Dr. Caroline Leaf: How to Crush Negative Thoughts & Transform Your Mental Health | Mental Health | YAPClassic

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Yap gang, what if I told you that your thoughts have weight and they're physically shaping your brain every single day?

In this Yap Classic episode, I sat down with Dr.

Caroline Leaf, a cognitive neuroscientist, best-selling author, and leading expert of the mind-brain connection.

We explored how you can literally rewire your brain to clean up your mental mess.

For over four decades, Dr.

Leaf has been proving what science once denied, your mind can change your brain.

In this conversation, she breaks down her transformative five-step neurocycle method for managing toxic thoughts, reducing anxiety, and building lasting emotional resilience.

This episode will completely transform how you think about your mental health and give you the tools to become the architect of your own mind.

So sit back and enjoy this conversation with Dr.

Caroline Leaf.

Hi, Caroline.

Welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.

Thank you, Harla.

It's so lovely to be with you.

Likewise, I'm so excited because we're going to talk all about the brain and the mind and the difference between the two and how they're related.

I can't wait to get into all that stuff.

But first, I want to understand where your fascination with the brain and the mind first came about.

From my understanding, you grew up in Zimbabwe and that's when when it first hit you in terms of this is the passion that you want to go on with your life.

So tell us about that, how you first got fascinated with the brain and the mind.

Absolutely.

Well, I was born in Zimbabwe and grew up in South Africa and we've been in the States now for the last 13 years and we travel globally.

I used to practice, I practiced 20 for 25 years as a clinician and I'm a brain, a mind-brain researcher neuroscientist.

I've been doing that for 38 years.

So I've been in the field for many, many years and my fascination with the mind and the brain began as a young girl.

i was very fast i was going to become a neurosurgeon i even got into that field and decided that i actually wanted to know more about understanding of the mind as opposed to just the physical brain and for i was trained in the era when they didn't believe that the brain could change, but they did understand that the brain was separate from the mind.

Then over the last 40 years, as we've learned more about the brain, the mind has been kind of separated and kind of ignored or seen as a byproduct of the brain.

So we've kind of transitioned in a negative sense.

A lot of the science has transitioned in a negative sense that we've advanced with brain science, but gone backwards with mind understanding.

And so I decided to spend, to dedicate my career to understanding mind, what it is, what are thoughts, what are memories, what's the difference between the mind and the brain, what happens when they interact, why do they need to interact?

How can you manage this process?

Do you have any control over the process?

And I started out my work trying to understand, I was just fascinated as a child with the brain and the mind and started out my initial research with people with very severe issues like traumatic brain injuries and severe war trauma and learning disabilities, dementias, autism, and then carried on in that field, but then adapted my work to helping everyone because you've all got a mind, we've all got a brain and we all need to manage it.

So it's just been a developmental process and my most recent book, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess, I put my most recent clinical trials in there in a summarized simple version just to show people the reality of mind-brain and the mind-brain connection.

So I know that you've been studying this for, I think, 38 years plus.

So that's a long time.

And you were actually trained to believe that the mind cannot change the brain.

And that's how you were trained.

So with that, how did you know in your gut that there was more to this story and that you needed to dedicate your life to figure this out?

Well, it was one of my neuroscience lectures that, and neuroscience was in its infancy in the 80s.

So I have to tell you that there was, we talk about neuroscience, it was more neurology and it was neuroscience, but it was just, it was very much in its infancy.

And it was believed that if you had damaged your brain, well, that's it.

And I remember one of the lecturers talking about this.

And I thought, this is not right because our mind is always changing.

Our experiences are changing.

Our day-to-day life is so totally different all the time.

So it cannot be that the organ through which the mind works

and uses,

if the mind is changing, obviously the organ that the mind uses would change as well.

So I challenged the professor, one of the professors, and they said, I said how can that be and they said well it is it is the way it is and i said well i don't think that is the case and they said well that's a ridiculous question and i said is it really a ridiculous question and i started i said let me work with the worst give me the worst scenario what would be the worst scenario that i could use to show you that i believe i'm right and they said well work with traumatic brain injury because once you've your brain's traumatized from a brain injury from a car accident well that's it you know you can't really do anything about that you just literally have to teach the patients to compensate so i started there i started working with with traumatic brain injury.

And one of my first subjects for one of my first research studies was a student of 16 who was quite an average student, not brilliant, but you know, she was the average and she had a terrible car accident, was in a coma for longer than two weeks.

Now, back in the 80s, if you were in a coma for longer than eight hours, you were told by the neurologist that you were basically brain dead.

So her parents were told that she's brain dead.

Then she was moving around a little bit.

So they said she was a vegetable.

Long story short, they just basically wrote her off.

The medical community wrote her off and and but she fought back in her coma she fought back her parents continued to stimulate her believe she'd come around after two weeks she she basically came around and they contacted me more or less six months but within the first six months after her accident where she was functioning back on a now listen to this sort of second grade level so she was totally frustrated because here her peer group were going into 12th grade and she could barely cope on a on a second grade level the fact that she'd actually come out of her coma was a miracle but that wasn't what she wanted.

So they contacted me.

I said, look, I was a young scientist, new research.

I said, well, we can try this.

I believe it'll work.

But anyways, long story short, fast forward eight months.

And this young girl not only finished, caught up with her PA group, but she finished school with her 12th grade PA group.

But not only just finished school, which was in itself a miracle.

So she caught up from second grade to 12th grade in like an eight-month period.

But she not only did that, she actually went on to become a math genius, which was amazing.

So she finished off with grades that were way better than prior to her accident.

So she was evidence that with directed mind input, with really hard, and this is not just, this is really deliberate, intentional using of the mind and developing of the mind, her brain changed.

So that's neuroplasticity where the brain can change, but the brain can't change on its own.

The brain changes by being changed by something and the something is your mind.

So the brain and mind are two separate things.

And what I would develop was a system to help this particular patient and then all the other subjects and patients since then and i've continued to research that is a system for how can you get your mind managed and self-regulated so that you can direct the neuroplasticity of your brain the brain changes and therefore body changes and how to do that in a successful way so that really just catapulted me into doing more and more research i did a lot of i do in the field research so i don't bring people into a lab and create a fictitious situation.

I didn't want to do that kind of research.

I go into the field.

and so I worked for years with different types of patients and different types of situations.

So in different organizations like government and education, schools, universities, I trained physicians, I worked in corporate.

So I worked in a multitude of different places from all different socioeconomic strata, war-torn countries, every color that you can, every race, to try to be able to reach an understanding of mind as a universal concept.

And basically that's what I've done for 38 years.

And that's what I present in my work.

And in my most recent book, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess.

It's kind of a summary of this philosophy plus a very practical application of how you, anyone, you've all got a mind, can use your mind to change your brain.

And to everybody listening, I would highly advise the book.

She gives five simple steps on how you can do this.

We're not going to be able to cover every single step in this podcast.

We'll try to, but you guys should definitely go read the book so that you can really understand how to use this powerful stuff.

So I want to step back a little bit because I think my listeners are, I think they're all new to this.

I think we know a lot about positive affirmations and all that kind of stuff, but I don't think we know the science behind everything.

And so first, what's the difference between the brain and the mind and how are they related?

Such a good question.

That's the best place to start.

And just for your listeners, that's the book, Cleaning Up a Mental Mess.

And she's holding up a book for the listeners.

For the listeners, yeah, I'm holding up the book.

And then I have other props as well, but I'll describe them.

So there are some views.

Is it just listeners?

Will there be some views as well?

Do you put it on YouTube?

Okay, perfect.

Yep.

YouTube and all social media will be video all the social media okay perfect so i've got i've got some props to help people understand and the first prop that i've got i'm holding up a brain and a skull it's not a real brain so for the listeners i'm holding up a brain and a skull and the reason i'm doing this is to give you the very strong visual image of this is not who you are You are not your brain.

Your brain is what you use.

It's part of you, but it's what you use.

But it's not the unus of you.

And yes, it's uniquely designed to match who you are as a person.

But if you were dead now, the difference between you and I, Harala, having this conversation and the listeners and viewers and a dead person is our mind.

So the mind is our aliveness.

So the brain, if you dead, if I was holding up, if this was a real brain, we could stare at this brain all day long and mind would never be produced from it because it's a dead brain.

So what makes this brain different if it's a brain in a dead person or a brain that's taken out of a person versus you and I who have our brains in our skulls and we are communicating?

It's our mind.

So our mind is separate from the brain.

It's our aliveness, our ability to be alive and to experience life and to process that.

So our mind therefore is external to the brain and the body, but it also moves through the brain and the body.

So on a physics level, if you want to use it sort of to understand on two levels, your brain is easy to understand.

It's the physical substance.

It's in your skull.

I've got another little image of a body of a model of a body.

And your brain and body are your physical.

That's easy to understand you can look at yourself you know you've got a skull that's the easy but that's only one percent of who you are one maybe ten percent of who you are if you're dead this just disintegrates if you're dead it doesn't do anything we can put all kinds of technology onto dead brains and dead bodies that they're not going to respond but you and i alive we could have ekgs q e g's all the various different types of fmris and we would see responses so what we are reading is when you look at technology brain technology for example i use q eegs you are seeing the mind moving through the brain.

So the mind is this force, this energetic force that is around the body.

It's like a cloud around the body.

So here's this model of the body again.

And if you imagine a sort of field or a gravitational field around this body, that's what the mind is.

And it also moves through the body.

So to make this really simple, I'm going to give you a couple of different analogies to visualize this.

So the first thing is we sitting, we're not floating.

That's because of gravity.

That's because we live in gravitational fields.

but what scientists have found and this is science this is science right back from in einstein's day even earlier the ancient wisdom there's a lot i know that you're very interested in that as well ancient wisdom speaks about the mind and brain separately all the time it's only in this last 40 years that we've that the narrative has mixed the two together that the mind and the brain are used but for up until 40 years ago it was always considered separate the the the physical from the mind the mind being this this energetic force that moves around the body.

So in our using our current physics, we can talk about gravitational fields.

Just a couple of years ago, scientists won the Nobel Prize for being able to measure gravitational fields.

And not only are we in gravitational fields, but we have our own unique gravitational field around each of us.

You've got yours, I can't take yours, you can't take mine.

And it's also within that gravitational field, you've got things like electromagnetic effects and you've got all the this, you know, you've got sound waves and electromagnetic light waves.

You've got all this stuff that we know so much more about now with modern science.

We've got words and technology to describe it.

Now, what's important here is that if a person's dead, that goes away.

You don't see that.

When a person's alive, you can put a Q E E G on and you can read the energy response in the brain.

You can put an EKG on the heart and you can see the energetic response in the heart.

That energetic response is mind.

So mind is this force that's around and through the body and it's only there when you're alive.

And that's why I talk about it as being your aliveness.

So that's on the kind of physicsy level.

Another way of seeing it on the physicsy level or just as an analogy is maybe you did this at school where you were given a piece of white paper and then there was a pile of iron filings on the paper and a magnet and we all know that magnets if you push magnets together they'll push each other apart we know magnets attract you can put a magnet attract paper clips we all understand that but you can't see the field around the magnet that's attracting the paper clip but if you but you know it's there that's kind of like the mind the brain and the body are like this magnet but then there's field is around it you can't see it but it is this force that is what we are using to experience life and moving through the brain and the body if you take a magnet and you put it in the middle of a pile of iron filings, so just graded iron filings, they go from being a pile to being a whole arrangement around the magnet.

And that creates, that's what you call an electromagnetic field.

So in this field around us, there's an electromagnetic field.

It's a quantum field.

It's got lots of different ways that you can understand it, but it exists.

And it's basically

the mind.

On a psychological level, it is how we think and feel and choose.

So notice I'm saying those three things together.

When you think you feel, when you think and feel, you choose.

So thinking, feeling and choosing is mind in action.

So when we talk about mind, we can think of it as this physics field, gravitational field, and psychologically, it's how we think, feel and choose.

So at the moment, all the listeners and viewers are hearing auditory sound, are hearing our voices, but actually what's being

received by the mind field is sound waves, electromagnetic light waves.

It's creating reactions in the gravitational field and all that's moving through the brain.

And then the brain is responding electrically, chemically, electromagnetically, at quantum level and genetically.

And as it responds genetically, as soon as we have a genetic response, it means things are made.

So structural changes occur, little amino acids which group together to form proteins are made.

So at the moment, our words, this conversation, everything I'm saying, the questions you're asking me and the discussion we have, all of this is being received into this field by the listeners and the viewers, and it's being processed through think-fill-choose, think-fill-choose at 400 billion actions per second.

You're going through these cycles of think-fill-choose, think-fill-choose, think-fill-choose, and that think-fill-choose is pushing this energy through the brain.

And the brain is responding because as the mind hits the physical brain, there's a reaction, and that reaction is electromagnetic, chemical, quantum, and genetic.

And as I said, when it's genetic, then it makes something and it makes proteins.

So, those proteins then hold my words as vibrations and the proteins group together because I'm saying lots of words.

So there's lots of proteins and then you basically grow a tree.

So what I'm holding up now is a little green plant that looks like a little green tree that's in a pot.

So obviously it has roots and that's a thought.

So the consequence or the product of mind is thoughts.

So here we're listening to this discussion of mind-brain.

So that's the discussion.

So that discussion is coming at you through this whole physics, gravitational field, think, field, choose.

And it's becoming this protein tree that's made of proteins.

And the words that are being heard and the things that are being seen are in the little proteins vibrating in the proteins that form these branches.

So as I'm speaking, more branches are growing because I'm giving more information.

But the words that I'm saying are the roots.

So every tree has roots.

So this is a thought that you're building of this discussion.

And if you look at like a tree's got lots of branches and lots of roots, a thought has has lots of branches and lots of roots, which are memories.

So, every so I'm giving the information I'm giving is actually memories, which are built into a thought.

So, a thought is made of memories.

They're not the same thing.

A thought's actually made of lots and lots of memories.

Could be hundreds, could be thousands.

So, everything I'm saying is going into the roots.

Like a tree, you plant the seed and then the roots grow.

As you introduce me, you planted the seed.

We're going to talk about mind-brain or mental health or whatever, how you introduce the podcast.

Then, as I'm speaking, the words I'm saying are be converted by the listeners into these roots and every word I'm saying is adding more branches so by the end of our discussion there could be two three thousand roots in this system

you as the listener is receiving that then the listener immediately interprets because you all have your own unique perception so the branches so the interviews have the roots of the source the branches then are your interpretation your perception how you are seeing this based on your own experience all the things you've read and who you are as a person and your cultural upbringing and everything you know about this field and everything you know about life because we're talking about life stuff here so these branches here are your thoughts feelings and choices the result of your thinking feeling and choosing your mind in action of this information and that's how we experience life we do this we we build eight to ten thousand of these in any one day because as you soon from the time you open your eyes till the time you go to sleep every experience is going through this process it's being received through the gravitational fields you think feel choose and the product is built which is is the thought so the the experience what you read what you hear what someone says to you the email the social media post the comment on social media the conversation the relationship the business plan that's the source your interpretation is this then this is how you act out.

So how you show up, what you say and what you do, your behavior.

So everything you say and do, like I'm speaking now, I'm not speaking from random.

I'm speaking from thoughts that I have built over the years, over 38 years.

I've got an extensive set of thought trees related to this topic.

So I'm drawing on this information as I'm speaking.

And so that's what we do all the time, which is, yeah, which is amazing.

So I've got years of experience.

And with your questions, the way you're asking me, I'm pulling up certain trees that are all kind of linked.

It'll be a whole bush of trees linked to the root system because it's all connected, but different trees in the same root system.

And I'm pulling on those as I'm talking to you.

And as you're listening to me, you're pulling on your own root systems to build this new thought.

So that's what's happening.

That's what we do all day long.

And that process can be controlled, which is amazing.

So the mind is doing the work and the physical effect is happening in the brain.

And not only are we building these trees in the brain, but we build a wave-like version of them in the gravitational field.

And there's a third place.

We also...

There's a representation of this in the DNA of every cell of our body.

And we have 37 to 100 trillion cells in our brain and our body.

So this moment, everything that the listeners are hearing and seeing is being converted by mind, think-fill-to's, gravitational fields, into the brain as thought trees.

Root system is what I'm saying, interpretation of the branch memories, and in the DNA and in the in waveforms like wavy trees in the gravitational fields.

Three places we build the consequences of our experience.

And that happens all day long.

And we've been doing this since a certain age in the womb.

So we have trillions and trillions of thought trees in our brain, gravitational fields and the DNA representation, which is phenomenal.

And all of that you can control.

It's so amazing.

It is absolutely amazing.

It makes you feel so blessed to be a human, you know, like just the fact that we are human and we have this incredible brain is a blessing.

And I feel like, hopefully, if you got nothing else from that, you realize that how magnificent it is to just be alive and be a human because you don't have a mind if you're not alive.

So there's so much to go with that.

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I want to know about your perspective in terms of the soul and your perspective on source energy and the universe and what you believe knowing what you know about our mind and our brain because I feel like you are one of the few people in the world that really, really understands what's going on.

So what is your perspective on spirituality and all of that?

I love that question.

So spirituality is science.

So it's the same thing, two sides of the same coin.

So when I talk about all these science-y things, I'm talking about the spiritual nature of man.

So I'm talking pretty much, and there's all these different words we can use in every single religion, you're going to find different names, but it's all pointing to the same thing.

So I like to talk about the concept as the soul, you know,

like in the Christian religion, they'll talk about spirit, soul, body, but you'll see representations of that in everything.

You'll see it in, you know, in Islam, you'll see it in the Jewish tradition, the Torah, you'll see it across the Ayurvedic text.

So you'll see it in all the ancient texts.

You'll see a version of that.

So everything points to the same concept that mankind has this spirit-soul thing and a body.

And the spirit-soul is this gravitational field.

So I see the soul and the spirit.

You could say this,

I talk about the spiritual level being this gravitational field that moves through and this thing-field choose.

And you could take it and I often talk about that as well I do talk about it in the book as well is you can take the spirit and the soul and you can say the spirit is the sort of deeper part but I prefer to explain the the soul and mind as the same thing I think it pretty much is the same thing it's our ability to think feel and choose but you can look at it in this way you have a messy mind and you have a wise mind every human at their core their spiritual core has this wisdom and this wisdom is this in neurobiology and neurophysiology we talk about being wired for love that the brain and the body doesn't have any structural design for anything that is toxic unmanaged toxicity so we have design for making a mess and repairing the mess but not staying in a mess so we have the design for maybe getting into an argument because that's the messiness of life but if we stay in the argument we don't have design for that what we have design for is having the argument and then fixing the argument managing the mess.

That's why I talk about cleaning up the mental mess.

We designed to clean up the mental mess and that's a very soulish spiritual thing that we're doing and we're using the brain and the body.

So without the brain and the body, we can't express ourselves.

So the mind and the soul, the spirit, soul, mind concept, that's why I lump it under mind.

And if you look at a lot of the ancient texts, you'll see mind is referring to spirit and soul as the same sort of thing.

So, and that's the, you can also talk about it as consciousness, but that's also not enough because consciousness, and I talk about this in the book, you've got the mind has got different levels.

And the one level is the conscious mind, then you've got the non-conscious mind, and you have the subconscious mind.

You have three levels of mind, and that's people get very muddled up as well.

So, to make this really super simple, think first of all of mind and brain, as I've described.

So, mind is this force, this gravitational field, and it's think field choose.

Brain and body is the physical.

Without the two are separate, the mind can't express itself, or the spirit can't soul can't express itself.

But with body, it has a place now to store and express.

So we can express ourselves.

So through the body, that's where the magic happens, the mystery of this connection between the mind-brain-body integration.

Okay, then think of, okay, so mind is the soul-spiritual level.

And if we think of mind, the easiest way to explain it is let's go back to the messy mind versus the wise mind.

Let's start there.

So think of it being a pilot in a plane.

This is often how I explain it.

And in a plane, you have the pilot and you always have a co-pilot.

And the co-pilot gives the bigger picture, kind of looks into what's going on, keeps a handle on planning, looking present, past and future.

It's kind of the best.

So there's wisdom in the co-pilot.

Not that there isn't wisdom in the pilot, but the pilot's really experimental.

They are actually doing the action of flying.

And so that's your messy mind.

And that's what we, when you wake up in the morning, till the time you go to sleep, the messy mind is operating.

It's your conscious mind.

So consciousness, when you talk about a stream of consciousness, that is when you're awake.

So you open your eyes till between the time you open your eyes until the time you go to sleep, you're experiencing the stream of consciousness.

And your messy mind is experimenting in that process.

So we don't know what's coming up.

We can't control people.

We can't control events and circumstances.

So it's very experimental.

And that's why it's messy.

But messy is okay because messiness allows us and affords us the opportunity to repair and to grow.

So if you have a, if you do get irritable and snap at someone you can either stay irritable and stay snapping and keep the damage your brain and body are not designed for that or you can respond to your wired for love design and your optimism bias recognize that as an imbalance recognize the impact it's had on you and on the person because it will cause brain damage in both you and the person and you can mind manage that you can self-regulate that you can apologize and you can change your behavior that's mind management that is you using your mind to manage your mind that is the messy mind that experimented and made a mess and then the the messy mind's actually listening to the wise mind the co-pilot and drawing on intelligence so that the ability to correct yourself the ability that we're having now to have this kind of conversation we're exploring the deep things of life and we and we like getting kind of deep with all this is the wise mind analyzing life and when you give someone advice and Someone comes to you and they ask you a question and you say you give them and you think wow This is like amazing advice I wish I could take my own advice That's your wise mind when you're in a situation and you know what you should do, you don't always do it, but you know what you should do.

That's your wise mind.

So your wise mind is at the core of your being.

It is your, for want of a universal kind of word, I use the word godness.

Could be godness.

It could be your ancient wisdom, source energy.

It makes so much sense to call it source energy because that's why I don't like to talk about God because it defines it to a religion.

And this is, we're talking about something that's beyond just man's religion.

This is we're talking about life, the essence of life.

So source is a great, is a great, but there's the wise source where you can.

And so what we do in life is we've got to train ourselves to listen to the source, to listen to the wisdom.

And that is cleaning up the mental mess.

That is the messy mind, learning to listen and tune in and introspect and find that wise mind and connect with that.

And we can train ourselves to do that.

If you played a music, maybe you play a musical instrument.

Do you play one?

I sing.

I can play piano a little.

Okay, so let's say now you wanted to become an expert piano player.

You would have to spend a lot of time with a great teacher, maybe a series of teachers.

You'd have to spend hours every day.

And you would eventually master it.

And maybe you have a natural talent and become brilliant, but you'd certainly become very good because you dedicate a lot of time.

In other words, the point I'm making is you could train yourself to become a really excellent piano player, maybe even a brilliant piano player, but it requires very deliberate and conscious attention and a decision to do that and do the development.

Or you could just be sort of an average player and just play now and then and you know like me I'll play chopsticks and that's about it.

But I used to play the mandolin and I don't play it anymore.

But I could do the same thing.

I could go and relearn it.

So the point I'm making is we can just, our mind is working anyway.

But if we don't manage it and we don't develop it, if we don't decide I'm going to develop to the level of brilliance and skill, then you stay in a messy mind.

So cleaning up the mental mess, the concept that I'm delivering to people and helping people to understand is that mind is this developmental process.

It's It's this thing that you can grow.

It's malleable.

It's trainable.

It's a deliberate and it's always working.

I mean, you can go three weeks without food.

You can go three days without water.

You can go three minutes without oxygen, but you don't even go three seconds without your mind working.

So your mind is working regardless.

So my question or my proposal is if your mind is always working and it's working with this messy mind, co-pilot mind, we can improve how that happens.

So we can get our messy mind to constantly be listening or to be listening the majority of time to the co-pilot, working with not even so much listening, but working hand in hand with.

Because messy is not bad if it leads to growth and repair or repair and growth.

Messy is only bad if you don't repair and grow and you get stuck.

That then maintains brain damage in the brain and body and increases vulnerability to disease because it changes the environment of the whole gravitational field and the body and increases vulnerability to disease by 35 to 98 percent, which is phenomenal.

So, we, but with mind management, you can reduce that risk factor in your body.

You can create, and you can then activate the natural pharmacopia and natural healing.

Thoughts have weight, these things that are products of mind, these have weight, these have physical structure in the brain.

And collectively, as you train your mind, and as you train yourself to work on these, and as you train yourself to access the source to build these, your wise mind, you are building incredible, powerful weight into your brain.

So, in other words, you are you are creating every time you think right now you're all creating because your your brain is changing that's neuroplasticity this is the question that they told me was ridiculous in the 80s which i showed by the late 80s i showed some of the first neuroplasticity research saying that hey if you change your mind you can change your brain which they didn't believe by the mid 90s it was accepted when we had fmri technology and we could not just i just had ct scans when i first started which is a static image by the mid 90s we could see the changes happening and we could start seeing what was going on so therefore now we know that the brain always changes.

The mind is always changing.

The brain is always changing.

So at this moment, you are being a creative being.

You are changing your brain.

Your brain is not the same as it was when you started the conversation.

That means you are creating structural change.

So my point is that you can design that.

You can direct that change by how you're managing your mind because your brain will simply do what your mind tells it to do.

So if your mind goes down the route of complaining or negativity or that's just and you practice that enough within 63 days, you've built a habit.

It takes 63 days to build a habit within 63 days of complaining so nine weeks of complaining you have wired in a toxic pattern so here's a toxic tree i'm holding up a wiry tree i was going to ask you what do they look like yeah they literally look like misfolded proteins so that's why i use these two analogies that would be healthy and that would be toxic so she's carrying up one really healthy plant and then one that looks like dead and black basically and the black one is the negative thought is the toxic healthy versus toxic so and i'm saying healthy versus toxic because negative and positive are too narrow so healthy versus toxic because you healthy is is you may still feel depressed but the fact that you're working on it you and you're trying to find out why you you're still depressed but you you're working on it that's healthy versus saying that depression is all bad see so because depression is not bad at all depression is a messenger depression is a signal telling you that there's something you need to work on you need to become a thought detective because everything if you recall in the beginning i explained how we build a thought with our mind and this is then how we show up so if you want to know what's going on in your mind you just got to look at what you're saying and doing what are you saying what are you doing what are you feeling what is your emotions how are you showing up on all those levels your behaviors your emotions your perspective and your body what's your body telling you and when you look at those as warning signals you can those are what this is generating

and then you can look at what you're generating and you can track it back why am i and that's what the generating this that's what the neurocycle is which is the second part of the book which is the system I developed over 38 years, developed as a therapeutic tool, but now adapted to make it very simple.

So by using the neurocycle, which is the five-step system, you can learn to track from your behaviors back down to the root and then reconceptualize that, reconstruct and decon, deconstruct and reconstruct.

So you can take these things and deconstruct and reconstruct, which is an energy transference process.

So you can take those negative thoughts that you have that are built in your brain.

They actually look like dead trees.

Physical substance.

And you can recreate them i guess neuroplasticity right actually change the way your brain is wired into something healthy is that correct that's exactly what's happening so and you're using your mind to do that so your mind changes your brain and when your mind changes your brain your brain controls your body so then your mind changes your body but your mind is moving through your entire body all the time that's why we'll have researchers that talk about the intelligences in the cells of the body because your brain and your body are made of of 37 to 100 trillion cells and each cell has got the DNA, and it's responding.

So, as you are listening now, your trees are building in your brain, but your whole body is responding.

So, this mind, your mind is a global thing over your entire body, and it's changing your body.

So, you are a change agent, you are actually making change.

Thoughts have got weight, they're substance.

So, we've created some, so from your mind, you create physical structure.

And then, what you say and do, so let's just think of the invention of Zoom that we are all so reliant on now.

The team of people that created that concept started as a thought.

So there was a problem.

How do we communicate via technology?

And Zoom was developed years ago, but some person asked a question, how can we have

communicated in a more effective way?

Whatever the question was.

So that was the experience from that they had an experience that required this.

And they then started thinking and working it out, which then led to the street being built, which then this then led to the invention.

The invention doesn't have just a random, it doesn't just pop out of the air.

It comes out of someone's head.

So someone's mind created that and then worked with a team of other people, anything.

Everything you look around, just look at a painting, look at the cars, look at buildings, look at architecture.

It's phenomenal.

What we've been doing as humans, it's all come from the mind.

The mind is doing that work and using the brain and the body to be able to express it, so to make it happen.

And that's what we can do.

Now, we look at the bad things that have happened.

I mean, look at the negative things.

Look at the wars and look at how this incredible knowledge we have as humans can be misused so mind can be misused and that's very toxic and people that are very toxic that will generate and you know terrible things that happen people that rape and murder their own brains are damaged because their brains are not wired for love so those toxic thoughts this is brain damaging this is increasing vulnerability to disease this is creating a you know this is very real but this is not the norm so therefore keeping these suppressing trauma or growing toxic whatever you think about the most will grow and if this is what you're thinking about this is what you see look how i'm looking through the tree i'm looking through this toxic tree now as opposed to looking through a healthy tree i'm holding up the healthy tree in front of my eyes now so how we look at life is what and what we think about the most is growing into our brain changing our brain and our body and that then produces what we say and what we do so we impact the world with our thoughts though the world's impact is coming from every invention everything that happens every political decision, every racist, systemic racist decision, every person that's hurt.

It's come from someone's mind.

It's so powerful what you're saying.

Like, it's literally so groundbreaking what you're saying.

I can't believe that they don't teach this stuff in school.

When I was reading your stuff, I just, I couldn't believe that like, we don't know about this.

It's not commonly talked about.

We only hear about positive affirmations.

We don't really hear the science behind it.

It's all kind of woo-woo when it's actually real, when it's dictating the whole world and everything we live in and everything we experience.

So it's so powerful.

No, you've got it exactly.

Mind is considered, conscious, it's considered the hard question of science, but consciousness, which is what we have when we're awake, which is conscious is just our mind when we awake.

We haven't even spoken about the non-conscious yet, which is so powerful.

But it's not the hard question of science.

It's the most obvious because just to ask that question, you've used your mind.

So how is mind hard?

If you want to study mind, what are you doing?

That's all you have to look at.

what are you doing what are you saying that is evidence that of mind in action that's the iron filing shape on the paper remember the magnet you can't see the field but put it in iron filings or put it next to a paper clip and suddenly there's a there's something happening that's what mind is if so you want to study mind what is a person saying and doing what look at just look around you just look in your room look where you're sitting now everything around you has come from mind and if you look at so therefore mind can be studied so then mind you need to look at conscious mind is you can't just talk about consciousness which is what they do in the literature.

They talk about consciousness and you hear people talking about stream of consciousness.

And that's often the source research, they'll talk about stream of consciousness.

But there's more.

There's the unconscious.

The unconscious mind is the biggest part of us.

The non-conscious mind is only 10% of the mind.

And the mind is 99% of who we are.

So what's the other 90% of mind?

It's the non-conscious.

And that's where all of our thoughts are stored.

And it goes, it works 24-7.

It works at 10 to the 27, which is faster than 400 billion actions per second.

It moves beyond space and time, so therefore it operates present, past, and future all the time.

It can be understood to a certain extent using things like quantum physics and gravitational fields.

And that's what is operating 24-7, and that's connected to the source.

Every human has that.

It's connected to the source.

And the source is uniquely playing out in each person.

So that, and what we need to do is find our own unique intelligence, which then is part of the puzzle of every single human on the planet.

And you know, when mankind gets to that kind of level, when we start recognizing that, because it's survival, it's actually love, we're talking about something that's love-based because it is for survival, it is for positivity, it's for health, love.

That's the basic core tenet of humanity.

And the basic core tenet of wisdom is basically operating together as a community for the betterment of mankind.

And we've been very bad about that in the last 150 years, but really in the last 40 years, it's been really, really, really bad.

Yeah.

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Let's talk about the last 40 years because I hear you talk about this often, how, you know, we've had so many medical advancements, but in fact, we're dying a lot earlier, 18 to 25 years earlier is what I remember you saying.

So why is that happening?

Like, how is that possible?

Like, technology is, you know, accelerating so fast, but yet we're still dying earlier.

It's really counterintuitive.

So can you explain that?

Totally, totally counterintuitive.

And

thank you for asking that question.

It's very intuitive of you to have picked that up because it's something that we should be telling everyone.

And you're quite right, we we should be teaching this as um in schools i did in south africa i worked i was huge um teaching across the country there teaching in schools teaching this i've done a lot of work in this country but it takes it's a very different way of thinking so it takes time so i'm always grateful to talk about this like on a anywhere to help try and expand this concept and get people thinking okay so that's the one thing so basically what's happened is that we were very good about exploring mind up until about 40 50 years ago and really and you've still got your philosophers of this day there's still a huge body of science but it's been pushed aside by a dominant classical philosophy of reductionism which basically means that we have become very advanced from the mid-90s with neuroscience the brain has taken over and it's great that we understand the brain it's led to the most phenomenal discoveries but it's became at the expense of mind so everything became mind so instead of mind being separate and it's forced the way i've described it the brain has become it and they talk about mind being almost like a mistake a side a byproduct of brain so they talk about brain producing mind and that then leads to this concept of you not a human with a story you're just basically your brain you're this mechanical thing so if you feel depression regardless of your story you've got something wrong with your brain you've got a brain disease you've got a neurobiological brain deficit you've got a broken brain you've got some whatever so they're always looking for the neuro biological correlate which means they're looking for where in the brain is this emotion is that experience is that thinking that it starts there there and produces so therefore your individuality or uniqueness your pussy your perspective of life the beauty the core of humanity which is this individuality that is accelerated i mean or that is accentuated or enhanced in community it's not about you it's about you in the world but it's the individual pieces that make up the whole that's been pretty much obliterated all reduced down to brain brain brain brain brain and at the same when you do that you then as i said you ignore the person's narrative now you can't ignore 90 to 99 percent of humanity, you can't switch off the gravitational field, you can't switch off the basic laws that how you what you're experiencing is affecting how you function.

So, you can't tell a child who's repeatedly abused and then gets put in a foster care system and gets more abused and then gets labeled with all, as in this climate gets labeled with all kinds of labels, and maybe gets more abused and then gets medically abused because they get given all these drugs and so on, to because they so-called behavioral issues, schizophrenic or learning disabled or something.

You can't tell that person

what's happening and they shouldn't be happening is that they're telling that kind of person, oh, you're a broken bane, you're diseased.

Now, they're not diseased.

They've had a terrible life.

They are having a response, a reaction.

If you've repeatedly abused, obviously you're going to be a behavior problem.

You don't even know how to cope with yourself.

You're going to hate yourself.

You don't know what to do.

You don't know who to trust.

You don't know where to turn.

So that will manifest in whatever you can do to cope.

And that's going to be different for everyone.

And obviously, it gets on a negative spectrum.

But that's not a disease.

So what has happened over the last few years is prior to that, we would see your experience as a reason for how you show up.

Now, your experience is not the reason for how you show up.

It's your brain.

is broken.

That's the reason for why you show up like you do.

So if a child's battling with behavior issues or if a person's really depressed, it's not about your story.

That, you know, yes, your story is going to make it worse, but they're saying it's your brain.

It's your genetics.

And that's wrong.

And when you have that view, it's unscientific.

It cannot, the science, 40 years of science has shown it's the wrong way of doing it.

It doesn't work.

It's made things worse.

Depression, anxiety, etc., haven't magically gone away.

Like cancer's been, we've got cancer pretty much under control with advances in medicine.

And we've got things like heart disease tremendously under control because of advances in medicine.

That works for the body.

It works for the physical parts of the body, but it doesn't work for mind.

Mind can't be put into that kind of category.

Mind is so massively expansive and everyone's, there's no cookie-cutter framework.

You can have two people in the same home that have had the same abuse and one will be a total success and one will be a drug addict.

And they've had exactly the same upbringing.

We see this with identical twins.

They totally different pathways in their life.

In other words, the uniqueness of humanity has been obliterated.

The story of humans has been obliterated.

And when that happens, you will have a major problem.

So for years, for decades, we have been living longer because of advances in medicine and technology because medicine was so bad and like nonexistent.

And then medicine developed, which was phenomenal.

And it's continued to develop.

So it's kept people alive.

But we've reached a point in history where that advance in medicine, technology, brain science, is we know how to keep a person alive, but we've taken away an ingredient that is the most important ingredient, and that's mind.

And that then has caused, so for the first time in decades, people are not living longer, they're dying younger, eight to 25 years younger.

And it's called deaths of despair.

So people are dying literally from lack of hope.

When you have a person who's been through multiple abusive situations, you take a woman who's in an abusive marriage and it goes on for years and years and she gets extremely depressing, goes to the doctor and it's been really bad and gets labeled as schizophrenic and

bipolar and gets given medication.

That's totally just ignoring the person's story.

You don't need to give them a label.

They're not diseased.

That person has been through trauma.

That person's story needs to be heard.

That person needs support to be a thought detective, to be able to recognize that that depression is a warning system.

It's a signal.

It's basically your, if you think of being a detective, it's your clue that there's something going on.

So

that's...

the top of the trees is how that person is thinking feeling and choosing about the experience the roots are all the abusive experiences over time which are manifesting in how that person person is functioning which is then all of this is showing up in the depression the withdrawal the breaking down the whatever it may be so if we see it like that then we can say okay your depression is not a disease it is telling us it's a messenger it's telling us about your story let's be thought detectives and let's understand your story let's deconstruct it and then let's reconstruct it you can't change the the fact that the abuse happened but you can change how you respond to it and how you want it to play out into your future.

So, if you look at this tree and if you look deeply inside, and I'm holding up the green tree again, and some of the branches for the viewers, some of the branches are light green and some are dark green, and they like that for a reason.

The dark green is how you want to be in the future.

You want to be free of that abuse, you don't want to be depressed.

You want depression, will still come, it's a normal part of life, but you don't want it to be controlling you that you're depressed all the time.

You want it to, when you have a bout of depression, you want to be able to recognize

what it is and manage it.

So, this person, let's take the scenario of the woman who's abused multiple multiple abuse in a marriage situation the process looking at the abuse deconstructing and reconstructing over time and this takes cycles of 63 days eventually you're going to build a new thought this thought will lose its energy this energy will be transferred from this toxic thought this of all the abusive situations and all the memories surrounding that that energy will be transferred to the new tree energy is never lost it's only transferred so if i take the energy from here this dies and if i put it here this grows and in in this, the light is the story, this, but reconceptualized.

This is what happened, but this is how I want to live my life.

The dark is how I want to live my life in the future.

How do I want this to play out?

I want to be happy, have a happy relationship.

I want to feel good about myself.

I don't want to feel the shame.

I don't want to feel the fear.

I want to be able to wake up in the morning and be happy I'm alive and not terrified of the day.

So that's the dark green.

And that's what you're moving towards.

That's not going to happen with a label and drugs.

That's going to happen with you understanding how to manage your mind 24-7 because you're living with your mind 24-7.

You wake up with your mind, you go to sleep with your mind.

Your conscious mind's awake when you're awake.

Your non-conscious mind is awake 24-7.

So while we're awake now, the non-conscious is working with the conscious.

So that's why we get triggered.

So now this person, this woman, is in a situation.

Let's say she's now working through the situation and she's now maybe in day 42 or something.

And a situation happens that is triggered.

She maybe sees a picture of the ex-husband or something like like that and that then triggers a response but because she's in the process of healing the trigger can be recognized for what it is it's a trigger of that fear that pain of what happened and there's a logic a wise mind can then co-pilot can say to the pilot okay that's what happened but this is how we're going to manage the situation we're going to practice this by day 63 when the trigger happens you're not going to respond with a flight and fright you're going to have the this so strong and so full of energy it's got to grow like a plant's got to grow.

It's only small in the big, and it takes 21 days for it to be made, for this to go and this to grow, but it takes another 42 days to make this strong enough that it's a habit, that it actually impacts your behavior.

So by day 63 onwards, when you're in a situation where you something triggers a memory from your past, you still feel

the anxiety, you still may feel the bit of depression, but the difference is you now know why and you now know what to do.

So instead of you falling into a slump and not being able to function in your day, you can have that moment of acknowledgement of the pain where it's coming from, the source.

And this is what your plan is to overcome that.

And so you move forward into a new relationship.

See what I'm saying?

That's the power that we have within us.

So I'm not going to, I don't say that you're going to eliminate depression.

I say you're going to eliminate the source of depression and therefore increase your management of future bouts of depression by 81%.

So therefore, what that means is that all of us are going to have periods of depression it's so normal it's not we've got to normalize what they've taken away and abnormalize they've made it abnormal if you have any kind of depression or up and down moods or you're feeling suicidal 95 people have suicidal thoughts and i'm not overriding that because these are vitally important in fact i'm giving more level of importance when i say it's so important to pay attention to your mind that i'm saying self-regulate your mind all the time neuroscience shows us we can do that every 10 seconds that's how important it is i am saying that if you just give it a label of bipolar and a medication, you're taking away the importance.

You're dishonoring and invalidating that person's whole life experience.

And you're not giving that person the power in their lives.

You're not empowering them to face this toxic issue and reconstruct it to a point that they can actually have mental peace.

So when we have a day where, let's say now that you've gone through this healing and it's 20 years later and you're 20 years after the abuse, but you're in a situation where something bad happens and you feel a bit depressed.

You're in the pandemic maybe this happened 20 years ago now the pandemic happens and there's things that can make us all depressed doesn't mean we're brain diseased it means that we're having an adverse experience okay so that's the concept so people when you take that away what happens then is that moving the mind in keeping these

keeping that abuse keeping the trauma this increases vulnerability to disease by 35 to 98 percent so here's the math if you don't deal with your stuff and you just get it labeled and suppressed because that's what the current narrative is doing the current gold standard of psychiatric treatment is label and there's there's therapy but the therapy is very often also just a band-aid on a on on a wound.

It's not really solving deconstructing and reconstructing and equipping people.

It's if you do that, you then increase the vulnerability to disease.

If you increase vulnerability to disease, what's going to happen?

You're going to die younger.

So this shift over the last 40 years has been happening.

So people are now getting, not processing, keeping this, which is then shortening lifespans.

And also being given drugs that also shorten lifespans.

Psychotropic drugs shorten lifespans.

They double the risk of suicide.

In women, antidepressants increase the risk of suicide by three to four times.

And in kids, it's even more.

So antipsychotics increase the risk of suicide.

All of these psychotropics increase the risk of anxiety and depression.

So the very thing they're supposed to be treating, they're actually increasing.

And we've been sung, the wrong message has been sung.

The science is evident.

These things do not work.

People are dying.

So in 1996, they started seeing this trend.

And by 2014, it was confirmed that people are dying younger.

And then the pandemic hit just a few years later.

While we're in the midst of the pandemic that hasn't been spoken about, which is not dealing with our mind.

And now the pandemic's happened.

What are they saying?

There's an increase in mental health.

disease and we have to give more diagnoses and more medication.

It's going to make it even worse.

It's not the solution.

The solution is we have to listen to people's narrative.

We have to work as communities to help people to cope with these changes.

And we have to deal with things like systemic racism, et cetera, et cetera.

We have to make massive community changes, not just individual changes.

Wow.

Sorry, I was a long answer to that.

That was a very good question.

No, it was so good.

And don't be sorry.

That was amazing.

So if I could just kind of regurgitate what you said, we are living in a world of labels, right?

We're always labeled.

You're depressed, you're bipolar, you're sick, you're diseased.

And these labels are just covering up and suppressing us.

Even the medicine is numbing our thoughts and the psychotropics, yeah.

Yeah, it's basically just covering it up.

It's not actually fixing anything.

And so, the dead black thought trees that you were telling us about, which are very much alive, which are very volcanic in nature.

Okay, so they're alive.

These toxic trees in our brain keep growing because we're not actually fixing the problem.

We're not actually rewiring our brain to heal ourselves.

So, it's so crazy like it's actually unbelievable that this is happening right now it is unbelievable and what you know what's worse sorry to interrupt you but that you know what's worse is that even the day-to-day stuff is not being managed so we think okay well the odd irritation the the politics happening the the systemic racism and you know seeing the the reading the news we think okay those may i'm reading the news it didn't happen to me we don't think it's affected but it is because those little traumas are are basically converging and growing and becoming as traumatic as these.

And we're not managing those either.

So that's also what I'm proposing.

Not only do we need to detox the traumas of the past, we need the patterns.

We need to look for the patterns.

The patterns tell us what...

is big and then we need to spend dedicated 15 to 45 minutes a day working on the patterns.

But you've also got to manage moment by moment.

You wake up in the morning, you've got to go to work, you've got to do this, you've got to do that, you've got to be a parent, whatever.

Whatever it is that you do, how are you doing it?

Are you getting mad?

Are you getting irritated?

Are you getting crazy in traffic?

Are you snapping at everyone?

Are you freaking out at every news bulletin?

Are you scrolling through social media and getting imposter syndrome every time you look at the comments on or someone else's post?

You know, what are you doing?

No one's talking about that.

We have to manage that too.

We have to self-regulate 24-7.

And when I say 24-7, consciously and deliberately, when you're awake, you can actually do it every 10 seconds.

The neuroscience shows you can stand back and observe your own thinking and monitor yourself and change yourself.

So like in other words, if you're in a conversation, in a business meeting and you find yourself getting terribly worked up because of what someone's saying and you're getting really mad and you want to say something nasty, you can do the neurocycle on that, in that moment in five seconds and you can get yourself calm and under control.

Then let's say you go from, you can benefit from the meeting.

Then you can go from that meeting, maybe you pick up the kids from school or something and they're all fighting in the car and you're going crazy because you haven't quite processed the meeting and you're upset about that and other kids.

Or you can do a neurocycle and get yourself under control each time.

You can have an argument, have to get onto a podcast or someone says something, or you get a terrible email.

Now you've got to interview someone because you and I do that a lot, interviewing people, you've got to be really focused.

It's not easy to interview someone and then you may have something may have upset you.

So you could have done a neurocycle just before to get your mind back.

In other words, we should be monitoring our mind and we are designed to do that every 10 seconds when we're awake.

And then at night time, our mind's still working and sorting out what we've done during the day.

So if we've got a good neurocycle system, if we are managing our mind, of our self, of our mind managements in place during the day, that means when we go into the night, we go in with a more peaceful sleep because sleep has been so badly affected over the last 40 years as well.

Oh my gosh.

I interrupted you there.

Sorry.

No, it's okay.

I need to bring you back on the show because I feel like there's so much that I need to talk about.

Maybe I'll bring you on Clubhouse or something soon.

There's so much I want to ask you.

I guess where I want to kind of close this out is actionable advice.

So let's say that one of my listeners out there, and I know that there's somebody listening and we're on the topic of depression, that's probably medicated right now for anxiety or depression.

And they've been told that this is how they're going to heal, and this is the only way to treat what's going on.

So what advice would you give them to kind of start improving their lives and moving towards healing themselves using their mind rather than using medication?

That's a great question.

So first off is that medication,

I'm not anti-medication for like heart disease and diabetes and just general medication for medicine and surgery I think it's a fantastic phenomenal thing and your mind is so important in be getting the benefit from that and research has shown just very quickly that if you are let's say getting cancer treatment and your mind is not if you're not managing your mind you won't get the same kind of benefit there's huge amounts of bodies of research showing that to get benefit from medication for physical illness you really need to have your mind involved okay so it's the first thing so when we talk about psychotropics we're talking about antidepressants anti-anxiety meds and psych antipsychotics and stimulants now they're anti-already is the wrong word because they're not anti-anything they're based on the concept of an antibiotic and an antibiotic is given to fight a bacteria so it's anti-the bacteria so psychotropic language has been stolen from that and the impression is that okay well if i take the antibiotic it kills the bacteria if i take the antidepressant it kills the depression it doesn't do that because depression isn't a chemical imbalance.

Depression is coming from, it's a signal, it's a warning signal.

It's not an it,

it's not a chemical imbalance, an it causing a chemical, or it's not a chemical imbalance in your brain, it's not an it.

There's no research to back that up at all.

It is a response to an underlying cause, and because it moves through your brain, your brain will respond with imbalances, chemical imbalances, and neurotoxicity, and all that kind of thing.

But it's different for every person.

And in the book, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess, I do show how I looked at things like inflammation, cortisol, DNA, and how when we don't manage our mind, those get worse.

But as soon as you manage your mind within nine weeks, you can change your telomere lengths, which means that you literally can reduce, increase your lifespan.

We had people that were so depressed at the beginning of the study that at the beginning of, and this is one in the book, that they had been clinically diagnosed with depression.

And I'm holding up now for those of you that can't see, I'm holding up what I call what I call QEEG head maps.

And it's just basically

photographs.

It's a QEEG image of inside the brain.

And there's three rows.

The top row is blue, and the bottom two rows are gray.

Okay, so what that means is that looking inside a person who's very depressed, the energy in the brain, the energy response in the brain, the blood flow,

all that kind of stuff, the blood flow, oxygen, et cetera, is very flat.

And you don't want that.

You want it to be like waves in a sea, where you've got the big waves at the back, and then they build to the breaker and they crash on the beach and there's the ripples.

And you want that kind of flow in your brain across both sides.

And that's a gray brain.

When that's happening, we'll see shades of gray.

When a person's very depressed, we'll see blue.

Now, when you manage your mind, the blue changes to gray.

So, what that was showing is in our clinical trial, we showed that people that were diagnosed with clinical depression and had tried everything,

once they were managing their mind using the neurocycle, the five steps, which is in the second half of the book, very, very simplistically explained, etc., they the depression lifted within 21 days.

It didn't go away, it lifted.

And the difference was, instead of them saying, I am depression, which was the identity, they were by 21 days, days they were saying I am depressed because of huge difference by day 63 they were not scared of depression they recognized they could use the depression to help themselves so that's massive okay so basically to come back quickly to the medication then on a practical level you cannot just stop a psychotropic psychotropics are basically like anesthetics so they numb the brain and that's why people feel better on them very often because the pain is numbed so that terrible pain that you've that can't that you can't get out of bed that lifts so you feel like you can live again and that's what a lot of people do do say so you know maybe for 24 hours or 48 hours but not longer because they're very addictive and they and they do change the brain so some of you may have been on these drugs for years and now you're thinking oh my gosh i've damaged my brain yes unfortunately you have damaged your brain but your brain can heal that is the beauty of this and but you never just stop them immediately so i have to put a disclaimer in here do not just stop any kind of antidepressant or antipsychotic or a stimulant because your brain will go into shock because your brain is physically changed so you have to come off very, very slowly.

So if you make the decision to choose to come off, you need to get with a medical professional who understands how to get you off medication.

And then you taper off, taper, T-A-P-E-R.

You can Google tapering.

And we're putting up a lot of reference.

We've got a lot of resources on our site too, and drleave.com.

And we're putting, we're putting up even more.

But basically, tapering means that you take fraction less every day.

So your body, so you help your brain to heal in the process of tapering off.

That's vitally important.

I just have to stress that up front you cannot just stop cold turkey because suicidal thoughts and all kinds of things will come back and then you'll get told by your doctors that the disease is coming back it's not a disease in the first place it's withdrawal effects the drugs create withdrawal effects and the last thing with drugs is that you can request from your doctor who ever's put you on for the informed consent which is a big document that tells you everything about drugs if the doctors legally are required to do that before they put you on and most doctors don't and it's a legal requirement and if if you read that document you would have very strong second thoughts about taking them because that document's filled with all the things that the drug could do to you but it's really important that you find the source so see the depression not as something negative see it as a helpful messenger it's telling you something so embrace it instead of suppress it and don't see depression as an it see depression as a clue be a detective be a thought detective say okay that depression is a messenger it's helpful as soon as you do that 1400 neurophysiological responses in your brain and body will start working for you and your resilience will increase.

So your attitude to, okay, this depression is fine.

It's okay.

There's a reason for it.

It's not a disease.

I'm not a broken brain.

I'm okay.

This is just a response.

It's a clue.

It's a signal to something going on.

And then you begin the process of being a thought detective.

Then you start doing the five steps every day for 15 to 45 minutes for the first 21 days.

And from day 21, 22 to 40 to 63, you just do step five.

The five steps, and then there's a million other things that you can do around.

There's a, there's so much, there's tables, there's explanations, there's examples of how to use for detoxing and everything.

But basically, the five steps train you to become to gather awareness of what the signals are, what they mean.

So, what are the emotional, what are the physical, what are the behavioral, what are the perspectives, signals, all the signals.

So, I teach you in the five steps how to gather awareness of the signals, but you're doing it as the pilot and the co-pilot.

So, you're distancing yourself.

You don't immerse yourself in that tree.

You literally imagine flying over a forest as pilot and co-pilot, messy mind and wise mind, and you're paying attention to the signal.

What's the signal?

Depression.

It's like imagine a little signal coming out of the tree, a little smoke signal.

There's a little wire sticking up there.

You land your plane, instead of just going over and ignoring it and suppressing it and pushing it and hoping it'll go away.

You land your plane, you get out your plane with the co-pilot.

So you're always with your wisdom and you stand back in your reserve.

So I'm not in it.

I'm not under it.

Imagine it's full of rotten apples.

You don't go stand under it, and then all the apples fall on your head.

You stand back and you pick the apples, you gather awareness.

That's the concept.

That's the sort of how you come into the process.

And you gather awareness of all the different signals.

Then you start reflecting very objectively.

You've got to go through the sequence.

Each sequence is creating more

two sides of the brain to work together, increasing blood flow to the front of the brain and oxygen, increasing your decision-making capability, pulling in more gamma activity.

That's increasing integration.

There's all the science of what's happening in each step I've put into the book, not all of it, but a simple version.

So each step is sequentially designed.

You can't skip a step.

You do all five steps because it's progressively taking you into a deeper state.

So the second one is basically a deep reflection.

The third one is third and fourth steps are writing steps.

You do two very specific ways of writing.

They're not just standard journaling, but each is taking you deeper and deeper.

And then the last step is an action that ends the work for the day because you don't want to be working.

You don't want to get stuck in this all day long.

You just focus on that toxic stuff for that 15 to 45 minutes.

So the act of reach, the action step five is just something that keeps you anchored back in a safe space.

So it's just I am not shame or something like that.

So it's a statement that every time your mind wants to go and ruminate, you don't allow it.

You capture that thought.

put it in the box you say tomorrow i'll work on it for today that's all i'm going to do and you work because the whole point is that you do it over time you're not going to get everything revealed in day one it takes a full 21 days to embrace process and reconceptualize into the healthy tree.

And then you would do step five for the rest of it.

So, I mean, that's a quick brief walkthrough, but it's in detail in the book.

And there's an app too, the neurocycle app that is also, it's all literally giving you therapy.

I was just going to say, guys, she has so many different resources.

She has her book, The Mental Mess.

Then she has an app.

She has a podcast.

So I highly recommend, like, honestly, guys, I've recommended books in the past, but I really, really recommend this one.

I feel like you guys are going to find so much value.

Dr.

Caroline Leaf, this was amazing.

The last question I ask all my guests is, what is your secret to profiting in life?

Mind management, without a doubt, is it's all driven by mind.

So everything is driven by mind.

So that's the, without managing your mind, you cannot, your life is just a mess.

And from there, it's just a natural profiting in everything, relationships, yourself, peace, finances, business, etc.

And you also get better perspective.

You don't look at anything, anything, i don't look at anything as an external thing to bring into me everything's from inside out because it's mined out and then i then you've much more then i'm much more accepting of everything that happens and i have goals and visions obviously but it's i don't they don't they're not external that i'm trying to get in i'm growing from the inside out I feel like what you're talking about is literally the future.

Like you are talking about the future, what everybody's going to learn in school 20 years from now, but we're learning it now and you can take advantage of it now, even though it's not mainstream.

So I want everybody listening and to realize that.

Thank you so much, Dr.

Caroline.

Where can people learn more about you and everything that you do?

Absolutely.

Thank you so much.

Dr.

Caroline Leaf is my Instagram handle, all my social media handles.

Obviously from Instagram, we all know you can get to everything.

Our book, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess, and is available wherever books are sold and also on our site, drleaf.com.

We've got a store there.

All my other books are there.

The Neurocycle app you can get in Google's iTunes.

Everything you can get through my Instagram page will take you to everything like everyone everyone knows.

And then my podcast is called Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess.

Perfect.

And I'll stick all those links in the show notes.

Thank you so much for your time.

It was such a pleasure.

Thank you so much.