NeuroCycle Workshop with Dr. Caroline Leaf

[Music] um [Music] um [Music] [Music] [Music] this is the beginning of my virtual book tour so i'm so excited to spend this time with you thank you for taking this time to spend with me too so that i can help you neuro cycle neuro cycling is one of the most amazing things that you're going to learn because it basically helps you manage your mind and if you don't manage your mind then your mind is going to be a mess and if everything's a mess if your mind's a mess everything's amazed so let me start by saying that this is the virtual book tour is about this book my new book cleaning up your mental mess five simple scientifically proven steps to reduce anxiety stress and toxic thinking this is based on 38 years of cumulative research over the past almost three decades from a clinical from our 25 years in clinical practice and 38 years in this field i have been researching the questions of what is mind what are thoughts what are emotions what are memories how do they work what's the brain what's this mind brain connection is there a difference and the most important question do you have any level of control over your thoughts which are in your mind which are the results of your mind working so therefore do you have control over your mind and the answer is yes and that's what i'm so excited to tell you and teach you in this book and the introduction is in this workshop so right now if you haven't already pre-ordered this book go now and pre-order this book go to cleaning up your mental mess.com or go to doctorleaf.com pre-order the book from wherever you buy books and then make sure you come back and register your pre-order at cleaningupyourmentalmess.com and then you get access to the most wonderful pre-order bonuses which will include three weeks very similar to this workshop that we're doing now plus you're going to get free chapters for example how to make an extra chapter on how to manage stress an extra chapter for kids how to help your kids in your cycle you're going to get a month free on my neuro cycle app which is the audio version well it's the literally more than the audio version it's literally therapy of how to neuro cycle through these cycles of 63 days and manage all kinds of things like grief and anger anxiety and people pleasing so there's a lot of different guides in that app but loads and loads of material to help you in the moment by moment things of daily life you're also going to get access to a downloadable workshop amazing pre-order bonuses but you can only get that if you pre-order so go pre-order your book now and then once you've got your book this particular session is going to be on and you'll be accessible on my youtube channel so you can go and follow me register on my youtube channel you'll be able to then re-watch this work this workshop with your book and you'll be able to get so much more out of it and you can also see it on facebook so there's so much that we are trying to give you to help you to manage your mind listen guys considering that you can go three weeks without food yes you can i know you don't we don't think that three weeks without food three days without water three minutes without oxygen but you don't even go three seconds without your mind working your mind is always working regardless whether you like it or not your mind is always working so either you manage the way your mind is working and therefore manage your life or you just make you just let it kind of go through in this erratic way and in that when that happens then your mind's a mess and your life's a mess so my argument or my thesis or my proposal to you is if your mind is always working if you wake up with your mind you eat with your mind you you get dressed with your mind you're watching this workshop with your mind you have your conversations with your family with your mind you do your work with your mind you do your work out with your mind you go to sleep with your mind if you are always using your mind then don't you want to know how to manage it because it's your mind that then builds the thoughts into your brain and in your body and your and in the energy fields of your mind and we learn about that in a moment and that is then influencing how you function so you're functioning what you say what you do how you how you are in your relationships how you are at work how you are in the moment by moment stuff all of that is managed by your mind so that's what is messy and erratic then those things are missing erratic now this doesn't mean when you when you learn how to neurocycle through managing your mind that it's just going to be all perfect what it means is that you will learn to manage your mind and build hope inside of you and build the sense of peace inside of you you're still going to make a mess i still make a mess i still make mental messes all the time that's why i wrote the book i think i wrote it for me most and i'll share the knowledge with you but you'll be all still make mental messes that's if you're human you have mental health issues no one's exempt we all make mental messes we can get irritated we can argue we can get worked up about work let's face it as soon as you wake up in the morning we it starts life the processing of life begins we are immersed in the experience of aliveness and of the experiences of life and they are changing moment by moment and what do you what does that actually mean you wake up you open your eyes and you maybe grab your phone and you read a text from your boss or your friend or you scroll instagram and suddenly you see something that makes you feel like you've got imposter syndrome or the email from your boss makes you freak out because you're not panicking or your your kids come in the room and they screaming and fighting or i don't know what but things happen then you've got to get up and get through the day your mind is already processing each of those things every few every and you're aware of this every 10 seconds but your mind is processing each of these things at 400 billion actions per second on an unconscious level and when i say your mind is processing these things it's your mind that takes in this experience and thinks and and the processing action is thinking feeling choosing and then it builds this this is an energy force this thinking feeling choosing thing that you are doing is an energy force and here i've got a model of the the brain and the body so the thinking the mind is your aliveness your energy field around your brain and through your brain and your body so here you wake up here you read the email it's your mind that information comes in as electromagnetic light signals you think feel chews that goes through your brain and you use your brain to convert that into little thoughts inside of your brain so if it's a toxic if it's a toxic experience then it's these toxic thoughts that are all these misfolded proteins and your brain doesn't like that so your immune system starts freaking out and your brain starts getting inflamed and all kinds of things go wrong in your brain and body instantly but if it's a healthy response if you've managed your mind you're going to build a nice healthy thought and thoughts do look like trees that's why i use this analogy so as a tree has roots so so does the thought have roots but we'll speak about the structure of thoughts in a moment this is just the general concept and the general introduction of why we need mind management so then the next instance happens and then the next instance everything you're going through is building into your brain and in fact during the course of the day you're gonna build somewhere between eight to ten thousand and maybe more thoughts in response to around about eight to ten thousand experiences that you will have during the day and that's just today and in building those you're going to bring up a whole bunch of other thoughts that already exist inside of your brain in the non-conscious level because you've been building thoughts with your mind since you're at a certain stage in the womb right up to today so you've got massive massive forests in your in your brain and your mind of all your experiences stored as thoughts in your brain and your mind and your body so as you are listening to me now and building this information into your brain as a thought tree and you're building a good thought because i'm telling you good stuff you're doing that at 400 billion actions per second but this building of this information is being influenced by all kinds of other thoughts popping up so maybe if i say the word trauma a toxic thought will pop up and as i'm saying whatever i'm saying to you you are using your past experience in other words the thoughts that are really in your head to help you understand what i'm saying and to make sense and linking the thoughts together and that's you that so that is about three times the amount of what you have that you're building so if you're building around eight to ten thousand thoughts and in building those you draw on three times the amount that means you have in any one day anything up to 40 000 thoughts going through your head and if you and you're brilliant i just want to tell you probably thinking oh no wonder i feel so crazy no wonder my head's so full no wonder i always feel like stuck well let me tell you that you are so brilliant that your brain is designed to handle that your body is designed to handle that but the only way that they handle it properly the only way that your brain and body respond like they should is if your mind is being managed if your mic so this is happening regardless okay i keep saying that okay you don't even go three seconds without thinking whether you're managing or not you still your mind is still in action so if you've got all this action happening if your mind is managed you can then manage this process because as i show in the beginning part of my book i have in the first half of my book i have put my most recent clinical trials summarized in a really simple easy way so that you can understand the science of what happens when we have this mental mess in our mind what actually happens in the brain and the body so that mind brain integration or what is the effect of thoughts on for example metabolism what is the effect of our thinking toxic thinking on our immune system on our heart on our brain on our cardiovascular system on our hormones on our skin on all the different parts of your lungs your kidneys your total functioning your total systemic functioning even down to the level of your dna so i looked at certain different what we call biomarkers like things that are in your blood for example your cortisol and homocysteine and acth indeed adhea various different blood biomarkers and dna biomarkers to look at what is the impact of toxic thinking on your brain and body and can you change that so and then i also looked inside the brain using the neuroscientific technique of the qeg which looks at the energetic response of the brain so it looks at how the different waves of the brain and and i and i talk i give i give lots of explanations and diagrams and everything to understand but your brain has these different waves like you have waves in the sea and the waves are what we call delta theta alpha beta high beta and gamma and they should flow like the waves in the sea from the big swells of the deep the deeper parts of the sweet sea to the like slightly less well there's deep swells to the building up of the wave to the crease to the crashing on the beach and in the little ripple then it all sucks back in again we want that kind of wave going through the brain which generates a very peaceful wave through the rest of the body so i show in my clinical trials that when we manage our mind which was our experimental group were tested with all these different things and they were given the neuro cycle in the app form which is the con which is basically exactly what's in here and they we found that they at the beginning of the study their blood marks were off they had inflammation they were vulnerable to disease they were they biological ages in which in other words the health of these cells and you're made of cells which then make up your brain and body and everything else but the health of these cells was so bad that some of my subjects in the in at the beginning of the study the biological age which is the age of your cells and organs was up to 30 years older than their actual age and what that meant was that they were in their 30s or 40s but they had bodies of a 60 or 70 year old a sickly 60 or 70 year old now if you're sitting at 30 and you have a sickly body of a 60 to 70 year old and you're not managing your mind what you've done is you've increased vulnerability you've increased vulnerability to disease because of the load immune response we see that without mind management your immunity can drop by up to 60 percent now that's scary i mean considering we're living in this climate of covert and we're living in this where we need our immune system strong and just in general bacteria and and diseases and things we need strong immune systems and your mind affects your immune system affects your metabolism within seconds of being toxically unmanaged having a toxicly unmanaged mind your glucose levels can plummet through the roof which means your cortisol plummets through the roof which means your metabolism is affected and all these cascading things will happen but within seconds using the neurocycle you can change that and you can change the biological age of your body i showed in cycles of three weeks so that within nine weeks you can men you can change the biological status of your body and this is an ongoing process i'm not talking about a one-off thing i'm talking about an ongoing process mind management is a skill that we have the ability to develop and it's linked to self-regulation and neuroscience shows us that we can self-regulate every 10 seconds which means that i'm not asking you to watch your watch every 10 seconds what it means is that you can actually manage you when you're awake when you're conscious you can constantly be managing how you are thinking and feeling and choosing to make sure that you're not making a mental mess and that's what the neuro cycle teaches you to do the more you use it the more self-regulated you get so i'm at the point in my life we have developed this use it for these years and now and practice using it and i still make a mental mess but here's the difference i in the past would have maybe have something that upset me and then i would let it penetrate through the day maybe the week and it would just kind of be this hovering thing that was reflecting all my ability to function on a high level and then when an acute trauma happens which it does we can't control the events and circumstances of life but we can control our reactions when that happens then that then that kind of throws everything else off and you get even worse okay and this can be a cascading cycle so what i now find in my own life is that i can get things under control so much quicker so instead of it lasting for hours and days and weeks and months i can get things under control within a few minutes and if i see i have a pattern in my life that i keep responding in a certain way to certain triggers and it's affecting me on a mental and physical level and it's affecting my work and it's affecting my relationships then i recognize that as a pattern and i can work on it in these cycles of 63 days and that's what this book is going to teach you you see what we see in this current environment is some scary stuff but now i'm going to move to the slideshow just to start helping you understand a little bit of the stuff that i'm sharing so toxic thoughts can be like a virus now i'm going to show you a toxic tree and we're going to look back at this toxic tree and we'll look back at the slide it's going to quickly show you this toxic tree that i'm holding so this toxic tree when you is is basically a representation of a thought but when we and i'm really gonna have a deeper look at what a thought is in a moment but i just want you to understand that thoughts are real things that you build these into your brain with your mind and that this is what our brain our brain is wired for survival and survival looks like this covert is is threatening our survival a virus and bacteria threatens our survival so that's why the immune system is in our brain in our body to then send out immune factors t lymphocytes b lymphocytes macrophages etc to fight this so that brings inflammation in the area and inflammation then allows your body to heal and then the inflammation goes away now a toxic thought is recognized by the immune system in exactly the same way so that's so that's really important that we understand that a toxic thought is as real to your brain and your brain's immune system and your body's immune system as a virus which means that threaten survival which means we can't just keep them if you just suppress and push things down it's going to explode in some way physically and mentally and both at some point because they are volcanic these are volcanic in nature okay so let's look at let's look at the next slide and what i'm going to talk to you about is how we can be empowered where there is a pathway to empowering you in this book i am empowering you to realize your sense of agency or autonomy over your mind so the neuro cycle leads it enables you to be able to look at a toxic thought and to see that toxic thought for what it is and recognize that you can manage that toxic thought and the toxic stress that it brings and in doing so you can then start seeing barriers and challenges as opportunities so this is a process of empowerment and agency that we are talking about if we look at the next slide you'll see there's just a little bit of a deeper explanation so if you have a look at the at the little graph you'll see there the little arrow going up as you increase autonomy which is what the neurocycle does you'll be much more aware of your toxic thoughts and they'll start decreasing and your toxic stress will start decreasing and things like you'll start seeing barriers as opportunities and this is how you will increase your empowerment so the more you do the neurocycle the more you're going to have that effect if you look at the next slide i now quickly want you to understand what the mind is versus what the brain is so the mind and the brain are not the same thing so here i'm holding up a skull with a brain and it's not real okay and this is not who you are we live in an era where the mind and the brain those words are used interchangeably but they're not your brain is one percent of who you are and your um your brain and your body are one percent of who you are more or less one and then one percent and your mind is 99 of who you are so now let's have a look at another model and this is the model of the body so there's the brain and the body look at yourself physically the physical that you can see and obviously with the stuff inside your brain and in the cells and all that stuff that is one percent of who you are but your mind is around and through this is the work this this research started over 120 years ago even actually earlier than that with einstein's work on photoelectric effects and photons and we just recently some nobel prize winners won the nobel prize for their working gravitational fields so what i'm talking about now is hardcore science every when you're alive you have this energetic field and electromagnetic field gravitational field around and through you if you're dead you don't have it and that gravitational field is the force that keeps the the body and the and the brain working it's all aliveness it's the mind it's your thinking feeling choosing so your thinking feeling choosing is this force that is happening now at 400 billion actions per second and taking my words and putting them into the brain as these little trees so the mind is 99 of who you are and its gravitational fields and when we have a toxic experience and a toxic reaction we get disruptions in the energetic field which then creates these kind of thoughts when we manage our mind then these kind of thoughts are then converting into healthy versions reconceptualized and then those fields which moves outside and through the brain and the body move from that to a nice wave like the waves that i described earlier on on the in the sea okay so if we look back at the slide just a quick summary you'll see that the mind is 99 of who you are it's the non-physical spiritual part of who you are it's how we it's the mind it's how we think feel choose it's so important because it's it's basically you it's your aliveness the brain is one percent of you who you are it's the physical part in the body and your brain and body collectively are made of 37 to 100 trillion cells so now if you look at the next slide which is really amazing this is a real human brain a real live person connected to how it connected to a very advanced technology and these people are thinking feeling and choosing they're alive their aliveness their their energy force the gravitational field of their unique energy force is responding to whatever the questions were that the people were asking and if you look back at the slide you'll see that the light shining through is the mind moving through the brain and the brain responding electromagnetically chemically genetically and on a quantum level and converting this thinking feeling choosing into these protein structures that are thoughts so now if we look back at the back of the screen basically what i've just described is that this energy force around the brain and the body and by the way you have yours i have mine i can't take yours you can't take mine but we can enhance each other so essentially what i'm showing you here is in on that slide is that at the moment your thinking feeling choosing is creating that firing pattern on the brain let's look back at the slide again and you'll see the firing pattern in the brain i'm going to actually show it to you again and we're going to have a look at that again talk just a little bit more you when your brain is a mess that firing pattern through the brain which is your mind this gravitational field this incredible force this aliveness that you're thinking feeling choosing is moving through your brain and your brain is responding and if it's a mess then that's a mess which means that you build the mess but you can change it this is the hope that we have you know you can change this at any point so let's have a look back um let's have a look back at the toxic thoughts this is not your destiny this is the consequence of your experience we are experimenting through life we can't control the events and circumstances as i said but we can learn to manage how we think feel and choose in response so it's experimental so sometimes we think feel and choose impulsively and we make a toxic mess but then we can manage that and what our brain is designed for is not keeping these our brain is designed to fix these our brain is designed and our body and our mind are designed to build to force survival which is these and survival is also recognizing these and fixing them so when you recognize your toxic issue and you start working out what it is then your brain is moving into a healthy mode when you suppress this and don't deal with this and just keep this and think well this is who i am and i can't do anything about it and i've got some clinical brain disease or neuropsychiatric brain disease and it's kind of hopeless if i if i have that then my then 1400 neurophysiological responses will work against me instead of for me but if i say okay i welcome i embrace i embrace these emotional signals and these physical signals i embrace this depression i embrace this pattern not because you're happy about what you're doing but because if you if you embrace it you now know from what i'm going to tell you is that when you embrace it you can change it you see you can change it i said in the beginning can you control your mind i spoke about the pathway to empowerment and getting autonomy and facing toxic thoughts this is what you're doing you are able to change how not by suppressing but by facing by embracing you've got to feel it to heal it you've got to go through it the only way out is through so the whole concept of the neurocycle is to train ourselves to self-regulate what are what are we thinking feeding and choosing in the moment in the day-to-day stuff that's disrupting our functioning and what are we thinking feeling and choosing in in patterns that relates to established traumas and toxic habits from the past so it's two levels we have to manage the moment with the neurocycle and we have to look at for the patterns and then change those over cycles of 63 days and i'm going to tell you how to do that so let's now go back quickly look at the slide and understand the structure of a thought and then we're going to get into the neurocycle okay so thoughts in your brain you've got neurons and thoughts basically build onto the neurons so thoughts look like trees and if you look at the next slide there's a forest of trees in the brain those are thoughts you build those you this is neuroplasticity i did some of the first neuroplasticity of research in the field in my field back in the 80s so you build these thoughts okay so if you look at the next slide here is what you are doing in your brain right now and this is obviously slowed down and obviously it looks unique for each of you but basically you are growing thoughts so if you have a look at the slide you'll see movement and this movement basically is my words coming at you as auditory signals and electromagnetic signals and you converting those to your think field choose mind into into thoughts inside of your brain these tree-like structures inside of your brain okay so if you look at the next slide i'm going to show you we're going to talk about you're going to see a picture of a tree on the screen and basically it's a summary of what i've said the mind is how you think and feel and choose and thoughts are therefore the end product of the mind so when you think feel and choose and there's all that firing going on your brain and all those little branches growing that is you growing thoughts of the experience in your mind and look at the tree structure it's got it's got roots and it's got a tree trunk and it's got the leaves and the branches and it's it's the branches with the leaves now the root part is the origin story like right now the roots of the tree that you're building in the brain and you're building a nice healthy tree is what i'm saying so everything i'm saying is growing in the root part and then the tree trunk and the branches and the leaves are your interpretation of what i'm saying each of us is completely unique in how we think feel and choose so each of you will interpret this information in your own unique way and that is the that is the that grows in your interpretation is in the leaves and the branches as your behaviors and your emotions and your understanding that whole tree the roots the tree trunks and the leaves and the branches are what you use to act to behave to get your behaviors your communication so whatever you're saying doing so whatever you say after this workshop and how you apply it is based on this whole tree that you have built and as you apply it then you learn more and you add more more things onto the branches and leaves and you keep on growing you keep on growing so as you're going through this we can we can actually constantly clean up our mental mess because if you think about this if we don't shape ourselves the world will shape or shape us and i think of it like just just the other night i was i'm doing so many interviews at the moment for my book tour and i was going like from 6 20 in the morning until nine at night with like literally no breaks and i was absolutely exhausted and everything that i didn't take the breaks that i always tell everyone to break i didn't take the thinker moments i just thought okay i'm a machine i can just you know conveniently just you know forget about these things and i made such a mess and by the time i came in the house my husband who was just trying to look after me and help me and he said he said something that triggered me but it was a caring it was why did you work so long and i and i immediately reacted and got mad saying i've been working all day why are you saying this why and i got all defensive and all angry and we nearly had a fight but because i could near a cycle i stopped myself i immediately stood back observed my own thinking and so here's what happened as i as i walked into the house and as my husband said spoke said those words to me that grew the roots and that's that was the origin story it was the the words then my perception of that was that he was that i had to defend myself and so i started this whole defense but then i self-regulated and i realized okay what are my signals what are my warning signals what are my emotional warning signals i'm tired i'm overreacting i'm frustrated um i misread and look and my body's tense uh my behavior sorry my emotional signals where i'm frustrated and i'm tired my body was completely tense and i reacted with a very strong body movement my behaviors where i got snappy back and defensive back and my perspective was that's not fair so then i quickly did that i then reflected which is step number two why was i doing that and my answer was obvious i hadn't taken breaks i had burnt myself out i've been a great successful day but i hadn't because of that i didn't actually hear what he was saying the third step is to write but in if if you've got when you do this over 63 days you physically write and i'm going to share that with you in a moment but in the mo in that moment when i had to quickly fix the situation the third step of writing you can do a visual exercise so when it's the in the moment neuro cycle you visualize when it's the breaking down of the toxic patterns and trauma then you're going to write and i'll talk about that in in a moment so i visualized the situation i saw flash the day flash by the recognition that i hadn't rested etc i just visualized that whole that whole process very quickly took me 10 seconds i then rechecked where i recognized okay well i didn't i re rechecked which is a little bit of a mental autopsy of of the situation recognized i was tired re-conceptualized that and said okay i got defensive because i was tired actually he was just trying to care for me what was my little fifth step active reach i apologize explained how i felt and he explained and it was all sorted out now that could have that was over in a few minutes but that could have been something that got worse and and created a problem in the past it would have that's a simple example of mind management so i'm always a mental mess but i clean it up all the time and that's what i'm trying to say to all of us is that we've got to stop being so hard on ourselves because here we have a system that we can use to manage that mental mess in the moment so if you look quickly at the next slide i want to show you i want to show you that um the if you this is a this is an image inside the book in fact this is actually in the book okay sorry okay i've got an urgent announcement that i have to make okay this is running live live so we had tech issues um but should be resolved now if you missed the first 30 minutes of the session don't worry sessions will be available on youtube to view your own anytime after the event so if you for some reason missed the first 30 minutes i'm so sorry we had tech issues they've been working at this since yesterday but tech is as messy as our minds that's for sure so we fixed it my tech team did a new cycle they solved the problem and the active reach is that they you will be able to observe or watch the whole event after this so don't worry if you missed the first part listen there's great stuff still coming so it's still great and you can pre-order the book and if you pre-order the book and you go pre-order now you're going to get all the pre-order bonuses which is and you can only get that if you pre-order and that is another three-week book club with me similar to this plus bonus chapters for your kids and more about stress management and a month free on the neuro cycle app and and discount offers on various different things it's amazing so go pre-order now and register your pre-order cleaning up your mental mess.com and you can get access to that you can get the book and you can still watch this on youtube and facebook so never worry no no problems you see there we had a chance to neuro cycle my team wasn't your recycling well done team okay so there you go we apply this all the time okay so one more thing that i haven't announced is that we are going to have a free giveaway at the end of the session so just as well i'm doing it now not at the beginning because a whole lot of you would have missed that so we are going to have a free giveaway in order for you to get to get a free signed copy of my book you're going to have to put a pr do one of one of a couple of things pre-order the book and then send and send a picture of that and dm me or post it somewhere make sure that you tag me so that we can see that you've pre-ordered the book that's how you can enter or you can post about what are you what are your takeaways from the session maybe you can post a little photograph of you watching me on this session and your favorite takeaway so and make sure you tag me so either a favorite takeaway or something about the session or a photograph make sure you tag us so that we see you are those we can't enter you and or you can show us that you pre-ordered the book send us a little the little pre-order confirmation okay so that's the free announcement and the at the end of the session i will be announcing the winners okay so now let's have a look back at the screen and i want to show you inside your brain what will happen when you use the neuro cycle this which is how you manage your mind and i just want to say up front when you start the neuro cycle it's kind of clumpy it's like anything remember when you learn to ride a bike or drive a car how confusing it all was at first and how everything you fell off the bike and you you know you stalled the car and then the as you practiced you got better and better that's the same principle operating with the neuro cycle the more you use it the more self-regulated you become and the more mental piece you have you know one of the things you'll see in one of the chapters of the book i talk about the fact that people are dying 8 to 25 years younger from what they call deaths of despair and the age group most affected are 25 to 64 year olds so children are losing their parents and people are dropping dead in the prime of their life and they're tracking that back to from two people are dying younger eight to 25 years and cobot's taken another year of people's lives and the main reason they're saying is it's prevent it's from preventable lifestyle diseases and all lifestyle is managed by mind so how you eat how you exercise the decision to eat the decision to manage the little silly argument that i was having and the big stuff like trauma that's impacted our relationships or dealing with in abusive relationships and acute traumas and toxic all these things of life the experiences of life as we manage those as we get those under control we make these massive changes okay so if we don't shape our mind our mind will shape us and what these deaths of despair are showing us that it's not happiness that keeps people alive it's not the pursuit of happiness which we told a lot in the wellness industry and in the pop culture you've got to get help you've got to get happy and happiness is important but it's a byproduct of something else it's a byproduct of hope so people are dying from a lack of hope and hope comes from i've got no control so i'm telling you now that you don't have control over the events and circumstances but you do have control over something that is so much more important and that is your response to the circumstances so the traumas of the past and the term current traumas and the things you're going through and the patterns you have in your life these are not your destiny you can learn to make make the past work for you in the future you can change how you want the past to play out into the future and that's reconceptualization and that's the end product of neurocycling so let's look back at the screen and what you're looking at are head maps you're looking inside the brain and this is in the book by the way you've actually we've actually got this these colored graphs in the book so the book is really beautiful it's got um you've found it over here page 169 was it's page 169 for those who already have the book but this colored image is in the book here we go so this exact thing you're seeing on the screen is in the book we have a few beautiful colored images in the book believe in me i did a lot of work convincing my publishers to print these to print these because i just wanted you to see this so the blue brain up there first of all you're looking at inside the brain the top parts the nose the side is the ears you're seeing five brains in a row and that is the different wave form so we're looking at the delta theta alpha beta gamma each one is doing they all work together each doing something to help you function as a human moment by moment and they've all got to do certain things and work together in a certain way across the left and the right side of the brain to help you so this particular subject this is one of the case studies in my book and this is this particular subject came into the study they all did but this and i'm using this one as an example very depressed very worked up very like offline relationships messed up work messed up tried had all the diagnoses tried the drugs tried the treatments they were pretty much they'd had it this was the kind of last lasted team to solve things and they would had all those different teeth that i told you about and the different blood markers and looked in the brain and what we see here in the brain is what we call a blue brain and that means that those waves from the delta to the theta to the peaking on the beach the the beta and the creased high beta and the gamma which is the little ripples on the beach that wasn't happening it was kind of flat line and that's not good because in its flat line it means you don't have enough oxygen and blood flow to the front of your brain and you don't have enough balance between the two sides of your brain which will affect everything else down cascading effect through the entire body and will increase and increase your inflammation and will shorten your telomeres this person did have shortened telomeres their biological age was much older than their chronological age let's look back at the slide and let's see the good news these people this put this particular subject as that all the subjects in the experimental group use the neurocycle which is the second half of the book in the second half of the book is all about how to do the neurocycle with all the applications and by the time day 21 hit which was three weeks this person's brain had gone gray which is great you want a grey brain that means that those waveforms are stabilizing those waveforms are kind of getting into a nice even kind of flow and that's wonderful and that if you look at the green at the front of the brain it does that shows a shift in identity so at the beginning of the study at day one that particular subject was saying i am depression my life is a mess not only did we look at the brain and blood but we also did psychological measures and we did my measure that looks at self-regulation and we also most importantly looked at their narrative they told us the story of their life what's so important in this day and age is to recognize that we can't treat you like a machine like an avatar like just a brain and we have to look at your whole story so this person had been told they were clinically depressed and their identity at the beginning of the study was depression what we what i told them with my work and with the what they learned through the neurocycle is that they are not depression depression is not an illness depression is not an it depression is a warning signal that something's going on in your life so back to our day 21 when they had gone through the five steps every day for 15 to 15 to 45 minutes at day 21 when we brought them back in and took their narrative spoke to them about their narrative and did all the other measures we found that they were saying things like the following i am not depression that's not my identity i now know why i have depression i see depression as a useful messenger and i can find i'm starting to see why i had depression in the first place i'm starting to see the roots of the tree the origin story by day 63 they were saying i know now know so much more about the origin of depression i recognize i will still have parts of depression but depression is no longer in it it is simply a warning signal and i now know how to manage it so when it comes up i know my triggers i know my activators and i have a plan of action to manage the depression that is radically different so by day 21 and 63 the inflammation levels had dropped their dna telomeres on their dna were normalized their brain had stabilized and they had reduced their biological age match the biological age match the chronological age which meant that the vulnerability to disease which was at a 75 to 98 percent level on day one had reduced to literally literally disappeared that vulnerability that high level of vulnerability had dropped radically right down on day by day 63. you see the environment that we create with our mind increases our vulnerability to disease so i'm not saying that if you think a bad thought you're going to get sick i'm just saying that the science shows that the more toxic you are and the more unmanaged your toxicity we're all toxic we all make a mess okay that's not what i'm not saying that you've got to get you're never going to completely get rid of that what i'm saying is that when you manage it that's when you reduce your vulnerability to disease so it's not a direct correlation of i'm now going i'm now i have been guilty jealous of this one or i haven't dealt with this therefore i'm going to get cancer i am not saying that all i am saying is that the in the the research shows that if we have an unmanaged mind our threat to survival exists in a very real way those toxic areas those toxic areas in the brain have increased damage to the brain and you've increased your vulnerability so the hope and the hope is the thing that keeps us alive the hope is that okay you can change it by embracing processing and reconceptualizing look at the next slide very quickly and you'll see that this is of one of the subjects in the control group and there you'll see a red brain and this they were made more and more and more aware through the testing of the issues but they didn't get the neurocycle so they got worse and worse the red brain shows incredible levels of high beta which is the crest of the wave too much of that and not enough of the other waves and that's kind of brain you just think you cannot even function you burnt out you feel crazy you just feel like it's too much and you're frantic and all over the place and panicky and this doesn't have to be your life now you can get into those states i mean i get into red brain states but i can get myself out of a red brain state very quickly i can get in a blue brain and i can get out of a blue brain very quickly with neurocycling okay so just moving on let's look at the five steps of the of the neurocycle before we do we have another urgent announcement this is live um so don't remember i don't remember okay fix that do remember to be entered in the giveaway post order confirmation to social media and and and make sure that you um tag us so to enter the giveaway post something on social media make sure you tag us or post that you've ordered the pre-ordered the book so those are the two requirements if you don't do that we can't enter you in the competition if you don't tag us we don't know you've entered the competition so pre-order post your pre-order and tag us or post something about what you've learned on this and tag as well okay so don't forget to tag me okay tag dr caroline leaf otherwise we can't find you okay so back to the five steps of the neuro cycle and i briefly introduced you to those when i spoke about the little exercise i did with my husband and that was just a little quickie one so here are the five steps the five steps of the neuro cycle are gather and gather is getting awareness of your emotional and physical warning signals and then the second step is to reflect and what you're doing you're reflecting on the data these signals are of what they are by asking answering and discussing with yourself the third thing is to write down write down the answers and information the fourth thing is to recheck which is recheck what you wrote and try to identify patterns and triggers and the first step is the active reach craft and affirmation craft some kind of affirmation or something that is an action to help you practice reconceptualizing the new healthy thought okay so if you have a look at the next slide this is just an example of a structure called a metacog which is the way that you write the information so what i do is i recommend that you get yourself a journal a nice big journal call it the neurocycle journal and do and as you're working through the neurocycle use your journal obviously if it's the day-to-day stuff you don't have to use your journal unless you want to make a record of it because if you find that they're like for example if i ca if i always responded to my husband like that if it was a regular pattern then i would need to go and do a 63-day a whole a whole 63-day neuro-cycle process in order to find out why i had that pattern a pattern something you keep doing is coming from an origin story that needs to be addressed and you've got to reconceptualize it or you're going to carry on doing that and as you carry on doing that you're increasing your toxic environment and increasing your vulnerability to disease okay you don't want to do that that goes against survival so you want to bring back to survival so i put these up here to show you what the structure looks like and there you'll see the fives look at the one on the on on my right your left first and um you'll be looking at the same the one on the right gather reflect right recheck active reach there you can see the description and it's exactly the same um there's a little just a summary of what the five steps are on the left is one for how you would apply this with children now if you pre-order you're going to get the whole a little chapter on how to use neuro cycling for children and i've also if you if you read if you subscribe to my podcast cleaning up your mental mess i am also doing a neuro cycle for how to apply this to children and down the line it's already in progress i am writing a book on neuro cycling for children so in the meantime and also in the neuro cycle app there's a neuro cycle guide for how to apply this with children so basically with children if you look back at that if you look back at the slideshow look at the left one you can just get very visual with your kids and you the biggest way to help a child is you you using the neurocycle yourself and you being very open and honest about your own emotions and showing how you progress through the whole point of the neuro cycle is you are processing through a situation so just let's look back at me again and let me quickly make make a lot of sense out of these five steps for you first then i'll quickly tell you a little bit about how to plot with children okay so here we have a toxic thought you've seen this now plenty of times we know thought is a real thing and a thought is what is the consequence of mind in action mind is that 99 part of you so remember mind is that gravitational field that 99 part of you that's around you moving through you it's all that sciency quantum physics gravitational field stuff on a psychological level mind is how you think feel and choose brain and body are the physical mind uses the brain and body to make the little protein trees the good and the bad and with the healthy and the toxic and also to be able to express yourself so you need your brain and your body to express your mind what you say in what you do you as a unique person all the things you say and do okay so that's the basic thing so you think feel and choose to build thoughts so thoughts are the consequence of what you are thinking feeling and choosing now as a tree we all know trees have roots okay you can't see the roots here but you know these roots here so you first plant the seed you get the roots the roots grow into stem and you get branches and leaves so thoughts have the same structures i mentioned earlier on the the see the the seed and the root part is the origin story what happened the trauma the abuse the the the bullying the political situation the racist incident that what every experience that looking at social media on instagram argument with my husband the people pleasing because you're going through social media the events every little event that you go through during the day it made you make little trees so you're gonna there's the source of the in the the information source the root stuff that's coming from the experience is there and then your interpretation is the tree trunk and the branches and the leaves how you perceive that in your life so for example if there's an abuse and there's all that terrible thing that happened that very often if it's a young child can be changed even an older child can be translated into i am shame so the tree trunk is the perspective of shame and then that manifests in emotions and behaviors that are related to shame and this whole thing combined produces behavior patterns in the child's life that are reflective of something going on okay so based on this so this is this is a healthy tree that would be a toxic tree obviously an abuse or trauma would be a toxic tree so the point of the five steps is 38 years of intensive research five simple steps but they are based on 38 years of intensive work of looking at how does the mind work all the stuff i've been saying and i have meticulously worked out how to how to to identify a toxic thought and break it down embrace process reconceptualize identify deconstruct and reconstruct in order to change this from this dangerous unhealthy pattern that's threatening your survival and your functioning and your cognitive emotional social everything from relational functioning to change it into something that works for you you're going to reconceptualize it into something that works for you it doesn't mean that that what happened to you is good but if it's if you haven't dealt with it it's still controlling you it has power over you and that threatens your survival and creates toxicity and brain damage and and damages your brain and body so by the doing the five steps meticulously in the way that they've been meticulously worked out when you do this this happens when you do step two this happens when you do it in that order this happens you don't skip the steps you don't change the order you and i've explained very very very clearly and carefully in the book what they are how to do them with stories the second part of the book is all about how to do the five steps of the neuro cycle with a lot of worked examples of the the pattern the ones over time plus also the ones that you can do in the moment okay so what we're going to do now is talk about the process and then i'm going to explain to you the timing of it the 63 days and the in the moment stuff okay so let's say now that you recognize that you have a pattern of let's say you're feeling really depressed and it's like a lot of times almost every day that you're noticing depression or depression and anxiety because very seldom isn't one emotion that's important i want you to stress that we don't just have depression these things are what we call comorbid depression generally there'll be anxiety or there'll be some despair or there'll be some grief so there's generally a lot more than just one emotion and depression is not a disease okay in our current model for the last 40 years the model um of how to understand people's pain or misery has been subsumed into what we call the biomedical model what that means in english is that you are seen as your brain and if some if you are having any kind of emotional trauma then that is defined as well that's who you are that's your identity you are depression you you have clinical anxiety you have clinical depression so it's been likened to a disease of the body like cancer diabetes but that's not accurate research and that hasn't helped the situation it's contributed to the fact that people are dying eight to 25 years younger which is the statistic i gave you earlier which is in the book i have a whole chapter one explains all the stuff that i'm talking about now this why this the current mental health system and the reason why we people are dying younger and how we can change that there's so much hope everything i'm telling you that's bad i'm just making you aware that i'm giving you the solution the book is the awareness plus the solution and the skill of how to develop and the solution being the mindset around the neurocycle and how to do the neurocycle in in in every aspect because our mind is always controlling everything okay so um when when you're using the five steps we we are we can't see depression and anxiety let's say it this way depression anxiety all these things are not illnesses of the brain they're not neurobiological brain diseases let's say that you go to a dinner party and when you can when we can so you're going to socially distanced in a party okay and you are talking in the conversation that comes up and you say oh i have a neuropsychiatric brain disease the conversation will go dead but if you say i oh my gosh this happened to me and i was i'm so depressed about this just and you tell your story everyone connects because everyone will say i'm so sorry and and this happened to me and there will be a relationship so what i'm saying is that our current model is sticking you in a label sticking you in a box and invalidating your experience the second part of the story we are taught where you tell your story and where people respond and that helps you that's what it should be and that's what i'm proposing and that's how mental health has never been handled very well unfortunately but it used to be in sort of 70s and 80s we did consider the story more but then we shifted as neuroscience advanced into clinical neuroscience where everything was about the brain so we need the information about the brain but we need to put it in perspective so everything you see the brain that's happening in your brain in terms of mental health that's your brain responding the mental health so mental health is not on the rise it's definitely not on the rise we hear the statistic one in four people are depressed and one in five people having anxiety and it's getting worse and it's going to be worse pandemic and and during the pandemic and so on we're going to have another pandemic of mental health and everyone's got this terrible fear and the solution to that is to say well let's label and diagnose and treat with medication that's not the solution that's not the solution mental ill health is not on the rise mental ill health has always been a problem since the beginning of time you're a human you're alive life is tough you're gonna it's experimental you're gonna make a mess and if you know how to clean up your mess you can sort it out and a lot of the times you do clean up on mess i'm just teaching you the science of what you do anyway about the non-conscious functioning of how to clean up our mental messes into our conscious understanding the science of thought and given it to use a tool to develop so that you can consciously learn to grow and develop your mind which is malleable and the earlier you teach this to your kids the better okay so therefore we need to see these situations not as emotion these emotions not as illnesses but as warning signals so here we see the tree the tree emits a warning signal and you are going to pay attention to that warning signal how do you do it here's how you do it imagine you are in a time capsule helicopter kind of thing and you are the pilot and you are the co-pilot the pilot is the one kind of flying the plane so it's experimenting it's trying this thing feel chews and you snap and you smile and you get it right or you do it right so it's the experimental part of you going through life the co-pilot is the wise mind the survival mind the wide full love mind we see in signs that our brain and body are wired for love we don't have structures for anything toxic we have structures for health and we have structures for managing our mind so the minute i say i'm anxious this is my clinical i'm clinically diagnosed with anxiety i can't cope life's terrible then i create that damage in the brain that i've been describing showing you those pictures the red brain the blue brain the telomeres all that stuff but the minute i say the second the millisecond i say okay i don't i'm not scared of that anxiety i'm not scared of that depression i am not scared of it i'm actually going to see it's helpful it's a helpful messenger it's telling me something that i need to go and pay attention to the minute you do that your body shifts functioning and i mentioned this earlier 1400 neurophysiological responses will now work for you in that instant so you still gotta fix this but the pr the fact that you are actually embracing and fixing your brain is out of that vulnerable state that's really important to understand so embracing is why i use the word embrace because you embrace those that you love you embrace what you want to welcome into environment you welcome the depression because of the message it brings not because of the depression because of the message behind it which is that whole thing that this whole tree thing okay so the five steps helps you to meticulously unpack that so the mindset coming in is you're in your helicopter and the co-pilot is this wise mind the wise part of us that we all have it's at the core of our mind it's designed as this wide full of nature of the brain and the body and in the energetic fields of the mind around the brain and body we see it as this lovely wave that i described earlier on we all have it that's based on basic functioning but then we as we think feel and choose we kind of mess that basic functioning up but there's a core part that can't be messed up so think of this like a forest there's this massive infinite forest with all these trees some are little green trees those are just experiences you may be had today some are bigger medium some are huge some are really big some are green some are light lighter than others and then these clusters of the dark ones in between that represents all the experiences of your life it's infinite there's trillions you're flying over and you are now the pilot flying over as you do life and what happens is that as the co-pilot's flying with you but the co-pilot has access to the middle of the forest and the middle of the forest is a strip through the middle that is this beautiful green forest and it's exquisite and it's perfect and it never gets messed up okay and that's your wise mind that's your wired full of nature of your brain and your body and essentially what happens is that you are going to you are going to pay attention to those who land your helicopter by paying it listening to the co-pilot paying attention to those warning signals and landing your plane at this tree in the forest because this particular group of trees is this huge big black clump and sending up these smoke signals and instead of flying over them you land the plane and you're with the co-pilot so you in this non-judgmental gathering awareness embracing state of mind that i call the multiple perspective advantage which i talk about in the book you look at the warning signals and you start gathering awareness so very quickly gathering awareness we are not sitting under the apple tree with all the apples hitting us on our head we're standing back and we're picking the apples off this tree these so you pick the first of all gathering awareness of the different signals what are the emotional signals what are the physical warning signals what are the behavioral warning signals what are the perspective warning signals then you reflect on those and you stand back and you look at what you've gathered and you ask answer discuss reflectors ask answer discuss be a detective put the thoughts on trial work out why you've got those then you write down that information from what you have gathered and what you have um reflected on and you capture that in written form in a metacog and a metacog is that pattern format that you saw earlier on on the on on this slideshow we can just quickly put that up the pic the image of the neurocycle there we go and you don't have to do it on i did this on my on my phone on an app but i do them i recommend you do them hand written into your book and that way of writing when you're writing a metacog it pulls the two sides of the brain together we can look back at the at the brain i'm going to show you the brain again when you it pulls the two sides of the brain together helps you get much more deep and insightful and really get to the core of the issue so metacog is a phenomenal way of solving problems in your life super quickly i use it therapeutically and i've used that you you can use the day day-to-day life the ins in the in the moment stuff and the long stuff then you would write and then and when you're writing in the medical just you're literally vomiting your thoughts on paper it doesn't matter how they look it's not about fancy it's about get it out okay and then you've got the recheck step where you go in and you sort out what you have what you have written down and then the active reach is to cumulatively take those four and create an action that that is like a full stop on a sentence that is what you've learned that day a positive little actionable statement that could be something as simple as i am not shame i practice your if only today um you will get through this a simple little statement that you can work through last thing and then we're going to dive into the questions is that if you're working if you recognize a pattern in your life with this where there's then there's some underlying trauma or toxic habits so it doesn't take 21 days to change a habit it takes 63 okay so important there's very little research on it i talk about that research in my book i've done the scientific research showing that within 21 days you will break down and build a new thought but that new thoughts a tiny little tree in that forest and doesn't have enough energy to impact your behavior so if you want a pattern to change in your life if you want a behavior to change if you're battling with relationships and you keep having the same issues you need to go to 63 days in order for you to actually change that pattern so you do the five steps every day for 15 to 45 minutes and then at day 21 you would have broken this down and reconceptualized it into this and then for the balance of the 42 days you just practice step five takes your minute a day so the last 42 days is quick it's a minute a day so you can write this down somewhere i have um i explained this in depth in the book in the neuro cycle app we've got a little section that's got active reach reminders where you can type this in so it pops up on your on the app on your phone and it'll remind you to do these but the extra 42 days gives us sufficient energy for this this one the new reconceptualized one you've got to water it give it energy so that it is strong enough to go from the non-conscious mind into the conscious mind only when it can it can access the conscious mind will we see behavior change you can only change what what has got enough strength to actually have been before changed into a habit and that is when it moves into a conscious mind it means it's strong enough and you will see behavior change so large statement in relation to this many people say but i've tried this and i'm stuck oh i've gone to therapy and i'm still stuck where i'm i've really i'm aware of what my got social anxiety because i was bullied at school but i can't seem to get over it you've you've got to systematically work on it daily this quick fix mentality that has come from the technological age that we live in has created a problem nothing is a quick fix this is hard work we have to work hard at this so that's why i've systematically worked out for you the systematic scientific way that you can change your mind to make it work for you and not against you and now we are going to transition over to the um questions but just before don't forget to don't forget about the giveaway don't forget about a posting on social media that you've either pre-ordered the book and you'll post the pre-order tag dr caroline leaf or post something about this conference what you've learned a photograph and tag me and then also don't forget to pre-order your book go right now and pre-order this book you need to pre-order this book if you pre-order it it's released on 2nd of march you get all those wonderful bonuses like extra chapters and a month free of the new cycle app and a three-week book club like this incredible bonuses to help you so go pre-order that right now and now we're going to transition to the questions so we have some people in the green room waiting tic the tech green room waiting for us to answer questions um waiting for me to answer questions and we got tons of amazing questions obviously i couldn't answer all of them but we've selected a few and then at this time at the end i am going to run through some of the other questions that we don't cover um directly okay so we are going to have our first guest coming on is that correct team it's the amy's coming on so our first guest coming on is amy and amy will be joining us and she's going to ask me a question and then i'm going to answer that okay hi amy hello can you hear me i can see you okay she i don't think she can hear me hi amy hi can you hear me yes i can hear you now yes i can hi i'm visually impaired so i'm trying to squint at the camera oh no problem no problem how lovely to meet you so i love your work i i'm working hard to get the book but the audio version isn't working for me right now so that's okay well the audio will work from second of march it will be available so then it should be working so that's possible i was just having trouble getting it so i was wondering what this the font size of your book is so that maybe i can try getting the um paper copies if you send us an email we can handle that we can just send us an email we can give you information on both of those questions but you had quite a specific question amy um can you just say and where you're from and then ask your question and then i'm going to answer your question okay so i am from uh british columbia canada um all right and so then i'm gonna ask my question okay so is there a neuro cycle for high stress situations such as work moving school that kind of thing absolutely so essentially that is pretty much our day-to-day stuff that most of us are living in so um you know that there's so many we have so many acute high stresses but you you specifically referring to a combination they move and move or starting a new school or something like that would be an acute stress so it's that sudden you've suddenly got to deal with that and it's quite a strong impact yes there isn't in the book and i'm going to just run you through in a moment but in the book i actually have a neurocycle for dealing with an acute stressor like dealing like going to school i'm just going to open that up and tell you which page it's on um okay johnny can you just find for me i'll put it in my notes there and then the other and answer both parts of the question the other part is like work work isn't more of a chronic stressor more something that's ongoing so the thing with the work is to once again if the stress of work a lot of the time you've got to find the reason what the stressor is so you need to work through the whole tree so you need to first ask yourself start with what are the warning signals so ask yourself what are the emotional warning signals so it may be that you are frustrated or you're feeling tired or you're feeling overwhelmed be very very specific in defining your emotional warning signals and in and we've got so there's a whole okay so there's a whole okay so sorry in chapter 12 amy in chapter 12 and for those watching there's a whole chapter on trauma and in this i cover acute trauma which is the sudden things like a move like death of a loved one those things that you know sickness the things that hit you out of the blue there's a whole section on how to do that i define trauma in general and then there's also a section on the big tea trauma and the small tea tournament with worked examples okay so just so that you know that that's in chapter 12 what i also have that is very very helpful in here is an emotional warning signal guide so on page 203 i have an emotional warning signal guide which are emotions so when you're looking for those emotional warning signals to help you then i've sometimes you can't we can't always think of the words to describe how we're feeling so things like you can then select are you feeling angst anguish anxiety apathy whatever so there's a whole bunch just to help you what's also really super helpful is on the next page i have an emotional warning signals guide which helps you to rank how you feel on the first day that you start neurocycling because if if it's a chronic issue which is happening in other words it's a pattern it's a consistent thing happening over time you definitely want to find the underlying the underlying cause and the patterns and triggers so that you can reconceptualize that so then it's a good idea to track your emotional intensity so for example one two three four to six seven to ten with one two three being okayish emotional in intensity or seven to ten you know much more extreme and then you can track over time so it's really important that you get yourself a neuro cycle journal and that you make sure that you track everything and you know and you're getting a nice big journal and or every time you work on a neuro cycle you should be dating it filling it in working through it so you can actually track your progress because that visual aid gives us help otherwise we kind of do it a bit and then we don't do it then we do it a bit and then we the consistency is very very important so the first thing then is to look at your emotional warning signals secondly is what is what are you feeling physically in your body in that moment about work so you could just take in in general start in general about work and um think you know because then as you get as you work through the neuro cycle you'll get more specific um so in general how do you feel when you think about work so the emotional then the physical tension in your body gut issues nausea shooting adrenaline tension in your shoulders whatever it is be as specific as you can you're just gathering away awareness remember you the pilots and the co-pilots you've landed your tree your pilot you've landed your tree you've landed your helicopter at this tree and while the reason it's a time capsule is because everything about work is not just about the now it's also about your past experiences informing your experience at work so that's why i say it's time travel we go into the past because the past influences how we function in any one moment so when you look at this tree you're not going to just see the present you're going to see the past and also your hopes for the future so you're kind of going through all three dimensions prison past and future so you're going to land that tree you're going to look at the emotional warning signals you're going to look at the the physical you're going to look at the behavioral signals so what are you doing what are you saying how are you reacting how are you managing your work what's the quality of your work what is your interaction um on email um in on zoom um in live when we when we are interacting with people how what are your behaviors with your kids your husband etc and then you're going to look at your perspective how is this work crisis affecting your perspective are you seeing that it's actually that life is just terrible and is it terrible because it's just related to the work or is it that when you're out of the work situation and you're back in your normal situation it's kind of okay so it's just within the work environment or is it a point where it's so chronic it's been so long term that it's now um seeping into how you manage your relationship with your family and how you just feel in general so you want to gather those signals so that's gathering awareness remember always get into the stance of you with your co-pilot the wise mind and think of you picking off those as though they're apples that you're picking and putting in your basket you're giving yourself also permission to feel this it's totally okay to feel anxious and depressed and overwhelmed and worked up and we've got to start giving ourselves grace it's okay those are not bad they're simply telling you something if you see them as bad and you feel guilty all that energy is now going into the sort of guilt you kind of lump that all into guilt or shame or condemnation or something and that then makes it worse so as soon as you feel that happening that's another warning signal grab that all these warning signals are energetic or they're energy and energy can never be lost it can only be transferred so you can make the decision at that point to say okay i'm not gonna i see the guilt i own the guilt i feel guilty because of that's where when you start going to the reflex step to grab the guilt put it in the basket and there's no condemnation in that you you're making it work for you instead of against you so by embracing it and seeing as a helpful messenger you then are shifting your brain into a into a very resilient state you bring this thought up from the toxic from from the non-conscious mind then an unconscious mind it's very it can't be changed it's just driving you it's just that tree in the forest that's driving how you're functioning and you're feeling worse and worse but as soon as you're aware of it you've shifted the power balance instantly now you are controlling that situation instead of that situation controlling you and don't rush yourself another just a side note don't think oh this has got to happen quickly it is going to take you probably 63 days which is nine weeks to get yourself into a position where you get this rule worked out and that's very important i'm not giving you five quick steps that you do these five steps today and tomorrow works great that's not realistic that what's realistic is that you're going to have to work through this in a five-step process daily so once you've gathered awareness you then go to the second step and you need to start asking yourself why do i feel this angst is it from and you ask answer and discuss with yourself is it from this is it from that and you you do this very very systematically gather first once you've gathered all those then ask it's it's this detective process why do i feel this angst is it because i've got too many tasks am i people pleasing am i not creating boundaries um or i'm feeling this constant anxiety because it's just there's just too much pressure um because of this so in other words get to the core ask ask ask until you can find out why you're doing that you won't find this out on day one because you're only doing it for 15 to 45 minutes if it's 15 minutes you're only going to spend about three minutes on each you're not supposed to solve it in one day you can't but tomorrow you can come back and the next day you come back so you've got to give yourself grace i can't stress this enough because people may be thinking okay well i'll do one thing and try and find the roots and and that's certain one no you won't find it in one day in the first day you may not even see the roots it may take you three or four days before you actually start seeing the origin you may see it straight away like you may see okay well it's it's there's just i've got no boundaries and that's great if you see that the first day that's great but then we have to find out why do you not have boundaries why can't you say no are you people pleasing and that's what those are the kinds of things that will start coming up as you move through the days so the reflex step is done to ask yourself an answer and discuss with yourself like a detective to find out why you had those specific signals and you can see i'm saying being very specific you write this you know you you gather awareness of each of these and you reflect on each of these and then the third step is you write it down so you put down in the middle of your page that this is opening overwhelmed at work too much going on and you start creating these little categories where you start this information that you gathered the signals about and the four different signals and the the ask answer discuss you write that down you just pull all over the page doesn't have to be organized maybe you've got a line coming at you and some stuff there and then you write some stuff there and then you draw an arrow there and then this thought comes in and that thought comes in that's why the metacog is so great you can see it's a pattern that as you create the metacog it doesn't have to be perfect the next step the recheck is where you can go and start making order of it so generally the right step is very messy then the fourth step is the recheck step and that's where i recommend that you take another color and you start rechecking because now you can start seeing okay what are my activators what are my triggers what are what are my patterns what what's going on here and you start seeing because it's so because you've done the three prior steps you've dragged stuff out of your non-conscious mind that you weren't there you started you started this dissecting this tree so you pulled out stuff from from the roots etc and you can start recheck and say okay well i'm starting to see this this all over the page where i wrote i'm saying i'm tired i'm tired it's too much too much i can't do okay so that's a pattern why what are you tired about what is this thing that's causing you so much tiredness at work is it that you and then you see oh i think i'm not saying no i'm people pleasing so there now we're starting to get to the root we're starting to see in the fourth step we're starting to see okay i'm tired because i don't know how to say no i'm trying i'm people pleasing therefore i'm not setting up boundaries and that's great insight so then your active reach for the day would be okay well i i have to sort out this people-pleasing thing that's why i'm feeling so exhausted i don't know how to say no and you could then summarize that into a little statement and write that statement out and then you remind yourself about that statement the rest of the day it's okay to feel tired something like it's okay to feel tired and i'm feeling tired because i can't say no or practice saying no today and that and then tomorrow you pick up where you left off where you what you the work you did you look at what you've written in your in your onto your metacog the recheck is done in another color you've done your little active reach statement you practice it today tomorrow you pick up on all of that and then you continue the process okay does that does that help you yeah i think so and i think that kind of ties into my second question i think ultimately i just need to get the book somehow i've got to get the book yes you got to just go pre-order with all and you get all those bonuses i mean it's so super easy pre-order and get the audio book is also on pre-order i'm trying uh my second question is what's a narrow cycle for social anxiety because i have a lot of that even even over video and i think part of that is because i'm visually impaired it's like trying to understand all the different uh pictures and slides which like yeah it's a lot and that's no no absolutely that's a lot and there's a lot of information and that's why you can go back and you can re-watch the video um you know it's slow and at you at your own pace and that's why if you've got the book in the audiobook you can take one chapter at a time and you can teach yourself slowly so that's you know that's okay social anxiety has a i've actually got the sort of pull up that um quickly pull ups my answer to that okay so basically social anxiety is very common it's not something that's uncommon it's very common and we had a lot of questions actually about social anxiety so i did make some notes on that um it's we often feel fear in certain social situations like meeting new people and as you said putting being on screen now and trying to deal with all these things yes it could be related to um your visual impairment which makes you anxious that you might miss something so you've kind of already got if you look at the toxic tree your social anxiety is the warning signal and the warning signal what you want to do is become much more specific because it's very it's very general um in fact i would call the whole thought social anxiety and then i would start breaking down the emotional and physical and behavioral and perspective warning signals it's when you start dissecting in that way you start getting to a much better way of reconceptualizing you see as you dissect the social anxiety into the emotions the behaviors the physical symptoms and the perspective which are the four different types of emotional warning signals and then as you reflect on them and as you write and as you reach it as you go through the process you then start getting more information and that information then helps you to build the the the deconstruct and reconstruct and build the the the way to manage it so the kind of some of the things that i see in terms of doing a little neurocycle you would gather awareness of how you respond in a social situation so you could take your first neuro cycle you're doing this you could take this particular you asking questions so first of all you know well done for actually getting online in front of thousands of people and i won't tell you how many thousands because that'll make you feel even more socially anxious but you are in front of thousands of people at the moment so i want to really take my hat off to you and to show you that you actually have done this you've asked brilliant questions and you've done that so you need to hang on to the success of this moment as you go and do the newer cycle and this memory of today of this is actually and i'm jumping right to step five is a very important act of reach it's the first thing that i would write down in your neuro cycle journal is that my active reach for today is that i actually got on camera with dr caroline leaf in front of thousands of people and if you want to know the number i can tell you um and i actually asked her a question and i stayed connected and you asked two questions okay so that's that could be active reach but essentially what you want to do is you want to gather awareness of how you respond in social situations identify each social situation break it down because you're going to respond generally in the same way but you want to know work situation versus this kind of situation versus this many people so break it down into the different types of situations and then find the signals for each of those situations because what you're doing ultimately through the five steps is identifying the different situations that really stress you out and finding the triggers and then the antidotes that's what the five steps will do for you so you gather awareness then you reflect on each of those and this this might be take a bit of time this might take remember 63 day cycles you might might have might do four or five um of these cycles but at least it's going to be at least 63 days okay in the first 21 you do all five steps the second 42 days you do just the first step so then you reflect on why you respond in those in those to those emotional signals in each specific way so if you say in a large situation when um when there's a lot of people you just freeze up you feel this you feel that why it's just so overwhelming so at least you know what it is and you write that down and then you get to the read the the right way you write it all down then your recheck would be okay well the pattern there is too many people what could i do what are some of the things i could do and here's some little things you could do first thing is you can remember that you coped today so you hang back on a past experience and you remind yourselves you walk into that room with a crowded room and you're freaking out and you say okay i went on camera with dr caroline leaf in front of let me tell you close to 12 000 people and you did it okay you remind yourself of your past success and any other success and that will immediately change your brain resilience and immediately shift you into that less vulnerable state it will change your neurophysiology so you have more oxygen and blood flow to the front of your brain and you'll therefore be stronger to handle the situation you can also do a little exercise that i call the 10 second pause which is where you breathe in for three counts and you breathe out for seven and so you breathe in for three out for seven that's ten seconds the reason you breathe out longer then you breathe in is because that pushes oxygen to the front of your brain and that decreases impulsivity which means that you will react with flattened flight so it helps to calm down your parasympathetic nervous system it helps helps to calm down the neurochemical chaos you can make that exercise even stronger by adding three words which brings in a cognitive component to the breathing so as you breathe in for three you say think feel and as you breathe out for seven you say choose you push it i choose you really whoosh it out now you can do it in your mind while you're looking there's a smile on your face or you can go in the bathroom and just do it or something like that um into the restroom or go hide in a corner somewhere and just do it if you do this six to nine times which will take you around about a minute you would have reduced the neurochemical chaos in your brain you would have balanced the two sides of your brain that great waveform will be back online you've increased resilience and you'll be more capable of going into the situation another little quick technique which is all i've got time for i need to get to the next question is you can visualize this is a fun one you can visualize everyone in the room as being this big literally you know honey i shrunk the kids that movie think of that movie and everyone's that small so you this you the person and they tiny and you're the big person there and that will give you a sense of of a little bit of internal power over the situation and you're just to help you to just navigate the situation more effectively so once again the answer to work through find you know go through the five steps and work through the five steps daily identify the different social situations work out your little active reaches and get yourself prepared for each situation so preparation is a huge part of it the neuro cycle is going to help you with the preparation and obviously everyone this information that i'm telling you is in this book so this is just a walkthrough i can't go into absolute depth in this time that i have but i'm just trying to give you an overview pre-order the book get the neuro cycle app you get the pre-order bonuses if you get it before this before the 2nd of march and this has really got detailed to help you there's so much information in here to really help you work through all these different situations the neuro cycle is mind management self-regulated mind management that can help you in every situation okay so we've got our next on next thank you so much amy well done thank you so much i'm proud of you good job thanks okay bye bye okay next person is who do we have next ariel hello hi hi ariel how are you doing good thank you for having us on my pleasure can you just tell us we know your name where you from and what your question is okay i'm from maryland the eastern shore of maryland the united states uh i have a three-part question i did your mental health summit and i just had a follow-up question from that but um what exactly is what exactly is suppression um is it the same is not choosing not to think of thought you know how do you take your thoughts captive and also you said about embracing thoughts how do you embrace the thought that you know isn't true but it feels so true without giving it power or accepting it it's true absolutely brilliant question and such a good one i'm glad you asked that so thank you okay so what is suppression what does it mean to capture thoughts and what does it mean to embrace those are um it sounds it seems so weird to say embrace something that's making you feel bad but the concept of embrace as i mentioned earlier you embrace someone that you love or you embrace people in your home so it's a welcoming thing so you are actually welcoming that emotional warning signal not because of how it makes you feel but because of the message that it carries because a warning signal is like an alarm the alarm goes off in the morning it's telling you to get up it's telling you something so what i'm saying is shift your perspective re-conceptualize from oh depression is bad i must suppress it push it down get rid of it and i'll handle the suppression part in a moment because that's when i handle embrace first and say this is wonderful i see this as a helpful messenger the minute you do that you are then shifting the power balance the minute you say i embrace this toxic issue that you're embracing then moves into your conscious mind on a neuroscientific level those little branches the protein branches that this toxic tree is made of in your brain they become weakened they become the little branches become looser the chemical and the chemical structure starts changing which means it's malleable which means it's changeable you can change and this is how you change okay so the first step in being able to change is to embrace you can't change what you don't know but if you're changing something you're fearful of then this still stays strong and it kind of stays in control so by you embracing you shift the power balance and you are now controlling that issue versus that issue controlling you so that's the first thing that you may not feel any different but here's the nice thing to know i'm the neuroscientist i've done the research i've got lots of great images and case studies in the book so there is stuff happening in your brain and body which we've seen from our research your mind your non-conscious mind that's the part of you that's that's working 24 7. it's the biggest part of you it's your dynamic intelligent huge massive part of you your non-conscious mind and your body and brain know what's going on before you consciously aware of it so you can still be consciously aware of feeling awful about feeling depressed and that feeling of depression or anxiety or despair or exasperation or grief or whatever it is but by the mere fact that you've embraced it you've already started creating of neurophysiological changes that we've seen you've already started dropping cortisone dropping and dropping glucose and all that kind of stuff okay so that's the first thing is that is to hang on to that fact and that's why you need to get the book and study the book is that that is going to and there's the images there your brain and body are changing your conscious mind is a bit slow and will catch up so that's why it feels so real okay so as you persist and go through the five steps daily you will find that around about seven to these different time points in the 21 day cycle the first 21 day cycle at day four there's a major change day seven day 14 by day seven you are starting to feel in control by day 14 you feel so good that we have what we call the mastery mirage where you think oh i've got this and you know there's a shift so within two weeks of work there's a shift and there's a temptation to stop there you mustn't you must keep pushing through because you haven't created a sustainable protein change yet for it to treat the new tree the new healthy tree to be formed in the brain because this one reconceptualizes into this and then then you've got to do the other 42 days to make sure you get behavior change so that's the one thing what is suppression suppression means that you are ignoring it so hear you in your little helicopter pilot and co-pilot and there's the warning signals of the smoke signals depression anxiety pay attention these trees are waving you feel awful but you just oops i'm not dealing with this and you just ignore it and you carry on but you can't because that tree is alive eventually the fire will burn too much and you will explode somewhere so genetically in your body wherever there's a weakness but those um and in your mind so however we all unique there's no cookie cutter response but at some point you that vulnerability increases to a level where your survival is being so threatened that those smoke signals get louder and louder and louder and you can no longer suppress and in in the continued attempt to suppress that's when people will shift to things like addictions to try and push it down or medications to try and numb it and that doesn't solve the problem because this is still there it does get worse before it gets better so it's like a surgery you have a surgery you get cut up to get better it's first painful healing from surgery is painful when we start facing the roots of why we of our suppressed issues it's awful and in fact my subjects in my study that blue brain one that i showed you that particular subject said that as they progressed through the days they were feeling more anxious and more depressed but in a different way they weren't seeing they weren't seeing it as an it as an illness they were seeing it as um that they actually are facing their stuff and that the reason they feel the depression and anxiety is because of the stuff and that they you know it's shocking when you see things that in the past that you that you didn't realize were there or that happened to you that you eventually start facing it's very painful but the only way out is through and then by day 21 you have that shift so suppression is trying to avoid it it's pushing it down we've got to capture those thoughts and we've got to unpack them and and deconstruct them and reconstruct them much like if you have an ugly old house that you want to renovate and you buy this house and it's disgusting and you take all these photos of the ugly carpets and the mold and whatever and you break that down you build a beautiful new house you've now got this beautiful new space that you're operating and you're not suppressing it anymore but if you keep if you keep living in that ugly old house you keep it there eventually the house falls down and it affects you and but if you reconstruct it you remember how you were but now you've got this new mental space of freedom does that answer your questions i think so yeah thank you good well thank you for answering them and and i hope that this is going to i hope you're going to enjoy neuro cycling and send us some nice testimonies okay thank you so much bye bye okay our next question is coming from christine hi christine how are you oops i can't hear you i think you muted themselves you need to unmute i think you've muted yourself you need to just unmute okay we still don't have sound what is she asking about i can start answering do you know what she's asking can you hear me now yes i can hear you yes yes okay thank you wonderful thank you so much for this opportunity so absolutely where are you from i'm from germany oh wow are you phoning from are you from in germany at the moment oh wonderful that's lovely yeah well welcome thank you so my question is um how do you recommend dealing with traumatic mental pictures like seeing someone getting shot or witnessing any other kind of violence okay excellent question it's something that we are irrelevant to anyone at any stage in history because there's so many terrible things that are going on so these as you experience that that issue it's once again like i explained in the beginning it's an experience that's as as it happens it's like literally sowing a seed and growing the roots so the roots are in our brain now the reason that an emotional violent experience seeing terrible things happen live or on tv is so so profoundly impactful is because the intensity in which it builds is is so strong because of all the emotions so it's got there's so much intensity there's so much energy that the roots form in a very very very quick and strong dense way so think of a really strong root system and even though it's so it's maybe only a short period of time like a few minutes or whatever however long it is that you're watching it forms an incredibly intense strong memory so the foundation is very very strong that's that in itself is very toxic so observing something toxic we are not used to that and and we're not designed for that our wired for love and survival mode of our brain and our body will immediately reject that so as soon as you build this it's going to be these these structures are protein structures and they're going to fold incorrectly and they and the vibration that's inside the little protein structure which is the information that you're seeing and viewing and hearing and all the data the emotions and all of that is very very very very strong and erratic and and makes you you get that response in your body too because not only are you building it in your brain but it's also going to be this very very very strong wave in your energy field and in every cell of your body and your body and brain are made of 37 to 100 trillion cells and every cell is going to also store that so your dna is affected this all collectively affects your whole neurophysiology so that's why we feel it so strongly we feel it in every part of our experience now the the fact that we're feeling it so strongly is threatening our survival because anything toxic as i mentioned earlier on like a virus in our body or any kind of bacteria or anything our immune system of our brain is immediately going to respond because this threatens survival so that toxic imagery is threatening your survival and that's also why it's so strong to protect you because it's so strong that it's so in your face that you just have to deal with it and the more you try and suppress it the worse it will get so it's very painful to deal with it but we have to deal with it because it's threatening our survival we often hear in the media and it's incorrect information that we have a negativity bias that our brain and mind and have a negativity bias and what that means essentially what they're trying to say is that we're drawn to the negative and it would seem like we have because what are the what does most of the media and priests present it's all this negative stuff and people are fascinated with with negative movies and people that are murdering people and there's effect but it's not that we are have a negativity bias or that we are got this evil gene inside of us or this evil neurobiology what we have is healthy neurobiology but that those incidents are going contra completely contrary to our survival so we are drawn to them to fix them okay so we daunted them to fix them so it's very important to process so as you experience that whatever you're watching whatever that violent issue is the roots are sewn immediately the tree trunk is sewn which is generally shock fear despair all those you know it's like this is terrible and um it may be like a life is bad your perspective is your mindset what does this do to your mindset do you now have a fear of um if you're watching um if it's sort of a racist thing does it increase your fear of racism if it's a violent attack does this do you feel like you're too afraid to go out because this could happen to you what is your perspective and that then produces your branches and leaves which is your interpretation of the event and that whole thing together is going to impact your behaviors so in order to deal with that you so it's grown that way to deal with it you have to use the neurocycle to go back and to reconceptualize it happened reconceptualize means it has happened but you're going to make it work for you not against you and you kind of have to take the the neuro cycle over time and it is going to take 63 days and maybe more um to take the energy of the pain and transfer that into the energy of that is terrible and you're going to your active reach kind of activities would be how can you contribute to maybe helping this not happen again or something like that so your active reaches will help will be the way that you disseminate that energy to transform it into something that you can manage but that's going to be a process so once again you're going to have to do what i've been saying you're going to have to start at the top it built from the bottom up into your brain and threatening survival you it's causing inflammation etc but now the minute that you actually asked me this question you shifted your whole brain health instead of just being something that is now increasing brain um illness or i mean increasing your decreasing brain health and decreasing body health the fact that you ask the question and all the listeners listening are benefiting from this because now we're saying okay well i can embrace that i can face it and remember what i said when it's suppressed it controls us when it's in from out from the unconscious and the conscious mind we can do something about it we can't change what we're not aware of but we can change what we're aware what we can what we are aware of so it's hard work it's time there's no quick fix um it's there's going to be a lot of trauma going through this you may have to talk to someone you may need to get some coaching and counseling you may want to sit with a group of people but this is the system that you would use and which would be what are the warning signals be very specific and and please what i want to stress here is it's so important that you get into your co-pilot pilot multiple perspective advantage which i explain in the book in depth okay when you have an acute trauma like seeing something violent like this and there is a whole chapter as i mentioned on dealing with acute trauma where these things i also talk about um and explain in depth but you need to have a support system because to try and make sense of violence is not something you can make sense of on your own so it's very very important that you're doing the neuro cycle for yourself but that one of your active reaches each day should be maybe to just talk to someone in um just about what you find out and experience that day the objective of the neuro cycle will be to try and make sense you can't i mean you can't make sense of violence but to try and help yourself deal with that and to reconceptualize that and to take away the the energy that's toxic that's keeping you stuck in that pain so we never want to lose the negative we never want to lose the fact that that violence is unacceptable so i'm not asking you to do that that's not going to help you we have to always realize that that is unacceptable we're drawn to that because it's imbalance we want to fix it so step number one is to is the first few days of neuro cycling you're going to really help yourself to just process the pain and the active reaches are acknowledging and helping yourself it's okay to feel this it's okay this is terrible and and as you talk to someone it will help you unpack those feelings and reduce the the pain of the trauma of the emotions then as you move on through the cycle by day 21 you start moving into a construct of okay this is wrong what can i do and then as you go into the 42 days it's then putting that action because the first step is an action step is what can you what can you do to actually change have some play some role in changing um violence in the future it may not be directly to what you've seen but in general toxicity or violence in the future that could happen which will happen because unfortunately we live in a very violent world where people are making very violent decisions but we need to talk about it we need to allow ourselves to talk about it we need to allow ourselves to process it a lot of the time people see these things they in the moment they are in shock and then as a coping strategy we tend to push it down we tend to suppress but it's not good because if it sits there in your in your psyche it's sitting there like this and it's causing increasing vulnerability so we need to pull it up we need to talk it through and i cannot stress enough do this do the neurocycle on your own but make sure that you have a support system within which you can discuss this so that you can find the active reaches that move you in a positive direction okay does that answer your question yes it does thank you very wonderful thank you so much for phoning in thank you thank you okay our next question is catherine hi catherine hi how you doing oh you muted as well it's your end if you can unmute and mute yourself on your end still muted still muted it should be on her web browser if you if you look at your web browser it should be on your web browser and there should be a little unmute button is this um what is katherine's question we're just going to um for all of you while we're getting catherine unmuted don't forget to pre-order your book you can go to cleaning up your mental mess or dr leaf.com you can pre-order this book you've got all the pre-order bonuses and don't forget to enter the competition by sending us a photo of your pre-order tagging me and dr caroline leaf or putting up something about what you've learned from the seminar about neurocycling about cleaning up your mental mess make sure to take us otherwise you won't be able to you won't be able to see you and we'll be announcing the winners at the end so have you pre-ordered it if you haven't go pre-order you need this book we need to clean up our mental mess remember our mind is always working so if you don't know how to manage your mental mess then you are being controlled by your mind people often say to me how can i control my mind and i say to them you've got to self-regulate you've got to mind manage and this is how you do it can we be good catherine's unmuted wonderful hi again hello hi again okay so you you're a little bit quiet catherine is it possible just to turn up the volume i don't know if it's on our side can you hear me now it's a little bit better okay i'm using both my that's good no it's perfect yeah that sounds great maybe use both headphones wonderful what is your question first of all where are you from i am from the oregon coast oh lovely wonderful yeah so i i know from some personal experience and now i'm working with women who are who are walking through betrayal trauma that it wreaks havoc on the mind and i know it's important to honor the process and give grace to what that looks like but also i'm curious to know what does mine management look like for someone who's walking through betrayal trauma okay so in any trauma so in that is trauma and it's one specific type of trauma that means someone is betrayed so the it's the what it looks like is it hurts it's going to get worse before it gets better but it will get it will get better that's the main thing and you have to you have to be very systematic there's no quick fix as we know so what it looks like is really working through the five steps very systematically over the 63 day cycles what we see very often with betrayal trauma and any kind of very you know it so there's no cookie cutter approach but sometimes it will take one cycle of 63 days but very often as you're working through by day 21 of using the five steps by day 21 you start seeing um you you get to the point where i say okay now i can see i feel betrayed because of this this and this but that's actually brought up another whole element and it's like a different thought that that portrayal was connected to so all these thoughts every thought in our in our brain has an incredible root system and they connect and especially when there's some sort of a relational thing that you know that connected incident or sometimes our thoughts are so there's such a huge component and there's so much that happens that multiple thoughts are happening in terms of as we go through life that then connect back to this original source i often liken the root systems of these toxic thoughts to the redwood forests in san francisco because they're very famous for their very extensive root systems and the root systems the connections in our brain are very much like that the connections also happen on a quantum level so very often we can be ten or five years or you know many time quite a long time post the actual incident or incidents and we still can recall what happens and suddenly an incident something will happen some sort of trigger or we get into some relationship we're doing something at work or just something happens politically and it just re-triggers that and this is you know the relationship with post-traumatic stress which is not an illness either it is simply a response to adverse circumstances so there's always these connections and that's why sometimes what it looks like in working through trauma is multiple cycles and what we've seen what i've seen from my experience clinically and from my research is that you can work through one you know you work through the whole project but it very systematically mind is mind needs to be managed systematically mind needs to be trained so we use our wise mind that green strip through the middle of the forest that instinct that i know i should be doing this but i'm not doing it or that that an another example of the wise mind would be someone comes to you for advice and you give them this phenomenal advice and suddenly you think wow where did that come from well that came from your wise mind it's that knowing in your nowhere it's just that in that we all have it's the survival instinct it's also pure survival instinct and we don't always know how to access that when we've been through something like betrayal because if you visualize the forest let's say that their portrayal is like maybe 10 or 12 trees so 10 or 12 different to give people an analogy there could be 10 or 12 or 15 or 20 or 30 different incidents that happen and they've got and they've grown they've been so established they've happened so many times that they've become so strong that they are generating such a false ripple effect through the the mind and the toxic toxic ripple effects with the mind and brain that they are almost blocking our access to our wisdom and that's why we need support that's why we need the therapy the counseling the coaching no one can fix you but having someone that you can talk to helps you to give perspective perspective means that i can actually kind of wade my way through the toxic dark forest and i can start seeing the green trees and i can start accessing the the wisdom i can start listening to the co-pilot because the co-pilot has direct access to the to the green trees so when you're standing there in front of this cluster in your messy mind as the pilot of your life and you can't see the wood for the trees you can only see the toxicity of the betrayal it's so hard to think there's any other way and that's okay i want you it's really important that you embrace that and as i've been saying you gather awareness of that you give yourself permission it's okay to feel like that i mean this and and giving people these visual analogies when i was a therapist still practicing i did this all the time and when you talk about helping kids you've got to get very visual and see that there's that tree that treats this by trail that tree's actually i don't blame you for getting stuck give yourself permission this is hard this thing is like hitting i'm under the apple tree and these rotten apples from these trees are just all over my life and as you admit that then you can say help and then you'll co-pilot the other part of you the wise mind can start digging through the forest and going and accessing the wisdom and so start to help you see that and the way what that looks like is that you get into that multiple perspective advantage you stand back and observe yourself you use you instead of i the co-pilot uses the the pronoun you and the messi can use i so i feel like this but the co-pilot's saying how do you so then the co-pilot then walks you through and as the co-pilot is walking you through so the trees are starting to clear and so you're starting to see what the wisdom is in the situation and that's why i always say to land you know think of the co-pilot in the capsule this time capsule helicopter kind of contraption landing the tree and helping you to to start making sense and you go through them the whole process from the signals it's okay to feel depressions okay let's what are they what it's you you have a big basket it may be huge and what are those emotional warning signals pick each one be as specific as you can and maybe you fill one whole basket with the emotional warning signals another whole basket you gather with all the physical another whole basket with all the behavioral another whole basket with a perspective and then from there now let's reflect let's look at these apples let's start asking answering and discussing day one you're not going to even gather it all day one you may just get a few day two you can add a few more apples to the basket day three and so you go until day 21 reflect as well you reflect on what apples are in the basket why am i feeding these emotional signals what does it mean ask answer discuss ask answer discuss give yourself an answer ask your answer why answer why discuss work it out write that down the metacog is absolutely essential in every situation but when it comes to trauma it is unpacks things that you don't know even there it is very very powerful it really gets the two sides of the brain working which means that all the structures of the brain especially the link between the frontal lobe and the hippocampus which is like kind of behind your eyes and the amygdala which is your emotional library all of those only working with you they're responding but those are have all got different jobs that they perform when your mind stimulates them they perform certain jobs and when your mind is working properly when your cop your pilot co-pilot mind is working properly those things start working properly which means the connections the electromagnetic flow and quantum energy through the brain is more efficient and that means you you feel more resilient and you're able to have more cognitive flexibility and you set up a great feedback loop between the mind and the brain that's what all these things are doing and all the stuff i'm saying is in the first half of the book that's why this works and this is working on an unconscious level so the other thing that um that as well as conscious that you need to tell how tell someone who's working through trauma of betrayal any trauma is what i already said earlier on to answer is that it it's happening in your brain and your body you may not feel it but the changes are happening the minute you start embracing the minute you start gathering reflecting writing rechecking looking for the patterns the activators the antidote getting to the action the actress active reach tip which is like the little antidote for the day to the poison kind of thing that each of those step is meticulously increasing the cognitive flexibility increasing the blood flow increasing the great feedback loop and helping you to dig to the root of why why um that betrayal happened and how to deal with the betrayal i mean you may know the details of the betrayal like someone can say that i was betrayed by ex-person and this is what happened but i don't know how to deal with it so you may know part of the roots when you go in but you've still got to be able to unpack everything and work through the process so that you can reconceptualize so reconceptualizing betrayal or reconceptualizing anything looks a lot like what we call the what is the japanese called the kinsuki principle which is the art of kinsuki which is if a vase shatters to the ground in a thousand pieces those pieces they don't throw the pieces away they pick up all the pieces so this is what you're doing you're gathering reflecting you're picking up all the pieces and you're rebuilding and now you've got this beautiful new vase and they rebuild with um with gold lacquer and platinum so if you look at this tree so you've got a beautiful new vase and the story is what's in the lines so you over time and this is also the violence question i answered earlier on observing violence over time that is part of your story it means you still cry you still have pain but the pain doesn't control you anymore that's reconceptualization you don't eliminate the story it's part of you can't eliminate you have to reconceptualize so if you look at this tree and you look carefully i don't know if you can see it some of the leaves are lighter than others so the lighter parts would be the reconceptualized betrayal but now i managed to tell was wrong but you want to release if you don't if you don't release and people will call it maybe forgiveness whatever you want but if you as soon as someone has betrayed you according to the law of quantum physics you've become entangled entanglement means that that in quantum physics if two particles are put into a relationship you can separate them as far as you want if one turns this way the other will turn that way in a psychological sense if someone has betrayed you you're entangled there's a there is a quantum connection between the betrayal your interpretation how it's impacting your life and the person who betrayed you or persons who betrayed you and those persons have an equally damaging toxic thought in their brain don't think it's only you the victim the person who betrayed is also brain damaged because they've also got the toxic thought because you're not supposed to do that so i mean even that in itself is a nice thing to tell people but you're staying connected so there's still power there's still control by neurocycling through the 63 days in as many cycles as you need you are severing that energy that is connecting to the other person and you're releasing you're insulating and you're fixing that's now their problem you don't have to worry about them you have to get yourself sorted out and hope that they will by your reaction or whatever that they will stop doing whatever that they're doing let's elude does that answer your question and as i said all of this is in the book in detail in the book and in the app yeah i thank you so very much i really love your analogy of the redwood trees because that's my backyard oh my goodness i'm so jealous i wish it was my backyard oh my gosh you're in the best place thank you yes thank you so very much appreciate it thank you my pleasure thank you and that's it we are done with this workshop and there's still thousands more questions but that's why you need to pre-order the book because the rest of the questions that that have that have been sent in and they've been a lot more i will be answering in the three-week book club that we have got coming up so if you pre-order now go to doctorleaf.com or cleaning up your mental mess.com the pre-order bonuses are amazing including a three-week book club where i will handle i promise you i've got them all here i will handle the rest of these questions so if you it didn't get your question answered and you pre-order you'll get it answered plus more and there's also a free month on the neuro cycle app so much more pre-order chat chapters on how to help your kids with new recycling and follow me on instagram you get so much help there as well um cleaning up your mental mess is my podcast where you can find out more about what my do what i do and i'm speaking so fast i'm tripping over what i'm saying here let me slow it let me do a new cycle to quickly slow down and let me announce the winners okay so we will choose a winner today my team said we haven't chosen the winner yet so you've still got a chance to enter you've got and we will let you contact you by email or direct messaging so you have a chance to enter your if you pre-order the book send through the receipt uh the pre-order confirmation tag us or put something up on social media about the this event that you've loved and remember to tag me dr caroline leaf whatever you post tag me one more thing for my team is anything else god that's that's it for today thank you so much for joining me don't forget this will be live on my youtube channel so subscribe to my youtube channel and follow me on instagram get the book i can only do so much you can do the rest thank you so much do [Music] so [Music] two [Music] oh [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] hello you

Channel: Dr. Caroline Leaf

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Length: 120min 30sec (7230 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 27 2021