Has Stress Taken Over Your Life? Try This Exercise

Has Stress Taken Over Your Life? Try This Exercise

What makes a recovery story truly inspiring? This conversation between Dr Daniel Amen and Tana Amen shows how stress, grief and serious illness can become turning points rather than life sentences. Speaking both as clinicians and as people who’ve been through it, they talk about stress in raw, honest terms. Daniel shares the heartbreak of losing his grandfather, whose heart attack led to major depression.

Instead of staying stuck in sorrow, he explains how he learned to “focus on the joy”, like making fudge and pralines together, and how that sadness now fuels the way he loves his own grandchildren and cares for his patients. Tana’s story takes a different route. As a young adult with cancer that had spread, no job and overwhelming debt, she felt completely lost.

A mentor’s tough question changed everything: “How much responsibility are you willing to take for this situation?” She explains that, “The word responsibility means the ability to respond,” not blame. That shift from victimhood to action became the first exercise she shares with listeners. The second exercise is the star of the episode: the "fork in the road" practice.

Through deep meditation and detailed journalling, you picture your life six months, one year, five years, ten years and twenty years ahead if you stay exactly as you are—then you do the same imagining if you commit to simple changes in health, habits and self-respect. Tana describes how vividly doing this snapped her into gear, pushing her towards what they call the Brain Warrior’s Way.

If stress feels like it’s running the show—whether from grief, illness, addiction triggers or daily chaos—this episode offers a practical, emotionally grounded exercise to help you choose your next road on purpose. Which path are you ready to write out for yourself?