← The School of Greatness
The School of Greatness
How to Rewire Your Mind in 63 Days | Dr. Caroline Leaf
01:41:51
This conversation will transform how you understand your own mind. You'll discover the scientifically proven method that reduces anxiety and depression by 81% in just 63 days, without medication.
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- [00:00]
Lewis Howes
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- [01:14]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Guys, thanks for helping me carry my Christmas tree. Zoe this thing weighs a ton. Drew Ski lift with your legs man. Santa Santa, did you get my letter?
- [01:21]
Lewis Howes
He's talking to you Bridges. I'm not.
- [01:24]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Of course he did. Right Santa, you know my elf Drew.
- [01:28]
Lewis Howes
He handles the nice list and elf. I'm six' three. What everyone wants is iPhone 17 and at T Mobile you can get it on them. That center stage front camera is amazing for group selfies.
- [01:37]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Right Mrs. Claus I'm Mrs. Claus much younger sister and AT T Mobile there's no trade in needed when you switch so you can keep your old phone.
- [01:46]
Lewis Howes
Or give it as a gift.
- [01:47]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
And the best part, you can make the switch to T mobile from your phone in just 15 minutes. Nice.
- [01:51]
Lewis Howes
My side of the tree is slipping. Kimber the holidays are better. AT T Mobile switch in just 15 minutes and get iPhone 17 on us with no trigger and needed and now T Mobile is available in US cellular stores with 24 month bill credits for well qualified customers plus tax and $35.
- [02:06]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Device connection charge credit and balance too.
- [02:07]
Lewis Howes
If you pay off earlier. Case Finance Agreement 256 gigs $830 eligible for in a new line $100 plus a month plan with auto pay plus taxes fees required. Check out 15 minutes or less per line. Visit t mobile.com I love that you're in this field of understanding the mind brain connection and how it plays into Our thoughts and our emotions, our feelings, our mental health and everything else that's happening in our lives. My first question is, what is the difference between the mind and the brain? And does the brain control the mind or does the mind control the brain?
- [02:37]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
You've asked one of my favorite questions there. That's a really great place to start. I've got some props. Is that okay? Can I use some props to show you?
- [02:44]
Lewis Howes
Show me, show me, explain. I need to understand in a simplified way.
- [02:48]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Okay, so here's a brain, not a real one, in a skull. And the terminology for about the last 40 years is that the mind and the brain have been used interchangeably. So most people think when you talk mind, you're talking brain, or when you're talking brain, talking mind. And most of the popular literature, even the scientific literature that the media tends to put out talks about how the brain produces thoughts or the brain produces the mind, but your brain actually can't do anything on its own. So if you did, and if I was holding up this, if this was a real brain and I just took 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 stare at this all day long, but it would never do anything. So what is the difference between a dead brain and yours and mine, and the listeners and the viewers, is that you are actually thinking, feeling and choosing. You're alive and your aliveness is your mind. And your mind is this ability, that of what you're doing right at this moment, as you're listening to me, you are processing the auditory sound waves, the electromagnetic light waves, through your ability to think and feel and choose which is mind. So your mind is like processing, unique, brilliant processing field, gravitational field around and through your brain and body. And you convert what you're hearing and seeing into actual meaning. And, and that meaning is formed from trees that you actually grow into your brain. So at 400 billion actions per second, you're using your mind to translate auditory and visual signals into protein, tree like structures in your brain to make sense of what I'm saying. And then each new thing that I say, you're growing more and more. And everything I'm saying is in the root section because it's the source of the information. And the tree trunk and the branches are your interpretation of what I'm saying and linking it to other existing, whatever, whatever I'm triggering at the moment that, that you know about whatever in your life related to a subject and that keeps going and that's what we do all the time. That's your mind is always with you and your mind works through the brain and the brain then responds. So here's a little model. So your mind is the gravitational field. And this is not woo woo science, this is hardcore Nobel Prize winning science that there's discovery of the gravitational field. In fact, Einstein spoke about it back in the early 20th century, how we, each human has gravitational field, this electromagnetic field around us and that is basically through us. And when you die, that's not there anymore. And that's the thing that's kind of keeping you alive. And that's the thinking, feeling, choosing the psychological version. And the, the sciency version is this gravitational field. So it's a little bit like a magnet. This is, this is a super easy way to understand it. If you imagine a piece of white paper and you put a whole lot of iron filings on the paper. You may have done this at school. And then you bring a magnet and you put that in the middle of this mountain of iron filings and suddenly you've got this beautiful electromagnetic field. The iron filing arranges itself into this field around the magnet. So you can't see the electromagnetic field, but you can only see it because of the iron filings. It's invisible. But the iron filings follow the tracing 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 your behavior. So the little pattern is your behaviors. And the biggest core thing is that that's the primary 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 do the podcast with your mind, you go to sleep with your mind. So mind is the source. And if you don't understand and manage it, it's changing anyway, then it's a mess. And if it's a mess, your brain and body are a mess. And you can't achieve greatness. So to achieve greatness, you need to understand mind. There you go. There was a mouthful.
- [06:32]
Lewis Howes
Let's, let's just end the podcast now. That was per. So how, how wide can this. So the mind, your thinking, your ideas, your thoughts, is a field, an energetic field.
- [06:46]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Yeah.
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Lewis Howes
Around you, inside of you, connected through your whole body and then outside of your body. Is that what I'm hearing you say?
- [06:53]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Exactly. Totally.
- [06:54]
Lewis Howes
How far does the field Extend? Is it two feet in front of us? Is it six feet? Is it football field? How far can it go?
- [07:04]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
We, they don't really, we don't really know because when you're talking about quantum phys. Gravitational fields there's a lot of interaction that occurs. But what the sign seems to show is that it's kind of a. Almost how you know, like around us sort of this.
- [07:18]
Lewis Howes
Like a halo field.
- [07:19]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Like a hate. Yeah. And it's probably more because. But it interacts because everyone's got this field and we, and we then we live in gravitational fields. So you, everything around you is a gravitational field. So everything's interacting. And so that's why you know, when you come up to someone you an example would be like that electrostatic shock when you, you know, when you brush past someone you get that and on a more psycholog level you can experience that that field is like maybe in a really great mood. And then you get into a conversation with some friends and they're so totally depressed and you come away from there thinking I feel awful, I need to go and have a shower. You feel so, so they. Their field has interacted with yours and impacted you because those fields that, that field is coming from your mind which then uses the brain and converts what you're experiencing into these thoughts. And then these thoughts are generating. You know, there's this whole relationship, the iron filings concept and this is back and forth and this literally is. Einstein showed us that we literally generating from our thoughts as we talk from our thoughts which we. That you can't talk without thoughts. You build thoughts and then you, your actions and behaviors and communication come from the thoughts. So this would generate healthy. It's a nice healthy green tree and here's a toxic one. So this would be a toxic, you know, the depression or whatever, you know, being negative or whatever that would generate toxic photons. And these are the ones that would make you, you know, you feel it, you feel that negativity. This is a sense of you're not a happy person and you just feel like amazing, you know. And so this is, it's very real. This is some ethereal thing. It's. We talking about the non physical sciences of quantum physics and physics and things like that. But it's real and it's, there's an impact and an effect and we can control it. That's, that's the interesting thing.
- [08:56]
Lewis Howes
What is the, what is the definition of quantum physics? What is that in relation to the mind?
- [09:02]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
So quantum physics is considered to be one of the most fundamental and accurate sciences. And at its most simple level, because it's really had bad press, but it's been around for very long. And it basically just deals with the unseen. The. When you talk about particles and waves and the subatomic level. So what we can see now looking at each other is. Would be what we would consider the classical physics realm that you can see and touch and feel and hear. So it's very.
- [09:28]
Lewis Howes
You can operate on it. You can.
- [09:29]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Yes, yeah, yeah. So it's the physical. But if you, if you actually. And we see from studying at the atom that things get smaller and smaller and then you've got the subatomic level, then you're entering the quantum world. So once we go into the subatomic level, we actually see that the atom is not really an atom. You know, particles change, change according to their waves and in their particles only when you actually 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 as we make a choice, we create reality, which we do. So as you think, 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 processing this world around us through this think field choose. And then we build thoughts. So there's this structural. There's this structural consequence. So thought is actually a physical response of the think field choose. And quantum physics kind of is helping us understand that. But quantum physics is real, is easier to understand with classical physics. So classical, physical, quantum, the sort of non physical world to work together, does that make sense?
- [10:44]
Lewis Howes
It does. When we feel something, when something happens, there's an event in our life. Someone touches us. Do we feel it first? Do we think that we're feeling something? How is that connection to the mind, body work?
- [11:00]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Very good question. So it's think, feel, choose. So like as we are.
- [11:03]
Lewis Howes
So I touch you on the shoulder, you think at first. Do you feel it first?
- [11:08]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
It's going to happen pretty much simultaneously. So there's going to be the. Because there's the sensation. And it immediately will stimulate think and then feel and then choose feeling. The, the think, feel, choose, work together to make sense of the physical impact and what it means and if it's threatening or not threatening. And all kinds of decisions are made in your mind. And it happens super Fast. So it's think, fill, choose, think, feel, choose in cycles. And it's really, really fast. You know, we talk about 400 billion actions per second, but it's actually 10 to the 27 and faster, which is an inconceivable speed. So what I've done with my work is to try and understand this, you know, what is a thought and what is memory and what is mind and what is brain and how do they interact and how do they influence. Do we have any sense of agency over this process? And what does it look like?
- [11:53]
Lewis Howes
Yeah. Can you explain it all?
- [11:55]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Absolutely. I can certainly try. So I spent 38 years studying this, and I started out in the world of working in more clinical. I practiced clinically for 25 years, and I initially started my research in the 80s. And funny enough, in the 80s, the brain, we were taught that the brain couldn't change. So all my lectures were around the brain is fixed.
- [12:15]
Lewis Howes
Fixed mind, fixed brain, fixed mindset.
- [12:18]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Yeah. So they. So kind of, that's. That you've just got to learn how to kind of, you know, work around it. And so that's just. And compensate. More of a compensation kind of philosophy. So I remember thinking in one of my neuroscience lectures that this does not work for me because we're changing and growing as humans. So I said, no, I'm going to start researching this. And I was told by my professors, that's a ridiculous question. And I actually did a TED talk on this, the ridiculous question of neuroplasticity. So in the 80s, I said, okay, well, give me the worst situation. What's the worst situation? They said, okay, it's traumatic brain injury. Once someone's had a traumatic brain injury, and I mean, your dad went through one, yeah, that's it pretty much that's, you know, written off. And we were trained, as I said, to compensate. So I said, okay, well, there's hardly any research in the 80s on brain injury and on how to comp. How to treat it. And so I thought, okay, well, I'm going to start there. And so I worked with people that had been in comas for like, longer than two weeks. And at that stage, if you had a coma for longer than eight hours, the brain damage was considered irreversible. Now, in this day and age, we know that's not the case. But in the 80s, that was the going philosophy. So I was completely swimming upstream when it came to this concept. Anyway, I showed with my subjects that with using your mind and not in any weird way, just a very systematic, deliberate Intentional mind management in different ways and different brain building and dealing with emotions and just different ways, same sort of process that you can actually change this. And so some of my, the first, my very first case study was a girl who was 16 at the time of accident and she had lost a whole year of school, written off as a vegetable. I mean that's what the doctors used to say in those days, which is terrible thing to say to someone. Anyway, long story short, after eight months, not only did she managed to. She came around. I started working with her when she was, when she was conscious and functioning sort of at a second grade level. And she wanted to, her goal was to get, her goal of greatness was to get back to finish 12th grade and with her peer group. Now that was an impossible task. All the doctors said don't even go down that road. Not, not even worth it. So I said, well, I was a new scientist then, very young, totally into this. Well you, you know, go, let's do this. And she, within eight months she caught up to a 12th grade level, finished school with her peers and went on to get a university degree. And one of the coolest things was that she was actually a really average student and not 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 like. And I can tell you story after story and that really motivated me to work across the board with. Now I really have to understand what's going on. And I happened to be living in South Africa where I grew up at the time. I was born in Zimbabwe and grew up in South Africa and in the apartheid era. I mean this is like, it really ages me, doesn't it go back into those. I work through the apartheid era, the transition and the post apartheid era. So I was seeing all the socioeconomic trauma, the racism trauma. And I worked in that three days a week in those environments with terrible poverty and whatever. And I worked in war torn Rwanda and I worked with the wealthiest of the wealthy heads of CEOs of corporations, schools everywhere, that my laboratory was the world to try and understand humans and mind and get away from this scientific concept that that consciousness is the hard question. And no one is really doing anything. We're just talking about it as being as this elusive philosophical thing that we will push aside and one day promissory science will do it one day. And I thought I can't do this because it's. I am mind. You are mind. So if I don't manage 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 using your mind. So my underlying premise was, okay, well, if that's the case, what is it and how do we manage it? And if it's. If I don't manage it, what I did from my research, you can learn to manage it. Mind is malleable. You can direct the neuroplasticity of your brain. I did some of the first neuroplasticity research in my field in the late 80s, early 90s, before it was accepted. By the mid-90s, neuroplasticity was, well, that's it. And I showed that my underlying argument or thesis was, well, if our mind is always changing, which it is. So you wake up, you're experiencing everything. Conversations, the emails, the life, politics. You're immediately immersed in life and you're processing that through your mind, growing it into your brain, and you're doing this every moment of the day. So if I don't control it, it's a mess. But if I do control it, then it isn't a mess. Now, I know we can't control events and circumstances. We all agree with that. So I'm not into this whole law of it. I'm not talking about law of attraction and, you know, saying 15 positive affirmations. And that's going to fix your story? No, I'm not talking about that at all. It's not realistic. I'm talking about the fact that you cannot control events and circumstances, but you can learn to manage your mind. Mind, which means your responses. Yes, the things are going to happen, trauma, death, life happens. But how you manage it. And you, I mean, your case is a classic example. Your life was thrown upside down and your family's life was thrown upside down and you managed your mind and got yourself back going. 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 that you've got millions in the bank and you, this famous superstar, it means that, do you have mental peace? Are you actually growing? Are you satisfied as a person? Are you. You know, that's the sort of where we want to go, as opposed to this very externalized version of it.
- [17:35]
Lewis Howes
So, yeah, wow. The school of greatness is brought to you in partnership with Airbnb. The holidays are such a special time to travel and gather with loved ones. Think about some of your best trips, those cozy spaces, thoughtful touches, and the feeling of being right at home wherever you are. Now, imagine getting to provide that same experience for someone else, because when you travel, your place is just sitting empty while you're away. Hosting on Airbnb can be a no brainer. And in a season where new experiences creating lasting memories, it's a unique way to help others make their own. And Martha and I both travel a lot, especially with her family in Mexico and mine all over the usa. So we know what it's like to be on the go during the holidays. And from our experience, hosting has always been easy and straightforward. And whether you're traveling often or just once in a while, it can be a simple way to earn a little extra while you're away. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much@airbnb.com host life is unpredictable and sometimes we're hit with an unexpected purchase after another. And I've been there before. One day the AC in your car decides to stop working in the middle of the summer, and the next day your cat got into something that they shouldn't have. So now, the same week, you're stuck with a large bill from the car mechanic and another large bill from the vet, neither of which you accounted for in this month's expenses. This is not a fun position to be in, but the U S Bank Split World MasterCard can help make it a little easier here in the moment. The Split Card is a new type of card that lets you pay later on every purchase. All purchases are automatically divided into three payments and placed into a payment plan to be paid back over three months. So if you're looking for additional flexibility, you can extend your plan to six or 12 months with equal monthly payments for a low monthly fee. So whether it's an unexpected vet bill or something more enjoyable like a last minute contract ticket, you can pay later on every purchase with the U.S. bank split card. Learn more@usbank.com splitcard the creditor and issuer of this card is U S Bank national association, pursuant to a license from MasterCard International Incorporated. Some restrictions may apply. This episode is brought to you by Apple Watch. With each new year, big goals are set, big promises get made, and then right around the second Friday of January, Quitters Day, most resolutions start to fade. And in fact, most people give up by the second Friday of the year. And it's time to break that pattern with Apple Watch, designed to make 2026 all about quitting. Quitting it brings motivation into the moments when it matters most. With tools like the workout App pace alerts and activity range. Whether your goal is moving more, staying active throughout the day, or building better habits, Apple Watch emphasizes progress with features that nudge, remind and support consistency. It tracks the ways the body moves, celebrates goals as they're reached, and helps create momentum that lasts past January. And as the new year begins, staying committed becomes less about perfection and more about natural not giving up. Find out more@apple.com Apple Watch Series 11 iPhone 11 or later required this is really powerful. So how do we learn to manage our mind in response in a more positive way to the chaos, stress, traumas, dramas of life around us? You know, obviously we, we can maybe influence certain events to manifest in our lives, but we can't control the things are happening 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 is trauma or pain around us?
- [21:38]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Brilliant question. It's a skill that we learn. So that's really nice to know. The sooner the, it is never too late to start, but the sooner we start, the better. So I have four adult children. They learned this, they grew up with this stuff and as I've learned new things, they've been my lab rats. So they've been trained and, and literally at my husband and they all work for me by the way.
- [21:56]
Lewis Howes
They're either, they're either all amazing kids or messed up kids hopefully.
- [22:00]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Yeah, yeah, we'll have to ask that question. Well, Dominique's my producer, so I think she's sort of doing okay there. But yeah, know the thing, the biggest thing with the mind and managing mind Lewis, is to accept that depression, anxiety, even the scary words like bipolar and schizophrenia and then going to the mood, sort of things like that we can accept grief, anger, etc, these are not, not illnesses. This is the biggest message that I probably have. The second biggest, the first is that mind is the source. And if you don't get mind right, everything else, you can read all the great books you want and go to all the great seminars and self help, but unless your mind is right, you won't even use that stuff. It's just data. And so there's another step missing and it's understanding that autonomy, that sense of agency that we have to manage what's going on around us. And to accept part of mind management is not to make the bad stuff go away, but to know how to live in the bad stuff because it's not going away. So despair, anger, depression, anxiety, these are all completely normal responses. In fact they're very helpful. They're helpful messengers and warning signals as opposed to being scary illnesses. They are not neuropsychiatric brain diseases like we've been told. They are actually responses. And because they are responses of our mind in, in the world, we use our brain and body to express them. Because we've got the mind has to have the brain and body to you know, build the thoughts and then from we use that to speak. We're using our physical to store what we've, what we've processed and to convert and then to speak. So obviously if our mind's a mess, our brain and our body will be a mess. But because our brain's neuroplastic and we, if we manage our mind, we can change our brain, we can change our DNA literally. 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 immediately influence your biomarkers. So for example, if you in acute trauma, for example, and you go just okay, let me explain it in a very simple way. I've just been testing out a glucose continuous glucose monitoring device and for some research purposes and I happened to, while I was wearing 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 neuro cycle that I've developed, I wanted to see the impact and I happened to be going through experience a very acute trauma in our family over December. And in the moment of the trauma I happened to see on my glucose monitor that my glucose had shot up to 240. Now that's heart attack level. And I immediately managed my mind through the neurocycle, which is the concept that I've developed, which is just a system, anyone can learn it. And I dropped my glucose levels within seconds back down to a normal level. And as it cycled up, it cycled, I could manage it. And in, if glucose is at that level, your cortisol's shot up at that level, your DHEA is dropped, your homocysteines up. All that means is that your immune system is going crazy. You get the same response to a mind thing, a thought which is the consequence of mind. Think, feel, choose, you build thoughts, thoughts of made of roots and trees, branches which are the memory. So thoughts are made of memories like trees are made of branches. Any kind of damage in my body, the immune system sees that as threatening survival because we, we are wired for survival. So this is not survival. So your immune system says, hey, that's a threat. Let's send out the army. T lymphocytes, B lymphocytes, macrophages, let's go fix this thing. And it creates inflammation, which is a temporary state of healing. So initially inflammation is to isolate. Exactly, isolate. And, and then you're supposed to, you know, fix this up and sor out and find the root cause 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 the stuff and we don't deal with our past traumas and we don't deal with those patterns in our life that we are enacting, that the constant arguments or these certain, you know, we all have these toxic patterns or no one's immune. And the signals of those are things like depression and anxiety. And those are simply telling you, hey, there's a pattern. It's either trauma based pattern or it's a toxic habit you've developed. But that pattern is actually putting your body under tremendous stress even to the point where your DNA is affected. And I showed in my research that, you know, if you think of the DNA ladder, if you pull out a chromosome, it looks like an X. And where you see my fingernails, pink fingernails for those of you that are listening, the pink fingernails would then represent what we call telomeres. And telomeres are a proxy for how you are managing your mind.
- [26:24]
Lewis Howes
Very interesting, aren't they also, also based on how long you'll live as well, if the telemetrics are longer.
- [26:30]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Exactly, totally correct.
- [26:32]
Lewis Howes
So those are under attack and dying. You're probably physically going to die as well.
- [26:37]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Exactly, that's exactly what I showed. So we had subjects at the beginning of, in my clinical trial that I put in this book, we had subjects and I've actually got a picture of this person's, one of the subject's brains. This is inside looking inside their brain. And the blue represents someone who's totally depressed. Flatline, brain, flatline, literally. And this person's, all their biomarkers were up there. Cortisol, inflammation, etc. But this shows that the energy levels in the brain are very flat. Blue means a very, very depressed. And this person was, the narrative was tremendous torment. Their life, they were offline, they were battling with work relationships.
- [27:14]
Lewis Howes
Everything was off, everything was off.
- [27:16]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Sleep, you name it. They were at like 3D to check out.
- [27:19]
Lewis Howes
What page is this on?
- [27:21]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
This is on page. I should tell you, I should know. The page of my heart 161.
- [27:28]
Lewis Howes
Okay, cool.
- [27:29]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
You probably got it in black and white in that version that you've got there. But so th. This person's telomeres, when we looked at their DNA and we looked at their telomeres they will tell you how that the shorter they are the weaker your cells, the shorter your lifespan, the more vulnerable you are to disease. So they were sitting so that will show in terms of your biological age. So their telomeres were short and unhealthy. They, the ages were in the of this particular subject and we had a group like this as well that similar they biologic chronological. The actual age was in their mid-30s but their biological age 70 or something. Yes. A sickly 70 year old.
- [28:07]
Lewis Howes
That's crazy within.
- [28:09]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Crazy within nine weeks of mind management. Note I didn't work on. I don't use drugs. I didn't. I do talk about diet and stuff. But in this particular clinical trial it was pure mind management. Just the neurocycle. Just get your mind under control. And that gray means that the brain's stabilized that the brain waves that they were actually managing. So here they were saying I am depression, I am hopeless. All the biomarkers DNA here they're saying I felt. I now know why I feel depression. I'm not depression. I now know why. And depression is simply a signal of an underlying cause. It's not who I am. It's not an it. It's not an illness by 63 days. And these numbers are very significant. They were actually seeing behavior change in their life. They were saying okay, so I know I'll still get depressed but I know why and I know what what to do. And there was changes in their behavior. They were back at work, they were back sleeping. 25% improvement in sleep. And I mean all kinds of like their relationships. Not suicidal anymore. And I mean that's. I can go on and on and on. Wow. This subject over here was in the control group. So they got no mind management. And what you'll see is a lot of red and a lot of chaos. And that red shows complete brain that is like a tsunami in your brain which the biomarkers were terrible. This person's DNA telomeres would. Were very short. And and so with mind management in nine weeks we showed how you can literally change your telomeres which are your markers for aging and for health, mental health and physical health. That's pretty unusual because most of the work on telomeres has been done around diet and exercise.
- [29:40]
Lewis Howes
Which are very like leafy greens and plant based.
- [29:45]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Exactly. Which is significant. And Also, there's been some work on meditation, but there's been no, I think this is the first study that's been done on actually doing deliberate, intentional mind work to change. And then we saw significant drops as well in inflammation markers and blood markers and. But the biggest thing was the narrative, the person's story. So if we go away from the biology for a minute and we listen to the person's story, that person was offline, they were online, they were living again. And even though. And they had also had this acceptance and this is what I wanted to kind of circle back to when you started was life and managing your mind doesn't mean that it's going to be one big rosy, you know, put on rose tinted glasses. That's crazy. It is actually the ability to be okay and at peace with having moments of depression and actually looking for the message and seeing them as helpful. We have this really weird philosophy, which has been about 40 years in the west now, where we look at depression and anxiety and those kind of things as illnesses and neuropsychiatric brain diseases and as bad symptoms that we must suppress, like cancer symptoms you must suppress. So it's been lumped or misery of life has been medicalized to quote a. A brilliant psychiatrist and Joanna Moncrief. So we've got to really watch out for that. But actually, the real truth is that those depression and anxiety are not illnesses. They are just survival instincts. It's telling you, hey, pay attention, there's something going on. You need to go.
- [31:08]
Lewis Howes
And something's not working, something's not working, something's not working.
- [31:11]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
And it's manifesting as a pattern that needs to be addressed and that'll block the greatness.
- [31:15]
Lewis Howes
So are you saying. Am I hearing. Did I hear you say that. That there isn't a mental health disease. It's more of just a pattern or something that we should be mindful of. But it's not an actual disease.
- [31:27]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
No, it's not a disease. And I know this counters the current philosophy, but if you look at the science, there's a large body of science. In fact, if you interpret all the science around this field and you really look at what's being tested, you actually will see it's not a. They've been looking for the neurobiological correlate. So they've been looking for where in the brain is depression. And for years we've been told about, about the serotonin imbalance causing depression. I mean, that's not even. It was a theory never proven. Great for Marketing for selling drugs and also the simplistic way of telling someone, hey, you're depressed, don't worry, it's chemical imbalance. Let me give you a drug to fix it. You know, we want this quick fix mentality. So as medicine has advanced and technology has advanced, so we've become very caught up in the quick fix. But life's not like that. Mind is not like that. Mind is separate from brain and body. You can apply that kind of thinking, not quick fix, but you can apply a symptomatic diagnosis, treatment approach to body, to physical brain and body. But when it comes to mind that, that there's this, this gravitational field, this force, this thing, feel, choose thing, it's not going to go. You know, a medication is not going to change how you're thinking, feeling and choosing. It's not going to get rid of this. It's just going to numb your brain. So maybe you don't feel this for while it's working, but at the same time as then when that drug weighs off, this is still there. This is still being recognized by the immune system of your brain as a problem. So this is increasing your vulnerability. The longer it's there, the more you increase your vulnerability to disease. Oh my gosh, you know, and this is what gets you stuck. And these are the patterns. So no, it's not an illness, it is a normal human response. Mental health has always been an issue. Notice from the beginning of time mankind has battled with life, with issues, with death, with fighting with war, with whatever. So mental health's not on the rise. But the mismanagement of mental health, making it a disease has created a whole new problem. So here we sit with before the pandemic. They started doing a population study in the mid-90s. And this is when I was still practice early days of my practicing sort of 10 years into my work and I started seeing this trend of and I was watching the study where people were with the decades long trend of people living longer. So we know, we all hear this message what this is what we've heard. People are living longer because of the advances in medicine and technology. None of us create question that. But something happened in 96 that did start questioning that by the mid 2000s it was an established researched fact that we don't live longer anymore, that the trend of people living longer has actually reversed and that we have a pandemic of deaths of despair where people are dying from preventable lifestyle diseases and the age group most being affected but are between 24 and 65. So people at the beginning of their career, in the prime of their career and through that, that age group are being, are dropping down dead like flies. And it's death considered deaths of despair by preventable lifestyle diseases. So we have to look at the lifestyle disease means that there's something in our body that's weaker. Why Lifestyle which is mind driven. How am I eating, drinking, sleeping. But more than that is what's my mind behind all of that? How am I actually managing the day to day moments? How am I managing the patterns, the traumas, the established toxic habits? What am I doing about that stuff? And that's when we ignore all of that because this current trend of science is saying, oh, those don't matter. What matters is the symptoms. Let's just look for the symptoms, checklist, diagnose, label. When you label someone, you chop you, you chop up to 10 years more of their life. You know, it's like it's adding on. They've shown studies of people with a mental health diagnosis have a chop the 20 years off, up to 20 years off their lifespan. People on psychotropic drugs because of all the complications and the changes in the brain and the body, chopping up to 25 years of their life. There's such a contradiction because they're saying, hey, hey, there's this adverse circumstance, grief of loss of people, uncertainty, medical and not knowing if you're going to live or die and how long is this isolation going to go on and economic impact and whatever, the whole lot that's trauma. And they're saying that when they're saying, but this is the way to treat it, let's label it, let's diagnose this, let's medicate it. So we've got to shift our narrative completely and we've got to stop saying that mental illness is on the rise and that there's 1 in 4 people on antidepressants who are depressed. 100% of people are depressed, depressed and anxious. 100% of people in the world at some point in their life have and will be anxious and depressed and in grief and sadness and terror and despair. And one of the others, a large percentage of the population, and I'm not sure the exact percentage because no one's really done this kind of research, but estimates it's probably 30, 40% of people will have extreme trauma from abuse, war trauma, that kind of stuff, where they'll go down the continuum to sort of the minus 9, 10, 8, 9, 10. If you look at a continuum of 0 to 10, 0 to minus 10 and have things like psychotic breaks and hearing voices and extreme states of distress, mental distress, which are still not diseases. They are simply in that traumatic situation, you having a traumatic response. Think of someone who's a war vet. I just interviewed a Navy SEAL the other day who was trained snipers. And I mean the things that he had to do and that his teams had to do, you know, they come back and try. And we all know the problem of trying to, you know, reconcile back into civilian life after you've gone through. I mean, you know, this is what they'd be experiencing all day long stuff that's completely against survival, completely against our human nature. And now they, instead of them being allowed to process this trauma, they're coming back and being told that they diseased. And he would tell me that what they do with a lot of. We don't hear this sort of thing, but he told me this. They, they will inject things like risperidol, which is an antipsychotic into the spines of war vets because they're a bit psychotic. And they, and they psychotic for a reason. It's their coping. They, they. How do you deal with this? Of course you're going to be angry, you're going to be frustrated, you're not going to be able to love like you did. You have to be able to embrace, process and reconceptualize. Giving them a drug is not going to make it, not going to help it. In fact, it constrains the brain, it restricts the brain. You can't, there's no chemical cure for that. This, this is, that's not, that's just going to add fuel to the fire because your mind's got to work through the brain. So now you put chemicals in and now that's not going to, that's not going to facilitate change. We have to do something. So it's like a narrative.
- [37:42]
Lewis Howes
Do you feel like there, I mean, is there such a thing as a chemical imbalance in some people? You know, when they say, oh, I have a depression, it's a disease, or bipolar, or I have this mental health disease or I have a chemical imbalance, I was treated with this. Don't try to say I don't because this is who I am. Is that. Do some people have that or is that.
- [38:03]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
That's a result of.
- [38:05]
Lewis Howes
Go ahead.
- [38:05]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
The narrative of I have a chemical imbalance and my depression is from chemical imbalance is a narrative that is the only explanation that people are being given. They're not given an alternative reaction. I mean an alternative narrative. So the most important thing is that anyone listening 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. I want to validate that. That doesn't need to be validated with a disease label. You're not diseased. You're not a broken brain. You aren't. Your brain isn't defective. You are going through something. So you aren't something, you aren't that. You are going through something.
- [38:44]
Lewis Howes
You're experiencing something.
- [38:46]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
You're experiencing something and you're experiencing and you've coped in the only way that you could cop that moment. So it created this adverse response because it was an adverse situation and you were just trying to cope. So what we have to do is go through a process of embracing and processing and reconceptualizing. So the important thing here is to recognize that chemical imbalance isn't the cause of your despair. The cause of your despair is what you've gone through and what you're going through and learning how to not knowing how to manage it and how to deal with those thoughts that are driving you crazy and those flashbacks and the. And the trauma of the flashbacks and going back into those situations of the rape or the abuse or the war trauma or the. That it could drive a person crazy. And that's not crazy in the sense of illness. It's crazy in the sense of your mind is like this erratic tidal wave around you and it's going through your brain and you've got these. And your immune system and everything screaming out you and saying, hey, let's fix this. So a disease label invalid validates it. And for a moment it might be nice to know, okay, well, these are label to how I feel because it kind of gives us a bit of. Feels like we've got a bit of control. So initially that gives you comfort, but don't see yourself as that. It's better to say, I'm experiencing post traumatic stress issues because of what I've been through versus I am ptsd, or I have the sickness of ptsd. It's better to say I'm experiencing symptoms of bipolar, these intense swings, because of my whole story then saying, I have bipolar, I have a chemical imbalance. I mean, just researchers coming out the other day show that we've got to stop saying this. The top psychiatrist that lead this field will tell you we've got to stop saying this, that there's no ways that serotonin, imbalance you can't even measure that. There's no gene for, there's no genes or serotonin imbalance causing it. It's what you've experienced that's the, the cause and then that moves through your brain and your body. So obviously your brain and your body respond. So we will see changes in the brain and the body. We will see neurochemical chaos. Not necessarily serotonin imbalance, that's just one. Sometimes it's dopamine and if dopamine's down, serotonin's off, and then anandamide's off. And then, I mean, I can give you a list of big chemical terms and that's going to change every function in the structure of your brain and your, your DNA and your telomeres and 1400 neurophysiological responses off. So, you know, that's, and that's the response though. And that doesn't mean that, that you have this thing hidden inside of you, the scary thing that's controlling you. And that invalidates. If I, if someone comes back from war, someone's had a sexual trauma, to tell them that the depression or anxiety they're feeling is an illness is an insult to what they've gone through. But if I say, if I say to you, gosh, that's terrible, tell me about it, I want to hear your story, I want to support you. Your depression and anxiety that you're feeling is a signal that there's stuff going on, there's an origin story, there's a source. So can I listen, can I help? Can I support you in trying to recognize the signals and go through the process to find the origin story and then to reconceptualize it? And that takes time. It's not a 15 minute appointment where I can give you a label that takes time. That's not also, it's also not the conditioning kind of treatments that are in place that some of them work if they're used in the right place. But to try and put a veteran who's gone through something back into the situation to try and condition them. You can't condition, you have to reconstruct. So it's kind of like an algebraic equation. X is the situation, Y is how you should want, you want to function for mental peace. So you've got X plus Y. And so here we are in our X situation where we, of human experiencing life, we're supposed to be at Y. And you put the two together and what the current treatment says is that, okay, now we're going to create Z, we're just going to ignore X and Y. We're going to create a new thing. And that new thing is you. Diseased. But that doesn't work. It's actually X, Y, X, Y. X is what you're going through. Y is where you want to find mental peace and you want to put the two together, to live together so that you can change how the past plays out into your future.
- [42:54]
Lewis Howes
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- [45:39]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Okay, so it's the process of the neuro cycle. Excellent question. It's the process of the neuro cycle which in this, it's in the second half of the book. So the neuro cycle is five signs.
- [45:49]
Lewis Howes
This is the five steps, right?
- [45:51]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Yeah, this is the five steps. This is what I initially developed for people with traumatic brain injury was my first time that I developed it and developed my theory and then from there I refined it to all the different types of, you know, situations I worked with. And then it's been refined over the years. This is the most updated research. So a good scientist should keep learning and changing and improving, which is what I've tried to do. So in this book is the updated version of the neurocycle. The neuropsychle is how you get your mind, which is always working under control. If in a state of acute trauma like I was in in that moment. Acute trauma creates a red brain. I showed you that picture of a red brain. That red brain means that I have a tidal wave in my brain going on or that the there is the left and the right brain will be out of harmony. I'll have a drop of blood and oxygen to the front of my brain. I'm going to have things like that delta. We've heard of things like delta, theta, alpha, beta, gamma, all those waves are supposed to flow like waves in the sea. And if you think of the sea, you've got the big swells which is delta, slightly smaller swirls, which is theta build which is beta, the crest which is high beta and the gamma which is the ripple on the beach. And so we want that through the brain in this nice kind of even way. That's kind of the why. So state X plus Y. X is what happens to us. Y is that state. So X happens and then that Y state gets thrown off. So in that moment that's what happened to me. So what we want to do is because mind works through brain and body and mind is experiencing this trauma which is a mess. Our brain and body just do what the mind's doing. So then there's a mess in our brain and our body. But if I have that kind of chaos, I can't think straight, I'm not going to have any wisdom, I'm going to fall apart. And in this situation I, I would have and I have in the past, but now I've learned how to deal with this. I talk about there that this neuro cycle can improve how you manage anxiety and depression by 81%. That's a massive claim and I've shown it scientifically. Okay, so what I did was to try and get myself back under control. Now in that state you don't know what to do in a tremendously acute traumatic state. But I knew from my science and from my knowledge and so I'm proactive. So I could go into two zones. So I went into two modes. The one mode was the mental mess that I was in which is the pilot because I'm driving, I'm in this time. Imagine yourself being in a helicopter that's like a time capsule and you flying over this forest and the forest is your mind with all these trees and this acute trauma has just grown because it's instant. So here's this terrible. And your helicopter is drawn to this because you are in shock and terror and fear and deep panic and anxiety. That is all the smoke signals. So I, my, my pilot's going like this. The co pilot is also me, but it's my wisdom because inside of each of us is our survival and that's our instinct that you know when you give someone great advice and you just think oh wow, where did that come from? Or you get that it's that depth like we know what we know, we know how much we can handle. We will say I know this, that kind of thing. That's the co pilot, this wisdom. So what we want to do in those states is to get ourselves into the co pilot. Remember the co pilot and the pilot and you use you language. So here you flying this plane all over and the co pilot saying okay, let's calm down, let's let landed at that tree. So you land the plane, you land this time capsule, whatever and you get out. But you with the co pilot so you safe. So you've created a distance and this is, I'm explaining in detail and obviously you train and it's all in the book and it's all, I've got an app that explains it too but this is the mindset that I have trained myself to come into. So I can go into an acute trauma in that I'm still crying, I'm still freaking out. Right. But I'm freaking out in this zone where I now know, because I know that I need. Need wisdom, I need to be able to tap into that. And I cannot get through this chaos if this chaotic brain and body, if and mind, unless I've calmed it down. So I have to get through this because I'm stuck in that black tree and I'm stuck in this chaotic brain.
- [49:35]
Lewis Howes
So that be considered. Would that be considered like fight or flight? Whether it's someone.
- [49:39]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Yes.
- [49:40]
Lewis Howes
Cutting you off in front of you in the, on the street in the car, or someone yelling at you, or someone. Whatever an event happening which is causing you to react in fight or flight. Whether it's a massive T trauma or little T trauma.
- [49:52]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Exactly, exactly. Or an acute trauma, which is the blind signing stuff. The stuff you don't expect that just hits us out the blue. Yes, absolutely. So you're going into a level of fight and flight. So everything physiologically, 1400 neurophysiological responses are activated to help you focus. But they can't work for you unless you do what I'm telling you to do, which is to shift your perception. So this is the how to. Because as soon as you shift your perception in an instant, because I told you within seconds I bought the glucose monitor down. And I mean I didn't expect it to work that fast. I was amazed. And it, as it cycled through the 12 hours of the, of the trauma, I was able to manage it more and more. So I mean it really. And this is not the first time. I mean I've done this my whole life. But it was just so interesting seeing it in real time.
- [50:34]
Lewis Howes
Sure.
- [50:35]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
And seeing the reaction.
- [50:36]
Lewis Howes
Okay, so, so step one is to get the co pilot state of mind to, to land the plane.
- [50:41]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
That's the preparation. We haven't even got to step one. So this is the preparation.
- [50:44]
Lewis Howes
Land the plane first.
- [50:45]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Yeah. So that's it. So recognize that you remember there's a co pilot, which is your wise man, mind you, the crazy pilot going all over the place. Land the plane. Did the co pilot tell you, okay, land the plane? And you land the plane where you need to, which is at the issue. And what drew you in to land the plane to find the issue was your emotional. So this is step one. You're going to gather awareness and gather means you controlling it. You're not sitting under the apple tree and all the apples are hitting you on the head. You are standing back and you picking the apple. So there's control, there's a sense of autonomy, a sense of agency. So in the midst of chaos you can create, create agency mentally because your mind's driving it. So you stand back and you say okay, I picked that apple. So that's my emotional warning signals. Terror, despair, utter, totally traumatized, like whatever they are. You pick those apples, you put them in your basket. So you gathering, then you gather.
- [51:35]
Lewis Howes
So this is gathering kind of your awareness. This is how I, this is how I'm feeling. This is what's happened, this is what's like, this is the event.
- [51:42]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Yes, this is gathering. It's almost. Yes it is. But you're getting in very four little distinct packages because the more organized you are, the more, the less chaos. We being very systematic.
- [51:53]
Lewis Howes
So what are those four things?
- [51:55]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
So you gather awareness of your emotional warning signals. So the despair, anxiety, whatever, panic attack. Then you gather awareness of your physical bodily response. So here's your co pilot saying okay, how are you feeling? Gather that apple, gather that apple. What is your physical flattering in the heart, panic attack, tension, gut wrenching adrenaline, whatever, flight and fright freeze mood mode you're in. Then your behaviors. What are you saying? What are you doing? You know, I mean how are you responding?
- [52:21]
Lewis Howes
How are you responding?
- [52:22]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Yeah, action. Yeah, what's what you're saying? What are you doing? Well you're, you know what is actually happening. And I'm grabbing this, I'm grabbing that, get this, get that, you know, so what is that and is it working? I mean like you. Well just doing this changes how you do things. It's amazing. You immediately go into this different mode. Fourth one is perspective. What's your perspective? This is doomed. This is terrible. This is sucks, this is end or okay, this is bad butt. You know what your so gather, you gather. Then as soon as you've got those, you then going to reflect. So it's very systematic. And then as you've gathered and done all this preparation thing, you've got the two sides of the brain. We've got coherence again. You've got blood flow back to the brain, you've got oxygen back to the front of the brain. When you've got low oxygen and low blood flow at the front of the brain, which happens in a, in an, in a trauma, in an acute situation, in those sudden things, it drops. Then you are impulsive, you're going to make bad decisions, you're Going to react incorrectly. You're going to create inconsistency, incoherence. Your alpha wave in the brain drops and becomes more active on the right side, and that's on the right side, which is not great because that means that we now are not going to have insight. So by doing what I've just said, you change all of that. You bring back coherence, you increase alpha. And it may not be excellent yet, but you've started the process. Then as you move forward through the five steps and I put all this brain stuff in the book and what happens? And so I'm just giving the overview. So then you start now reflecting. Okay, what have I got in my basket? So number two, reflect. Reflect is an incredibly beautiful word, as is gather awareness. Gathering awareness. I just want to point out in the earlier on I said that we mustn't be frightened of despair and anxiety and trauma and I mean, and Dan depression. Those scary. Don't be scared of them because they are messengers. They're helpful messengers that are telling you something. And if you respond to them in that, that way, you then control them. But if you respond to them in fear, they control you.
- [54:12]
Lewis Howes
O yeah, yeah.
- [54:13]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
And then you're not going to move forward. You're going to get very stuck and then stuck in rumination and the patterns will just get worse. So get the control. Even though you can, you can be crying, screaming, swearing, I don't care what you're doing, but just get the control. You're at the tree, you're doing the stuff. So gather. Reflect is when you think of light going through a prism, it reflects all the colors of the rainbow. So these depth, these, that one thing means a lot. And so reflect is this process of being a detective. Okay, well, why am I having that reaction? Why am I now when it's something in the moment? We pretty much know why. I mean, I knew why I was. So I didn't have to do too much reflection, but I had to the reflection in terms of why, because I knew the cause. But the difference was I needed to reflect to say, okay, if I react like this, this is going to happen. So it was, it was, it was questioning, what are you doing with that emotion? What are you doing with that behavior? Is that behavior helping? So the reflect in that situation would be different to a reflect for someone who is having a complete and utter imposter syndrome attack. And it's a pattern and they keep doing it. So they're now working sequentially through the process. So they're going to have to start finding why, what does it track back to what level, what sort of self esteem issues are, what is the origin story of it? So that the reflection in that case would be, you know, ask, answer, discuss. Why do I feel this? Why, why, why? And so it's a different. So these. But reflect is to just, you know, get meaning, but in a very comprehensive way because there's all these patterns of meaning in that acute trauma. It's quick. I'm doing the five steps quick. If I'm working on a pattern over time I'm going to spend longer. Third step is you write. And the writing step is obviously I was in the midst of a trauma, I couldn't write. So I visualized. So the quick stuff you can just visualize or even you can write, write, writing. I recommend if you write right, write in the form of a metacog. I teach you how in the book. And I have a video of a neuropsycho app that goes with this.
- [56:02]
Lewis Howes
What's a met? What's a metacog?
- [56:03]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
A metacog is a pattern form of writing that stimulates. It looks like a tree, you start in the middle and you work on branches and you put words and you don't write whole sentences. You basically just pour information and you literally let it just come out in this pattern format. But each the one of the key things things is to, is to group as you as a thought. As something comes up, you put it on one area and as something else comes up, you put it wherever. So you have these clusters of information and every words on a line and every line goes out of the previous line. And that format is unbelievable. It just drags the two sides of the brain together, digs deep and you start getting insight into what you didn't even know was there. And then the fourth step is to then go and sort out that chaos that you've just written down. So the fourth step is to okay, I've gathered awareness, I've reflected, I'm writing. What does this mean? What's the mental autopsy? What's the, what's the pattern, the activators, the antidotes? What's. How can I reconceptualize this beautiful word? Reconceptualize. And then you end off the cycle with a little action. And that action, if it's in the moment, like in that five seconds or whatever, it's okay. I'm going to actually take a deep breath and I'm going to act like this or I'm going to say that or I'm going to do this. So it's a little action that anchors you back in a state where you can function in the next next moment in that acute trauma or in that imposter moment and imposter syndrome moment. And you've now got to go and into a business meeting. You're feeling like you can't because you're in, you know, the imposter syndrome fraud sort of set up. So in doing it in the quick moment by moment, you're going to have a simple quick action in the big stuff where you're working out the pattern each day. You will have you do your work for a limited amount of time. And I say do the work because it's not a quick fix. If you're looking for a quick fix, nothing related to greatness is a quick fix or mind, right? It's time. And you know that you experience that with your whole story. And so essentially you would do it for around 15 to 45 minutes a day when you're fixing up the big stuff. And you would do it Lewis, the big stuff you would do for 63 days. So that's why.
- [57:57]
Lewis Howes
Why 63?
- [57:58]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Glad you asked that. So we've all been told 21 days to build a habit. Well, that's a complete myth. I put it in. I wrote about it in the book too. A neurosurgeon. It's not a neurosurgeon. A surgeon many years ago was talking about the physical cycles of healing that are body goes through. Like if you get a blister, it takes about three weeks for the stem cells and everything to form and the immune system to do its job to get rid of the blister. That's assuming that your mind's not a mess. If your mind's a mess, you can chop off 60% of that healing time. It'll take 60% longer. 60% longer. If your mind's a mess, you.
- [58:29]
Lewis Howes
If your mind is right, it does.
- [58:31]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
It does it on time. It does it on time and sooner. It depends, you know, it depends on the level of damage. And sometimes you'll need one cycle of three, sometimes you'll need multiple. That's for physical healing. Mind healing, however, needs a minimum of three cycles for behavior.
- [58:47]
Lewis Howes
Really? How.
- [58:48]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
How do we.
- [58:48]
Lewis Howes
Is this scientifically proven or is this.
- [58:50]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
So there's very little research in the 21 day myth. So I decided to research it and there's a few studies. There's one from University College London. I put them in my book. There's my one that I've just done recently over the, in 2019, over 2020, where I tracked and retract in the brain what happened. So 21 days, you get, you get what we call gamma peaks, which means that you've taken this, you've deconstructed it and you've reconstructed it into something healthy. So you've, you've changed this thought, but it's xy. So that's in there, but it's in a different, it looks different. It's like if you take an ugly old house that you're going to renovate, you take lots of photos of all the mold and all the ugly carpets and you bash it down, you build a beautiful new house. You still remember how it was, but you've reconceptualized it. You're living in that new space. You remember, remember the old. Okay, so that's what I'm talking about. That takes 21 days. So you create to break down and build a thought with memories. Because a thought is a tree made of memories. Memories are what, like a tree is made of branches. Thoughts are made of memories. So to make something that's got a level of sustainability takes about 21 days. And in that 21 days after that, if you stop there, it's a tiny little plant in your forest. It doesn't have enough energy to move from the non conscious mind. N o N. The non conscious mind operates 24, 7. It's where all your experiences are stored in thoughts, all your belief systems, your nurturing, everything about you and that is influencing your conscious mind. Conscious minds only awake when you're awake. So right now, as I'm talking, everything that I'm saying is stimulating thoughts from your non conscious mind to move into your conscious mind to make sense of what I'm saying and to build all this new stuff into thoughts in your trees. So nonconscious mind for a thought to move from the nonconscious to the conscious through the subconscious. So non conscious. Subconscious is the bridge. Conscious is when you're awake. Non conscious 24 7. Infinite, huge, massive. And where our wisdom is as well. So the wisdom is through the middle. If you want to imagine a forest, you've got the beautiful dark green strip which is all your instinctive wisdom, survival stuff, wired for love stuff, optimism, bias. And then everything we experience in life is around the edge. Little trees, big trees, dark trees, green trees. The smaller the tree, the newer the extra experience, or the newer the memory, the weaker the memory to the big established trees are the ones that influence. So those things are powerful. So if it's a big dark tree and it's influencing, it's going to jump into your conscious mind and influence your view. So track backtracking. To get something that's good that you've rebuilt to, to actually influence how you view something, it has to have more energy put into it. Energy is never lost. Energy is transferred. Quantum physics talks about energy. These things, things are proteins with energy vibrating in the little protein structures. So you want that they're weak, so you've got to strengthen.
- [61:25]
Lewis Howes
You got to water it, you got to feed it some fertilizer.
- [61:28]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Totally. And all you do is. It's so easy. Oh my gosh, it's so easy. From day 22 to 40 to 63, you simply do step number five for about a minute a day. That's how simple it is. It's 42 minutes over 42 days. In my NeuroCycle app, I've actually got an active reminder function that you can type it in so it pops up on your phone and you can remind yourself to, to do this just. And you literally just read it and it keeps, just reading it reminds you to do it. And then you're building your strength and you're turning it into behavior change. So to go around, you know, the theme of your podcast, you know, to get to greatness requires behavior change. So real behavior change, if you really want to build a good habit into your life, you're going to have to spend the 63 days doing it. So not, not only is that 63 days, I mean, I've shown it scientifically and so on. Not only is it for detoxing, the patterns, the traumas, the toxic habits, the small T, big T as you mentioned, the acute stuff, the bad habits we've developed, but it's also to build new habits. So if you, if you know, you identify. This is an area that I want to grow in my life, to go to the next level of greatness, whatever that is, you need 63 days at least, and sometimes more. Sometimes a trauma is so easy, embedded and it's blocking your greatness that you might need multiple cycles of 63. There's no cookie cutter design, but the more you do that and the more you practice it in the moment by moment, the more self regulated you become. Which brings us right back to the beginning of the conversation, which was that mind is always in action, so you may as well control it. So here, I've just told you how to do it. It's pretty much, wow, the nuts and bolts.
- [63:03]
Lewis Howes
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- [64:56]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
No, no, there's a, there's a lot of stuff like that out there and you're not far off in terms of what the lit. What the, what the media is saying in terms of the people. I follow people that are heavy into understanding the numbers of, you know, the. From a various neuroscientific perspective. And I've done my own calculations. The. We build around about 8 to 10,000 thoughts a day. So we building. So that's sort of how many events we experience. It could be more. These are very, very, very, very, very average numbers. It really is. So it's somewhere. So it's somewhere between 8 and 18,000 that we build. So we build in response to what we experience. So whatever's new is built but then to build you also have the thoughts popping up. So at any one moment. So you, you know, we can work in 10 second blocks. That's what neuroscience shows us. Just to give you some kind of tangible thing to handle, hang on to. In any 1/10 moment you can literally have anything from 1 to 13 thoughts that will move from the nonconscious and maybe more and more and in as well and also build a couple of thoughts in that thought with one thought but with multiple, maybe 100 memories in that. So there's, that's, that's 120 odd things happening in any 10 second block and multiply that by 60 seconds, you know, times six in one minute. So you can already see the numbers as they multiply. So that's where we get anywhere between 8,000 we build and then probably about another 10,000 are coming up. So 18,000 seems to be a more. But whatever the number is, it doesn't really matter. It's a lot of thoughts we have.
- [66:31]
Lewis Howes
A lot of, a lot of them are more negative it seems like.
- [66:33]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Right? Not necessarily. If you look over, the only reason it feels like that is because the negative get more attention. Not because they are, not because you wired that way, but because they have created completely disruption in your brain.
- [66:48]
Lewis Howes
So we see stronger physical reaction. Right.
- [66:51]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
You got to get rid of it. It's, it's, it's against your survival. So you're going to pay attention to whatever's threatening your survival. Think of it. If someone's at your front door and they're trying to bash your front door down and you've got your family to protect, you're going to pay attention. You're not going to watch tv. You're going to pay attention to what's catch what's, what's a threat to your survival. That's why we. So it's not that we have more.
- [67:08]
Lewis Howes
Negative thoughts when we're relaxing, calm, we're not thinking I need to fix this. That's we're just relaxing and hanging out. But it's when there's a thought that's negative, we put a lot of attention on.
- [67:19]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Exactly. It's the big tree in the forest. It's where whatever you think about the most will grow. So you may have. If this huge infinite forest of green, the strip through the middle is the wise mind that can't ever change. The majority is green, small trees, big trees and you're going to have clusters of the black in between. Some people will have more because they've had more abuse you know, As I said, 30, 40% or 20, 30% of the population depending on where you are in which country would have more experience, more trauma, socioeconomic, you know, abuse, war, et cetera. So war torn countries you'll find more ptsd, higher percentage than in some way like a less war torn country and that kind of thing. But on average the forest is mainly green. But whatever's getting the most attention in your life, if you're living in war torn something or if you living in an abusive situation or you living in with a bullying boss or you living under the threat of someone in your family who's really ill, that's what's going to dominate. So it's not that we have more negative, negative thoughts, it's because that is survival. It's threatening our survival. It's creating brain damage. We've got to get rid of it, we've got to manage it. It's a call to management. Paying attention to the toxic is a call to management. It's created disruptions in the gravitational field. Think of those, those. I need to get an image. There's a movie and I don't know which one it is but it's those, you know, you get that ripple effect, it's moving through like, like a field or something. And you can almost, you know, they create, with the movies, they create the, that ripple effect, you know what I'm. Can you visualize something like that? Okay, that's what's happening with the mind. So we've got these ripples. It's not just trees that are standing still, there's these ripples but even now and then that ripple is toxic. So it's like it's going to be very disruptive and that sends out this, this upsets the neuro, the balance in the non conscious mind and it's linked to a physical. So that the, the, this gravitational field wave disruption storm is linked to one of these in the physical brain. So it's in the storm, storms there, somewhere there. So maybe it's there and then it's also there, this thing in there. So those are linked and those are threatening your survival. So they will get your attention and your attention is to go fix. So if we suppress.
- [69:22]
Lewis Howes
So if we suppress in terms of what? Not pay attention, not be aware.
- [69:26]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Yeah.
- [69:27]
Lewis Howes
Medicate, take drugs, drink, whatever the addiction is.
- [69:32]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Exactly.
- [69:33]
Lewis Howes
As opposed to address it. What happens?
- [69:35]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Well, so essentially I'm glad you brought that up. So addiction is not a disease. We're not caught by the chemical and the chemicals do change your brain. I've just explained that. But your mind can override any biological change because your mind's more powerful than your brain. And that's how we, you know, you can always draw on that internal survival instinct, which is that internal strip of green trees, just for the analogy sake. So addiction isn't a disease. Addiction is a response like depression. It's a warning signal. It's trying to. Trying to take something that's painful and taking something to numb the pain. So as you said, the sex, the pornography, the alcohol, the drugs, the smoking. Yeah. So you often find. Exactly. So if you find someone who was talking to someone yesterday who had a tremendous battle with cocaine and alcohol, but it wasn't those that grabbed them, we get the impression that, oh, your brain's diseased, therefore you're vulnerable to those and you can't control it. Nonsense. That's taken all the hope. People are dying from lack of hope, Louis. That's what that statistic I spoke about earlier, the reversal of trends. People are dying from lack of hope. Deaths of despair. When you take away people's sense of agency, you're taking away the most core dynamic of who you are as a human. Your mind is all about agency. Think, feel, choose. You control that, and you remove that agency from someone by saying, hey, you can't control the fact that you're addicted to alcohol or that you're addicted to. That's terrible. But if you say, okay, I see that. That is where you finding your coping strategy at the moment that having the alcohol is numbing the pain. Having the, you know, the pornography, the. The repeated whatever. The abuse of. Whatever abuse of anything to, To. To hide it. The opioid addiction, it's the, it's just to numb the pain. So once a person is in a loving, supportive environment where they can start seeing. Seeing that change, then they can start and seeing why. Then you can take them through the process of, okay, well, let's see, maybe that signal has got a cause. And let's start finding. And when you start working through the neuro cycle, they. I can tell you now, most of the time they're still addicted to something because the pain's so bad. And they deny this is a disease because it's easier to accept that initially, but they deny. No, I don't. I'm not addicted to alcohol. I know I'm not addicted to. To whatever the cocaine pain. I'm not addicted. But once you start lovingly showing them. Okay, well, let's talk about. Forget about the. The Which. The substance. Let's talk about you, what's going on, what's happened. And when you start doing that, then I'm depressed and this and this. And then the things start coming up. And as soon as you start getting that cycle happening, then the person is more able to say, oh I see, I've been trying to numb my pain. And then you can start getting the release. 86 to 93% of people that are addicted get out of addiction through choice. And that choice is stimulated by a supportive. A super supportive loving environment that is help. Helps people to see what's going on because it's very hard to face that stuff. So we can live in a state of denial. And so that's what takes a lot of good supportive and good therapy and good environments, you know, supportive environments. But to tell someone I'm always an addict is one of the worst things you can say. You take, okay, you have, have no power.
- [72:39]
Lewis Howes
Right, right. I'm a victim to this chemical imbalance or whatever it might be. Yeah.
- [72:43]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
But that's not the case. And it's. And it may take you years. I mean I was speaking to someone the other day who was as I said, a cocaine battling with. I mean all kinds of stuff. And now is one of the most amazing people helping other people doing the most incredible work. That person had been raped multiple times as a child, came from a very wealthy family and a babysitter who looked after him when he was. Parents were so busy working was repeatedly raping this child through his childhood and then got. I mean it happened again at university and this and this in different work environments and, and in different parts of the world when he traveled to the different parts of the world and that's where. So he had to get to the point where he realized he was numbing the pain. You know, so that's. So if. Can you see we have to shift the narrative. Absolutely. You know that this is. I mean these are extreme cases, but these also the day to day. I mean we got to live with ourselves. Someone the other day said to me, well, that's all in well relationship big extreme. What about just sitting here with myself and I can't sleep at night and I'm worrying about like you know, the things that on I can still get through life but I'm ruminating and I'm overthinking and I'm stuck in anger and you know, that's that too. We've got to manage all of that.
- [73:49]
Lewis Howes
And that was my, that was 25 years of my life because I, I talk about Being sexually abused when I was five and having anger and resentment and frustration and rage for 25 years until I was, until I actually started opening up and talking about it, until I did therapy, until I did, you know, emdr. And yeah, I mean I did every type of therapeutic experience I could do and it, it really truly gave me the, the environment of love, support and peace to begin the path of setting me free, setting the pain and the trauma free by giving it a voice, by expressing it, by beautiful doing the work. And it didn't happen overnight. It's eight years later, it's still an ongoing thing of healing and yeah, it's much easier and I can have a conversation about it with ease where eight years ago I would, you know, be crying talking about it.
- [74:40]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
So X, Y, that's the x + y equals x Y. You've read, you've reconceptualized, you're able to talk. So I didn't mean to interrupt you, but that's what you've done. You've been, you've been neurocycling without knowing it. Now if you formally start neuro cycling, if you start a daily program, you're going to start unwiring it even more. You're going to get even more control over the accumulation of all the things that happened. I mean that's just what I would recommend that you try it out for sure.
- [75:07]
Lewis Howes
So what should we be thinking when 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, it doesn't support the, of our future and our vision. What should we be thinking in terms of replacing that in terms of the process? Or is that something we shouldn't be rejecting? Negative thoughts, we should be analyzing and being aware. But how do we do it without consuming our life?
- [75:41]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Okay, so you, you kind of answered the question, the second part. That's what you do. The only way to get control is to embrace and to process and reconceptualize. And you do it in a very extensive accepting manner. So it's like get into the helicopter and be the messy pilot. Be the co pilot. Yeah, and get, get into that state of mind because then, and then it's very non judgmental that you start by telling yourself like the very first thing as you're getting in the helicopter, whichever point when you're in is to say it's okay. It's okay. There's been a million billion people who have been in the same position as you that are battling. In fact, most people battle with self esteem. It's very few people that don't for some reason battle with self esteem. For example, example, just take that example, thinking I can't do this or I am ashamed. Because every toxic experience we have completely rips at the core of who we are. And the core of who we are is I'm needed, I'm valuable, and I have something to contribute to the world that no one else can contribute. So when someone tries to take that away from you through an abuse or that has attacked the core of you, so you kind of hide amongst shame and self esteem comes out of this, I shouldn't be feeling this. But especially a young child like five to be abused, you don't know how to process that. So the most immediate thing is because it's so against survival. Because the adult in your life who's supposed to be the protector, everything's assorted. You don't have the language, you don't have the brain power yet, the mind power yet to process. So your coping strategy will be, well, this made me feel bad, so I am bad. So you tend to have this pervasiveness. Sexual trauma tends to create a pervasiveness of shame and that comes out in all kinds of behavioral manifestations, whether it's withdrawal, whether it's being difficult, aggressive, and it's pervasive. And that attacks self esteem because something at the core of who you are has been attacked. And that's why it takes time as you spoke about, to go back and find that. So in terms of what do you say to 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 those as very helpful. It's a complete 90 degree or 360 degree change. Despair, anxiety, shame, thinking I am shame, thinking I have no self esteem, thinking I can't do this, that's okay. Because as soon as you say that's okay, as soon as you can admit you're feeling that you've controlled it, you've now promised no self power back. Yeah, you've got the power back. You've shifted the power balance. So instead of this is now in the nonconscious, it's this former, it's the five year old, it's gone through the years, whatever, and there's been this. And I'm not saying you did this. But there may have been a period that you suppressed because you didn't know how to process it till maybe 15, 16, 17, when you were getting more cognitive, metacognitively able and started seeing things, maybe it was older. Very often it hits around between 1822 where early childhood trauma, where we start seeing those patterns manifesting and a bit of awareness coming. So now that when this comes into consciousness in the brain, this thing is now weakened. So these protein branches which are the memories and the emotions, the data of the event which was that right, is now weakened. So the minute I through my tears say, okay, I feel, I feel shame, I feel like I've got no self esteem, I feel like I'm useless and I'm ugly and I'm this and I'm that and I can't ever achieve anything. The minute I can accept that, I can look at that objectively, pilot, co pilot. And the co pilot can say, what do you feel? I feel okay, let's now see if that's real. And that whole calm, just the way I'm speaking, calm. It's okay, own it. It's fine, it's okay. Now we can fix it. That's weakened these chemical bonds, protein bonds. I've started changing the structure in my brain. I've now shifted 1400 neurophysiological responses, responses to work for me instead of against me. I've now started recreating balance in the brain. I've increased blood flow. So I'm setting myself up to be more resilient, to do the very hard work of unpacking. And it gets worse before it gets better. And the, the one of the really good things that I have presented in, in my work and in, in this book is to, to know that scientifically I've shown that even if you feel worse, which you will when you unpack this and you start seeing stuff that you sort of rest, it's terrible, it's heartbreaking, it can make you feel like you just want to die.
- [79:55]
Lewis Howes
That's how I felt when I started talking about it. I was like, this is the scariest, hardest thing that I've ever done. I'd ra. I almost rather die. Like is the feeling that you have. You're like, if anyone ever knew these things about me, if I had to truly face these things, it's the most scary, challenging thing I've ever emotionally had to deal with. And it feels, feels like you're dying. I don't know. I mean, yeah, 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 process this and if people knew this about me.
- [80:29]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Yeah.
- [80:29]
Lewis Howes
How could they ever accept me? How could they ever love me? I'm going to be alone for the rest of my life. Like your mind. My mind went through these thoughts.
- [80:36]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Yeah.
- [80:36]
Lewis Howes
Yeah.
- [80:36]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
And there's like no meaning and there's no purpose and what can you do? And it's a waste of time and I can't live with myself like this. And it's so terrible. And I just can't do this. And then you start rejecting people around you or you make wrong. It's totally normal. That is normal. You need to accept that about the process. It will get worse before it gets better. And that's okay. And that's totally what you've gone through is normal. And we can't go and label that and medicate that. Then I invalidate your experience by you being able to talk about your experience. This format of having a podcast where around the world now where people are being much more vulnerable and opening, it's bringing this into the open and it's enabling us to then be able to weaken that. You've shifted the power balance and it does get worse. As you said, you want to die. It's so bad. But then the shift starts happening because look where you are today. A shift happens at some point when it really gets down. Where you may even have tried to commit suicide or you may even have got to the point where this is it, I'm out of here. Or something traumatic, really traumatic. And then you suddenly there's that shift. Is that awareness. And then you can start. Start rebuilding. And you know that is a time process and that's. That shift is real. It's what you asked me about. What would you say to someone who's in that state? Where do you start? You start by giving yourself permission. You start by getting into the co pilot. Pilot seat, by letting that pilot fly like a maniac and you know, crash the plane. It's a time capsule. You can get that plane going again. But helping, leaning on the power and the comfort of the co pilot to say, I'm really scared of that. I don't want to land my plane. You land. But I will. And you land your plane and then you take out your spades and you start the process of getting to eventually digging this whole thing up and slowly as you're ready. That's why I say 15 to 45 minutes a day. You don't do longer, you do a little bit at a time and you do as many cycles as you need. And eventually it gets to the point where you have reconceptualized.
- [82:26]
Lewis Howes
How do we, I mean, how do we truly heal the trauma of the past that causes a lot of our thoughts? Because I hear, like the hearing you say that, I'm feeling the traumas, the memories of the past that we had from the event. And we're holding onto the memory, the idea, the thought of the event. And sometimes we, we. And a lot of the times I would go to say, you know, I'll speak for myself. And I'm, I'm thinking most of us, probably an event happens and our memories after decades and years build it up into something bigger and more extreme. Potentially the event actually was. And we're hoping, holding on to now, our mind is coming up with memories that weren't even real that caused this reaction in us. So how do we really. Is it healing the trauma of the past? Is it healing the memory of the past? Is it healing all of it? What should we do? Is it only through therapy? Can we do it alone? Through journaling?
- [83:20]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
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 six, some sort of support system. If you can get to therapy, it will definitely help. But therapy is a catalyst. It's not actually. And it's your place where you can unpack the pain and get the guidance for how to manage the next step. But you're still living with yourself 24 7.
- [83:38]
Lewis Howes
You got to do the work.
- [83:39]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
You've got to do the work. And this is where having a system of mind management is so vital. So what you've described is the whole thought tree and that thought tree. Let's take the incident of what you went through as a child and that would have been, you know, what the actual incident would have been is the.
- [83:55]
Lewis Howes
Route and then your.
- [83:56]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
The event and, and the details and the timing and the all the everything. And that then builds your perspective of how you viewed yourself and how you viewed this whole, which this is your emotions and the data and that manifested in how you actually lived your life.
- [84:10]
Lewis Howes
Yeah.
- [84:11]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
So that's a trauma from the past. There's no guilt in this, even though it's toxic because that's all you could do to survive. It's a coping mechanism. So this toxic tree is a coping mechanism. So we've got this inbuilt thing in our mind and our brain that in or system that enables us, because this should wipe you out. You shouldn't even be alive kind of thing, if you look at the natural biology. But there's this protective system in place that kind of cocoons it for a season until you're ready to deal with it. So that's, you know, there. And then something will come in event will come in your life where now you have to deal with it. And sometimes we ignore that. We ignored it a few times before we do. And then eventually. So there's kind of a cocoon. So it's protective, so it is damaging. But because you're not ready to deal with it, it's not wiping you out. It's still causing problems. It's still creating a few shock waves there in the ground and that kind of thing. But when you're ready to, you know, then suddenly something will happen in your life. And it's being put. It's slowly infiltrating. It's the slow infiltration that. So it's sending out little tendrils, you know, it's growing, that you're still surviving, but things are getting worse and worse. And eventually that. Eventually this cocoon starts breaking down and it explodes in your mentally, physically, in something in a relationship, in a work environment, in a. It builds, it cascades and little things happen. And eventually there's a big explosion. That's this thing, the cocoon, starting to come off. As you are maturing and getting older and doing more with your life and experiencing more. This has to then get sorted out. So your body gets to a point where it has to reject it. It has to. The pus has to go. For want of an awful analogy, but it's a good example. At some point you. It can't stay there anymore. And that's when it explodes. And when it explodes, these are all the memories as you recall it. This is the concept of the abuse as a child. That's the thought. This is the detail of the story. And that's how you experienced it. And so you've got to go from your. The signal back to the data here.
- [86:04]
Lewis Howes
How you experience it back to the actual moment. Yeah.
- [86:07]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
And then you reconceptualize. 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 because you said it earlier. You can talk about it now without falling apart. But at some point, you could not talk about it at all.
- [86:19]
Lewis Howes
And so you rewrite the script.
- [86:21]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Yeah, you rewrite and that. And that takes time. That takes these cycles of 63 days. You literally re. Reconceptualization is rewriting the script. So very. Eventually this goes. You then have this and that now instead of being toxic, is. Can you see? Some of these leaves are shining a little brighter than the others? Okay, so there is that in that it's reconceptualized. I can now talk about it. I can now. It's. That'll make you cry. But you've now turned it into a part of your. You've. You've redesigned it. You've. It's the. It's the beautiful new space. That's how it was. But now you. You've. You've made it work for you instead of against you. So that is then the trauma of the past, which is there's no excusing that. There's no forgiveness even in that. But you need to be released. Because if you still connected to that trauma kept there keeps you connected in the quantum world literally to the. To the abuser. So until we release. So there's a connection. So you literally. Here's your brain, here's that person maybe 10,000 miles away, but because of it. Entanglement in quantum physics, there's no space, time, dimension, and there's. Because of. That's a toxic entanglement. But when particles are entangled, and you may have heard of this somewhere with someone saying this, but when two particles are put in a relationship in quantum physics experiments, no matter how far apart they are shot, they still are in relationship. So this one turns this way, this one will turn this way. So until you release, until you reconceptualize, you still connected. So that will always be controlling you. So when we talk about. People say forgiveness, I think release is a better word because how do you forgive these? These going through this process over time, as you reconceptualize, you slowly cutting the ties. So as you. So by the time it's in this format, no longer is that invisible tie there. You know that you've cut the tie when you can actually talk about it and you're not excusing that person's behavior that can never actually. What they've done, can never be forgiven if you think of it, but you can release it. So we talk about forgiveness as being part of a healing, but we've got to. I had this discussion with someone the other day. We've got to be very careful of using the term forgiveness loosely. Because when someone's done something wrong, that wrongness, even whatever you've done wrong to someone. That wrongness is always there. What is forgiven is what, what's. What should be done is we should release. We should realize that that was a moment in time, it was wrong. The person needs to own it. But it's not your responsibility to make that person own it. They have to unpack that wrongness and kind of work through that. What you have to do is be released, released from it, and to put that into your past. And that's kind of easier thing to do because a lot of people keep getting stuck because they think, I can't forgive, I can't forgive. How can I forgive someone who's. How do you forgive someone who's raped you? How does your parents forgive someone who's hurt their child? You know, how do you, how does the. How, how does. When someone's murdered, you know that. I'm not saying that you have to keep that and not, you know, the. You, you have to get, you have to release yourself from that. And you have to accept that that event, maybe that person was operating out of trauma. So them doing that was trauma driven. And it doesn't make it right. It makes it. But we can't ignore it. And what I think we've also tried to do with a lot of sort of psychological approaches is, oh, forgive. Especially in the religious community, forgiveness. It's all gone. It's all gone away. It hasn't. It's still there. It's part of your story. I think the Kintsugi principle explains it the best. You know the Kintsugi principle, the Japanese art, when a vase shatters to the ground and it's in a thousand pieces, they don't sweep the pieces away. When you were raped as a child, your life was shattered, okay, but you didn't sweep the pieces away. Every. What they did was they collect every piece. And they meticulously rebuilt the vase with gold lacquer and platinum. So now you have this beautiful new vase with all the gold and platinum represents what you've gone through. It's enriched you who you are as a person. Now you are helping others through your story. You are teaching others. You have. You as a leader, are one of the 3% only that are enabling others to talk about their trauma. Only 3% of leaders are talking about mental health. 3% globally. That's terrible. So if we as leaders don't talk about it, how do we give permission to those that are following to talk about it? So as a leader, as you talk, you've now taken the Kintsugi principle. You are showing us your gold cracks, the shining light, the leaves and it's the the trauma is shocking. We never forgive. That is wrong. We can never say that's right. It's never right. But what you've done with it is right. And now you can turn it into helping others go into greatness. Yeah, that's kind of the the transformation.
- [90:48]
Lewis Howes
Wow. I'm curious. How do we what's the process of protecting our mental health on a daily basis? Whether we've it sounds like first we need to be aware of and do the process of healing the past or the the traumatic memories of the past, however you want to call it. But what's the process of protecting the present and the future so that we don't fall back into a dark space that kind of keeps us there for so long?
- [91:12]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Absolutely.
- [91:13]
Lewis Howes
Is there a process you recommend?
- [91:15]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
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- [94:15]
Lewis Howes
What does that mean?
- [94:16]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
A new skill or a new every day new data. So for me I will take my scientific research every, every day I spend at least an hour looking at neuroscientific or scientific studies related to my field of work. Studying new information, the latest. So I study it to the point where I could actually give a lecture on it or I could write an exam on it. So I take the five steps and I study information every day. When you wake up, you have millions of new baby nerve cells and nerve cells look like trees and they are waiting for you to be to like lattices to strengthen the new cells, the new thoughts that you build into the the neurons of your brain, these little branches, these thoughts and if you don't use them, they Become toxic waste. So that affects your sleep at the end of the day and affects your dreams. And cumulatively over time they affect your health of your brain. So when you, when you brain build, it's like cleaning your teeth. If you don't clean your teeth every day, eventually you're going to have a real problem with your teeth and your brain because it's going to cause all kinds of issues in your body and so on. Same thing with brain building. Brain building builds mental and physical resilience. So by learning something, we actually think deeply. When you neurocycle to brain build, what I'm doing is getting you to think super deeply. And when you think deeply, you make all these great things happen in the brain. The left, right side oxygen and all that stuff and you, and that's the only way you can actually grab those new, those new baby dendrites. They respond to deep thinking, they don't respond to shallow thinking, they don't respond to scanning through headlines and hurry sickness and rush, rush, rush and data capturing and never doing anything. They respond to, oh that's scan the headlines, that interests me. Let me read that article and study it as though I'm going to write an exam or I'm reading this great book or take my book and study it. You know, study that every day for an hour. You'll get, you'll not only get the tools but you'll be building your brain, whatever. Take anything you're interested in. If you love cooking, if you love whatever you are 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. All my patients, when they came into my practice, I would obviously evaluate and do all that kind of thing. We work out sort of where the issues were. But we would always do brain building first. Sometimes for a few sessions I would only do brain building and get them to a state where I could recognize they're starting to get more resilient and self regulated. Then we would start doing the trauma work and the learning disability work and the work with trauma, you know, working with traumatic brain injury. We would, and in fact all the traumatic brain injury and stroke work that I would do with my patients, like if I was working with someone like with your dad went through, I would teach the, the patient and the family brain building. We would take, what are you interested in? And like if your dad was interested let's say in whatever, let's say he was interested in, I don't know. What was your dad interested in?
- [96:55]
Lewis Howes
He's into playing piano, singing, sports, running. Yeah.
- [96:59]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Okay, so you could take maybe sports and you could then use the brain building. You can do this with him now. You can take the brain building and take out sports. And you don't just read it, but you actually study it. You do the first five steps and you studied as though you are now going to give a lecture. Dad, you're going to now teach this. That's what I would do with my patients. And then we would slowly restore function because that changes them. It orders the gravitational fields, orders the brain changes and directs the neuroplasticity and healing comes and you start transforming. I had CEOs of top companies in South Africa have terrible car accidents and completely lose their functionality. Not be to able, able to function, do this brain building in the whole over a period of time and go back and become something else. So like the one guy was an engineer but went into management and became the CEO of a huge corporation, had this terrible car accident, ended up going back and becoming a top engineer with brain damage. So I mean like I've had pilots that at 82 that couldn't fly anymore, that have become accountants. I mean I can tell you story after story when I'm in the most distressed state. Like that night of acute trauma that I told you about, besides the glucose monitoring, besides doing the neurocycling, what did I do? I did brain building. I sat there brain building to calm myself down in that state. So I would shift between the, the management neurocycle to the brain building neuro.
- [98:21]
Lewis Howes
Cycle to try to learn and understand something. Yeah.
- [98:23]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
And that, but that built resilience. So it calmed me down. If I'm worked up, I'll go to brain building. If I'm really out of it and I'm not managing and I'm feeling, feeling like I'm getting super anxious or depressed or something. I will even go into 10 minutes of brain building. I'll grab a study, study it, do the brain building and I've immediately increased my resilience.
- [98:40]
Lewis Howes
Does brain building only happen when you're studying and learning something or is it more of like okay, I'm gonna play like ping pong or play a sport or do an activity to help like hand eye coordination?
- [98:51]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Yes. No, definitely you can do that too. So ping pong is fantastic for the brain. You know, anything that really, really challenges the brain to coordinate is definitely going to be a brain building exercise. So you know, racquetball, tennis, ping pong you know, things that are, whatever. Yeah, yeah, you can do those two. So do those, those are more physical related. So I would balance, I would balance the physical with the mental so that you do the cognitive as well. I mean both are mental. I shouldn't say that. Sort of text and physical make sure that you break with a combination.
- [99:24]
Lewis Howes
You know, I feel like a lot of parents in general don't have the tools to have conversations with their kids around mental health. You know, I don't remember much of my parents, although they're amazing. I don't remember us talking about mental health and these, these challenges that might arise, these emotions and these feelings that might arise for us at different times in the ways of how to manage it properly as like the tools that are now being discovered and researched like you have today. What conversations should parents be having with their kids around mental health in order to make them feel safe, seen and loved with the confusion that they have maybe as teenagers or young adults in today's world.
- [100:09]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
I love your question and it's so important we should be doing this from babies. So when child comes home from school and they may be three or four years old and they sad, they don't have the language. But to be able to actually notice and validate I see you feeling sad. Why are you sad? And what you know, give them toys to be able to act out the older they get. Never overlook a child's emotion. Always validate I see you sad. Do you want to talk about it? I see you. So it's, it's I see you. Do you notice I'm saying I see you and you can find your own wording of that. But it's just to acknowledge which validates and never to judge or say oh, you don't need to feel like that. What parents do a lot unintentionally, I'm a parent of four. I did it even with all my knowledge I have. So we make mental mess, as I say we make mental messes all the time. But it's very important not someone your child comes to you and says I I'm really worried. And, and then you say what are you worried about? I'm worried about this one doing something that you think is totally irrelevant. Oh, that's not so bad. You don't have to worry about that. That is the worst thing you can do to a child because what you've done is invalidate something that for them is now they feel shame. So now they've got this confusion of worry. They don't know how to Process it. And you know what, parents do that.
- [101:20]
Lewis Howes
And you haven't accepted their feelings or their thoughts.
- [101:22]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
That's it. So it's very important, even if you don't think that, that it's valid, you're not helping them. Saying, and I know it's done often with the intention of, oh, it's not so bad, it'll be okay, okay, calm down, don't do that. It's, it's rather sit down and embrace it. Say, okay, let's talk about how you're feeling. Why do you think you go through the five steps I've actually got in my NeuroCycle app? I've got a whole thing on how to use neurocycling for children. And I'm writing, I've written books in the past, but now we're doing the updated versions of neuro cycling for Babini tots, Neuro cycling for young kids, teenagers, whatever. So exactly how to have the conversations. But it's openness. One of the things that I have as a parent and I mean I've worked with, I used to do a lot of family therapy when I practice and as the advice I always gave parents and that I've tried to apply as much as possible is keep the environment open, keep it no matter what. Your kids, if 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're going to talk about them somewhere else. And that goes for emotions too. We've got to allow our kids to say, I am feeling depressed. The day other day, someone said, how do I help my child not be a professor of depression? And it was quite an interesting way of phrasing it. And my response to that was, well, help them process it. If they're a professor of depression, what can you learn from them? If you feel that they are so good at depression, that's a symptom or a signal of something going on. You need to acknowledge that and say, I see you feeling depressed. Can you explain more? And then work through the whole, get those, you know, the five steps, work through it system systematically. You can use a lot of visuals with kids. I mean, I've been doing this with kids when I was practicing and training in schools and things as young as three. And I would take the brain, listen, three year olds respond to this. They will. And I'll say, this is in your brain. And we'll take a tree. Okay, so now this is this happy tree, the sad tree. And you work through. Okay, what are you feeling? What's the. What's the sad. Give me. And you give them the words. And then, let's see, what are you doing? And you work through, systematically through the process. And you say, okay, so this is where. And it might take a few days. Same. So it's the same process, but you're orientating them to their level. And then what you're doing is you're modeling what to do at the same time. Don't hide your feelings as a parent. You know, there's so much.
- [103:27]
Lewis Howes
Don't act perfect.
- [103:29]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
No, because it's in the mess that they see your parent grow. Mess is how they learn. So you make a mess. You get mad at your child for no reason, and then you feel guilt and condemnation. Don't do that. If you get mad, it's. Explain why you're mad. Say, I'm really mad. I'm sorry I said the wrong thing. I was. I didn't mean to do that. This is why I did it. But this thing that we mustn't let a child grow up. Oh, you're the mother. You chose to have me, therefore you've got to be perfect. And if you fail, you've messed up my life forever. That's not healthy for a child. And that's what happens. And it's bad for the parent and the child and all the parents pretending, oh, no, everything's fine. And, you know, meanwhile, behind closed doors, you and your husband are having a huge fight or you and your wife are having. That's so confusing. When my husband and I have an argument. We, the kids grew up knowing why. We explained, okay, we were wrong. We shouldn't have said this. This is why we argued, and this is our solution. You know, and it's so. It's that authenticity and that honesty and. And you know what? They may not like it always because it can be quite scary, but life is scary. And you've got to give. You've got to give people, your kids the tools to know that, hey, this is how I'm managing it. And I'm an adult, and I still battle. So when they're an adult and they battling, they don't think, oh, gosh, I'm an adult. I'm supposed to be. Be like my mother who was perfect. No, my mother still cries. My dad still gets upset. But they've got a management plan. So it's that authenticity and honesty. Does that answer the question?
- [104:45]
Lewis Howes
Absolutely. I've got a couple final questions for you. This has been Fascinating. Really inspired by all this and I can't wait to dive in more in the book Cleaning up your mental 5 simple scientifically proven steps to reduce anxiety, stress and toxic thinking. So make sure you guys get the book. Look, if you haven't got it yet, this is going to be really powerful and helpful for you, for a family member, for a friend. So make sure to check this out. Really inspired by this.
- [105:13]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Thank you.
- [105:14]
Lewis Howes
You've been doing this work for what, three decades now?
- [105:16]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Nearly four, 38 years now.
- [105:19]
Lewis Howes
So almost four decades you've been doing this work and research and as a practitioner as well, applying this in the real world. What is the biggest challenge you still face today? Even, even knowing all of these practices and awareness around the brain, the mind, thoughts, thinking, memory, all this stuff? What's the challenge you still face as a human being with four decades of experience?
- [105:44]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
The challenge that, personally, it's, I wish I could manage it 24 7. And that's my goal because I know it works and when it does, and I get totally frustrated when I think, what, why didn't I just use the neurocycle? It's got to the point in our family where if I would like. I actually went to my husband yesterday, I was really like worked up about something. He said, well, why aren't you neuro cycling? Don't say that to me. I don't feel like neuro cycling. I want to, I just want to have a moan, you know, that kind of thing. But yeah, essentially it's true, because I had to. I actually got myself back under control. So my greatest, the greatest hard, probably the hardest thing to do is to watch people in pain when I. That 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, not probably, you can't do that. It's made me. My weakness is I now want to fix everything and everyone and if I can't, I think, what have I done wrong? So I have to keep reminding myself all the time that I can't, I can only. You cannot fix anyone else, but you can only support them. So that's a very big challenge for me because I can see, hey, just do this, even to myself, do that. You will be fine afterwards. You'll, you'll, you'll, you'll get through this. You know, as that saying goes, this too shall pass when you know how to manage it. So that's, yeah, that's for me, a big challenge. And in terms of globally, the narrative of mental health. We just have to stop telling people that they are brain damaged when they are just being normal humans. That's a huge challenge.
- [107:07]
Lewis Howes
This is awesome. I'm really glad we had this conversation.
- [107:10]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Thank you so much.
- [107:11]
Lewis Howes
This question I ask everyone towards the end is called the three truths question. So I'd like you to imagine it's your last day on earth, many years away from now and you get to accomplish all your goals and dreams. They all, they all come true. But eventually you gotta, you gotta go to the next place, you gotta leave this earth and you gotta take all of your work with you, all of your research, all of your books, your, you know, this interview. It's got to go with you to the next place.
- [107:35]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
But you get to especially.
- [107:36]
Lewis Howes
Yeah, exactly. But you got. But you get to leave behind three lessons that you would share with the world. This is all we would have to remember you by. Are these three lessons lessons or what I like to call three truths? What would you say you would share.
- [107:51]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
That the mind is something 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 I would leave the system behind. I'd say listen, learn, learn to manage your mind, use the neurocycle, develop it further, whatever. But that's what I would. And the fact that your mind is that your mind is always with you. If you don't get your mind under control, everything else is just wind addressing. We have to. That would really. So that would be sort of the main thing. And then the how to. I would definitely leave behind, do this and develop it, grow it further, make it even better than what I've done. But this is what I can offer humanity is this has hard managed mind. And then the, then the philosophy. The third thing I'd leave behind is three words, three lessons that psychologist Williams James is quoted often as saying. And that's three things in life. What's so important. Be kind, be kind, be kind to yourself, to others. And those three things. I think we'd be pretty well equipped to have a decent, peaceful, realistic existence.
- [108:53]
Lewis Howes
Absolutely. Those are beautiful truths, Caroline. I appreciate that. I want to acknowledge you Caroline, for a moment because this has been very inspiring and eye opening. And I now for the nearly four decades of constant curiosity, constant research and dedication to understanding the mind and the complicated nuances of the mind, of the mind, body connection of the mind, brain connection of quantum physics and all the things surrounding the energetic field of the mind. It's something I've been fascinated with my entire life as a young child growing up, learning about it. But it's something that I've been more curious about. 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 human beings can understand their minds. I really acknowledge you for doing the work, showing up consistently and providing and having the passion you have to share this information. I think it's really inspiring. So I acknowledge you for all of it.
- [109:58]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Thank you. That's so kind of you. Appreciate it.
- [110:00]
Lewis Howes
I want to remind everyone again, get the book cleaning up your mental mess. Make sure you check it out. Right now you are on social media. You do a lot on Instagram. I see Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, DrCaroline, leaf on pretty much everywhere. And also your website is just Dr. Caroline leaf.com just drleaf.com drleaf.com it's got all your information, your books, all the different stuff over there. So make sure people check out Dr. Leaf.com. this a final question. Yeah, go ahead.
- [110:31]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
I have, I have a podcast as well called cleaning up your mental mess. So that's another place. And then. And you, I want to interview you as soon as possible on there as well. I'd love to have your story be fantastic.
- [110:42]
Lewis Howes
For sure. Would love to. Yeah. I'm always down to. To do the work. If anyone wants to analyze me and do sessions with me, I'm in. So.
- [110:49]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Oh, you have such a wonderful story.
- [110:51]
Lewis Howes
I appreciate it.
- [110:52]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Thank you.
- [110:53]
Lewis Howes
My. My final question is what's your definition of. Of greatness?
- [110:57]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
I think you know my answer to that. My definition of greatness is when you start getting to grips with understanding how you think, feel and choose, then you start, you start seeing greatness because there's something you can do that no one else can do. And when you recognize that there's something that you can do that no one else can do, which, which is your mind, it's what you doing. It's your perception. Then there's no envy or jealousy. There's no desire to be like someone else. Competition goes because you can't be competed with because no one can do what you can do. So everyone is in that same boat so suddenly now if you move from competition to enhancement and that is key. So when we enhance each other, that's when we really grow as humanity.
- [111:36]
Lewis Howes
I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's. Episode with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally as well as ad free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our greatness+channel exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as well. Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review. I really love hearing feedback from you and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve of you moving forward. And I want to remind you if no one has told you lately that you are loved, you are worthy and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.
- [112:31]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
Did you know 39% of teen drivers admit to texting while driving? Even scarier, those who text are more likely to speed and run red lights. Shockingly, 94% know it's dangerous, but do it anyway. As a parent, you can't always be in the car, but you can stay connected to their safety with Greenlight Infinity's driving reports. Monitor their driving habits, see if they're using their phone, speeding and more. These reports provide real data for meaningful conversations about safety. Plus, with weekly updates, you can track their progress over time. Help keep your teens safe. Sign up for Greenlight Infinity@Greenlight.com podcast DSW's semi annual sale is fast take 50% off all clearance shoes in stores for a limited time. Literally every single clearance item at your designer shoe warehouse store is on sale right now. Sneakers, boots, dress shoes.
- [113:17]
Lewis Howes
If they're on the clearance racks, they're 50% off.
- [113:20]
Dr. Caroline Leaf
So what are you waiting for? Don't sleep on these savings. Get to DSW asap. It's all or nothing, people. Shop the DSW Semi Annual Sale today.