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

people are dying from lack of hope death of despair when you take away people's sense of agency you're taking away the most core dynamic of who you are as a human being i think you gotta have a dream the school of greatness please welcome welcome back everyone at the school of greatness podcast very excited about our guest dr caroline leaf is in the house a cognitive neuroscientist specializing in the mind-brain connection who's been in this field for many decades i'm very excited to hear thanks for being here thank you i'm so excited to be talking to you lewis it's great thank you and and i am i love that you're in this field of understanding the mind brain connection and how it plays into our thoughts and our emotions our feelings our mental health and everything else is happening in our lives uh my first question is what is the difference between the mind and the brain and does the and does the brain control the mind or does the mind control the brain you've asked one of my favorite questions there that's a really great place to start i've got some props is that okay can i use it yeah show me okay explain i need i need to understand in this simplified way okay so here's a brain not a real one um in a skull and the terminology for about the last 40 years is that the mind and the brain have been used interchangeably so most people think when you talk mind you're talking brain when you're talking brain you're talking mind and most of the popular literature even the scientific literature that the media tends to put out talks about how the brain produces thoughts or the brain produces the mind but your brain actually can't do anything on its own so if you did and if i was holding up this if this was a real brain and i just took it out of someone's head which i wouldn't do but if it was bleeding and whatever and you looked at this brain we could stare at this all day long but it would never do anything so what is the difference between a dead brain and your yours and mine and the listeners and the viewers is that you are actually thinking feeling and choosing you're alive and your aliveness is your mind and your mind is this ability that of what you're doing right at this moment as you're listening to me you are processing the auditory sound waves the electromagnetic light waves through your ability to think and feel and choose which is mind so your mind is like processing unique brilliant processing field gravitational field around and through your brain and body and you convert what you're hearing and seeing into actual meaning and that meaning is formed from trees that you actually grow into your brain so at 400 billion actions per second you're using your mind to translate auditory and visual signals into protein-tree-like structures in your brain to make sense of what i'm saying and then each thing new thing that i say you're growing more and more and everything i'm saying is in the root section because it's the source of the information and the tree trunk and the branches are your interpretation of what i'm saying and you're linking it to other existing whatever i've whatever i'm triggering at the moment that that you know about whatever in your life it related to our subject and that keeps going and that's what we do all the time that's your mind is always with you and your mind works through the brain and the brain then responds so here's a little model so your mind is the gravitational field and this is not wuru science this is hardcore nobel prize winning science that there's discovery of the gravitational field in fact einstein spoke about it back in the early 20th century how we each human has this gravitational field this electromagnetic field around us and that is basically through us and when you die that's not there anymore and that's the thing that's kind of keeping you alive and that's the thinking feeling choosing the psychological version and the the sciencey version is this gravitational field so it's a little bit like a magnet this is this is a super easy way to understand it if you imagine a piece of white paper and you put a whole lot of iron filings on the paper you may have done this at school and you bring a magnet and you put that in the middle of this mountain of iron filings and suddenly you've got this beautiful electromagnetic field the iron filing arranges itself into this field around the magnets so you can't see the electromagnetic field but but you can only see it because the iron filings it's invisible but the iron filings follow the tracing of the field and therefore you can see it so the relationship between the magnet and the field allows the iron filings to express themselves in that pattern the the brain is like the magnet and the field is your mind and the relationship allows you to express your behavior so the little pattern is your behaviors and and the biggest cool thing is that that's the primary source you never stop thinking your mind is always going you wake up with your mind you eat with your mind you choose your clothes with your mind you're doing the podcast with your mind you'll go to sleep with your mind so mind is the source and if you don't understand and manage it it's changing anyway then it's a mess and if it's a mess to brain and body or a mason you can't achieve greatness so to achieve greatness you need to understand mind there you go there was a mouthful let's let's just end the podcast now that was perfect uh so how how wide can this so the mind your thinking your ideas your thoughts is a field an energetic field yeah around you inside of you uh connected through your whole body and then outside of your body is that what i'm hearing you say exactly totally how far does the field extend is it two feet in front of us is it six feet is it uh football field how far can it go they don't really we don't really know because when you're talking about quantum physics and gravitational fields there's a lot of interaction that occurs but what the science seems to show is that it's kind of a almost how you know like around us sort of this field yeah and it's probably more because but it interacts because everyone's got this field and we then we live in gravitational fields so you everything around you is a gravitational field so everything's interacting and so that's why you know when you come up to someone you an example would be like that electrostatic shock when you you know when you brush past someone you get that and on a more psychological level you can experience that that field is like maybe in a really great mood and then you get into a conversation with some friends and they're so totally depressed and you come away from there thinking i feel awful i need to go never shower you feel so so they their field has interacted with yours and impacted you because those feel that that field is coming from your mind which then uses the brain and converts what you're experiencing into these thoughts and then these thoughts are generating you know there's this whole relationship the iron filings concept and this is back and forth and this literally is photons and sun showed us that we're literally generating from our thoughts as we talk from our thoughts which we that you can't talk without thoughts you build thoughts and then you your actions and behaviors and communication come from the thoughts so this would generate healthy it's a nice healthy green tree and here's a toxic one so this would be a toxic you know the depression or whatever you know being negative or whatever that would generate toxic photons and these are the ones that would make you you know you feel it you feel that negativity this is a sense of around a happy person and you just feel like amazing you know so this is it's very real this is not some ethereal thing it's we talking about the non-physical sciences of quantum physics and physics and things like that but it's real and it's there's an impact and an effect and we can control it that's that's the interesting thing what is the what is the definition of quantum physics what is that in relation to the mind so quantum physics is considered to be one of the most fundamental and accurate sciences and at its most simple level because it's really had bad press but it's been around for very long and it basically just deals with the unseen the when you talk about particles and waves and the subatomic level so what we can see now looking at each other is would be what we would consider the classical physics realm that you can see and touch and feel and hear so it's very you can operate on it yes yeah so it's the physical but if you if you actually um and and we see from studying at the atom that things get smaller and smaller and then you've got the subatomic level then you're entering the quantum mold so once we go into the subatomic level we actually see that the atom is not really an atom you know particles change according to their waves and in their particles only when you actually look at them so it's it's considered the observer effect and it's really interesting because it means that we have these waves of energy and as we make a choice we create reality which we do so as you think feel and choose you change your brain because everything every time you choose think feel and choose those three things always go together always thinking always thinking means you're always feeling thinking and feeling means you're always choosing and it's happening at like 400 billion actions per second constantly so we're processing this world around us through this thinkfield choose and then we build thoughts so there's this structural there's this structural consequence so thought is actually a physical response of the thinkfield choose and quantum physics kind of is helping us understand that but quantum physics is real and is easy to understand with classical physics so classical physical quantum the sort of non-physical world to work together does that make sense it tells us when we feel something when something happens there's an event in our life uh someone touches us do we feel it first do we think that we're feeling something and how is that connection to the mind and body work very good question so it's think feel true so like as real so i i touch you on the shoulder you think it first you feel it first it's it's going to happen pretty much simultaneously so there's going to be the because there's the sensation and it immediately will stimulate think and then feel and then choose so the feeling that the the think field choose work together to make sense of the physical impact and what it means and if it's threatening or not threatening and all kinds of decisions are made in your mind and it happens super fast so it's think filters think feel choosing cycles and it's really really fast you know they we talk about 400 billion actions per second but it's actually 10 to the 27 and faster which is an inconceivable speed so what i've done with my work is to try and understand this you know what is the thought and what is memory and what is mind and what is brain and how do they interact and how do they influence and do we have any sense of agency over this process and what does it look like yeah can you explain it all absolutely i can certainly try so i spent 38 years studying this and i started out in the world of working in clinical i practiced for clinically for 25 years and i initially started my research in the 80s and finally enough in the 80s the brain we were taught that the brain couldn't change so all my lectures were around the brain is fixed it's fixed mind fixed brain fixed mindset yeah so they so kind of that's that you've just got to learn how to kind of you know work around it and so that's just and compensate more of a compensation kind of philosophy so i remember thinking in one of my neuroscience lectures that this does not work for me because we're changing and growing as humans so i said no i'm going to start researching this and i always told my professors that's a ridiculous question and i actually did a ted talk on this the ridiculous question of neuroplasticity so in the 80s i said okay well give me the worst situation what's the worst situation they said okay it's traumatic brain injury once someone's had a traumatic brain injury and i mean your dad went through one yeah that's it pretty much that's you know written off and um we were trained as i said to compensate so i said okay well there's hardly any research in the 80s on brain injury and on how to comp how to treat it and so okay well i'm going to start there and so i worked with people that had been in comas for like longer than two weeks and at that stage of you in a coma for longer than eight hours the brain damage was considered irreversible now in this day and age we know that's not the case but in the 80s that was the going philosophy so i was completely swimming upstream when it came to this concept anyway i showed with my subjects that with using your mind in and not in any weird way just a very systematic deliberate intentional mind management in different ways and different brain building and dealing with emotions and just different ways same sort of process um that you can actually change this and so some of my my first my very first case study was a girl who was 16 at the time of accident and she had lost a whole year of school written off as a vegetable i mean that's what the doctors used to say in those days which is terrible thing to say to someone anyway long story short after eight months not only did she manage to she came around i started working with her when she was when she was conscious and functioning sort of at a second grade level and she wanted to her goal was to get her goal of greatness was to get back to finish 12th grade and with her peer group now that was an impossible task all the doctors said don't even go down that road not not even worth it so i said well i was a new scientist then very young totally into the said well you know go with me let's do this and she within eight months she caught up to 12th grade level finished school with her peers and went on to get a university degree and one of the coolest things was that she was actually a really average student and not even good at math after after the accident using her mind to change her brain she became like a math genius you know i mean this was like and i can tell you a story of the story and that really motivated me to work across the board with now i really have to understand what's going on and i happen to be living in south africa where i grew up at the time i was born in zimbabwe and grew up in south africa and in the apartheid era i mean this is like it really ages me doesn't it go back into those i worked through the apartheid era the transition and the post-partum era so i was seeing all the socio-economic trauma the racism trauma and i worked in that three days a week in those environments with terrible poverty and whatever and i worked in war-torn rwanda and i worked with the wealthiest of the wealthy heads of ceos of corporations schools everywhere that like my laboratory was the world to try and understand humans and mind and get away from this scientific concept that consciousness is the hard question and no one is really doing anything we're just talking about it as being as this elusive philosophical thing that we will push aside and one day promissory science will do it one day and i thought i can't do this because it's i am mind you are mind so if i don't manage it i mean you can go three weeks without food three days without water three minutes without oxygen but you don't even go three seconds without using your mind so my underlying premise was okay well if that's the case what is it and how do we manage it and if it's if i don't manage it what i did from my research you can learn to manage it mind is malleable you can direct the neuroplasticity of your brain i did some of the first neuroplasticity research in my field in the late 80s early 90s before it was accepted by the mid-90s neuroplasticity was well that's it and um and i showed that my underlying argument with thesis was whatever mind is always changing which it is so you wake up you're experiencing everything conversations the emails the part life politics you're immediately immersed in life and you're processing that through your mind you're growing it into your brain and you're doing this every moment of the day so if i don't control it it's a mess but if i do control it then it isn't a mess now i know we can't control events in circumstances we all agree with that so i'm not into this whole law but i'm not talking about law of attraction and you know saying 15 positive affirmations and that's going to fix your story no i'm not talking about that at all it's not realistic i'm talking about the fact that you cannot control events and circumstances but you can learn to manage your mind which means your responses so you can yes the things are going to happen covert trauma death life happens but how you manage it and you i mean your case is a classic example your life was thrown upside down and your family's life was so upside down and you managed your mind and got yourself back going so you were doing this concept anyway you know greatness that's why i said greatness comes from us managing our mind and greatness doesn't necessarily mean that you've got millions in the bank and you're this famous superstar it means that do you have mental peace are you actually growing are you satisfied as a person are you you know that's the sort of way we want to go as opposed to this very externalized version of it so yeah wow um this is it's really powerful so how do we learn to manage our mind in response in a more positive way to the chaos stress traumas dramas of life around us you know obviously we we can maybe influence certain events to manifest in our lives but we can't control the things that are happening around us necessarily just how we respond like you said so how do we learn to reframe our mind or rewire our mind and so that we can have inner peace when there is trauma or pain around us brilliant question it's a skill that we learn so that's really nice to know the sooner the it's never too late to start but the sooner we start the better so i have four adult children they learned this they grew up with the stuff and as i've learned new things they've been my lab rats so they've been trained and literally had my husband and they all work for me by the way they're either they're either all amazing kids or messed up kids totally yeah yeah we'll have to ask the question well dominic's my producer so i think she's sort of doing okay there but you know the thing the biggest thing with the mind and managing mind lewis is to accept that depression anxiety even the scary words like bipolar and schizophrenia and then going to the mood sort of things like that we can accept grief anger etc these are not illnesses this is the biggest message that i probably have the second biggest the first is that mind is the source and if you don't get mind right everything else you can read all the great books you want and go to all the great seminars and self-help but unless your mind is right you won't even use that stuff it's just data and so you you these are these that's there's another step missing and it's understanding that autonomy that sense of agency that we have to manage what's going on around us and to accept part of mind management is not to make the bad stuff go away but to know how to live in the bad stuff because it's not going away so despair anger depression anxiety these are all completely normal responses in fact they're very helpful they're helpful messengers and warning signals as opposed to being scary illnesses they are not neuropsychiatric brain diseases like we've been told they are actually responses and because they are responses of our mind in in the world we only use our brain and body to express them because we've got the mind has to have the brain and body to you know build the thoughts and then from we use that to speak we're using our physical to to store what we've what we've processed and to convert and then to speak so obviously if our minds and mess our brain and our body will be a mess but because our brain's neuroplastic and we if we manage our mind we can change our brain we can change our dna literally that's what i've shown in my research you can literally change your dna your blood markers literally if you change your mind if you change your mind you can immediately influence your biomarkers so for example if you in acute trauma for example and you go through just okay let me explain it in a very simple way i've been testing out a glucose continuous glucose monitoring device and for some research purposes and i happened to while i was wearing it because you wear it and then you you know you track your levels uh and i wanted to see if in terms of mental health and the neuro cycle that i've developed i wanted to see the impact and i happened to be going through experience a very acute torment or family over december and in the moment of the trauma i happen to see on my glucose monitor that my glucose had shot up to 240. now that's heart attack level and i immediately manage my mind through the neuro cycle which is the concept that i've developed which is just a system anyone can learn it and i dropped my glucose levels within seconds back down to a normal level and as it cycled up it cycled i could manage it and in if glucose is at that level your cortisol is shot up at that level your dhea has dropped your homocysteine up all that means is that your immune system is going crazy exactly you've got a cytokine storm like we talked with covert and in fact your your brain's immune system and your body's immune system will recognize that traumatic event or that established trauma or that mismanagement of whatever that it will recognize that as an invader like a virus like covert so you get the same response to a mind thing a thought which is the consequence of mind think field choose you build thoughts thoughts are made of roots and trees branches which are the memory so thoughts are made of memories like trees are made of branches this is toxic it will stimulate the same response in the immune system as if i had covert or if i had a flu virus or if i had measles or something or any kind of damage in my body the immune system sees that as threatening survival because we we are wired for survival so this is not survival so your immune system says hey that's a threat let's send out the army tea lymphocytes be lymphocytes macrophages let's go fix this thing and it creates inflammation which is a temporary state of healing so initially inflammation is to isolate and fix exactly isolate and then you're supposed to you know fix this up and sort this out and find the root cause and then this goes away and then the anti-inflammatory factors come in and the inflammation goes away but if we don't deal with the stuff and we don't deal with our past traumas and we don't deal with those patterns in our life that we are in in acting um like the constant arguments or these certain you know they all have these toxic patterns well no one's immune we all and and the signals of those are things like depression and anxiety and those are simply telling you hey there's a pattern it's either trauma-based pattern or it's a toxic habit you've developed but that pattern is actually putting your body under tremendous stress even to the point where your dna is affected and i showed in my research that you know if you think of the dna ladder if you pull out a chromosome it looks like an x and where you see my fingernails pink fingernails for those of you that are listening um the pink fingernails would then represent what we call telomeres and telomeres are a proxy for how you are managing your mind very interesting but they also aren't they also based on how long you'll live as well exactly exactly totally correct so if you're under attack and dying you're probably physically gonna die as well exactly that's exactly what i showed so we had subjects at the beginning of our in my clinical trial that i put in this book we had subjects and i've actually got a picture of this person's one of the subjects brains this is inside looking inside their brain and the blue represents someone who's totally depressed flatline brain flatline literally and this person's all their biomarkers were actually in cortisol inflammation etc but this shows that the energy levels in the brain are very flat blue means a very very depressed and this person was their narrative was tremendous storm in their life they were offline they were battling with um work relationships a lot of stuff everything was off everything was off sleep you name it they were at like 3d to check out what page is this on this is on page i should tell you i should know the page of my heart um 161 okay you've probably got it in black and white in that version that you've got the um um so the this person's telomeres when we looked at their dna we looked at their telomeres they will tell you how that the shorter they are the weaker your cells the shorter your life span the more vulnerable you are to disease so they were sitting so that will show in terms of your biological age so their telomeres were short and unhealthy they their ages were in the of this particular subject and we had a group like this as well that similar they were biologically chronological the actual age was in their mid-30s but they biologically 70 or something yes a sickly 70 year old that's crazy within a crazy within nine weeks of mind management no i didn't work on i don't use drugs i didn't i do talk about diet and stuff but in this particular clinical trial was pure mind management just the neurocycle just get your mind under control and that gray means that they're brain stabilized that the brain waves that they were actually managing so here they were saying i am depression i am hopeless all the biomarkers dna here they saying i felt i now know why i feel depression i'm not depression i now know why and depression is simply a signal of an underlying cause it's not who i am it's not an it it's not an illness by 63 days and these numbers are very significant they were actually seeing behavior change in their life they were saying okay so i know i'll still get depressed but i know why and i know what to do and there was changes in their behavior they were back at work they were back sleeping 25 improvement in sleep and i mean all kinds of like their relationships not suicidal anymore and i mean that's i can go on and on and on wow this subject over here was in the control group so they got no mind management and what you'll see is a lot of red and a lot of chaos and that red shows complete brain that is like a tsunami in your brain which the biomarkers were terrible this person's dna telomeres were very short and so with mind management in nine weeks we showed how you can literally change your telomeres which are your markers for aging and for health mental health and physical health and that's pretty unusual because most of the work on telomeres has been done around diet and exercise which are basically like uh you know leafy greens and plant-based exactly which is significant and also there's been some work on meditation but there's been no no i think this is the first study that's been done on actually doing deliberate intentional mind work to change and then we saw significant drops as well in information markers and blood markers and but the biggest thing was their narrative the person's story so if we go away from the biology for a minute and we then we listen to the person's story that person was offline they were online they were living again and even though and they had also had this this acceptance and this is what i wanted to kind of circle back to when you started was life and managing your mind doesn't mean that it's going to be one big rosy you know put on roast into glasses that's crazy it is actually the ability to be okay and at peace with having moments of depression and actually looking for the message and seeing them as helpful we have this really weird philosophy which has been about 40 years in the west now where we look at depression and anxiety and those kind of things as illnesses and neuropsychiatric brain diseases and as bad symptoms that you must suppress like cancer symptoms you must suppress so it's been lumped or misery of life has been medicalized to quote a new a brilliant psychiatrist um and uh joanna moncrief so we've got to really watch out for that but actually the the real truth is that those depression and anxiety are not illnesses they are just survival instincts it's telling you hey pay attention there's something going on you need to go and something's not working something's not working some is not working and it's manifesting as a pattern that needs to be addressed and that will block the greatness so are you saying am i hearing did i hear you say that there there isn't a mental health disease it's more of just a a pattern that or something that we should be mindful of but it's not an actual disease no it's not a disease and i know this counters this count as the current philosophy but if you look at the science there's a large body of science in fact if you interpret all the science around this field and you really look at what's being tested you actually will see it's not a they've been looking for the neurobiological correlative you're looking for where in the brain is depression and for years we've been told about the serotonin imbalance causing depression i mean that's not even it was a theory never proven great for marketing for you know fulfilling drugs and also the simplistic way of telling someone hey you depressed don't worry it's chemical imbalance let me give you a drug to fix it you know it's it's we want this quick fix mentality so with as medicine has advanced and technology has advanced so we've become very caught up in the quick fix and but life's not like that mind is not like that mind is separate from brain and body you can apply that kind of thinking not quick fix but you can apply a symptomatic diagnosis treatment approach to body to physical brain and body but when it comes to mind that that this this gravitational field is force this think feel choose thing it's not going to go you know a medication is not going to change how you're thinking feeling and choosing it's not going to get rid of this it's just going to numb your brain so maybe you don't feel this for while it's working but at the same time as then when that drug wears off this is still there this is still being recognized by the immune system of your brain as a problem so this is increasing your bone the longer it's there the more you increase your vulnerability to disease oh my gosh you know and this is what gets you stuck and these are the patterns so no it's not an illness it is a normal human response here we compandemic we all know that everyone's going on about the next pandemic is mental health we if mental health has always been an issue notice from the beginning of time mankind has battled with life with issues with death with fighting with war with whatever so mental health's not on the rise but the mismanagement of mental health making it a disease has created a whole new problem so here so here we sit with before the pandemic they started doing a population study in the mid 90s and this is when i was still practicing early days of my practicing sort of ten years into my work and i started seeing this trend of and i was watching the study where people were with a the decades-long trend of people living longer so we know we all hear this message what this is what we've heard people are living longer because of the advances in medicine and technology none of us question that but something happened in 96 that did start questioning that by the mid-2000s it was an established researched fact that we don't live longer anymore that the trend of people living longer has actually reversed and that we have a pandemic of deaths of despair where people are dying from preventable lifestyle diseases and the age group most being affected but are between 24 and 65. so people at the beginning of their career in the prime of their career and through that that age group are being or dropping down dead like flies and it's this considered death of despair by preventable lifestyle diseases so we have to look at the bone lifestyle disease means that there's something in our body that's that's weaker why lifestyle which is mind driven how am i eating drinking sleeping but more than that is what's my mind behind all of that how am i actually managing the day-to-day moments how am i managing the patterns the traumas the established toxic habits what am i doing about that stuff and that's when we when we ignore all of that because this current trend of science is saying oh those don't matter what matters is the symptoms let's just look for the symptoms checklist diagnose label when you label someone you chop you you chop up to 10 years more of their life you know it's like it's adding on they've shown studies of people with a mental health diagnosis have a chopped 20 years of up to 20 years of their lifespan people on psychotropic drugs because of all the complications and the changes in the brain and the body chopping up to 25 years of their life i mean this is serious so here we have this already existing then the pandemic it's now in other years they say that there's an additional year being chopped off people's lives but there's such a contradiction because they're saying hey this is adverse circumstance grief of loss of people uncertainty medical and you know not knowing if you're going to live or die and how long is this isolation going to go on and economic impact and whatever the whole lot that's trauma and they they're saying that when they're saying but this is the way to treat it let's label it let's diagnosis let medicate it so here we've come into covert with a problem with that stupid philosophy that's created such a lot of problems and scientifically this has all been researched and shown and now we've got the pandemic and now they want to carry on that system that didn't work to this which is going to make it even worse so we've got to shift our narrative completely and we've got to stop stop saying that mental illness is on the rise and that there's one in four people on antidepressants were depressed 100 of people are depressed and anxious and concerned about this covert pandemic 100 of people in the world at some point in their life have and will be anxious and depressed and in grief and sadness and terror and despair and one of the others a large percentage of the population and i'm not sure the exact percentage because no one's really done this kind of research but estimates it's probably 30 40 of people will have extreme trauma of it from abuse war trauma that kind of stuff where they'll go down the continuum to sort of the minus nineteen eight nine ten if you look at a continuum of zero to ten zero to minus ten um and have things like psychotic breaks and hearing voices and extreme states of distress mental distress which are still not diseases they are simply in that traumatic situation you're having a traumatic response think of someone who's a war vet i just interviewed a navy seal the other day who was trained snipers and i mean the things that he had to do and that his teams had to do you know they come back and try and we all know the problem of trying to you know be reconciled back into civilian life after you've broken yeah i mean you know this is what they'd be experiencing all day long stuff that's completely against survival completely against our human nature and now they instead of them being allowed to process this trauma they're coming back and being told that they're diseased and he would tell me that what they do with a lot of we don't hear this sort of thing but he told me this they they will inject things like respiratory which is an antipsychotic into the spines of war vets because they're but psychotic and they and they psychotic for a reason it's they coping they they how do you deal with this of course you're going to be angry you're going to be frustrated you're not going to be able to love like you did you have to be able to embrace process and reconceptualize giving them a drug is not going to make it not going to help it in fact it constrains the brain it restricts the brain you can't there's no chemical cure for that this this is that's not that's just going to add feel to the fire because your mind's going to work through the brain so now you put chemicals in and now that's not going to that's not going to facilitate change we have to do something so it's like a narrative do you feel like there i mean is there such a thing as a chemical imbalance in some people uh you know when they say oh i have a depression it's a disease or bipolar or i have this mental health disease or i have a chemical imbalance i was treated with this don't try to say i don't because this is who i am is that do some people have that or is that that's the result the narrative of i have a chemical imbalance in my depression is from chemical imbalance is a narrative that is the only explanation that people are being given they're not given an alternative reaction i mean an alternative narrative so the most important thing is that anyone listening to this podcast i want to validate your depression your anxiety your grief your despair your ptsd whatever label you've been given i want you to i want to validate that that doesn't need to be validated with a disease label you're not diseased you're not a broken brain you aren't your brain isn't defective you are going through something so you aren't something you aren't that you're going through something you're experiencing something you're experiencing something and you're experiencing and you've coped in the only way that you could cope in that moment so it created this adverse response because it was an adverse situation and you were just trying to cope so what we have to do is go through a process of embracing and processing and reconceptualizing so the important thing here is to recognize that chemical imbalance isn't the cause of your despair the cause of your despair is what you've gone through and what you're going through and learning how to and not knowing how to manage it and how to deal with those thoughts that are driving you crazy and those flashbacks and and the trauma of the flashbacks and going back into those situations of the rape or the abuse or the war trauma or the that it can drive a person crazy and that's not crazy in the sense of illness it's crazy in the sense of your mind is like this erratic tidal wave around you and it's going through your brain and you've got these and your immune system and everything screaming at you and saying hey let's fix this so a disease label invalidates it and for a moment it might be nice to know okay well these are labeled to how i feel because it kind of gives us a bit of feels like we've got a bit of control so initially that gives you comfort but don't see yourself as that it's better to say i'm experiencing post-traumatic stress issues because of what i've been through versus i am ptsd i had the sickness of ptsd it's better to say i'm experiencing symptoms of bipolar these intense swings because of my whole story than saying i have bipolar i have a chemical imbalance i mean just research researchers coming out the other day show that we've got to stop saying this the top psychiatrists that lead this field will tell you we've got to stop saying this that these there's no ways that serotonin imbalance you can't even measure that there's no gene for there's no genes or serotonin imbalance causing it it's what you've experienced that's the cause and then that moves through your brain and your body so obviously your brain and your body responds so we will see changes in the brain in the body we will see neurochemical chaos not necessarily serotonin imbalance that's just one sometimes it's dopamine and if dopamines down serotonins often then in anandamites often then i mean i can give you a list of big chemical terms and that's going to change every function in the structure of your brain and your your dna and your telomeres and um 1400 neurophysiological responses are off so you know that's and that's the response though and that doesn't mean that that you have this thing hidden inside of you the scary thing that's controlling you and i that invalidates if i if if someone comes back from war someone's had a sexual trauma to tell them that the depression or anxiety they're feeling is an illness is an insult to what they've gone through but if i say if i say to you gosh that's terrible tell me about it i want to hear your story i want to support you your depression and anxiety that you're feeling is a signal that there's stuff going on there's an origin story there's a source so can i listen can i help can i support you in trying to recognize the signals and go through the process to find the origin story and then to reconceptualize it and that's takes time it's not a 15-minute appointment where i can give you a label that takes time that's not also it's also not the conditioning kind of treatments that are in place that some of them work if they use in the right place but to try and to try and put a veteran who's gone through something back into the situation to try and condition them you can't condition you have to reconstruct so it's kind of like an algebraic equation x is is the situation y is how you should want you want to function for mental p so you've got x plus y and so here we are in our x situation where we are the sort of human experiencing life we're supposed to be at y and you put the two together and what the current treatment says is that okay now we're going to create z we're just going to ignore x and y we're going to create a new thing and that new thing is you diseased but that doesn't work it's actually x plus y equals x y x is what you're going through y is where you want to find mental piece and you want to put the two together to live together so that you can change how the past plays out into your future man this is powerful gosh i want to go back to what you said when you're experiencing this traumatic event in the family you had recently where you're wearing a glucose monitor and you mentioned that there was a process you realized like the monitor went through the roof heart palpitations stress you could feel your physical your body changing into this stress response this protection tightness whatever it was yeah fear anxiety all these these things you were experiencing in the moment what was the process that you broke down to bring it back to more normal levels for yourself of feeling more peace groundedness calm okay so it's the process of the neuro cycle excellent question um it's the process of the neuro cycle which is it's in the second half of the book so the neuro cycle is five sign this is the five steps right yeah this is the five steps this is what i initially developed for people's traumatic brain injury was my first time that i developed it and developed my theory and then from there i refined it to all the different types of you know situations i worked with and then it's been refined over the years this is the most updated um research so a good scientist should keep learning and changing and improving which is what i've tried to do so in this book is the updated version of the neuro cycle the neurocycle is how you get your mind which is always working under control if in the state of acute trauma like we were like i was in that moment acute tumor creates a red brain i showed you that picture of a red brain that red brain means that i have a tidal wave in my brain going on or that there is um the left and the right brain will be out of harmony i'll have a drop of blood and oxygen to the front of my brain i'm going to have things like that delta we've heard of things like delta theta alpha beta gamma all those waves are supposed to flow like waves in the c and if you think of the c you've got the big swells which is delta slightly smaller swells which is theta then they build which is beta the creased which is high beta and the gamma which is the ripple on the beach and so we want that through the brain in this nice kind of even way that's kind of the the y state x plus y x is what happens to us y is that state so x happens and then that y state gets thrown off so in that moment that's what happened to me so what we want to do is because mind works through brain and body and mind is experiencing this this trauma which is a mess our brain and body just do what the mind's doing so then there's a mess in our brain in our body but if i have that kind of chaos i can't think straight i'm not gonna have any wisdom i'm gonna fall apart and in this situation i would have and um and i have in the past but now i've learned how to deal with this and i talk about that this neurocycle can improve how you manage anxiety and depression by 81 that's a massive claim and i've shown it scientifically okay so what i did was to try and get myself back under control now in that state you don't know what to do in a tremendously acute traumatic state but i knew from my science and from my knowledge so i'm proactive so i could go into two zones so i went into two modes the one mode was the mental mess that i was in which is the pilot because i'm driving i'm in this time imagine yourself being in a helicopter that's like a time capsule and you're flying over this forest and the forest is your mind with all these trees and this acute tumor has just grown because it's instant so here's this terrible and your helicopters drawn to this because you are in shock and terror and fear and deep panic and anxiety that is all the smoke signals so i my my pilot's going like this the co-pilot is also me but it's my wisdom because inside of each of us is our survival and that's our instinct that you know when you give someone great advice and you just think oh wow where did that come from you know you get that it's that tips like we know what we know we know how much we can handle we will say i know this that kind of thing that's the co-pilot this wisdom so what we want to do in those states is to get ourselves into the co-pilot remember the co-pilot and the pilot and you use the u language so here you flying this plane over in the co-pilot saying okay let's calm down let's land it at that tree so you land the plane you land this time capsule whatever and you get output you with the copilot so you're safe so you've created a distance and this is i'm expanding in detail and obviously you train and it's all in the book and it's all i've got an app that explains it too but this is the mindset that i have trained myself to come into so i can go into an acute trauma in that moment i'm still crying i'm still freaking out right but i'm freaking out in this zone where i now know because i know that i need wisdom i need to be able to tap into and i cannot get through this chaos if this chaotic brain and body if and mind unless i've calmed it down so i have to get through this because i'm stuck in that black tree and i'm stuck in this chaotic brain so let me consider it would that be considered like fight or flight whether it's someone yes cutting you off in front of you in the uh on the street in the car or someone yelling at you or someone whatever an event happening which is causing you to react in fight or flight whether it's a massive t trauma or literally trauma exactly exactly or acute trauma which is the and the blind signing stuff the stuff you don't expect that just hits us out the blue yes absolutely so you're going into a level of fight and flight so everything physiologically 1400 neurophysiological responses are activated to help you focus but they can't work for you unless you do what i'm telling you to do which is to shift your perception so this is the how to because as soon as you shift your perception in an instant because i told you within seconds i brought the glucose monitor down and i mean i didn't even expect it to work that fast i was amazed and as it cycled through the 12 hours of the of the trauma i was able to manage it more and more so i mean really and this is not the first time i've done this my whole life but it was just so interesting seeing it in real time sure um and seeing the reaction okay so so step one is to get the co-pilot state of mind to to land that's the preparation we haven't even got to step one so there's preparation the plane first yeah so that's it so recognize that you remember there's a co-pilot which is your wise mind you the crazy pilot going all over the place land the plane let the co-pilot tell you okay land the plane and you land the plane where you need to which is at the issue and what drew you into land the plane to find the issue was your emotional so this is step one you're going to gather awareness and gather means you controlling it you're not sitting under the apple tree and all the apples are hitting you on the head you are standing back and you're picking the apple so there's control there's a sense of autonomy a sense of agency so in the midst of chaos you can create agency mentally because your mind's driving it so you stand back and you say okay i picked that apple so that's my emotional warning signals terror despair utter totally traumatized like whatever they are you pick those apples you put them in your baskets you're gathering then you gather awareness so this is gathering kind of your awareness this is how i this is how i'm feeling this is what's happened this is what's like this is the event yes this is getting it's almost yes it is but you're gathering in very four little distinct packages because the more organized you are the more the less chaos we could be bringing very systematic so what are those four what are those four things so you gather awareness of your emotional warning signals so the despair anxiety whatever panic attack then you gather awareness of your physical bodily response so here's your code part of saying okay how are you feeling gather that apple gather that apple what is your physical flattering in the heart panic attack tension gut-wrenching adrenaline fly for whatever flights in front freeze mode you're in then your behaviors what are you saying what are you doing you know i mean i was responding how are you responding yeah action yeah what's what you're saying what are you doing what you're you know what is actually happening and i'm grabbing this i'm grabbing that get this get that you know so what is that and is it working i mean like you well just doing this changes how you do things it's amazing you immediately go into this different mode fourth one is perspective what's your perspective this is doomed this is terrible this is sucks this is end oh okay this is bad but you know what so gather you gather then as soon as you've got those you're then going to reflect so it's very systematic and then as you've gathered and done all this preparation thing you've got the two sides of the brain you've got coherence again you've got blood flow back to the brain you've got oxygen back to the front of the brain when you've got low oxygen and low blood flow at the front of the brain which happens in a in a trauma in an acute situation in those sudden things it drops then you are impulsive you're going to make bad decisions you're going to react incorrectly you're going to create incoherence your alpha wave in the brain drops and becomes more active on the right side and that's on the right side which is not great because that means that we're now not going to have insight so by doing what i've just seen you change all of that you bring back coherence you increase often it may not be excellent yet but you've started the process then as you move forward through the five steps and i've put all this brain stuff in the book and what happens and um so i'm just giving you the overview so then you start now reflecting okay what have i got in my basket so number two reflect reflect is an incredibly beautiful word as is gather awareness gathering awareness i just want to point out in the earlier on i said that we mustn't be frightened of despair and anxiety and trauma and i mean and the dexa depression those scary don't be scared of them because they are messengers they're helpful messengers that are telling you something and if you respond to them in that way you then control them but if you respond to them in fear they control you yeah and then you're not going to move forward you're going to get very stuck and then stuck in rumination and the patterns will just get worse so get the control even though you can you can be crying screaming swearing i don't care what you're doing but just get the control you're at the tree you're doing the stuff so gather reflect is when you think of light going through a prism it reflects all the colors of the rainbow so these depths these that one thing means a lot and so reflect is this process of being a detective okay well why am i having that reaction why am i now when it's something in the moment we pretty much know why i mean i knew why i was so i didn't have to do too much reflection but i had to the reflection in terms of why because i knew the cause but the difference was i needed to reflect to say okay if i react like this this is going to happen so it was it was it was questioning what are you doing with that emotion what are you doing with that behavior is that behavior helping so the reflect in that situation would be different to a reflect for someone who is having a complete and utter imposter syndrome attack and it's a pattern and they keep doing it so they're now working sequentially through the process so they're going to have to start finding why what does it track back to what level what sort of self-esteem issues are what is the origin story of it so that the reflect in that case would be you know ask answer discuss why do i feel this why why why and so it's a different so these but reflect is to just you know get meaning but in a very comprehensive way because there's all these patterns of meaning in that acute torment it's quick i'm doing the five steps quick if i'm working on a pattern over time i'm going to spend longer third step is you write and the writing step is obviously i was in the midst of a term i couldn't write so i would visualize so the quick stuff you can just visualize or if you can write right writing i recommend if you write right right in the form of a metacog i teach you how in the book and i have a video of a neurocycle app that goes with this what's a matter what's a matter a metacog is a pattern form of writing that stimulates it looks like a tree you start in the middle and you work on branches and you put words and you don't write whole sentences you basically just pour information and you literally let it just come out in this pattern format but each the one of the key things is to is to group as you as a thought as something comes up you put it on one area and there's something else coming up you put it wherever so you have these clusters of information and every words on a line and every line goes out of the previous line and that format is unbelievable it just drags the two sides of the brain together digs deep and you start getting insight into what you didn't even know was there and then the fourth step is to then go and sort out that chaos that you've just written down so the fourth step is to okay i've gathered awareness i've reflected i'm writing what does this mean what's the mental autopsy what's the what's the pattern the activators the antidotes what's how can i reconceptualize this beautiful word we conceptualize and then you end off the cycle with a little action and that action if it's in the moment like in that five seconds or whatever it's okay i'm going to actually take a deep breath and i'm going to act like this so i'm going to say that or i'm going to do this so it's a little action that anchors you back in a state where you can function in the next moment in that acute trauma or in that imposter moment and imposter syndrome moment and you've now got to go and into a business meeting you're feeling like you can't because you're in you know the imposter syndrome fraud sort of set up so doing it in the quick moment by moment you're going to have a simple quick action in the big stuff where you're working out the pattern each day you will have you do your work for a limited amount of time and i say do the work because it's not a quick fix if you're looking for a quick fix nothing related to greatness is a quick fix or mind it's time and you know that you experience that with your whole story and um so essentially you would do it for around 15 to 45 minutes a day when you're fixing up the big stuff and you would do it louis the big stuff you would do for 63 days so that's why why 63 glad you asked that so we've all been told 21 days to build a habit well that's a complete myth the way i put it in i wrote about it in the book too a nurse it's not a neurosurgeon a surgeon many years ago was talking about the physical cycles of healing that our body goes through like if you get a blister it takes about three weeks for the stem cells and everything to form and the immune system to do its job to get rid of the blister that's assuming that your mind's not a mess if your mind's a mess you can chop off sixty percent of that healing time it'll take sixty percent longer right up to sixty percent longer if your mind's a mess you're increasing if your mind is it depends it depends on the level of damage some and sometimes you'll need one cycle of three sometimes you'll need multiple that's for physical healing mind healing however needs a minimum of three cycles for behavior really how do we is this scientifically proven yes so there's very little research in the 21 day mass so i decided to research it and there's a few studies there's one from university college london i put them in my book there's my one that i've just done recently over the in 2019 early 2020 we are tracked and we tracked in the brain what happened so 21 days you get you get what we call gamma peaks which means that you've taken this you've deconstructed it and you've reconstructed it into something healthy so you've you've changed the thought but it's xy so that's in there but it's in a different it looks different it's like if you take an ugly old house that you're going to renovate you take lots of photos of all the mold and all the ugly carpets and you bash it down you build a beautiful new house you still remember how it was but you've reconceptualized it you're living in that new space you remember the old okay so that's what i'm talking about that takes 21 days so you create to break down and build a thought with memories because the thought is a tree made of memories memories are what like a tree's made of branches thoughts are made of memories so to make something that's got a level of sustainability takes about 21 days and in that 21 days after that if you stop there it's a tiny little plant in your forest it doesn't have enough energy to move from the non-conscious mind no n the non-conscious mind operates 24 7 it's where all your experiences are stored in thoughts all your belief systems your nurturing everything about you and that is influencing your conscious mind conscious mind is only awake when you're awake so right now as i'm talking everything that i'm saying is stimulating thoughts from your non-conscious mind to move into a conscious mind to make sense of what i'm saying and to build all this new stuff into thoughts in your trees so an unconscious mind for a thought to move from the non-conscious to the conscious through the subconscious so an unconscious subconscious is the bridge conscious is when you awaken unconscious 24 7 infinite huge massive and where our wisdom is as well so the wisdom is through the middle if you want to imagine a forest you've got the beautiful dark green strip which is all your instinctive wisdom survival stuff wild for love stuff optimism bias and then everything we experience in life is around the edge little trees big trees dark trees green trees the smaller the tree the newer the experience or the newer the memory the weaker the memory to that big established trees are the ones that influence so those things are powerful so if it's a big dark tree and it's influencing it's going to jump into your conscious mind and influence your view so track backtracking to get something that's good that you've rebuilt to to actually influence how you view something it has to have more energy put into it energy is never lost energy is transferred quantum physics talks about energy these things are proteins with energy vibrating in the little protein structures so you want that they're weak so you've got a strain through you know you've got to water it you've got to feed it your fertilizer totally and all you do is it's so easy oh my gosh it's so easy from day 22 to 40 to 63 you simply do step number five for about a minute today that's how simple it is it's 42 minutes over 42 days in my neuro cycle app i've actually got a active reminder function that you can type it into it pops up on your phone and you can remind yourself to to do this just and you literally just read it and it keeps just reading it reminds you to do it and then you're building your strength and you're turning it into behavior change so to go around you know the theme of your podcast and to get to greatness requires behavior change so real behavior change if you really want to build a good habit into your life you're going to have to spend the 63 days doing it so not only is that 63 days i mean i've shown it scientifically and so on um not only is it for detoxing the patterns the traumas the toxic habits the small tea big tears you mentioned the acute stuff the bad habits we've developed but it's also to build new habits so if you if you know you identify this is an area that i want to grow in my life to go to the next level of greatness whatever that is you need 63 days at least and sometimes more sometimes the trauma is so embedded and it's blocking your greatness that you might need multiple cycles of 63. there's no cookie cutter design but the more you do that and the more you practice it in the moment by moment the more self-regulated you become which brings us right back to the beginning of the conversation which was that mind is always an action so you may as well control it so here i've just told you how to do it it's pretty much pretty much the the nuts and bolts what does the neuroscience say behind positive thinking versus negative or toxic thinking and i i think this i don't know what the status is 60 000 a day or something like that we have and 80 or 90 percent of them are the same recurring thoughts it i'm probably off there but no no there's a there's a lot of stuff like that out there and you're not far off in terms of what the what the media is saying in terms of um the people i follow people that are heavy into understanding the numbers of you know the from a various neuroscientific perspective and i've done my own calculations we have we build around about eight to ten thousand thoughts a day so we're building so that's sort of how many events we experience it could be more these are very very very very very average numbers it really is so it's somewhere so it's somewhere between eight and eighteen thousand that we build so we build in response to what we experience so whatever's new is built but then to build you also have the thoughts popping up so at any one moment so you know we can work in 10 second blocks that's what neuroscience shows us just to give you some kind of tangible thing to handle hang on to in any one ten-second moment you can literally have anything from one to thirteen thoughts that will move from the non-conscious and maybe more and in as well and also build a couple of thoughts in that thought with one thought but with multiple maybe 100 memories in that so these that's that's 120 odd things happening in any 10 second block and multiply that by 60 seconds you know some six so in one minute so you can really see the numbers as they multiply so it that's where we get anywhere between 8 000 we build and then probably about another 10 000 are coming up so 18 000 seems to be a more but whatever the number is it doesn't really matter it's a lot we have a lot of a lot of them are more negative it seems like right not necessarily if you look over the only reason it feels like that is because the negative get more attention not because they are um not because you're wired that way but because they have created complete disruption in your brain so we see a stronger physical reaction right and you've got to get rid of it it's fine it's against your survival so you're going to pay attention to whatever's threatening your survival think of it if someone's at your front door and they're trying to bash your frontal down and you've got your family to protect you're going to pay attention you're not going to watch tv you're going to pay attention to what's catching what's what's a threat to your survival that's why we so it's not that we have more negative thoughts we're not thinking i need to fix this we're that's we're just relaxing and hanging out but it's when there's a thought that's negative we put a lot of attention exactly it's the big tree in the forest it's re whatever you think about the most will grow so you may have if this huge infinite forest of green the strip through the middle is the wise mind that can't even change the majority is green small trees big trees and you're going to have clusters of the black in between some people will have more because they've had more abuse you know as they said thirty forty percent or twenty thirty percent of the population depending on where you are in which country um would have more experience more trauma socioeconomic you know abuse war etc so war-torn countries will find more ptsd higher percentages than in some way like a less war-torn country and that kind of thing but on average the forest is mainly green but whatever is getting the most attention in your life if you're living in war-torn something or if you're living in an abusive situation or you're living in with a bullying boss or you living under the threat of someone in your family who's really ill that's what's going to dominate so it's not that we have more negative thoughts it's because that is um survival it's threatening our survival it's creating brain damage we've got to get rid of it we've got to manage it it's a call to management paying attention to the toxic is a call to management it's created disruptions in the gravitational field think of those those oh i need to get an an image there's a movie and i don't know which one it is but it's those you know you get that ripple effect it's moving through like uh um like a field or something and you can almost you know they create with the movies they create that ripple effect you know can you visualize something like that okay that's what's happening with the mind so we've got these ripples it's not just trees that are standing still these ripples but even and then that ripple is toxic so it's like it's going to be very disruptive and that sends out this this it upsets the near the balance in the unconscious mind and it's linked to a physical so that the this gravitational field wave disruption storm is linked to one of these in the physical brain so it's in the storms there somewhere there so maybe it's there and then it's also there this thing in there so those are linked and those are threatening with survival so they will get your attention and your intention is to go fix so if we suppress so if we suppress in terms of what not pay attention not be aware yeah medicate take drugs uh drink whatever the addiction is exactly as opposed to address it what happens well so essentially i'm glad you brought it up so addiction is not a disease we're not caught by the chemical and the chemicals do change your brain i've just explained that but your mind can override any biological change because your mind's more powerful than your brain and that's how we you know you can always draw on that internal survival instinct which is that internal strip of green trees just for the analogy sake so addiction isn't a disease addiction is a response like depression it's a warning signal it's trying to take something that's painful and taking something to numb the pain so as you said the sex the pornography the um the alcohol the drugs the smoking yeah so you often find exactly so if you find someone who was talking to someone yesterday who had a tremendous um battle with cocaine and alcohol but it wasn't those that grabbed them we get the impression that oh your brain's diseased therefore you're vulnerable to those and you can't control it nonsense that's taken all the hope people are dying for like from lack of hope louis that's that's what that statistic i spoke about earlier the reversal of trends people are dying from lack of hope death of despair when you take away people's sense of agency you're taking away the most core dynamic of who you are as a human your mind is all about agency think feel choose you control that and you remove that agency from someone by saying hey you can't control the fact that you're addicted to alcohol or that you're addicted to that's terrible but if you say okay i see that that is where you're finding your coping strategy at the moment that having the alcohols and i'm in the pain have it take it having the you know the pornography the the the repeated whatever the abuse of whatever abuse of anything to to to hide the opioid addiction it's it's just to numb the pain so once a person is in a loving supportive environment where they can start seeing that change then they can start and see why then you can take them through the process of okay well let's see maybe that signal has got a cause and let's start finding and when you start working through the neuro cycle they i can tell you now most of the time they're still addicted to something because the pain's so bad and they're denying this is a disease because it's easier to accept that initially but they deny no i don't i'm not addicted to alcohol i know i'm not addicted to to whatever the cocaine i'm not addicted but once you start lovingly showing them okay well let's talk about forget about the the substance let's talk about you what's going on what's happened and when you start doing that then i'm depressed and this and this and then the things start coming up and as soon as you start getting that cycle happening then the person is more able to say oh i see i've been trying to numb my pain and then you can start getting the release 86 to 93 of people that are addicted get out of addiction through choice and that choice is stimulated by a supportive as a super supportive loving environment that is helps people to see what's going on because it's very hard to face that stuff so we can live in a state of denial and so that's what takes a lot of good supportive and good therapy and good environments you know supportive environments but to tell someone i'm always an addict it's one of the worst things you can say you'd say okay you have no power right right i'm a victim to this chemical imbalance or whatever it might be yeah but that's not the case and it's and it may take you years i mean i i i was speaking to someone the other day who was as i said a cocaine battling with i mean all kinds of stuff and now is one of the most amazing people helping other people doing the most incredible work that person had been raped multiple times as a child about came from a very wealthy family and the babysitter who looked after him when he was parents were so busy working was repeatedly raping this child through his childhood and then got i mean it happened again at university and this and this and different work environments and and in different parts of the world when he traveled to different parts of the world and that's where so he had to get to the point where he realized he was numbing the pain you know so that's so if you can you see we have to shift the narrative absolutely you know that this is and these are extreme cases but there's also the day-to-day i mean we've got to live with ourselves someone the other day said to me well that's all and well relationship big extreme what about just sitting here with myself and i can't sleep at night and i'm worrying about like you know the things that on i can still get through life but i'm ruminating and i'm overthinking and i'm stuck in anger and you know that's that too we've got to manage all of that and that was my that was 25 years of my life because i i talked about being sexually abused when i was five and having anger and resentment and frustration and rage for 25 years until i was until i actually started opening up and talking about it until i did therapy until i did uh you know mdr yeah i mean i did every type of therapeutic experience i could do um and it it really truly gave me the the environment of love support and peace to begin the path of setting me free setting the pain and the trauma free by giving it a voice by expressing it by beautiful doing the work and it didn't happen overnight eight years later it's still an ongoing thing of healing yeah it's much easier and i can have a conversation about it with ease where eight years ago i would you know be crying talking about it x y that's the x plus y equals x y you've read you've reconceptualized you're able to talk sorry it means interrupt you but that's what you've done you've been you've been neuro cycling without knowing it now if you formally start neuro cycling if you start a daily program you're going to start unwiring it even more you're going to get even more control over the the accumulation of all the things that happened i mean that's just what i would recommend that you try it out for sure it's uh so what should we be thinking when toxic thoughts about ourselves i'm not good enough i'll never amount to anything i shouldn't try this this person doesn't like me drama stress anxiety whatever it is when we have a toxic thought that doesn't support our dreams it doesn't support the betterment of our future and our vision what should we be thinking in terms of replacing that in terms of the process or is that something we shouldn't be rejecting negative thoughts we should be analyzing and being aware but how do we do it without consuming our life okay so you you've kind of answered the question the second part that's what you do the only way to get control is to embrace and to process and reconceptualize and you do it in a very accepting manner so it's like getting to the helicopter and you'll be the messy pilot and be the co-pilot yeah and get get into that state of mind because then and then it's very non-judgmental that you start by telling yourself like the very first thing as you're getting in the helicopter whichever point when you're in is to say it's okay it's okay there's been a million billion people who have been in the same position as you that are battling in fact most people battle with self-esteem it's very few people that don't for some reason battle with self-esteem for example just take that example thinking i can't do this or i am shame because every toxic experience we have completely rips at the core of who we are and the core of who we are is i'm needed i'm valuable and i have something to contribute to the world that no one else can contribute so when someone tries to take that away from you through an abuse or that is has to attack the core of you so you kind of hide amongst shame and and self-esteem comes out of this i shouldn't be feeling this but if especially a young child like five to be abused you don't know how to process that so the most immediate thing is because it's so against survival because the adult in your life if you're supposed to be the protector everything's distorted you don't have the language you don't have the the brain power yet the mind power you to process so your coping strategy will be well this made me feel bad so i am bad so you tend to have this but pervasiveness sexual trauma tends to create a pervasiveness of shame and that comes out in all kinds of behavioral manifestations whether it's withdrawal whether it's being difficult aggressive and it's pervasive and that that attacks self-esteem because something at the core of you always been attacked and that's why one it takes time as we as you spoke about to go back and and find that so in terms of what you say to someone the first thing is to get to the point where we have to change our narrative we have to forget what the world said about all these scary words and see those as very helpful it's a complete 90 degree or 360 degree change despair anxiety shame thinking i am shame thinking i have no self-esteem thinking i can't do this that's okay because as soon as you say that's okay as soon as you can admit you're feeling that you've controlled it you've now promised yourself you've got the power back you've shifted the power balance so instead of um if this is not in an unconscious it's this trauma it's the five-year-old it's gone through the years whatever and there's been this and i'm not saying you did this but there may have been a period that you suppressed because you didn't know how to process until maybe 15 16 17 when you were getting more metacognitively able and started seeing things maybe it was older very often it hits around between 18 22 early childhood trauma where we start seeing those patterns manifesting and a bit of awareness coming so now that when this comes into consciousness in the brain this thing is now weakened so these protein branches which are the memories and the emotions the data of the event which was that right is now weakened so the minute i through my tears say okay i'm i feel i feel shame i feel like i've got no self-esteem i feel like i'm useless and i'm ugly and i'm this and i'm dead and i can't even achieve anything the minute i can accept that i can look at that objectively pilot co-pilot and the co-pilot can say what do you feel i feel okay let's now see if that's real and that whole calm just the way i'm speaking calm it's okay own it it's fine it's okay now we can fix it that's weakened these chemical bonds protein bonds i've started changing the structure in my brain i've now shifted 1400 neurophysiological responses to work for me instead of against me i've now started recreating balance in the brain i've increased blood flow so i'm setting myself up to be more resilient to do the very hard work of unpacking and it gets worse before it gets better and the the one of the really good things that i have presented in in my work in in this book is to to know that scientifically i've shown that even if you feel worse which you will when you unpack this and you start seeing stuff that you've suppressed it's terrible it's heartbreaking it can make you feel like you just want to die and that's how i felt when i started talking about it i was like this is the scariest hardest thing that i've ever done i'd rather i'd almost rather die like it's the feeling that you have you're like if anyone ever knew these things about me if i had to truly face these things it's the most scary challenging thing i've ever emotionally had to deal with and it feels like you're dying i don't know maybe that's too extreme maybe it's too extreme but i think you're thinking or feeling like i'm going to die because if i process this and if people knew this about me yeah how could they ever accept me how could they ever love me i'm going to be alone for the rest of my life like your mind my mind went through these thoughts yeah yeah and there's like no meaning and there's no purpose and what can you do and it's a waste of time and i can't live with myself like this and it's so terrible and i can't do this and then you start rejecting people around you or you make wrong just it's totally normal that is normal you need to accept that about the process it will get worse before it gets better and that's okay and and and that's totally what you've gone through is normal and and we can't go and label that and medicate that then i invalidate your experience by you being able to talk about your experience this format of having a podcast where around the world now with people are being much more vulnerable and opening it's bringing this into the open and it's enabling us to then be able to weaken that you've shifted the power balance and it does get worse as you said you want to die it's so bad but then the shift starts happening because look where you are today a shift happens at some point when it really gets double you may even have tried to commit suicide or you may even have got to the point where this is that i'm out of here or something traumatic really traumatic and then you suddenly there's that shift there's that awareness and then you can start rebuilding and you know that is a time process and that's that shift is real it's what we you asked me about what would you say to someone who's in that state where do you start you start by giving yourself permission you start by getting into the co-pilot pilot by letting that pilot fly like a maniac and you know crash the plane it's a time capsule you can get that plane going again but helping leaning on the power and the comfort of the co-pilot to say i'm really scared of that i don't want to land my plane you land in a brawl and you land your plan and then you take out your spades and you start the process of getting to eventually digging this whole thing up and slowly as you're ready that's why i say 15 to 45 minutes a day you don't do longer you do a little bit at a time and you do as many cycles as you need and eventually it gets to the point where you have reconceptualized how do we i mean how do we truly heal the trauma of the past uh that causes a lot of our thoughts because i hear like the i'm hearing you say that i'm feeling the traumas the memories of the past that we had from the event and we're holding on to the memory the idea the thought of the event and sometimes we we and a lot of the times i would go to say uh you know i'll speak for myself and i'm thinking most of us probably an event happens and our memories after decades and years build it up into something bigger and more extreme potentially yeah the event actually was and we're holding on to now our mind is coming up with memories that weren't even real that caused this reaction in us so how do we really is it healing the trauma of the past is it healing the memory of the past is it healing all of it what is the process what should we do is is it only through therapy can we do it alone no you can't you can do it alone you can do it with therapy you can do it i would never do anything completely alone i would make sure you have some sort of support system um if you can get your therapy it will definitely help but therapy is a catalyst it's not actually and it's a place where you can unpack the pain and get the guidance for how to manage the next step but you're still living with yourself 24 7. yeah you've got to do the work and this is where having a system of mind management is so vital so what you've described is the whole thought tree and that thought tree let's take the incident of of what you went through as a child and that would have been you know what the actual incident would have been is the roots and then the event and the details and the timing and the all the everything and that then builds your perspective of how you viewed yourself and and how you viewed this whole which this is your and your emotions and the data and that manifested in how you actually lived your life so that's a trauma from the past there's no guilt in this even though it's toxic because that's all you could do to survive it's a coping mechanism so this toxic tree is a coping mechanism so we've got this inbuilt um thing in our mind and our brain that in a system that enables us because this should wipe you out you shouldn't even be alive kind of thing if you look at the natural biology but there's this protective system in place that kind of cocoons it for a season until you're ready to deal with it so that's you know the and then something will come and the event will come in your life where now you have to deal with it and sometimes we ignore that we ignored it a few times before we did an eventually so there's kind of a cocoon so it's protective so it is damaging but because you're not ready to deal with it it's not wiping you out it's still causing problems it's still creating a few shock waves there in the ground and that kind of thing but when you're ready to you know then suddenly something will happen in your life and it's being put it's slowly infiltrating it's the slow infiltration so it's sending out little tendrils you know it's growing that you're still surviving but things are getting worse and worse and eventually that eventually this cocoon starts breaking down and it explodes in mentally physically in something in a relationship in a work environment in a it builds and cascades and little things happen and eventually it's a big explosion that's this thing the cocoon starting to come off as you are maturing and getting older and doing more with your life and experiencing more this has to then get sorted out so your body gets to a point where it has to reject it it has to the past has to go for want of an awful analogy but it's a good example at some point you can't stay there anymore and that's when it explodes and when it explodes these are all the memories as you recall it this is the concept of the abuse as a child that's the thought this is the detail of the story and that's how you experienced it and so you've got to go from your the both warning signals back to the data here how you experience it back to the action and then you re-conceptualize so how do you make it play out in your future that's always part of your story but you change how like you've already done it you said it earlier you can talk about it now without falling apart but at some point you could not talk about it at all and so you rewrite the script you rewrite it and then and that takes time that takes these cycles of 63 days you literally re reconceptualization is rewriting the script so eventually this goes you then have this and that now instead of being toxic is can you see some of these leaves are shining a little brighter than the others okay so there is that in that it's reconceptualized i can now talk about it i can now it's that'll make you cry but you've now turned it into a part of your you've redesigned it you've it's the it's the beautiful new space that's how it was but now you you've you've made it work for you instead of against you so that is then the trauma of the past which is there's no excuse in that there's no forgiveness even in that but you need to be released because if you still connected to that trauma kept there keeps keeps you connected in the quantum world literally to the to the abuser so until we release so there's a connection so you literally here's your brain here's that person maybe 10 000 miles away but because of entanglement in quantum physics there's no space-time dimension and this because of that's a toxic entanglement but when particles are entangled and you may have heard of the subway or someone saying this between two particles are put in a relationship in quantum physics experiments no matter how far apart they are shot they still are in relationship so this one turns this way this one will turn this way so until you release until you reconceptualize you're still connected so that will always be controlling you so when we talk about people say forgiveness i think release is a better word because how do you give these these going through this process over time as you reconceptualize you're slowly cutting the ties so as you so by the time it's in this format no longer is that invisible tie there you know that you've cut the tie when you can actually talk about it and you're not excusing that person's behavior that can never actually what they've done can never be forgiven if you think of it but you can release it so we talk about forgiveness as being part of a healing but we've got to i had this discussion with someone the other day we've got to be very careful of using the term forgiveness loosely because when someone's done something wrong that wrongness even whatever you've done wrong to someone that wrongness is always there what is forgiven is what what's what should we do is we should release we should realize that that was a moment in time it was wrong the person needs to own it but it's not your responsibility to make that person own it they have to unpack that wrongness and kind of work through that what you have to do is be released from it and to put that into your past and that's kind of the easiest thing to do because a lot of people keep getting stuck because they think i can't forgive i can't forgive how can i forgive someone who's how do you forgive someone who's raped you how does your parents forgive someone who's hurt their child you know how do you how does the how how does when you've someone's murdered you know that i'm not saying that you have to keep that and not you know you you have to get you have to release yourself from that and you have to accept that that event maybe that person was operating out of trauma so the reason for them doing that was trauma driven and it doesn't make it right it makes it but we can't ignore it and what i think we've also tried to do with a lot of sort of psychological approaches is oh forgive especially in the religious community forgiveness it's all gone it's all gone away it hasn't it's still there it's part of your story i think the kinsugi principle explains it the best you know the kinsugi principle the japanese art you know when a vase shatters to the ground and it's in a thousand pieces they don't sweep the pieces away when you were raped as a child your life was shattered okay but you didn't sweep the pieces away every what they did was they collect every piece and they meticulously rebuilt the vase with gold lacquer and platinum so now you have this beautiful new vase with all the gold golden platinum represents what you've gone through it's enriched to who you are as a person now you are helping others through your story you are teaching others you have you as a leader are one of the three percent only that are enabling others to talk about their trauma only three percent of leaders are talking about mental health three percent globally that's terrible wow so if we as leaders don't talk about it how do we give permission to those that are following to talk about it so as a leader as you talk you've now taken the kansugi principle you are showing us your gold cracks the shining light in the leaves and it's that the trauma is shocking we never forgive that is wrong we can never say that's right it's never right but what you've done with it is right and now you can turn it into helping others go into greatness yeah that's kind of the transformation wow i'm curious how do we what's the process of protecting our mental health on a daily basis whether we've it sounds like first we need to be aware of into the process of healing the past or the the traumatic memories of the past however you want to call it but what's the process of protecting the present in the future so that we don't fall back into a dark space that that kind of keeps us there for so long absolutely is there a process you recommend there is and it's self-regulation it's being very very self-regulated um we see from neuroscience and i actually have a little quote in the book where i think i've got it i think i actually had it open because i was really i did it um i actually did a little a live on it today but you can every it would i can tell you what it is every 10 seconds here it is um every i thought i had the page open every 10 seconds you can be consciously aware of what you're thinking feeling and choosing mental peace and keeping yourself in a state of mental peace comes from being aware every 10 seconds now i'm not asking you to set your watch and your time on your phone i'm just saying that translate that out it means all the time that as when you're awake you need to be standing back and observing your own thinking you need to be thinking okay what am i thinking in this moment how am i reacting this moment i wake up i feel great and then i read an email i feel lousy oh i wake up feeling on edge why i'm talking to this person how am i reacting how am i responding i'm doing this email i'm doing this work what's my it's constantly monitoring and that may sound exhausting but it's not it's the most natural thing in the world it's one of the most brain healthy things you can do so that's the one key is self-regulation it as your neurocycle as you get into the habit of neurocycling your self-regulation skills are trained to a level where it changes your life i honestly if i had to sell what would say say what protects my mental health it's my increased self-regulation from constantly living a life of neurocycling then the other thing in the neuro cycling that is phenomenal for protecting mental health which no one speaks about i don't know anyone except me speak about this and it's called brain building and there's a whole section in the book on brain building and that's taking the five steps of the neuro cycle to learn new information as humans what does that mean a new skill or a new new everyday new data so for me i will take um my scientific research every day i spend at least an hour looking at neuroscientific or scientific studies related to my field of work um studying new information the latest so i study it to the point where i could actually give a lecture on it or i could write an exam on it so i take the five steps and i study information every day when you wake up you have millions of new baby nerve cells and they nerve cells look like trees and they are waiting for you to be to um to like lattices to strengthen the new cells the new thoughts that you build into the the neurons of your brain these little branches these thoughts and if you don't use them they become toxic wastes so that affects your sleep at the end of the day and affects your dreams and cumulatively over time they affect your health of your brain so when you when you brain build it's like cleaning your teeth if you don't clean your teeth every day eventually you're gonna have a real problem with your teeth and your brain because it's gonna cause all kinds of issues in your body and so on same thing with brain building brain building builds mental and physical resilience so by learning something we actually think deeply that when you neurocycle to brain build what i'm doing is getting you to think super deeply and when you think deeply you make all these great things happen in the brain the left right side oxygen and all that stuff and you and that's the only way you can actually grab those new those new baby dendrites they respond to deep thinking they don't respond to shallow thinking they don't respond to scanning through headlines and hurry sickness and rush rush rush and data capturing and never doing anything they respond to oh that's i scan the headlines and that interests me let me read that article and study it and so i'm going to write an exam well i'm reading this great book or take my book and study it you know study that every day for an hour you'll get you'll not only get the tools but you'll be building your brain whatever take anything you're interested in if you love cooking if you love whatever you are interested in self-help books anything don't just read study them use the five steps take an hour a day if you can do more do more and you will transform your mental health all my patients when they came into my practice i would obviously evaluate and do all that kind of thing would work out sort of where the issues were but we would always do brain building first sometimes for a few sessions i would only do brain building and get them to a state where i could recognize they're starting to get more resilient and self-regulated then we would start doing the trauma work and the learning disability work and the work with trauma you know working with traumatic brain injury we would and in fact all the traumatic brain injury and stroke work that i would do with my patients like if i was working with someone like what your dad went through i would teach the the patient and the family brain building we would take what are you interested in and like if your dad was interested let's say whatever let's say he was interested in i don't know what was your dad interested in he's into uh playing piano singing sports running yeah okay so you could take maybe sports and you could then use the brain building you can do this with him now you can take the brain building and take about sports you don't just read it but you actually study it you do the five steps and you study it as though you are now going to give a lecture that you're going to now teach this that's what i would do with with my patients and then we would slowly restore function because that changes them it orders the gravitational fields orders the brain changes and directs the neuroplasticity and healing comes and you start transforming i had ceos of of top companies in south africa have terrible car accidents and completely lose their functionality not be able to function do this brain building in the whole for over a period of time and go back and become something else so like the one guy was an engineer but went into management and became a ceo of a huge corporation had this terrible car accident ended up going back and becoming a top engineer with brain damage so i mean like i've had pilots that at 82 that couldn't fly anymore that have become accountants i mean i can tell you story of the story when i'm in the most distressed state like that night of acute trauma that i told you about besides the glucose monitoring besides doing the neurocycling what did i do i did brain building i set the brain building to calm myself down in that state so that i would shift between the the management neuro cycle to the brain building near a cycle to try to learn and understand something yeah and that but that brought resilience so it calmed me down if i'm worked up i'll go to brain building i'm really out of it and i'm not managing and i'm feeling like i'm getting super anxious or depressed or something i will even go into 10 minutes of brain building i'll grab a study study it do the brain building and immediately increase my resilience does brain building only happen when you're studying and learning something or is it more of like okay i'm going to play like ping-pong or play a sport or do an activity to help like hand-eye coordination yes no definitely you can do that too so ping-pong is fantastic for the brain you know anything that really challenges the brain to coordinate is definitely going to be a brain building exercise so you know racquetball tennis uh ping pong you know things that are skeletons whatever yeah yeah you can do those too so do those those are more physical related so i would balance i would balance the physical with the mental so that you do the cognitive as well i mean both are mental i shouldn't say that sort of um um text and physical make sure that your brain build with a combination you know i feel like a lot of parents in general don't have the tools to have conversations with their kids around mental health um you know i don't remember much of my parents although they're amazing i don't remember us talking about mental health and um these these challenges that might arise these emotions and these feelings that might arise for us at different times in ways of how to manage it properly as as like the tools that are now being discovered in research like you have today what conversations should parents be having with their kids around mental health in order to make them feel safe seen and loved with the confusion that they have maybe as teenagers or young young adults in today's world i love your question and it's so important we should be doing this from babies so when a child comes home from school and they're maybe three or four years old and they sad they don't have the language but to be able to actually notice and validate i see you feeling sad why are you sad and what you give them toys to be able to act out the older they get never overlook a child's emotion always validate i see you sad do you want to talk about it i see you so it's it's i see you you notice i'm saying i see you and you can find your own wording of that but it's to acknowledge which validates and never to judge or say oh you don't need to feel like that what parents do a lot unintentionally i'm a parent of four i did it even with all my knowledge i have so we make mental messages i see we make mental messes all the time but it's very important not someone your child comes to you and says i i'm really worried and and then you say what are you worried about i'm worried about this one doing something that you think is totally irrelevant oh that's not so bad you don't have to worry about that that is the worst thing you can do to your child because what you've done is invalidate something that for them is now they feel shame so now they've got um this confusion of worry they don't know how to process it and you know what parents do that you know you haven't accepted their feelings or their thoughts that's it so it's very important even if you don't think that that it's valid you're not helping them saying and i know it's done often within teaching oh it's not so bad it'll be okay calm down don't do that it's it's rather sit down and embrace it's okay let's talk about how you're feeling why do you think you go through the five steps i've actually got in my neuro cycle app i've got a whole thing on how to use neuro cycling for children and i'm writing i've written books in the past but now we're doing the updated versions of neuro cycling for baby tarts and recycling for young kids teenagers whatever so exactly how to have the conversations but it's openness one of the things that i have as a parent um and i mean i've worked with i used to do a lot of family therapy when i practice and as a the advice i always gave parents and that i've tried to apply as much as possible is keep your environment open keep it no matter what your kids your kids want to talk to you about sex and and things that you don't want to talk about if you don't want to talk about them they're going to talk about them somewhere else and that goes for emotions too we've got to allow our kids to say i am feeling depressed the other day someone said how do i help my child not be a professor of depression and it was quite an interesting way of phrasing it and my response to that was well help them process it if they're a professor of depression what can you learn from them if they if you feel that they are so good at depression these that's a symptom or a signal of something going on you need to acknowledge that and say i see you feeling depressed can you explain more and then work through the whole get those you know the five steps work through it systematically you can use a lot of visuals with kids i mean i've been doing this with kids when i was practicing and training in schools and things as young as three and i would take the brain listen three-year-olds respond to this say well and i'll say this is in your brain it'll take a tree okay so now this is this happy tree the sad tree and you work through okay what are you feeling what's the what's the sad give me and you give them the words and then let's see what are you doing what you work through systematically through the process and you say okay so this is where it's cut and it might take a few days same so it's the same process but you're orientating them to their level and then what you're doing is you're modeling what to do at the same time don't hide your feelings as a parent you know there's so much don't act perfect no because it's in the mess that they see european grow mess is how they learn so you make a mess you get mad at your child for no reason and then you feel guilt and condemnation that's don't do that if you get mad explain why you're mad say i'm really mad i'm sorry i said the wrong thing i was i didn't mean to do that this is why i did it but the thing that you mustn't let a child grow up oh you're the mother you chose to have me therefore you've got to be perfect and if you fell you've messed up my life forever that's not healthy for a child and that's what happens and it's bad for the parent and the child and or the parents pretending oh no everything's fine and you know meanwhile behind close towards you and your husband are having a huge fight or you and your wife are having that's so confusing when my husband and i have an argument we the kids grew up knowing why we explained okay we were wrong we shouldn't have said this this is why we argued and this is our solution you know and it's that authenticity and that honesty and you know what they may not like it always because it can be quite scary but life is scary and you've got to give you've got to give people your kids the tools to know that hey this is how i'm managing it and i'm an adult and i still battle so when they're an adult and they're backing they don't think oh gosh i'm an adult i'm supposed to be like my mother who was perfect no my mother still cries my dad still gets upset but they've got a management plan so it's that authenticity and honesty does that answer the question absolutely uh i've got a couple final questions for you this has been fascinating um really inspired by all this and i can't wait to dive in more in the book cleaning up your mental mess five simple scientifically proven steps to reduce anxiety stress and toxic thinking so make sure you guys get the book if you haven't got it yet this is going to be really powerful and helpful for you for a family member for a friend so make sure to check this out really inspired by this um you've been doing this work for what three decades now nearly fought 38 years now so almost four decades you've been doing this work and research and as a practitioner as well applying this in the real world what is the biggest challenge you still face today even knowing all of these practices and awareness around the brain the ma the mind thoughts thinking memory all this stuff what's the challenge you still face as a human being with four decades of experience the the the challenge that personally it's i wish i could manage it 24 7 and that's my goal because i know it works and when it does and i get totally frustrated when i think why didn't i just use the neuro cycle it's got to the point in our family where if i would like i actually went to my husband yesterday i was really like worked up about something he said well why aren't you neuro cycling i'm just like don't say that to me i don't feel like neurocycling i want to i just want to have a moan you know that kind of thing but yeah essentially it's true because i had to i actually got myself back under control so my greatest the greatest hard the probably the hardest thing to do is to to watch um people in pain when i know that they can that there's a way out and i wish i could fix things and that's probably what you can't do i mean not probably you can't do that it's made me my weakness is i when i want to fix everything and everyone and if i can't i think what have i done wrong so i have to keep reminding myself all the time that i can't i can only you cannot fix anyone else but you can only support them so that's a very big challenge for me because i can see hey just do this even to myself do that you'll be fine afterwards you'll you'll get through this you know as that saying goes this too shall pass when you know how to manage it so that's yeah that's for me a big challenge and in terms of globally uh the narrative of mental health we just have to stop telling people that they are brain damaged when they are just being normal humans that's a huge challenge this is awesome i'm really glad we had this conversation um thank you so much this question i ask everyone towards the end is called the three truths question so i'd like you to imagine it's your last day on earth many years away from now and you get to accomplish all your goals and dreams they all they all come true but eventually you gotta you gotta go to the next place you gotta leave this earth uh and you gotta take all of your work with you all of your research all of your books your you know this interview it's gotta go with you to the next place but you're looking to but you get to leave behind three lessons that you would share with the world this is all we would have to remember you by are these three lessons or what i like to call three truths what would you say you would share that the mind is something you can control the mind is real the mind is the source of everything and that is something that you can learn and develop and that i would leave the system behind i'd say listen learn learn to manage your mind use the neuro cycle develop it further whatever but that's what i would um and this the fact that your mind is real that your mind is always with you if you don't get your mind under control everything else is just wonder dressing yeah we have to really so that would be sort of the main thing and then the how to i would definitely leave behind do this and develop it grow through them make it even better than what i've done but this is what i can offer humanity is this has hard managed mind and then the then the philosophy the third thing i'd leave behind is three words three three lessons that um psychologist william james has quoted often as saying and that's three things in life what's so important be kind be kind be kind to yourself to others and those three things i think we'd be pretty well equipped to have a decent peaceful realistic existence absolutely those are beautiful truths carolina appreciate that i want to acknowledge caroline for a moment because this has been very uh ah inspiring and eye-opening and i acknowledge you for the nearly four decades of constant curiosity constant research and dedication to understanding the mind and the complicated nuances of the minds of the mind body connection of the mind brain connection of quantum physics and all the things surrounding the energetic field of the mind uh it's something i've been fascinated with my entire life uh as a young child uh growing up learning about it but it's something that i've been more curious about but for you to make this your life's mission and study it and then make it simple try to simplify the complex in a way so human beings can understand their minds i really acknowledge you for doing the work showing up consistently and providing and having the passion you have to to share this information i think it's really inspiring so i acknowledge you for for all of it thank you that's so great i want to remind everyone again get the book cleaning up your mental mess make sure you check it out right now uh you are on social media you do a lot on instagram i see uh twitter instagram facebook dr caroline leaf on pretty much everywhere and also your website it's just doctorcarolineleaf.com thisdoctorleaf.comleaf.com it's got all your information your books all the different stuff over there so make sure people check out dr leaf.com um it's the final question yeah go ahead i have i have a podcast as well called cleaning up your mental mess so that's another place check out the podcast and then and you i want to interview you as soon as possible on there as well i'd love to have your story be fantastic for sure would love to yeah i'm always down to to do the work if anyone wants to analyze me and do sessions with me i'm in so we have such a wonderful story i appreciate it thank you my final question is what's your definition of greatness you i think you know my answer to that my definition of greatness is when you start getting to grips with understanding how you think feel and choose then you start you start seeing greatness because there's something you can do that no one else can do and when you recognize that there's something that you can do that no one else can do which cut which is your mind it's what you're doing it's your perception then there's no envy or jealousy there's no desire to be like someone else competition goes because you can't be competed with because no one can do what you can do so everyone is in that same boat so suddenly now if you move from competition to enhancement and that is key so when we enhance each other that's when we really grows humanity wow dr caroline leaf i'm very inspired and impressed thank you so much for being here for sharing your wisdom and i can't wait to do it in the future again i can't wait as well thank you so much it's been amazing thanks for your incredible questions i love the the depth of the conversation that we've had and thank you if you're looking for more greatness in your life make sure to check out this video right here and also check out our free pdf the three secrets to unlock the power of your mind to help you change your life download it right here these neurochemicals are all internal and while some of them are designed to be released in response to things very reflexively like food sex sleep

Channel: Lewis Howes

Views: 1,136,951

Rating: 4.8743949 out of 5

Keywords: Lewis Howes, Lewis Howes interview, school of greatness, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, success habits, success, wealth, motivation, inspiration, inspirational video, motivational video, success principles, millionaire success habits, how to become successful, success motivation, caroline leaf anxiety, caroline leaf podcast, caroline leaf ted talk, caroline leaf interview, heal your body and mind, prevent disease, how to heal yourself

Id: zX4DeCV31YY

Length: 103min 6sec (6186 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 10 2021