, that's tough. There's no black or white answers. There's no clerk. It's all about communication and using problem solving skills to help come up with better answers. So that'd be first thing. So what a parents need to do. Okay. Read parenting books. I mean, learn how to connect with your kid, but also learn problem solving skills.

Yeah. You know which, by the way, do they teach you problem solving skills and the high school? I mean, I never learned them.

Sadie: Math problem, solving

Dr. Faber: skills, album solving, like life problems, skills, like he was define the problem. So what does it mean? It means that as parents, we might want to go get some information.

There's great books on problem solving skills. There's great books on connection. Okay. So you start to learn the skill sets she needs now. So that's the answer part one. Okay. So second when it starts to become a problem, I think you got gotta be a pretty clear cut. You stay calm, but with your child, your child, here's our expectations.

You know, that, you know, we're not drinking. Okay. If that's what it is, that's I think it should be personally. And it seems like this has gone beyond, we've set some, some expectations to stop you and be able to follow him. We are getting concerned. So you put up the preamble warning and you can also throw out if it continues, then here's what we're going to need to look at doing.

Okay. Now, if you get to the point, here's what we need to look out. We're going to do something, have some resources of what you're going to do. Okay. If you don't have them, then the believability of the credibility goes down. If you've got three programs on the web, you showing your team, here's what we're thinking of it.

They can't stop. Here's what we got to do. So that's sort of that now as a team, you're not going to like that. Who's going to like that. Right. Okay. So then parents can throw in a few preambles it's like, listen, you know, as a parent, we you've, and this, you basically got two jobs. One is to build a relationship with your, your, your, your team.

Okay. That's fun, you know? Hey, what'd you do last night. Hey, how was your time with your friends? Hey, want to go out and watch this game? So that's part one, part two is to teach you how to be self-disciplined right. Well, what does that mean? You know, it means doing things you don't necessarily want to do.

Well, that sounds kind of punitive and not fun. Well, why do parents do that? It's so when you're done with high school, the more self-disciplined you are the more opportunities you're going to have in life. Okay. Now this is self-discipline. Okay, bill, or do one of your kid's name is like, how do you like hearing this stuff?

You know, then I go like here and then the parents would say, well, how much do you think I like doing this? Yeah. Yeah. But that's your job as a parent. A hundred percent. Okay. And so you're, you're defining your roles and why you're doing what she's doing. Okay. Another thing I'd throw out is as a parent, how five to 10 why's your recommendations are not to drink.

Yeah. Okay. If you've got 10 whys you're you're you're it doesn't matter who you are. You're you're feeding the other person's brain unconsciously reasons. Why it's not healthy use

Sadie: that. Yeah. I think that makes a ton of sense. The last area of teen substance use that I want to dive into, which I think is becoming even more prevalent is adolescent, marijuana usage and smoking.

I first want to talk about what the difference that has on the brain compared to smoking or drinking. So what happens when, when an adolescent is smoking or doing edibles all over?

Dr. Faber: Okay. So that's a great question. So I'm in California and so it's this sort of like, since it's legal here, things I hear in the office, it's like, oh, the government finally woke up, you know, it's legal, it's a plan.

It's now. Yeah, this should've been done years ago. Right. Okay. So that's sort of where the, the culture is. Yeah. Part. This is more science. Okay. There's two active ingredients in marijuana. One is CBD oil. If you look at the data so far salons don't smoke. It, it looks really safe. I mean, we haven't seen a

Sadie: whole lot of thoughts on CBD.

Is that bad or?

Dr. Faber: Yeah, so far the data on CBD oil. So long as you put on your skin or swallow it in recommended amounts, it looks safe. I've seen one DNA study where it may alter DNA, which gives me more concerned about cancer, but all the other studies for the most part, it looks good. Okay. So that's active ingredient.

Number one, hurray. Let's clap our hands and two there's THC. Okay. T H C is the more active ingredient that gives you the high, that happiness sort of disinhibition that is not friends with. It is toxic. It causes perfusion problems and it can cause cognitive and emotional difficulties later on, probably earlier than alcohol.

If you look at what brain is smoking versus when that's using marijuana, the marijuana probably affects it more. Okay. So, and your brain doesn't know it's THC. It doesn't know it's a plant just knows it's THC. So, and I'll normally in my office while I show pictures of THC brains and you can see kind of the difference from normal and it's fairly pronounced.

Sadie: that's on Instagram for anyone listening, if they want to see those as well. Yeah.

Dr. Faber: See those and then the other just to kind of drive home the point it's, I'll get on my, my, my YouTube. And I'll say, Hey, I'll show you someone who smoked pot a lot and I'll go to a movie called, fast times at Ridgemont high and I'll pull it up on YouTube and there's a character called Spicoli. She's played by Sean Penn and Sean is basically a pothead, you know, hanging out in high school. And it's hilarious. I mean, if you watch the movie, I mean, I can still remember when I first saw my, my, my gut was hurting.

Sadie: Okay.

Dr. Faber: Yeah. Yeah. So his class clown, he's got the slow. Hey, well man, which doing, it looks like. The stoner verbosity, you know, buying pizzas and having them delivered in the middle high school class yet. Right. It's funny. You're laughing, you know, but then he doesn't graduate from high school and all his friends do.

And so all of a sudden what's, oh, ha ha. He, he, he isn't this great, you know, in real life. It's not. And so is this, when you graduate from high school, when all your friends are at graduation, do you want to be like Spicoli at home? Literally with a history teacher writing a paper. And so if we took Spicoli today and scan his brain, I'm telling you there'd be like perfusion problems everywhere, everywhere.

Okay. And so the word they get out, I find is THC. It's not healthy and it may be legal, but alcohol is legal to if you look what it does to your brain and your liver for that matter, it's not such a, it's not such a great thing. So that's sort of phase one. The other phase with it is you let's say you smoke pot and you can't stop.

Sadie: Okay. My question people say, oh, you can get addicted to pot. You can get it to,

Dr. Faber: okay. You can't get addicted. We already talked about cigarettes. Okay. Six months, 90% are using again. Pot use decide to stop smoking pot a year later. Guess what percent I still sober? They're not smoking very low percent.

Sadie: 20%.

Oh my God.

Dr. Faber: 20%. Yeah. I mean, it's crazy. And so, you know, in the office, what I do is say, listen, it's like, I'll be, you know, I'm not saying it negatively. I'm saying, you know, you're going to be, you know, you're going to be the exception to the. You will be in the 20% come, you know what or high water you will not be smoking pot.

If you decided we're going to figure out a system to do. And I can tell you this, if you look at what's out there, research wise, the two big things that help you be in that 20% is one having a group of friends, people that support you. And that, that, that endeavor. And it's like, oh God, is this like self-help groups?

Well, if you find great mentors it's, it's all the difference in the world. I mean, if you just go to a meeting and you're not connected with a bunch of people, that's not a self-help group, that's just the beach people getting together. If you find someone who's maybe eight to nine years older than you that's graduated from high school and has a great job, maybe became a great athlete or they're doing something they're going to be a much more influential.

And I think inspirational to think about the longterm, you know, management to help you get to where you want to go. You need that because your brain has been programmed. Okay. You say, you're going to stop you go to school, you smell something. You know, maybe it's the eraser from a pencil and your brain says, oh, that reminds me of when you were doing that paper and you were racing and you couldn't write, so you smoked weed in, it went better.

So that smells sends a message to our reward center, a nucleus accumbens. And honestly, we get these urges. That's like where where's all this coming from. So you're barraged by this all day long. And so you need a group of people that are going to one help you learn how to deal with those urges. And then two it's.

You got to find other things that are fun to do. You gotta replace it with something. If you don't replace it you end up just either you're really not happy. Okay. Or you're on the other 80% you're using again.

Sadie: So smoking, drinking that's now confusing. We'll say vaping, drinking, smoking weed. What is the lesser of all evils and what is avoid at all costs if you had to rank them regarding gas, adolescent usage.

Dr. Faber: No, that's a good question.

Sadie: Of course it's like subjective depends on like the amount of use and all that kind of stuff, but generally,

Dr. Faber: yeah. I mean,

You know, that's a tough one. I mean, I guess I would start with smoking cigarettes because people usually start smoking cigarettes and that leads to other entities from there. So, you know, if you're smoking and you can learn the skillsets to stay away from that, it can help with the other ones. But you know, that could be debated, you know, in several ways, you know, a lot of people, if they're doing one, they're doing the other, their studies are now with, with there's a really interesting the status last year, people who smoke weed, your cognition goes down, you can't focus as well.

So guess what you do, you smoke cigarettes to get your cognition up. And so it's like rather

Sadie: than taking uppers to decrease the effects, the downers

Dr. Faber: spiral, it's a cycle, you know, circle. It's not like one in everything circles rather than as linear. And it just makes things more complicated. But I think the best thing is, is.

Get really creative to figure out ways to have a blast with life without the substances.

Sadie: I love that. And I think it's, it's very, it's very feasible. It's very possible. And it's, it's a great tip. A hundred points. Yeah.

Dr. Faber: So, and then people will say, well, how do you do that? It's like, well, okay. One is find out what your passions is.

If you end up like here, my foundation, if you're into art, you know, and let's get you at some really cool art Institute after school where you're working in some of the world's best. If you're into dancing. Oh my gosh, I here, it's like, let's get, I've taken my, some of my youth to dance with will, I am from black IP.

Isn't stuck there. So yeah. So then it takes on a whole nother anal ambiance. If you're like acting figure way to get to the backstage at a theater production and meet all the actors and actresses. So yeah, so that's, you. To be smarter and more creative. And this is where problem solving becomes huge.

Sadie: Yeah. There's so much that's missing and even just the public school education system, but the education system in general, about mental health, how to cope with different challenges that come up, what is happening when we're experiencing emotions, problem solving, all these things that we're just not equipped with and are more valuable a lot of times in life and like, oh, how can I differentiate this calculus problem, which you don't end up using?

And so I, I completely agree with you there,

Dr. Faber: there was a high school class and I'm I'm not sure what I would call it like leadership skills, entrepreneurial skills, where you went in and each week you had a different topic that used like cutting edge information. There's a lot of good stuff out there.

Like I'm creating a vision setting goals communication skills. Self-control how to, how to deal with. Besides what we're seeing my opinion on you named the cable station. How do you resolve issues rather than hyper Popolo? What if they had a class, do you think that would be something people would engage in

Sadie: a hundred percent and especially if it was relevant to things that are going on now, students are more engaged.

They're more passionate than they're more willing to engage in their other classes. They're spending more time researching, doing things that they love, and it would, it would equip them so much more longterm or whether they go to college, if they're working after high school, whatever it is, I think it would be extremely valuable.

Like all of the skills that I learned when I didn't, when I was in intensive treatment, serve me so well now. And that wasn't part of like my typical freshmen sophomore year curriculum, but learning how to dissolve content, conflict, and advocate for myself and validate other people and, and be consistent with habits and, and tracking.

Those are all things that helped me be successful, but I didn't learn in a math class or a physics class and all of that kind of stuff.

Dr. Faber: There's since you brought it up. So we talked about the one factor to be in that 20% is having a social group. The other is having purpose. Now, if you go to school and here's your math assignment, do it.

Here's your reading assignment. Do it. Here's your science assignment. Do it. And there's no connection with life. There's no motivation. There's no purpose. And if you take away purpose, it's a problem. I, one of my, my, my foundation, one of my 22 year olds, you know, we started talking and he was, he loves singing.

And I said, well, how was high school? You said you didn't like it. I said, well, you know, what do you wish you would've learned better? And he said math. And I'm like, really? He goes, yeah. He said, yeah. I said, why do you say that? He said, because I need it. I don't know how to do my checkup. Yeah. I don't know how to understand my credit card.

I didn't teach her or invest. Why didn't the teachers, rather than just saying do problems one through 10, put in some meat and say, you know, you have a checking account, you have $1,500. You're thinking of buying a car for $1,850. Yeah. Should you buy the car or not so 1500 a month. I mean, and so I'm just my, my heart broke.

It's like the, these these are solvable problem and you can create purpose and meaning, it's like, oh my gosh, if you're in high school, it's like, you know, how much money do I have in my account? How do I really holistically want to spend it as opposed to what do you, do? You get your check spending? You know, what'd you buy?

I don't know, 22. Yeah. Food, fast food, you know whatever. And so I just, my own personal opinion is how do we create purpose for people starting? And even before high school parents, they're, they're so busy these days and they don't know necessarily how to teach it themselves. So we've got to get more creative to help that occur.

And if we create a purpose, guess what? We'll probably see substance abuse. If you know, at age, I'm making this up. Now let's say at age 16, you know, you want to go to college to become a doctor or a lawyer. You, you know, the kind of organizational skills, the classification skills and memorize memorization skills you're going to need.

And you'll know what. That are outside everybody due to it. And you'll be more apt to stay away

Sadie: a hundred percent. Yeah. I don't remember exactly what study it was, but it was in Johann. Hari's lost connections book and they were talking about how there were, these were, there are these extremely high suicide rates in this very specific sector of this company.

I think it was in England. And they did like this giant study and they were like, what is going on here? Like why is only this department having such high suicide rates? And it was because every single day they came to work and they were paper pushing and every single time. Finished a paper, 30 more we're on the stack.

And there was no sense of purpose. They didn't feel like they were making a change in the world. Nothing was happening with this output of work. And they looked at a very similar department where they were also paper-pushing, but they felt that they were making progress. They were making movement, they were contributing in some way to the world and the suicide rates weren't there.

And so it's, it's so true in the science backside, and it's a huge pillar of feelings of depression and feeling very hopeless and not really knowing like where you, where you belong in the world. And so it's just, it's so true. Well, thank you so much for sitting down with me and having such an amazing conversation about adolescent substance use.

I know this will help so many teens and parents alike, and I, I really thank you for taking the time to sit down with me. Thank you, Sadie.

In case you skipped to the end, Dr. Faber. And I talked all about what happens to the adolescent and teenage brain when it's under the influence of nicotine, marijuana and alcohol, we talked about, which is the lesser of all evils of phase three, and which has the most damage. We talked about long-term effects of substance abuse in teens.

We talked about what steps you can take. If you are looking to quit substances and how to know if that might be an effective option for you. And we also talked about how to support someone who is interested in looking to quit substances from the perspective of a parent or a loved one. If you enjoyed this week's episode, please, please share it with a friend or family member who you think would benefit from giving it a lesson, leave a review on apple podcasts or wherever you're listening and subscribe.

So you don't miss any new updates. I'll see you next Monday.

© 2020 She Persisted LLC. This podcast is copyrighted subject matter owned by She Persisted LLC and She Persisted LLC reserves all rights in and to the podcast. Any use without She Persisted LLC’s express prior written consent is prohibited.