Neuroscientist REVEALS How To COMPLETELY HEAL Your Body & Mind! | Caroline Leaf & Lewis Howes

people are dying from lack of hope, death from despair, when you take away people's sense of agency, you are taking away the most central dynamic of who you are as a human being, I think you should have a dream, the school of greatness , yes, please, welcome, welcome. Back everyone to the School of Greatness podcast very excited about our guest, Dr. Caroline Leaf is in the house, a cognitive

neuroscientist

specializing in the

mind

-brain connection who has been in this field for many decades. I'm very excited to hear it. Thanks for being here. Thank you. I'm so excited to talk to you Lewis, it's great, thank you and I love that you're in this field of understanding the

mind

-brain connection and how it influences our thoughts, our emotions, our feelings, our mental

heal

th. and everything else is happening in our lives.

My first question is what is the difference between the mind and the brain. Does the brain control the mind or does the mind control the brain? You asked one of my favorite questions there. That's a great place to start. I have some accessories. Okay, can I use it? Yes, show me. Okay, I need to understand it in a simplified way. Okay, so here's a brain, not a real one, um in a skull and the. The terminology of the last 40 years is that mind and brain have been used interchangeably, so most people think that when you talk mind you're talking brain, when you talk brain you're talking mind, and most popular literature , even the scientific literature that the media tends to publish talks about how the brain produces thoughts or the brain produces the mind, but

your

brain can't actually do anything on its own, so if it did and if you were holding this, If this was a real brain and I just pulled it out of someone's head, which I wouldn't do, but if it was bleeding and whatever and you looked at this brain, we could look at it all day but it would never do anything, so what's the point?

The difference between a dead brain and

your

s and mine and the listeners and viewers is that you are actually thinking, feeling and choosing that you are alive and your vitality is your mind and your mind is this ability of what you are doing right at this moment like you are listening to me, you are processing auditory sound waves, electromagnetic light waves through your ability to think, feel and choose what the mind is, then your mind is like processing a unique bright processing field, a gravitational field around and around you. through your brain, your

body

and you.

It turns what you're hearing and seeing into real meaning and that meaning is formed from trees that you actually grow in your brain, so at 400 billion actions per second you're using your mind to translate auditory and visual signals into proteins. similar to trees. structures in your brain to make sense of what I'm saying and then every new thing I say grows bigger and bigger and everything I say is in the root section because it's the source of information and the tree trunk and branches are your interpretation. of what I'm saying and you're linking it to other existing ones, whatever is triggering right now, that you know about anything in your life that relates to our topic and that continues and that's what we do all the time, your mind is always with you and your mind works through the brain and the brain then responds, so here's a little model for your mind to be the gravitational field and this is not science, this is hard.

Nobel Prize winning science that there is a discovery of the gravitational field, in fact, Einstein talked about it at the beginning of the 20th century, how every human being has this gravitational field, this electromagnetic field around us and that is basically through us and When you die, it is no longer there. and that's what keeps you alive and that's the feeling of thinking, choosing the psychological version and the scientific version is this gravitational field, so it's a little bit like a magnet. This is a super easy way to understand it if you imagine a piece. of white paper and you put a bunch of iron filings on the paper.

Maybe you've done this in school and you bring a magnet and you put it in the middle of this mountain of iron filings and suddenly you have this beautiful electromagnetic field. The iron filings are organized in this field around the magnets, so you cannot see the electromagnetic field, but you can only see it because of the iron filings, it is invisible, but the iron filings follow the path of the field and, therefore, you can see it. so the relationship between the magnet and the field allows the iron filings to express themselves in that pattern, the brain is like the magnet and the field is your mind and the relationship allows you to express your behavior, then the small pattern is your behaviors and and The most interesting thing is that that is the main source you never stop thinking your mind is always going you wake up with your mind you eat with your mind you choose your clothes with your mind you are doing the podcast with your mind you are going to sleep with your mind, so the mind is the source and if you don't understand it or manage it, it is changing anyway, then it is a disaster and if it is amazed, your brain, a

body

or a bricklayer, you cannot achieve greatness, so to achieve greatness you need to do it.

Understand mind, there you go, there was a bite, let's finish the podcast now, that was perfect. So how broad can this be? So the mind, your thinking, your ideas, your thoughts, is a field, an energetic field, yes, around you, inside you, uh, connected through your whole body and then outside your body is what which I'm hearing you say exactly how far the field extends is two feet in front of us is six feet is uh football field how far can it go? We don't really know because when you talk about quantum physics and gravitational fields, there's a lot of interaction going on, but what science seems to show is that it's almost like knowing what's going on around us. field yes, and it's probably more because it interacts because everyone has this field and then we live in gravitational fields so everything around you is a gravitational field so everything interacts and that's why you know when you get close to someone you're an example .

It would be like that electrostatic shock when you know that when you brush by someone you feel it and on a more psychological level you can experience that field is maybe in a very good mood and then you strike up a conversation with some friends and they are totally depressed and you get out of there thinking I feel terrible, I need to go take a shower. You feel like this, their field has interacted with yours and it has impacted you because they feel that that field is coming from your mind, which then uses the brain and converts what you are experiencing into these thoughts and then these thoughts are generated, you know, there is This whole relationship, the concept of iron filings, and this is back and forth and this is literally photons from our ancestors that we are literally generating from our thoughts as we talk about our thoughts, that you can't talk without thoughts, you build thoughts and then your actions, behaviors and communication come from the thoughts, so this would create

heal

th, it's a nice healthy green tree and here's a toxic one, so this would be toxic, you know, depression or whatever that you know, being negative or whatever would generate toxic photons and these are the ones that would let you know, you feel it, you feel that negativity, this is a feeling of being around a happy person and you just feel amazing, you know, so this It is very real, it is not something ethereal, we are talking about the non-physical sciences of quantum physics and physics and things like that, but it is real and there is an impact and an effect and we can control it that is the interesting thing what is the definition of quantum physics what is that in relation to the mind so quantum physics is considered one of the most fundamental and precise sciences and at its simplest level because it really got bad press, but it has been around for a long time and basically deals with the invisible, then when you talk about particles and waves and the subatomic level, then what we can see now by looking at each other would be what we would consider the classic. realm of physics that you can see, touch, feel and hear, so it is very possible to operate in it, you can, yes, yes, yes, so it is the physical, but if you actually see by studying the atom that things become smaller and smaller and then you have the subatomic level and then you are entering the quantum mold, so once we enter the subatomic level we see that the atom is not really an atom, you know, the particles change according to their waves and in their particles only when In fact, look at them, so it's considered the observer effect and it's really interesting because it means that we have these waves of energy and when we make a decision we create reality, which we do when you think and feel and choose, you change your brain because everything every time you choose think, feel and choose those three things always go together always thinking always thinking means you're always feeling thinking and feeling means you're always choosing and it's happening at like 400 billion actions per second constantly so we are processing this The world around us through this thought field choose and then we construct thoughts, so there is this structural consequence, so thought is actually a physical response of the thought field, choose and quantum physics helps us understand that, but quantum physics is real and it's easier. understand with classical physics the classical physical quantum the type of non-physical world to work together does it make sense?

It tells us when we feel something when something happens there is an event in our life uh someone touches us do we feel at first? Think about what we are feeling something and how that connection with the mind and body works. Very good question, so think, feel real, like real, so I touch you on the shoulder, you think about it first, you feel it first. a lot simultaneously, so there will be because there is the sensation and it will immediately stimulate thinking and then feeling and then choosing, so that the sensation that the thought feels chews works together to make sense of the physical impact and what it means and whether it is threatening. or it's not threatening and all kinds of decisions are made in your mind and it happens super fast, so it's about field choice cycles and it's really very fast, you know, we're talking about 400 billion actions per second, but in reality It's 10 to 27 and faster. which is an inconceivable speed so what I have done with my work is to try to understand this, you know what thinking is and what memory is and what the mind is and what the brain is and how they interact and how they influence and Do we have any sense of agency over this process and what does it look like?

Yes, can you explain everything absolutely? I can certainly try. I spent 38 years studying this and started out in the world of clinical work. I practice clinically. 25 years and initially I started my research in the 80s and finally in the 80s, the brain they taught us that the brain could not change, so all my lectures revolved around the brain, it is fixed, it is a fixed mind, a fixed brain , a fixed mindset, yeah, so Pretty much that's it, you just have to learn how to fix it and that's fair and compensate more as a kind of compensation philosophy, so I remember thinking in one of my neuroscience lectures that this doesn't work for me.

Because we are changing and growing as humans, I said no, I'm going to start researching this and my professors told me it was a ridiculous question and I actually gave a tea talk on this ridiculous question of neuroplasticity in the '80s. I said, well, give me the worst situation, what's the worst situation, they said, okay, it's a traumatic brain injury, once someone has had a traumatic brain injury and I mean, your dad went through one, yeah, that's everything, you know, was canceled and, um, we were trained. like I said to compensate, so I said, well, there's almost no research in the '80s on brain injuries and how to compensate for them, how to treat them, so well, I'm going to start there and I worked with people who had been in a coma for longer. of two weeks and at that stage when you were in a coma for more than eight hours the brain damage was considered irreversible now in this era we know that that is not the case, but in the eighties that was the current philosophy, so Of all Anyway, I was swimming

completely

against the current when it came to this concept, I showed my subjects that by using the mind, and not in any strange way, just intentional, deliberate and systematic mental management in different ways and different forms of developing the brain and dealing with emotions and just different ways, the same kind of process, um, you can really change this, and so one of my first, my first case study, was a girl who was 16 years old. at the time of the accident and had missed an entire year of school, discarded as a vegetable.

I mean, that's what doctors used to say in those days, which is a terrible thing to say to someone anyway, long story short, after eight months, he not only coped, but he recovered, I started working with her when she was conscious and functioning. something like at a second grade level and she wantedthat his goal was to achieve his goal of greatness was to finish 12th grade again and with his peer group now that was an impossible task, all the doctors said don't even lower that. The road wasn't even worth it so I said well, I was new.

Scientist then very young totally in this world, you know, go with me, let's do this and in eight months she reached level 12, finished school with her classmates and got a degree. college and one of the most interesting things was that she was actually an average student and she wasn't even good at math after the accident, using her mind to change her brain, she became like a math genius, you know, I mean, this was and I can tell you a story from the history and that really motivated me to work in all areas, now I really have to understand what is going on and I happen to live in South Africa where I grew up at the time I was born in Zimbabwe and I grew up in South Africa and the apartheid era.

I mean this really ages me, doesn't it go back to those I worked on during the apartheid era, the transition and the postpartum era? So I was looking at all the socioeconomic trauma, the trauma of racism, and I worked on those three days. a week in those environments with terrible poverty and whatever and I worked in war-torn Rwanda and I worked with the richest corporate CEO heads from schools everywhere who, like my laboratory, were the world to deal with to understand humans and the mind and get away from this scientific concept that consciousness is the hard question and no one is really doing anything, we're just talking about it as some elusive philosophical thing that we'll put aside and that someday promising science will do it one day and I thought I can't do this because I'm mental, you're mental, so if I don't make it, I mean you can go three weeks without food, three days without water, three minutes without oxygen, but you don't even go three seconds without consuming. your mind, so my underlying premise was okay, well, if that's the case, what is it and how do we handle it? and if so, if I don't handle it, which I did from my research, you can learn to handle it.

The mind is malleable, you can direct it. the neuroplasticity of your brain I did some of the first research on neuroplasticity in my field in the late '80s and early '90s, before it was accepted in the mid-'90s, neuroplasticity was well, that's it and um, and I showed that my underlying argument was that the thesis was any mind. It's always changing, so you wake up, you're experiencing everything, the conversations, the emails, the politics of life, you're immediately immersed in life and you're processing it through your mind, you're growing it in your brain. and you're doing this every moment of the day so if I don't control it it's a disaster but if I control it then it's not a disaster now I know we can't control events in circumstances where we're all okay with it so I don't mind.

All this law is interesting, but I'm not talking about the law of attraction and you know, say 15 positive affirmations and that will fix your story. No, I'm not talking about that at all. It's not realistic. I'm talking about the fact. that you can't control events and circumstances, but you can learn to manage your mind, meaning your responses so that you can, yes, things are going to happen, covert trauma, death, life happens, but how do you handle it? and I mean, your case is a classic example. life was turned upside down and your family's life was sewn upside down and you managed your mind and you recovered so you were doing this concept anyway you know greatness that's why I said greatness comes from us managing our mind and Greatness doesn't necessarily mean you have millions in the bank and are a famous superstar.

It means you have peace of mind. Are you really growing? Are you satisfied as a person? Do you know that this is the path we want to follow? to this very externalized version, so yeah, wow, this is really powerful, so how do we learn to manage our mind in response in a more positive way to the chaos, the stress, the traumas, the dramas of life around us ? You know, obviously, we can influence it. certain events manifest in our lives but we can't control the things that happen around us necessarily just how we respond like you said so how do we learn to reframe our mind or rewire our mind and so that we can have inner peace when there are trauma or pain around us brilliant question it's a skill we learn so it's great to know sooner it's never too late to start but the sooner we start the better so I have four adult children who they learned this with and grew up with. things and as I've learned new things, they've been my lab rats, so they've been trained and literally with my husband and they all work for me because of the way they are, either they're amazing kids or they're messy.

Well, kids, totally, yes, yes, we'll have to ask the question. Well, Dominic is my producer, so I think he's doing well, but you know, the most important thing with the mind and mind management, Lewis, is accepting depression, anxiety, even what's scary. words like bipolar and schizophrenia and then go to mood, things like that, we can accept pain, anger, etc., these are not illnesses, this is the biggest message I probably have, the second biggest, the first is that the mind is the source and if you don't have your mind right, everything else you can read all the fantastic books you want and go to all the fantastic seminars and self-help, but unless your mind is right, you won't even use Those things are just data, so these are At this point another step is missing and that is to understand that autonomy, that sense of agency that we have to manage what happens around us and accept part of the management of the mind is not doing that bad things disappear, but to know how to live in bad things. things because it's not going to go away, so despair, anger, depression, anxiety, these are all

completely

normal responses, in fact they are very helpful, they are useful messengers and warning signs, rather than being scary illnesses, they are not brain illnesses. neuropsychiatric as we have been told.

They are actually responses and because they are responses of our mind in the world we only use our brain and body to express them because we have the mind, we have to have the brain and the body to construct the thoughts and then from us. Use that to speak, we are using our physical to store what we have processed and convert and then speak, obviously, if our minds and our brain and our body will be a disaster, but because the neuroplastic of our brain and we, if we manage our mind , we can change our brain, we can literally change our DNA, that's what I've shown in my research, you can literally change your DNA, your blood markers, literally, if you change your mind, if you change your mind, you can do it immediately.

They influence your biomarkers, so, for example, if you suffer from acute trauma and you have a good time, let me explain it in a very simple way. I've been testing a continuous glucose monitoring device and for some research purposes, and it occurred to me while I was using it because you wear it and then you know you track your levels and I wanted to see in terms of mental health and the neurological cycle that I have developed. I wanted to see the impact and I happened to be going through I experienced very acute family torment during December and at the time of trauma I saw on my glucose monitor that my glucose had shot up to 240.

Now that's heart attack level and I immediately manage my mind through the neurocycle, which is the concept that I have developed, which is just a system, anyone can learn it and I brought my glucose levels down in seconds to a normal level and as it went up I could control it and if the glucose is at that level, your cortisol. spiked to that level, your dhea has lowered your homocysteines, all that means is that your immune system is exactly going crazy, you have a cytokine storm like we talked about undercover and in fact your brain's immune system and the your body's immune system. will recognize that traumatic event or that established trauma or that mismanagement of whatever it will recognize that as an invader like a virus as covert then you get the same response to a mental thing, a thought that is the consequence of the mental thought field that you choose build thoughts thoughts are made of tree roots and branches which are memory so thoughts are made of memories like trees are made of branches this is toxic it will stimulate the same response in the immune system as if you had a virus covert or if you had a flu virus. or if I had measles or something like that or any kind of damage to my body, the immune system sees it as a threat to survival because we are programmed to survive, so this is not survival, so your immune system says, hey, that's it. a threat, let's send the army. -lymphocytes are macrophage lymphocytes, we are going to fix this and it creates inflammation, which is a temporary state of healing, so initially the inflammation is isolate and fix exactly isolate and then you are supposed to fix this, sort it and find the the cause root and then this goes away and then the anti-inflammatory factors come in and the inflammation goes away, but if we don't deal with those things and we don't deal with our past traumas and we don't deal with those patterns in our life that we're acting on, um, those Are they constant arguments or are you sure, you know, everyone has these toxic patterns, well, no one is immune, all of us and the signs of those are things like depression and anxiety, and those just tell you, hey.

There is a pattern, either it is a trauma-based pattern or it is a toxic habit that you have developed, but that pattern is actually putting your body under tremendous stress, even to the point where your DNA is affected and in my research showed that you know if you think about the DNA ladder, if you pull out a chromosome, it looks like an how they are being handled. your mind is very interesting, but they are also not, they are also based on exactly how long you will live, totally correct, so if you are under attack and dying, you will probably also die physically, exactly that is exactly what I showed that we had subject to the beginning of our clinical trial that I put in this book.

We had subjects and I actually have a photo of this person. The brain of one of the subjects is inside, looking inside his brain and the blue represents. someone who is totally depressed literally and all of this person's biomarkers were absolutely on cortisol inflammation etc., but this shows that the energy levels in the brain are very flat. Blue means this person was very, very depressed. His narrative was a tremendous trauma in his life. they were offline they were struggling with work relationships a lot of things everything was off everything was off sleep whatever they were like 3d to see what page this is on this page this should tell you should know the page of my heart um 161.

Okay, probably you have it in black and white in that version you have the um, but um, so this person's telomeres when we look at their DNA we look at their telomeres, they will tell you. how the shorter they are, the weaker your cells are, the shorter your life, the more vulnerable you are to disease, so they were sitting, that will show up in terms of your biological age, their telomeres were short and unhealthy, their ages were in them. this particular topic and we also had a group like this that was similar, they were biologically chronological, the actual age was around 30, but biologically they were 70 or something, yeah, a sickly 70 year old man who is crazy inside a madness within nine weeks of mental management. no, I didn't work on I don't use drugs, I didn't talk about diet and stuff, but in this particular clinical trial it was pure mind management, just the neurological cycle, just control your mind and that gray means that they are stabilized brain and the brain waves they were actually driving, so here they were saying I'm depressed, I'm hopeless, all the DNA biomarkers here say I felt, now I know why I feel depressed, I'm not depressed, now I know why and the Depression is simply a sign of an underlying cause, it's not who I am, it's not an illness at 63 days and these numbers are very significant, they were actually seeing a behavioral change in their life, they were saying it's okay so I know I will do it.

I still get depressed but I know why and I know what to do and there were changes in their behavior they went back to work they went back to sleep 25 improvement in sleep and I mean all kinds of things like their relationships are no longer suicidal and I mean they are I can go on and on and on. Wow, this guy here was in the control group, so they had no mind control and what you're going to see is a lot of red and a lot of chaos,and that red shows a complete brain that is like a tsunami. in your brain, the biomarkers were terrible, this person's DNA telomeres were very short, so with mental management in nine weeks we showed how you can literally change your telomeres, which are your markers of aging and health, mental health and physical health, and that's nice. unusual because most of the work on telomeres has been done around diet and exercise, which are basically like

leaf

y greens and plants, which is important and there has also been some work on meditation, but no, no, I think this is the first time.

There has been a study done on deliberate and intentional mental work to change and then we saw significant drops also in information markers and blood markers, but the most important thing was their narrative, the story of the person, so if we move away from the biology for a minute. and then we heard the person's story, that person was offline, they were online, they were living again and even though they had also had thisthis acceptance and this is what they wanted to go back to when you started life and managing your mind doesn't mean it's going to happen. to be a big rosy, you know, putting roast in glasses, that's crazy, it's actually the ability to be okay and at peace with having moments of depression and really look for the message and see them as useful, we have this philosophy It's really strange that it's been around for about 40 years in the West where we look at depression and anxiety and that sort of thing as neuropsychiatric brain diseases and illnesses and as bad symptoms that we should suppress, like cancer symptoms that you should suppress, so it's has been lumped together or the misery of life has been medicalized to quote a brilliant new psychiatrist um and uh jo anna moncrief, so we have to really be careful with that, but actually the truth is that depression and anxiety are not diseases, they are just survival instincts, they're telling you, hey, pay attention, there's something going on, you need to leave and something's not working, something's not working, something's not working and it's manifesting as a pattern that needs to be addressed and that will block greatness. .

So are you saying? I'm listening? Did I hear you say that there is no such thing as a mental health illness? It's more of a pattern that or something that we should be aware of, but it's not a real disease, no, it's not a disease and I know this contradicts this account as current philosophy, but if you look at the science, in fact , there is a lot of science if we interpret all the science around this field. and if you really look at what's being tested, you'll see that they haven't been looking for the neurobiological correlation, but rather you're looking at where in the brain the depression is and for years they've been telling us about the serotonin imbalance that causes depression.

I mean, it wasn't even a theory that never proved to be good for marketing, you know, food sealing drugs and also the glib way of telling someone, hey, you're depressed, don't worry, it's a chemical imbalance, let me give you some medicine to fix it, you know? We want this quick fix mentality, so as medicine has advanced and technology has advanced, we are very caught up in the quick fix, but life is not like that, the mind is not like that, the mind is separate from the brain and the body, you can apply that. This type of thinking is not a quick fix, but a symptomatic diagnostic treatment approach can be applied to the body, the physical brain and the body, but when it comes to mind, it is that this is this gravitational field, it is strength, it thinks , feel, choose something, it's not going to work, you know, medication. it's not going to change how you're thinking and feeling and choosing, it's not going to eliminate this, it's just going to numb your brain, so you might not feel this while it's working, but at the same time when that drug wears off this is still there this it's still being recognized by your brain's immune system as a problem so this increases your bone the longer it's there the more you increase your vulnerability to disease oh my gosh you know this and this is what's trapping you stuck and these are patterns, so no, it's not a disease, it's a normal human response.

Here we can make a pandemic. We all know that everyone is talking about the next pandemic being mental health. If mental health has always been a known problem from the beginning. For a long time humanity has struggled with life, with problems with death, with war, with anything, so mental health is not on the rise, but the mismanagement of mental health by turning it into an illness has created a whole new problem, so here we sit before the During the pandemic, they started doing a population study in the mid-90s and that was when I was still practicing the early days of my practice, ten years after starting my work and I started to see this trend and I was looking at the study where there were people with a decades-long trend of people living longer, so we know we all hear this message, what have we heard, people are living longer due to advances in medicine and technology, none of us questions that, but something happened in '96 that did start. question that by the mid-2000s it was an established research fact that we are no longer living longer, that the trend of people living longer has actually reversed, and that we have a pandemic of deaths of despair in which people are dying due to preventable diseases related to lifestyle and the most affected age group, but it is between 24 and 65 years.

So people at the beginning of their career in the prime of their career and during that age group they are or drop dead like flies and it is considered preventable death of despair. lifestyle diseases so we have to look at the bones lifestyle disease means there is something in our body that is weaker why lifestyle is driven by the mind how am I eating drinking sleeping but more than that is what It's my mind behind all that, how am I really? handling the day to day moments, how am I handling patterns, traumas, established toxic habits, what am I doing with those things and that's when we ignore all that because this current trend of science says, oh, that doesn't matter what. .

It's the symptoms that matter, let's just look at the symptom checklist. Diagnostic label. When you tag someone, you cut them off. You cut up to 10 more years off his life. You know it's like it's a sum. They have shown that studies of people with a mental health diagnosis have 20 years cut off from up to 20 years of lifespan for people taking psychotropic drugs because of all the complications and changes in the brain and body that shave up to 25 years off their life. , I mean, this is serious, so here we have this that already exists. then the pandemic is now other years, they say there is an additional year that people's lives are cut short, but there is such a contradiction because they say, hey, this is an adverse circumstance, pain from the loss of people, medical uncertainty and you don't know if you are we are going to live or die and how long is this isolation going to last and the economic impact and whatever it is a trauma and they are saying that when they say but this is the way to treat it, let's label it, let's diagnose it, let's medicate it So here we have secretly come in with a problem with that stupid philosophy that has created so many problems and scientifically all this is being investigated and proven and now we have the pandemic and now they want to continue with that system that did not work, which is going to make things even worse , so we have to change our narrative completely and we have to stop saying that mental illness is increasing and that there are one in four people who are on antidepressants. depressed 100 of the people are depressed and anxious and worried about this coveted pandemic 100 of the people in the world at some point in their lives have and will be anxious and depressed and in grief and sadness and terror and despair and one of the others a great percentage of the population and I'm not sure of the exact percentage because no one has really done this kind of research, but it is estimated that probably 30 to 40 of the people will have extreme trauma from abuse, war trauma, that kind of thing in the that will fall down the continuum to sort of minus 19 8 19 if you look at a continuum from zero to ten zero to minus ten um and you have things like psychotic breaks and hearing voices and extreme states of anguish mental anguish that aren't illnesses yet, they're just In that traumatic situation you are having a traumatic response, think about someone who is a war veteran.

I just interviewed a Navy Seal the other day that he was a trained sniper and I was talking about the things that he had to do and that his teams had to do. You know, they come. Come back and try, and we all know the problem of trying to reconcile with civilian life after you've broken up, I mean, you know this is what they would be experiencing all day, things that are completely against survival, completely against our human nature. and now instead of being allowed to process this trauma they come back and tell them they are sick and he was telling me what they do with a lot of us we don't hear this kind of stuff but he said I this they will inject things like a respirator which is an antipsychotic in the spines of wolves because they are nothing but psychotic and they and they are psychotic for a reason is that they manage, they how do you deal with this, of course you are you will get angry you will get frustrated you won't be able to love like you did it you have to be able to accept the process and reconceptualize giving them a medication it won't help them it won't help them in fact, it restricts the brain, it restricts the brain, you can't, there is no chemical cure for that, this, this, that, no , that, it will just add sensation to the fire because your mind is going to work through the brain, so now you put chemicals in it and now that is not going to facilitate the change we have to do something like that that is like a narrative do you feel that there is something like that like a chemical imbalance in some people?

You know when they say oh, I have depression. It's an illness or bipolar or I have this mental health illness or I have a chemical imbalance I was treated with this don't try to say no because this is who I am is that some people have that or is that a result of the narrative that I have a chemical imbalance in my depression comes from chemical imbalance it is a narrative that is the only explanation that has been given to people, they have not been given an alternative reaction, I mean an alternative narrative, so the most important thing is that anyone listen to this podcast I want to validate your depression your anxiety your grief your despair your PTSD whatever label you've been given I want you to do it I want to validate that that doesn't need to be validated with an illness label you're not sick you're not a broken brain you're not your brain is not effective you're going through something so you're not something you're not you're going through something you're experiencing something you're experiencing something and you're experiencing and you've dealt with it in the only way you could cope at the time, so that created this adverse response because it was an adverse situation and you were just trying to cope with it, so what we have to do is go through a process of acceptance, processing and reconceptualization, so the important thing here is to recognize that the chemical imbalance is not the cause of your despair, the cause of your despair is what you've been through and what you're going through, and learning how and not knowing how to handle it and how to deal with those thoughts that are driving you crazy and those flashbacks and the trauma of the flashbacks and going back to those situations of rape or abuse or the trauma of war or what could drive a person crazy and that's not crazy in the sense of an illness, it's crazy in the sense of your mind, it's like an erratic tidal wave around you and it's going through your brain and you have these and your immune system and everything screaming. to you and says, hey, let's fix this so that a disease label overrides it and for a moment it would be nice to know that okay, these are labeled by how I feel because it makes us feel like we have a little bit. of control, so initially that comforts you, but don't see yourself like that, it's better to say that I'm experiencing PTSD problems because of what I've been through instead of that I have PTSD, I had the illness of PTSD , it's better to say I'm experiencing bipolar symptoms these intense changes because of my whole history than to say I have bipolar I have a chemical imbalance I mean just the researchers that came out the other day show that we have to stop saying this the main ones psychiatrists who run this field will tell you that we have to stop saying this that there is no way that serotonin imbalance can even measure that there is no gene because there are no genes or a serotonin imbalance that causes it, that's what that you have experienced that is the cause and then that moves through your brain and your body, so obviously your brain and yourbody respond, then we will see changes in the brain and body, we will see neurochemical chaos, not necessarily a serotonin imbalance, that's just one, sometimes it's dopamine and if dopamine decreases, serotonin is often then in anandamites often so I mean I can give you a list of important chemical terms and that's going to change every function in the structure of your brain and your DNA and your telomeres and um 1400 neurophysiological responses are turned off so you know, that's and However, that's the answer and that doesn't mean that you have this thing hidden inside you, that terrifying thing that controls you and me, that invalidates if someone comes back from war, someone has had sexual trauma to tell them that depression or The anxiety they feel is an illness, it is an insult to what they have been through, but if I tell you, if I tell you, my God, that's terrible, tell me, I want to hear your story, I want to support you in your depression and anxiety. what you feel is a sign that things are happening, there is an origin story, there is a source, so can I listen, can I help you?

Can I help you try to recognize the signs and follow the process to find the origin story and then reconceptualize? that and that takes time, it's not a 15 minute appointment where I can give you a label that takes time, that's also not the type of conditioning treatments that are out there, some of them work if used the right way. It's no other place than trying to put a veteran who's been through something back into the situation to try to condition him. You can't condition, you have to rebuild, so it's like an algebraic equation x is the situation and y is how you should want it. works for mental p then you have x plus y and here we are in our which is okay, now we're going to create z, we're just going to ignore x and and we're going to create something new and that new thing is that you're sick but that doesn't work, it's actually x plus y is equal to x and x is what you're going through. and it's where you want to find a mental piece and I want to bring the two together to live together so you can change the way the past plays out in your future.

Oh man, this is powerful. Oh my goodness, I want to go back to what you said when you're experiencing this traumatic event in the family that you had. Recently, you were wearing a glucose monitor and you mentioned that there was a process that you became aware of, like the amount that spiked, heart palpitations, stress, you could feel your physicality, your body switching to this stress response, this protection, stiffness, whatever it was, yes, fear. anxiety all these things that you were experiencing at the time what was the process that you interrupted to bring it back to more normal levels for yourself of feeling more peace grounded calm okay so it's the neurological cycle process excellent question um, is it the cycle process neurological, which is in the second half of the book, so the neurological cycle is five signs, these are the five steps, yes, these are the five steps, this is what I initially developed for people's traumatic brain injuries , it was the first time I developed it and developed my theory and then from there I refined it to all the different types of situations that I worked with and then it was refined over the years.

This is the most up-to-date research, so a good scientist must continue to learn, change, and improve. What I have tried to do in this book is the updated version of the neurocycle. The neurocycle is how to ensure that your mind is always working under control if we are in a state of acute trauma like the one we were at that moment. an acute tumor creates a red brain. I showed them that picture of a red brain. That red brain means that I have a tidal wave in my brain or that there is um, the left brain and the right brain will not be in harmony.

I will have a drop of blood and oxygen in the front of my brain I will have things like that delta that we have heard about things like delta theta alpha beta gamma all those waves are supposed to flow like waves in the c and if you think about the c you have the big waves that are delta a little bit smaller waves that are theta then build that is beta the fold that is high beta and the gamma that is the wave on the beach and so we want that through the brain in this nice kind of way uniform which is some kind of state and x plus y x is what happens to us and is that state then What I do is because the mind works through the brain and the body and the mind is experiencing this trauma which is a disaster.

Our brain and body simply do what the mind is doing. So there is a mess in our brain and our body, but if I have that kind of chaos, I can do it. I don't think clearly. I won't have any wisdom. I'm going to break down and in this situation I would have and have done it in the past, but now I've learned to deal with it and I talk about it. The new cycle can improve the way you manage anxiety and depression at 81, that is a huge claim and I have proven it scientifically well, so what I did was try to take back control now in that state where you do not know what to do. a tremendously acute traumatic state, but I knew it from my science and from my knowledge, so I am proactive, so I was able to go to two zones, so I entered two modes, the only mode was the mental disaster that I was in, which It's the pilot because I'm driving, I'm right now, imagine being in a helicopter that's like a time capsule and you're flying over this forest and the forest is your mind with all these trees and this acute tumor just grew because it's instantaneous. , so here it is.

This is terrible and your helicopters are attracted to this because you are in shock, terror, fear, deep panic and anxiety, that's all the smoke signals, so me, my pilot, does like this, the co-pilot is also me , but it is my wisdom because inside. For each of us it is our survival and that is our instinct you know when you give someone great advice and you just think oh wow where did that come from? You know you understand it's those tips like we know what we know, we know how much we can handle, we'll say I know this, that type of thing, that's the co-pilot, this wisdom, so what we want to do in those states is get into the co-pilot. , remember the co-pilot and the pilot, and use the u. language, so here you are flying this plane with the co-pilot saying, "Okay, let's calm down, let's land on that tree," so you land the plane, you land this time capsule, whatever and you get out, but you're with the co-pilot, like this that You are safe so you have created a distance and this is what I am expanding in detail and obviously you train and it is all in the book and that is it.

I have an app that explains it too, but this is the mindset I have. I trained myself to go in and be able to go into acute trauma where I'm still crying. I'm still freaking out, but I'm freaking out in this zone where I now know because I know I need wisdom. Being able to access and I cannot overcome this chaos if this chaotic brain and body and mind unless I have calmed it down so I have to overcome this because I am trapped in that black tree and I am trapped in This chaotic brain so let's consider it , it would be considered fight or flight, whether it's someone cutting you off in front of you on the street in the car or someone yelling at you or someone, whatever event is happening that's causing you. react in fight or flight, whether it's a massive tea trauma or literally a trauma exactly exactly in an acute trauma, which is the and the blind signatures, the things that you don't expect that hit us out of nowhere, yes, absolutely, so you are entering a level of fight and flight so that everything physiologically activates 1400 neurophysiological responses to help you focus, but they can't work for you unless you do what I'm telling you to do, which is change your perception, so this is how do it because as soon as you change your perception in an instant because I told you that in a matter of seconds I lowered the glucose monitor and I mean, I didn't expect it to work so quickly, I was surprised and as I went through the 12 hour day trauma, I was able to handle it every again, so I'm serious and this is not the first time I've done this in my entire life, but it was very interesting to see it in real time, of course, and see the reaction, okay, like this, like this.

The first step is to get the co-pilot's mental state to land, that's the preparation, we don't even have the first step, so first there is the preparation of the plane, yes, that's it, so recognize that you remember that there is a co-pilot who It's your Note that the crazy pilot goes everywhere lands the plane, let the co-pilot tell him it's okay, land the plane and land the plane where he needs it, what's the problem and what led him to land the plane to find the The problem was emotional, so this is step one. You are going to become aware and gathering means that you control it.

You're not sitting under the apple tree and all the apples are hitting you on the head. You are going back and picking up the apple. so there is control, there is a sense of autonomy, a sense of agency, so in the midst of chaos you can create agency mentally because your mind is driving it, so you walk away and say, "Okay, I took that apple, so those are my emotional warning signs.” Terror, total despair. traumatized like whatever you pick those apples you put them in your baskets you're gathering then you become aware so this is becoming aware this is how I this is how I feel this is what happened this is what it is this is the event, yeah, this is happening, it's almost yes, it is, but it's coming together in four different little packages because the more organized it is, the less chaos there is, we can be very systematic, so what are those four?, what are those?

Four things? So you become aware of your emotional warning signs, then despair, anxiety, any panic attacks, then you become aware of your physical bodily response, so here's your part of saying, "Okay, how are you feeling?" . Pick up that apple. Pick up that apple. What is your physical compliment? the heart panic attack gut wrenching tension adrenaline fly by whatever flight in front freeze mode you are in then your behaviors what are you saying what are you doing you know I mean, I was responding how are you responding yes action yes what are you responding are you saying what are you doing right, you know what's really going on and I'm grabbing this, I'm grabbing that, get it, you know, so what is that and is it working?

I mean, like you, well, just doing this changes. how you do things is amazing immediately you go into this different mode the fourth is the perspective what's your perspective this is doomed to fail this is terrible this sucks this is the end or okay this is bad but you know, look, so get together , meet as soon as you have those that you're then going to reflect on, so it's very systematic and then when you've gathered and done all this preparation, you have both sides of the brain, you have coherence again, you have blood flowing back to the brain, you have oxygen back to the front of the brain when you have low oxygen and low blood flow to the front of the brain, which happens in trauma, in an acute situation, in those sudden things. falls then you are impulsive you are going to make bad decisions you are going to react incorrectly you are going to create incoherence your alpha wave in the brain falls and becomes more active on the right side and that is on the right side which is not great because that means that now We're not going to have information, so by doing what I just saw, you change all that, you get consistency back, you increase often, it may not be great yet, but then you've already started the process.

As you go through the five steps and I put all this brain stuff in the book and what happens and um, so I'm just giving you an overview to start thinking about now, okay, what do I have in my basket? ? So ponder number two. reflect is an incredibly beautiful word, as is becoming aware, becoming aware, I just want to point out that before I said that we should not be afraid of despair, anxiety and trauma, and I mean dexa depression, those that are scary, don't be afraid. You are afraid of them because they are messengers, they are useful messengers who are telling you something and if you respond to them that way, then you control them, but if you respond to them with fear, they control you, yes, and then you are not going to do it. move forward you will get very stuck and then stuck in rumination and the patterns will get worse so take control even if you can you may be crying yelling swearing I don't care what you are doing but just take control you are up the tree you're doing things so gather, reflect is when you think about light passing through a prism, it reflects all the colors of the rainbow, so there is depth, there is one thing that means a lot and therefore reflecting is this process.

Being a detective is fine, well, why am I having that reaction?things, but on average the forest is mostly green, but whatever gets more attention. in your life, if you're living in something war-torn or if you're living in an abusive situation or you're living with an intimidating boss or you're living under the threat of someone in your family who is really sick, that's what's happening. dominate, so it's not that we have more negative thoughts, it's because that's survival, it's threatening our survival, it's creating brain damage, we have to get rid of it, we have to manage it, it's a call to management to pay attention to the toxic it's a call to management it's created disruptions in the gravitational field think about those those oh I need to get a picture there's a movie and I don't know which one it is but it's those ones you know you get that ripple effect that it's moving through like uh um like a field or something and you can almost tell that they create with the movies, they create that ripple effect, you know, can you visualize something like that?

Okay, that's what's happening with the mind, so we have these waves, they're not just trees. that are still there are these waves, but every once in a while those waves are toxic, so they are going to be very disturbing and that sends this, it upsets the nearby balance in the unconscious mind and it is linked to a physical, so the This gravitational field wave disruption storm is linked to one of these in the physical brain, so it's in the storms somewhere, so maybe it's there and then there's also this thing there, so they're linked and they threaten survival, so I'm going to get your attention and your attention is to go fix it, so if we suppress then if we suppress in terms of what don't pay attention, don't be aware, yeah, Medicaid, take drugs, drink anyone who be the addiction rather than addressing it, which happens well, so essentially I'm glad you brought it up, so addiction is not a disease, we are not trapped by the chemical and chemicals do change your brain.

I just explained that, but your mind can override any biological changes because your mind is more powerful than your brain. and that's how we know that you can always turn to that inner survival instinct, which is that inner fringe of green trees, just to make an analogy, so addiction is not a disease, addiction is a response like depression, it's a warning sign, you are trying to take something. that's painful and taking something to numb the pain, so like you said, sex, porn, alcohol, drugs, smoking, yeah, you often find exactly that if you find someone who was talking to someone yesterday who had a tremendous battle with cocaine. and alcohol but it's not that those who caught them give us the impression that oh your brain is sick that's why you're vulnerable to that and you can't control it nonsense that has taken away all the hope that people die from lack of hope louis that's it what that statistic I talked about before the reversal of trends people are dying from lack of hope death from despair when you take away people's sense of agency, you are taking away the most central dynamic of who you are as a human being, you Mind is about agency, think, feel, choose, you control that and you take that agency away from someone by saying, “hey, you can.” You don't control the fact that you're addicted to alcohol or that you're addicted to that is terrible, but if you say "it's okay," I see that that's where you're finding your coping strategy right now, that having the alcohol now is causing you pain. . having taken, you know, porn, repetition, any abuse, any abuse, anything, to hide opioid addiction, it's just to numb the pain, so once a person is in a loving and caring environment support where you can start to see that. change, then they can start and see why, then you can take them through the process of well, let's see maybe that signal has a cause and let's start to find and when you start working on the neurocycle, I can tell you now most of the time.

They are still addicted to something because the pain is very bad and they deny that this is a disease because it is easier to accept it initially but they deny it. No, I do not know. I am not addicted to alcohol. I know I'm not addicted. whatever cocaine is, I'm not addicted, but once you start showing it with love, well, let's talk about forgetting about the clock, the substance, let's talk about you, what's going on, what happened and when you start doing that , so I'm depressed and this and this and then things start to come up and as soon as you start to have that cycle, the person is more able to say oh, I see, I've been trying to numb my pain and then you can start to get liberation 86 for 93 percent of people who are addicts come out of addiction through choice and that choice is stimulated by a loving supportive environment as a super support that helps people see what is happening because it is very difficult to face those things, so we can live in a state of denial and that is what requires a lot of support, good therapy and good environments, you know, supportive environments, but telling someone that I am always an addict is one of the worst things you can say, you would say, okay, you have no power, right, right, I'm a victim of this chemical imbalance or whatever it is, yeah, but that's not the case and it can take you years.

I mean, the other day I was talking to someone who, like I said, was struggling with cocaine. all kinds of things and now he's one of the most amazing people helping other people do the most amazing work. That person had been raped several times when he was a child. He came from a very wealthy family and the nanny who took care of him when he was a father was He was so busy working, he repeatedly raped this kid throughout his childhood and then, I mean, it happened again in college and this and this and different work environments and in different parts of the world when he traveled to different parts of the world and that's where he had to get to the point where he realized that he was numbing the pain, you know, so if you can, you see we have to absolutely change the narrative. , you know that this is and these are extreme cases, but there is also the day to day. day, I mean, we have to live with ourselves, someone the other day said to me, well, that's it and that's fine, the relationship is big, extreme, what if I sit here with myself and I can't sleep because of the night and I worry, how do you know? the things that aren't I can still get through life but I'm ruminating and overthinking and I'm stuck in anger and you know, that's it too, we have to manage all of that and that was my 25 years of my life because I talked about being abused. sexually when I was five years old and from having anger, resentment, frustration and rage for 25 years until I started opening up and talking about it until I did therapy until I did uh you. you know mdr, yeah, I mean, I did every kind of therapeutic experience I could do and it really gave me the environment of love, support and peace to start the path of freeing myself, releasing the pain and trauma by giving it a voice by expressing it beautifully. doing the work and it didn't happen overnight it's like eight years later it's still an ongoing healing process yeah it's a lot easier and I can have a conversation about it easily where eight years ago I would know I was crying talking about it that x and that is x plus y is equal to Plus, you'll get even more control over the accumulation of all the things that happened, I mean, that's just what I would recommend.

Try it for sure. So what should we be thinking when we have toxic thoughts about ourselves? I'm not good enough. I'll never amount to anything. I shouldn't try this. This person doesn't like me. Drama. Stress. Anxiety. Whatever it is. When we have a toxic thought that doesn't support our dreams, doesn't support the betterment of our future and our vision, what should we think about in terms of replacing that in terms of the process or is that something we shouldn't do? Rejecting negative thoughts, we should analyze and be aware, but how do we do it without consuming our life?

Okay, so you answered the question. The second part, that's what you do. The only way to gain control is to accept, process and reconceptualize. and you do it in a very tolerant way, so it's like getting to the helicopter and being the messy pilot and being the co-pilot, yeah, and getting into that state of mind, because at that point it's very unbiased to start saying to yourself Like first. What do you do when you get on the helicopter, whatever moment you are in, is to say: okay, okay, there have been a million billion people who have been in the same position as you who are struggling, in fact, the Most people struggle. with self esteem there are very few people who for some reason don't struggle with self esteem for example just take that example thinking I can't do this or I'm ashamed because every toxic experience we have completely tears at the core of who .

We are and the core of who we are is that I am needed, I am valuable and I have something to contribute to the world that no one else can, so when someone tries to take it from you through abuse or that they have to attack your core so that you hide among the Shame and self-esteem arise from this. I shouldn't feel this, but if especially a small child like five years old is abused, you don't know how to process it. The most immediate thing is because it goes against survival because the adult in your life, if you are supposed to be the protector, everything is distorted, you don't have the language, you don't have the brain power, but the mind allows you to process. then your coping strategy will be good, this made me feel bad, so I'm bad, so you tend to have this, but omnipresent sexual trauma tends to create an omnipresence of shame and that manifests itself in all kinds of behavioral manifestations, whether Whether it's withdrawal, whether it's difficult. aggressive and it's omnipresent and that attacks self-esteem because something at the core of you has always been attacked and that's why it takes time, as you mentioned, to go back and find that in terms of what you say.

Someone, the first thing is to get to the point where we have to change our narrative, we have to forget what the world said about all these scary words and see them as very useful, it's a complete 90 or 360 degree change, desperation, anxiety, shame, thinking. It makes me ashamed to think that I have no self-esteem. Thinking I can't do this. It's okay because as soon as you say it's okay, as soon as you can admit that you feel like you've gotten a handle on it, you've now promised yourself. You've taken back the power, you've changed the balance of power, so instead of um, if this isn't in the unconscious, it's this trauma, it's the five-year-old, it's been over the years and this has happened, and it doesn't.

I'm saying you did this. but there may have been a period that you suppressed because you didn't know how to process it until maybe 15 16 17 when you were becoming more cognitively metacognitively capable and you started to see things maybe it was older very often it happens between the ages of 18 and early 22. Childhood trauma where we start to see those patterns manifesting and a little bit of consciousness coming in, so when this comes to consciousness in the brain, this is now weakened, so these branches of proteins that are the memories and the emotions, the data of the event that was that.

Now my right is weakened, so the moment I tearfully say, "Okay, I feel ashamed, I feel like I have no self-esteem, I feel worthless and ugly and I am this and I am dead and I can't even accomplish anything at the moment." in that I can accept that I can objectively look at the co-pilot pilot and the co-pilot can say what do you feel? I feel good, let's see now if that is real and that. It has weakened these chemical bonds protein bonds I have begun to change the structure of my brain I have now put 1400 neurophysiological responses into operation for me instead of against me I have now begun to recreate balance in the brain I have increased the flow. blood, so I'm preparing myself to be more resilient to do the hard work of unpacking and it gets worse before it gets better.

One of the really good things that I've presented in my work in this book is knowing that I've scientifically proven that even if you feel. worse, what you're going to feel when you unpack this and start seeing things I've suppressed it's terrible it's heartbreaking it can make you feel like you want to die when I started talking about it I thought this is the scariest and hardest thing I've ever done in my life I'd rather I'd almost rather die like this is the feeling you get, you're like if anyone ever knew these things about me, if I really had to face these things, it's the scariest challenge I've ever had to deal with emotionally and it feels like you're dying.

I don't know, I mean, maybe that's too extreme, maybe that's too extreme, but I think you're thinking or feeling like I'm going to die because if I processed this and if people knewThis about me, yeah, how could they accept me? Could you ever love me? I'm going to be alone for the rest of my life like your mind. My mind went through these thoughts, yeah, yeah, and there's no meaning and there's no purpose and what can you do and it's a waste of time. I can't live with myself this way and it's so terrible and I can't do this and then you start rejecting the people around you or you make a mistake, it's just totally normal, that's normal, you have to accept that about the process that it's going to take.

It gets worse before it gets better and that's okay and that's totally what you've been through, it's normal and we can't label it and medicate it, so I invalidate your experience by being able to talk about your experience in this format. of having a podcast where now all over the world people are much more vulnerable and the openness is bringing this to light and allowing us to then be able to weaken that you have changed the balance of power and it gets worse as you said. you want to die, it's so bad, but then the change starts to happen because look where you are today, a change happens at some point when it really goes down, you may have even tried to commit suicide or you may have even gotten to the point where this is that I'm out of here or something traumatic, really traumatic and then all of a sudden there's that change, there's that awareness and then you can start to rebuild and you know it's a process of time and that change is real, that's what you asked me about. .

Would you tell someone who is in that state? Where do you start? You start by giving yourself permission, you start by getting into the co-pilot and letting that pilot fly like a maniac and you know, crash the plane as much of a time capsule as you can get. that plane goes again but helping by relying on the power and comfort of the co-pilot to say I'm very afraid of that I don't want to land my plane you land in a fight and you land your plane and then you take Take out your shovels and begin the process of getting to dig up all this slowly as you are ready.

That's why I say 15 to 45 minutes a day you don't do more, you do it little by little and do as many cycles as you need and eventually you will get to the point where you will have reconceptualized how I mean, how we really heal the trauma of the past. That causes a lot of our thoughts because I listen as I am listening. you say I'm feeling the traumas, the past memories that we had of the event and we hold on to the memory, the idea, the thought of the event and sometimes we, and a lot of times I would go to Say, uh, you know, I'll speak for myself and I think most of us probably have an event happen and our memories after decades and years turn it into something bigger and with more extreme potential.

Yes, the event actually was. and we are holding on now our mind comes up with memories that weren't even real and that caused this reaction in us, so how do we actually do it? Are you healing past trauma? Is the memory of the past healing? cure everything what is the process what should we do is it only through therapy we can do it alone through no you can't internally you can do it alone you can do it with therapy you can do it I would never do anything completely alone I would make sure you have some kind of support system.

If you can get your therapy, it will definitely help you, but therapy is a catalyst, it's not really a catalyst and it's a place where you can unravel the pain and get guidance on how to manage it. next step, but you're still living with yourself 24/7. You have to do the work and this is where having a mental management system is so vital, so what you have described is the whole thought tree and that thought tree, let's take the incident what you went through as a child and that would have been, you know what the actual incident would have been and then the event and the details and the moment and everything, and that then builds your perspective of how you saw yourself and how you saw this whole thing, which is your emotions and the data. and that manifested itself in how you actually lived your life so it's a past trauma there's no blame in this even though it's toxic because that's all you can do to survive is a coping mechanism so this toxic tree is a coping mechanism, so we have this thing built into our mind and our brain that in a system that allows us, because this should eliminate you, you shouldn't even be alive.

If you look at natural biology, there is a protective system that surrounds it for a season until you are ready to deal with it, so you know and then something will come and the event will come into your life. where now you have to deal with it and sometimes we ignore it, we ignore it a couple of times before we do it, eventually, so there's some kind of cocoon that's protective, so it's harmful, but because you're not ready to deal with it, it is not. wiping you out, it's still causing problems, it's still creating some shock waves there on the ground and that kind of thing, but when you're ready to know it, suddenly something is going to happen in your life and it's slowly creeping in, it's slow. infiltration, so it sends out little tendrils, you know it's growing, you're still surviving, but things are getting worse and worse and eventually this cocoon starts to break and it explodes mentally physically into something in a relationship in a work environment in a it builds in a cascade and little things happen and eventually there is a big explosion that is the cocoon that starts to come off as you mature and get older and do more with your life and experience more. to a point where you have to reject it, you have to go to the past for lack of a terrible analogy, but it's a good example, at some point you can't stay there anymore and that's when it explodes and when it explodes, these are all the memories like that how you remember them this is the concept of abuse when you were a child that is the thought this is the detail of the story and this is how you experienced it and then you have to go from both warning signs to the data here, how you experience it, you go back to the action and then you reconceptualize it, so how do you make it play out in your future?

That's always part of your story, but you change how, like you've already done it, you've said it before, you can talk about it. now without falling apart, but at some point you couldn't talk about it at all, so you rewrite the script, you rewrite and that takes time, which takes these 63 day cycles, literally, reconceptualization is rewriting the script, so eventually this So you have this and that now, instead of being toxic, can you see that some of these leaves glow a little brighter than the others? Okay, so that's reconceptualized, now I can talk about it. Now I can. make you cry but now you've made it a part of you you've redesigned it is the it's the beautiful new space that's how it was but now you've made it work for you instead of against you, so that's the trauma of the past, that there is no excuse to say there is no forgiveness even in that, but you need to be released because if you are still connected to that trauma, it keeps you connected in the quantum world, literally, to the abuser, so until we release it, there is a connection , so literally, here is your brain, here is that person, maybe 10,000 miles away, but because of entanglement in quantum physics there is no space-time dimension and because of that, there is toxic entanglement between the particles that are entangled. and you may have heard of the meter or someone said this between two particles they get in a relationship in quantum physics experiments, no matter how far they shoot, they're still in a relationship, so this one spins this way, this one turn this way so until you release until you reconceptualize you are still connected so that will always control you so when we talk about people we say sorry I think release is a better word because how do you give them these going on through this process over time as you reconceptualize that you are slowly cutting ties so by the time it is in this format there is no longer that invisible tie there, you know you have cut the tie when you can actually talk about it and you are not excusing the behavior of that person who can never really forgive what they have done if you think about it, but you can release it, so we talk about forgiveness as part of healing, but we have to do it.

I had this discussion with someone the other day we have to be very careful about using the term forgiveness loosely because when someone has done something wrong, that wrong, even anything that you have done wrong to someone, that wrong is always there, what is forgiven is what we must do. we should free ourselves, we should realize that that was a moment in time, it was wrong, the person needs to own it, but it is not your responsibility to make that person take ownership, they have to unravel that mistake and work on it, which What you have to do is be freed from it and put that in your past and that's the easiest thing to do because a lot of people are still stuck because they think I can't forgive I can't forgive how can I forgive someone that's how you do it? forgive someone who raped you how do your parents forgive someone who hurt their child?

Do you know how? How do you do that? Like when you have someone's mood? You know I'm not saying you have to keep it and you don't know that. the you that you have to get, you have to free yourself from that and you have to accept that that event maybe that person was operating from a trauma, so the reason they did that was driven by the trauma and that is not makes it right, it does. but we can't ignore it and what I think we've also tried to do with many types of psychological approaches is oh, forgive, especially in the religious community, forgiveness, it's all gone, it's all gone, no, it's still there. part of your story I think the kinsugi principle explains it better do you know the kinsugi principle japanese art do you know when a vase breaks on the ground and is in a thousand pieces they don't sweep up the pieces when you were raped as a girl, your life was shattered, it is okay, but you didn't sweep the pieces, what they did was they collected each piece and they meticulously rebuilt the vase with gold lacquer and platinum, so now you have this beautiful new vase with all the gold that represents the gilded platinum.

What you have been through enriches who you are as a person You are now helping others through your story You are teaching others You have yourself as a leader You are one of the three percent who allow others to speak only about their trauma Three percent of leaders are talking about mental health. Three percent globally, that's terrible. Wow, so if we as leaders don't talk about it, how do we give permission to those who follow us to talk about it? So, as a leader, as you speak, you have now taken the principle kinsugi you are showing us your gold crack the bright light in the leaves and that is that trauma is shocking we never forgive that is wrong we can never say it is right it is never right but what you've done with it okay and now you can turn it into helping others achieve greatness, yeah that's kind of a transformation.

I am curious to know what the process of protecting our mental health is on a daily basis. It seems that we must first be. aware of the process of healing from the past or traumatic memories from the past whatever you want to call it, but what is the process of protecting the present in the future so that we don't fall back into a dark space that kind of keeps us there for so long? time. Is there a process that you recommend? It is self-regulation. It is being very, very self-regulated and we see it from neuroscience. In fact, I have a little quote in the book where I think I have it.

I think I actually had it open because I did and I actually did a little live on it today but you can tell yourself what it is every 10 seconds here it is, I don't know what it is um Every time I thought, I had the page open every 10 seconds. You can be aware of what you are thinking, feeling and choosing peace of mind and staying in a state of peace of mind comes from being aware every 10 seconds. Now I'm not asking you. to set your clock and your time on your phone, I'm just saying that, translate it, it means that all the time, when you're awake, you need to be standing and observing your own thoughts, you need to be thinking, well, what am I?

I'm thinking right now how I'm reacting right now I wake up I feel great and then I read an email I feel bad oh I wake up feeling nervous why I'm talking to this person how I'm reacting how I'm responding I'm sending this email I'm doing this job What is my? You are constantly monitoring and that may seem exhausting, but it is not. It's the most natural thing in the world. It's one of the most brain-healthy things you can do, so that's the only key. -regulate it as you do the neurocycle as you get into the neurocycle habit, your self-regulation skills are trained to a level where it changes your life.

Honestly, if I had to sell what I would say, what protects my mental health is my increased self-regulation from consistently living a life of neurocycling and then the other thing in neurocycling that is phenomenal for protecting mental health that no one talks about. I don't know anyone except me who talks about this and it's called brain development and there's a whole section in the book on brain development and that'staking the five steps of the neurological cycle to learn new information as humans, what does that mean? a new skill or new new data every day, so for me I will take my scientific research every Day I spend at least an hour looking at neuroscientific or scientific studies related to my field of work, that is, studying new information, the latest, so that I study it to the point of being able to give a lecture about it or write an exam about it.

I take the five steps and study information every day, when you wake up you have millions of new nerve cells baby and those nerve cells look like trees and they are waiting for you to be like lattices to strengthen the new cells. thoughts that you build in the neurons of your brain, these little branches of these thoughts and if you don't use them they become toxic waste, so they affect your sleep at the end of the day and they affect your dreams and cumulatively over time they affect your the health of your brain, so when you develop your brain it's like cleaning your teeth, if you don't clean your teeth every day, eventually you will have a real problem with your teeth and your brain because it will cause all kinds of problems in your body and so on. , the same with building the brain, building the brain builds mental and physical resilience, so when learning something, we really think deeply that when you do a neurological cycle to build the brain, what I'm doing is making you think very deeply and when you think deeply. you make all these great things happen in the brain, the left right side, the oxygen and all those things and you, and that's the only way you can really grab those new baby dendrites, they respond to deep thought, they don't respond to superficial thinking.

Don't respond to scanning the headlines and rushing, illness and rushing, rushing, capturing data and never doing anything you respond to, oh let's scan the headlines I'm interested in, let me read that article and study it, so I'm going to write a test, Well, I'm reading this great book or take my book and study it, you know, study that every day for an hour, not only will you get the tools, but you will also develop your brain, regardless of what you do. Are you interested If you love cooking If you love anything Are you interested in self-help books Anything Don't just read Study them Use the five steps Take an hour a day If you can do more Do more and you will transform your mental health To all my patients, when they came to my consultation, obviously I evaluated them and did all those kinds of things that we solved where the problems were, but we always did the brain development first, sometimes during a few sessions, I would just do the brain development and get them to a state where that could recognize that they are starting to become more resilient and self-regulated, then we would start doing the trauma work and the learning disability work and the trauma work, you know, working with traumatic brain injury we would do that and, in fact, all the traumatic brain injuries and strokes. work that I would do with my patients as if I were working with someone like what your dad went through, I would teach the patient and the family how to develop the brain, we would take what you are interested in and if your dad was interested, let's say whatever let's say he was interested. in I don't know what your father was interested in playing the piano singing sports running yeah okay so you could play sports and then you could take brain development you can do this with it now you can take brain development and sports no you just read it but you study it, you do the five steps and you study it as if you were now going to give a lecture that you are now going to teach, this is what I would do well with my patients and then we would slowly restore function because that changes them , order the gravitational fields, order the brain changes and direct neuroplasticity and healing arrives and you begin to transform.

I had CEOs of major companies in South Africa. I have a terrible car. accidents and they completely lose their functionality, they can't function, they build this whole brain over a period of time and they come back and become something else, so one guy was an engineer but he went into management and became CEO of a big company. company. The corporation had this terrible car accident and ended up coming back and becoming a senior engineer with brain damage, so I've had pilots who at 82 couldn't fly anymore and became accountants, I mean I can tell the story of the story. . when I'm in the most distressed state, like that night of acute trauma that I told you about, in addition to glucose monitoring, in addition to doing neurocycling, what did I do?

I did brain development, I set up brain development to calm myself in that state, so I would switch between the neurological cycle of management and brain development close to a cycle to try to learn and understand something, yes and that, but that brought me resilience, so it calmed me down. If I'm nervous, I'll go to brain development. I'm really out of it and I'm not handling it and I feel like I'm getting super anxious or depressed or something. I will even spend 10 minutes developing the brain. I will take a study that makes the brain develop enough.

To immediately increase my resilience, does brain development only happen when you're studying and learning something or is it more like, I'm going to play ping pong or play a sport or do an activity that helps me, like hand-eye coordination? Yes no Definitely, you can do that too, so ping pong is great for the brain. You know, anything that really challenges the brain to coordinate is definitely going to be a brain-building exercise. Yes, you can do that too, so do it. Those are more related to the physical. It is our balance. I would balance the physical with the mental so that you do the cognitive as well.

I mean, they're both mental. I shouldn't say that kind of text um um and physical, make sure your brain develops with a combination. You know, I feel like a lot of parents in general don't have the tools to have conversations with their kids about mental health. You know, I don't remember much about my parents, though. You're amazing, I don't remember us ever talking about mental health and these challenges that can arise, these emotions and these feelings that can arise in us at different times, how to handle them properly and like the tools that exist now. It is being discovered in research like yours today what conversations parents should have with their children about mental health so that they feel safe, seen and loved with the confusion they perhaps have as teenagers or young adults in today's world.

I love your question. And it's very important that we should do this from babies, so when a child comes home from school and is maybe three or four years old and is sad because he doesn't have the language, but to be able to notice it and validate it, I see. you feel sad why you are sad and what do you know give toys to be able to act as they grow you never overlook the emotions of a child you always validate I see you sad you want to talk about it I see you then it's I see you Do you realize I'm saying I see you and you can find your own wording, but it's recognizing what's validating and never judging or saying oh, you don't need to feel that way.

What parents often do without meaning to. I am a father of four children, I did it even with all my knowledge that I have, so we make mental messages. I see that we make mental messes all the time, but it's very important, not if someone, your child comes up to you and says: "I'm very worried" and then you say what's worrying you, I'm worried that this one will do something that you think is totally irrelevant oh that's not so bad you don't have to worry about that that's the worst thing you can do to your child because what I've done is invalidate something that they now feel ashamed of, so now they have this confusion of worry , they don't know how to process it and you know what parents do, you know you haven't accepted their feelings. or their thoughts that's all so it's very important even if you don't think it's valid you're not helping them saying and I know it's often done within teaching oh it's not that bad it'll be fine calm down don't do that it's rather sit down and hug him, say, okay, let's talk about how you feel, why do you think you follow the five steps?

I actually have it in my neurocycle app. I have a whole issue on how to do it. I use neurocycling for children and I am writing. I've written books in the past, but now we're doing the updated versions of neurocycling for benny tots neurocycling for toddlers, teens, whatever, exactly how to have the conversations, but it's openness. of the things that I have as a parent um and I mean that I've worked with I used to do a lot of family therapy when I practice and like advice that I always give to parents and that I've tried to apply As much as possible, keep your environment open. , keep it no matter what your kids want to talk to you about sex and things that you don't want to talk about, if you don't want to talk about them, they are Let's talk about them somewhere else and that goes for emotions too.

We have to allow our children to say: I feel depressed. The other day someone said: How can I help my child not be a teacher of depression? And it was quite interesting. way to put it and my response was: help them process it if they are depression teachers, what can you learn from them if you feel like they are so good at depression? That is a symptom or a sign of something. happening, you must recognize that and say: I see that you are feeling depressed. Can you explain more and then work through everything? Get the ones you know.

The five steps. Working them systematically. You can use many visual elements with children. I mean, I have been. Doing this with kids when I was practicing and training in schools and things as small as three years old and taking the brain listen to three year olds respond to this say okay and I'll say this is in your brain, take a tree okay, Now this is this happy tree, the sad tree and you work well, what do you feel? What is sad? give me and you give them the words and then let's see what you're doing, what you're systematically working on during the process. and you say okay, so this is where it cuts and it may take a few days, so it's the same process, but you're coaching them at their level and then what you're doing is modeling what to do at the same time. time, don't hide your feelings as a parent, you know there are so many things, don't act perfect, no, because it's the mess you see Europeans grow up in.

The mess is how they learn, so you make a mess, you get angry at your child for no reason. and then you feel guilt and condemnation that's don't do that if you get angry explain why you're angry say I'm really angry I'm sorry I said the wrong thing I didn't mean to do this that's why I did it but what you shouldn't let a child grow up oh you're the mother you chose to have me therefore you have to be perfect and if you fall you ruined my life forever that is not healthy for a child and that is what happens and it is bad for the parents and for the child and/or for the parents who pretend oh no, everything is fine and you know that meanwhile, behind closed doors, you and your husband are having a big fight or you and your wife are having that's it.

It's very confusing when my husband and I argue, we We kids, we grew up knowing why we explain ourselves, okay, we were wrong, we shouldn't have said this, this is why we argue and this is our solution, you know, and it's that authenticity and that honesty and you know we may not always like it because it can be pretty scary, but life is scary and you have to give, you have to give people, your children, the tools to know that, hey, this is how I'm handling it and I'm an adult and I'm still I struggle, so when they're adults and they step back, they don't think, oh God, I'm an adult.

I'm supposed to be like my mother, she was perfect. No, my mother still cries. My dad still gets angry, but they have a management plan, so authenticity and honesty absolutely answers the question. I have a couple final questions for you. This has been fascinating. Really inspired by all of this and I can. Don't wait to go deeper into the book, Clearing Your Mental Clutter, Five Simple Steps Scientifically Proven to Reduce Anxiety, Stress and Toxic Thinking, so make sure you get the book, if you don't already have it, it will be really powerful and helpful for yourself, for a family member, for a friend, so make sure you check this out, really inspired by this, you've been doing this work for what three decades almost fought, 38 years, so almost four decades you've been doing this work. in research and as a practitioner, apart from applying this in the real world, what is the biggest challenge you still face today?

Even knowing all these practices and awareness around the brain, the main thing, the mind, the thoughts, the memory, all of this, what is the challenge that you still face? As a human being with four decades of experience, how challenging it is personally, I wish I could handle it 24/7, and that's my goal because I know it works and when it does, and I feelTotally frustrated when I think why I didn't do it. just use the neurological cycle. It got to a point in our family where, if I wanted to, I went with my husband yesterday. I was really worried about something he said, well, why don't you do the neurological cycle?

I'm just saying, "no." Don't tell me that, I don't feel like doing neurocycling, I just want to moan, you know that kind of thing, but yeah, essentially it's true because I had to do it. In fact, I regained control, so my greatest, greatest effort. Probably the hardest thing to do is watch people suffer when I know they can, there's a way out and I wish I could fix things and that's probably what you can't do, I mean you probably can't. Doing that has made me my weakness. I am when I want to fix everything and everyone and if I can't, I think what I have done wrong, so I have to keep reminding myself all the time that I can't, only I can, you can't. fix someone else, but you can only support them, so it's a very big challenge for me because I can say, hey, just do this even with myself, do that, then you'll be fine, you'll get over this, you know that saying.

This too will pass when you know how to handle it, so yes, for me it is a big challenge and in terms of the overall mental health narrative, we just have to stop telling people that they have brain damage when they are just being normal. humans, it's a big challenge, this is incredible, I'm so glad we had this conversation, thank you very much, this question that I ask everyone towards the end is called the three truths question, so I would like you to imagine what it is his last day on earth. Many years from now you will be able to achieve all your goals and dreams, they will all come true, but eventually you must go to the next place, you must leave this earth, uh, and you must take all your work with all your research all your books you know this interview has to go with you to the next place but you are looking but you can leave behind three lessons that you would share with the world this is all we would have to do I remember you for these three lessons or what I like to call three truths what would you say you would share? that the mind is something that you can control the mind is real the mind is the source of everything and that is something that you can learn and develop and that would leave the system behind, I would say listen, learn, learn to manage your mind, use the neurological cycle , develop it more, whatever, but that's what I would say, and this is the fact that your mind is real, that your mind is always with you.

If you don't have your mind under control everything else is just wonderful dressing yeah we really have to do it so that would be the main thing and then how to do it I would definitely leave it behind do this and develop it grow through them . It's even better than what I've done, but this is what I can offer to humanity. He has a very managed mind and then philosophy. The third thing I would leave behind are three words, three three lessons that psychologist William James has often cited. As I say and those are three things in life, what is so important, be kind, be kind, be kind to yourself, With each other and those three things, I think we would be pretty well equipped to have a realistic, peaceful, decent existence.

Absolutely, those are beautiful truths,

caroline

, I appreciate it. I want to thank Caroline for a moment because this has been so inspiring and insightful and I thank you for almost four decades of constant curiosity, constant research and dedication to understanding the mind and the complicated nuances of the minds of the mind. -body connection of the mind-brain connection of quantum physics and all the things that surround the energy field of the mind uh it is something that has fascinated me my entire life uh as a child uh growing up learning about it but it is something that I have had more curiosity, but for you to make this your life's mission and study it and then make it simple, try to simplify the complex in a way so that human beings can understand their minds, I really thank you for doing the work and constantly showing up . and giving and having the passion that you have to share this information, I think it's really inspiring, so I thank you for everything, thank you, it's great.

I want to remind everyone again to get the book and clean up your mental mess. Be sure to check it out. It's available right now. You are on social networks. You do a lot on Instagram. I see Twitter. Instagram. Facebook. Dr. Carolina Leaf. You are practically everywhere and also on your website. It's just Dr. Carolina

leaf

.com, this Doctorleaf.com, Dr Leaf.com. all your information, your books, all the different things that are there, so make sure people visit dr leaf.com. um, that's the final question. Yeah, go ahead, I have a podcast that's also called clearing your mental clutter, so that's another place to check out. the podcast and then and I also want to interview you as soon as possible there.

I would love for your story to be fantastic. I'd love to. Yes, I'm always willing to do the work if anyone wants to analyze. with me and do sessions with me. I'm in, so we have such a wonderful story. I appreciate it, thank you. My last question is what is your definition of greatness. I think you know my answer. My definition of greatness is when you start to understand how you think, feel and choose, then you start to see greatness because there is something you can do that no one else can do and when you recognize that there is something you can do that no one else can do, that cut what is your mind is what you are doing is your perception so there is no envy or jealousy there is no desire to be like another person the competition goes because you cannot compete with you because no one can do what you can do so everyone is in that same ship so suddenly now if you go from competition to improvement and that's key, so when we improve each other that's when humanity really grows.

Wow, Dr. Caroline Leaf, I am so inspired and impressed. Thank you so much for being here to share your wisdom and I can't wait to do so again in the future. I can't wait too. Thank you so much, it's been amazing, thank you for your amazing questions. I love the depth of the conversation we've had and thank you if you're looking for more greatness in your life be sure to watch this video here and also check out our free pdf. The three secrets to unlock the power of your mind and help you change your life. Download it here.

These are all neurochemicals. internal and although some of them are designed to be released in response to very thoughtful things like food, sex, sleep.