Neuroscientist Reveals How To START HEALING Your Body & Mind Today! | Caroline Leaf

as a clinical neuroscientist have developed a systematic way to reconstruct the brain and what is seen is immediate massive change positive change by traumatic brain injured patients from literally being written off as vegetables to getting degrees by doing brain building using the neurocycle [Music] i really wanted to start with this understanding of what the mind is i think many of us when we think of our minds we think of it as one distinct entity but it's very clear that you use the mind and brain you talk about them differently because they are different yet a lot of writers a lot of scientists i feel use those terms interchangeably this is such a vitally important topic to discuss and mind is my passion i have been researching it for 38 years now which is a long time and i practiced clinically as a clinical neuroscientist for 25 of those years and mind has been the dominant focus of what i've been trying to understand and interestingly enough back in the 80s the mind and the brain was seen as separate and in fact if you go back to the sort of 150 years of science you'll see that discussion and also if you go into the ancient texts whether it's philosophical spiritual science you'll see the mind brain split in all different ways there's always been this thing that mind is this kind of like a force that is driving things so probably the easiest way to understand mind is to think of the difference between you and i alive talking in our listeners and viewers and a dead person so if you and i had a dead person here which we obviously don't they wouldn't be doing what we doing they wouldn't be responding this is so basic but the brain and the body would be disintegrating but right now you and i in response to being alive our brain every second we making eight hundred and ten thousand two million new cells our brain is responding our heart is responding there's stuff going on but if you die that stops so i see mind as this force that is driving this aliveness and enabling us to experience life everything the ups and downs and process it and then put that into the brain so i see the brain from my research and sort of the feel that i'm moving psychoneurobiology the brain and the body are the responders the mind is the driver so the mind is kind of if you think of our mind as being around us and in us and on a physics level we're talking about gravitational fields i mean there's amazing research being done in gravitational field work where nobel prize physicists have shown that you can actually measure gravitational fields and we know that it stops us floating we know the basics but we can actually see that we have our own unique gravitational fields we know from electromagnetics that these that we have this electromagnetic field around us we can see that in ekgs we can see that in the blood we can see that in qegs we have so we we have a lot of evidence in the physics world of this force that is moving through the human body creating this aliveness response on a psychological level the mind would be our ability to think and feel and choose in response to for example this conversation in response to the when you woke up this morning in the conversation you had with a loved one or the decision to eat what you ate and this decision when you read the politics and the latest thing uncovered and decisions about our lifestyle all of that is mind driven the mind is driving everything so i see the mind is this force physics level psychological level interacting with the brain receiving the world putting it into the brain and the brain and the body responding so you're quite right i've watched this over the last 40 years of my career that as from a young scientist and practicing clinician to where i am at the moment still doing clinical trials i have watched this trajectory where we've gone from discussing mind and brain as being separate but absolutely intimately connected and necessary to to the one media that you can't be without and to the point where mind and brain are being used as the same term and so it's this is always one of the first questions i get asked in any interview any lecture any q a is the mind brain separate the difference so i'm not talking about dualism in the sense of descartes or something i'm talking more about you know i mean that's these elements of that there i'm talking about this force this life force and i see mind under that so we could say spirit we could say soul we could say you know there's all the beautiful spiritual philosophical ways we can explain it but it's it's our life force and the brain is this beautiful physical organ that is extremely complex that we've learned dramatically more about over the last 40 years and more than we've learned in all of history and yet we've as we've learned more about the brain we've become neuro-reductionistic everything's been about the brain to the point where even a human experience like an emotion is not considered an illness if someone has depression and the emotional depression is seen as an illness i don't see it as an illness i see it as a response as a warning signal as a clue as a messenger because it's our mind brain and body working together to tell us that something's going on so yes i see a definite separation and i see the signs backing this up yeah so it's kind of like the brain is receiving inputs from the mind and the mind it's like the driver and tells the brain what to do exactly it's driving the brain it's like a computer computer is although i hate to compare their brain to computer because it's way more intelligent but the philosophies is similar we have these computers if we don't plug them in and charge them and make them work they don't do anything so i kind of see the brain as something way more sophisticated than a computer because of just the way that the neurons work and the firing and so on i mean i love that um caroline i really really like the way you've described that and you've mentioned that the brain is much more powerful than a computer which of course it is and i absolutely concur with that but i've heard you say before that the mind is even more powerful than the brain yes so i believe it well i think that's i think that's a really beautiful way to look at it because we know that these smartphones in our pockets are just incredible in terms of what they can do but we're going up a level say no the brain's better than the smartphone and better than the computer but the mind's even more powerful than the brains you know how did you how did you discover that i know you said there's some research behind that but i think that's really really inspiring for us i i agree with you and yes you verbalize that beautifully i think it began 38 years ago when i was sitting in i had actually applied to get into neurosurgery and i was sitting in a neuroscience lecture and then it was actually been given by a neurologist and they were saying that okay well when you work with your tbi patients traumatic brain injured or chronic traumatic encephalopathy cte that kind of thing just remember that their brain can't change and that immediately caught my attention and i questioned the professor i said listen how can that be we are experiencing different things every moment of every day i'm not the same now as i was when i walked into this lecture if that's the case if my mind is using my brain then my brain is the organ that is making the stuff happen then the brain has to change because there's new experiences every day and they actually said well you know it's a ridiculous question but you know what go and do research on it and that's i did a talk on this and then i did research and 38 years later i'm still doing research because at that point i said okay i'm going to take tbi traumatic brain injury there was because there was literally no research on traumatic brain injury in the 80s for the reason just described they said well why study the tbi when the brain can't change and carol i don't mean syrup yeah i just want to make it clear for people listening that tbi traumatic brain injury you know this could be someone in an accident they have fallen down and hurt their heads or had some sort of problems relating to some sort of trauma to their heads yes sorry thank you for describing that i appreciate them cte would be trauma from sports injuries or repeated impact that kind of thing which creates a slightly different pattern um so i took um looked at those two fields as specifically traumatic brain injury because it was considered well just teach the patient to compensate they're never going to restore function very often the neurologist at that time would say well they're a vegetable if they've been in a coma for longer than eight hours and so there was a lot of sort of negativity around it so i thought well if i can look at that worst case scenario and show even a minuscule change then there's hope but the change was way beyond what i expected i worked with a patient that had the first patient i worked with and that i did research on was someone who had been in a car accident 16 at the time of the accident in a coma for two weeks written off by the neurologist as a vegetable was really non-functioning um the parents just did not give up that she came around after two weeks and the parents still did not give up even though no one was they were they were just not getting any kind of support because it just wasn't believed in those days so long's fast forward the story i was doing research they heard about me they said please they begged me please work with her i said i can guarantee nothing because i've never even done this before it's new series i'm developing it's new science and anyway long story short i worked with this child for eight months her goal was to get back to finish and finish high school and she was 16 at the time of the accident by the time i saw her she was 17 eight months into her accident which is significant because we know the first year after traumatic brain injury you know if you don't they used to say you don't catch it in that first year well you can do nothing for the for the patient she her peer group had gone we're finishing we're going into the high school year we're halfway through and her goal was to get back and finish school with him which is an impossible goal because she couldn't even function on a second grade level you know one a sort of like a sort of eight nine year old and so i really didn't you know it was the young scientist in me that took on something that was impossible it was phenomenal actually she worked three hours a week with me and then every day at home they worked at a supported home within eight months she caught up she finished high school not only did she finish high school who grew great her results were phenomenal she was a really weak math student prior to the accident post accident she'd become a math genius long story short is that her social emotional cognitive and behavioral changes were uncanny and you know we had statisticians check the numbers we i repeated the studies with different situations and i took it to a larger scale and then i've continued all these years that motivated me that made me see mind something's going on here with the mind parallel to that i was in south africa at the time working in the then apart terrible apartheid system and working i would go out into the areas where they had written off you know put all the the colored and black people terrible terrible situation as you all know and i would go out there and work because they weren't getting educated so i would go and work in the schools i would drive through these places i mean i would sit go to community centres and have two thousand three thousand people turn up just to hear about how i can use my mind to change my brain i teach them how to learn and then through the transition period the posts are quite error i did through that three days a week and there i learned dr chatterjee about the resilience of the human mind they are learnt about in the most constrained of situations where people are starving abused the impact of like trauma like unbelievable how when you tell someone okay this is the physical but this is your mind let's start changing let me teach you how to learn dramatic impact we had schools that had been written off that were coming back on the grid and getting grades getting kids that were passing 12th grade which is um matric in south africa but that's where i saw the power of the mind i mean it's it's so inspiring hearing you talk there's a real passion there's a real authenticity a desire to just help people i can i can hear that i know that's what people love about you what i hear when you talk about south africa and the apartheid era and um you know all the work you've done with the whole for in a whole variety of different settings like i can't help but think that this work is applicable to each and every one of us whether we've had a brain injury or not using your methods we can harness the power of our mind to change our brain change our body change the quality of our lives and what i also like is that a lot of this stuff is is really accessible to everyone you know your program a lot of it can be done i feel at very little cost so even if someone lives you know in in very harsh in a very harsh uh deprived environment and of course a lot of the trauma and socioeconomic stress that exists is in those communities actually they can still apply the method you that you've come up with yeah you're so right and that's what motivated me inspired me it was those days that i realized that yes we need therapy and i'm awful therapy and counseling and coaching but it's expensive and and every human has the right to have access to understanding mind management and that's really been my goal is to understand what is mind and what is mind management and make it accessible to humanity because if we can manage our minds we can improve how we are functioning as humans and we can improve these issues in the world and i know that's such a huge big philosophical statement but it starts with the mind because we are where we are because of our minds we are you know we experience racism and we experience all this political divide and we experience all these things that we're experiencing globally at the moment and have been since the beginning of time because of mind because of humans making choices and if we can try and help people to shape and manage that and access and recognize this is who i am and i'm showing up like this because of it's not who i am if i can try and manage the big these these patterns that are disrupting my my functioning get back to the core of who i am and live this mind management lifestyle i can do contribute to the world in the way that only i can because as i always told every single patient that i ever worked with and every person now that i talk to which is millions is that there's something you can do that no one else can do i mean you bring something to the table doctor chatterjee that no one else can bring to the table you have an angle of philosophy a way of thinking that is enriching lives that no one else can do so if you don't do what you do we all lose out and that's what i believe for every human and i believe that's part of our mental health walk is that we have to recognize that we've got to stop saying that there's um mental illness we've got to start talking about these extreme states because of extreme adversity but every human's battling every single one of us needs mind management and if you think of life on a scale of one to ten a lot of you know most of the time we kind of hovering around one to four which is the average ups and downs of life and then sometimes things catch up like covert happens and this happens and multiple whatever happens and we land up going into extreme states but that doesn't mean that we are we have neuropsychiatric brain diseases all these scary labels that totally limit people and then you've got to get all this inaccessible expensive therapy and and get that if you can but the average person can't afford that there's millions of people that need help one thing i deeply resonate with in your work is this idea of how problematic labels can be and if i reflect on my 20-year career now as a medical doctor and i was reflecting earlier on today in preparation for this conversation i was thinking about i've always had a problem with how we were taught to manage things like depression and anxiety i just felt a discomfort that what you know i'm sort of have to code them and put them in the computer that this person now has depression and then almost always it would be a form of a pharmaceutical medication that we'd be asked to prescribe yeah we might refer for some therapy as well but almost always there would be therapy there would be some sort of pharmaceutical therapy and i remember this deep sense of frustration thinking well this person coming with depression and this person coming in with these so-called labels of anxiety it doesn't really tell me anything about their life why why do they have this response why are they showing it with these symptoms so i felt very dissatisfied it's taken me a few years to really figure out how to manage them better but i think that's one of the things i love about your approach is that you also do not believe that these labels are that helpful for the majority of people um i'm so you know i'm smiling and saying thank you so much for saying what you said and i work with so many physicians and i train physicians and i have for years and this is the same cry from every heart of every physician i've ever met and worked with and you know it's it's to just sort of lump someone's pain into a label i often tell people it's like you know getting a gift that's empty because initially when you feel so overwhelmed and distraught from the challenges of life and you're feeling that extreme depression and anxiety and it's so incredibly real just for someone to say oh it's this is this immediate sense of oh wow at least there's a reason but then you open that gif there's nothing in there now what and it's also a bit of a tautology as you would have experienced as well because these the list of symptoms there's the label and then you can say well the patient can say well why do i have that because of those symptoms what are the symptoms because you have that you know so you're just going symptom levels sometimes you're not even getting to what you said already which is what is the person's story you know that is what we need to look at because each and every one of us is in life with our stories and our stories are the because of we showing up in x way because of and until we find the because of and until we re-conceptualize that we can't change what's happened to us but we can change what's in us and that's reconceptualization and until we've done that we're gonna just have these labels that you and i both know just look at the research i mean i was just looking at i'm writing a paper at the moment on my most recent clinical trial and be busy with another huge one at the moment with over 30 000 people over this covered period dealing with mental health and mind management and just looking at the we all know the impact of mental health we all know it's hit the younger worse than the older age group women more than men but across the board there's been a tripling of anxiety but the way it's verbalized oh gosh it's like there's another virus and it's made people even more fearful meanwhile it is an adverse circumstance an extreme adverse circumstance so the story is extreme adverse reactions so it's not that we've got a bunch more ill people it's that we have people that are backing to code so we have to as a society re-look at how we are actually telling people stories so it's not going to help someone who's lost someone in pen depending because being lonely who's whatever and they are given oh you have clinical depression that's not an answer and then the medication which we also know if you look at the history of what the medications have done we are sitting now in 2021 with a worse situation than ever before the the the affidavit there was that federal data huge study i put it in my book which you may have already seen but from 1996 to 2014 they started identifying a trend a very worrisome trend and that trend was that despite the advances of technology and medicine and neuroscience people are actually living shorter so for decades we've been living longer but the for now people are dying up to 80 to 25 years younger and it's got worse obviously over the pandemic and it hasn't the way we've managed mental health this mental illness philosophy this biomedical model for mental health has not actually made it better made it worse it's increased people's life lifespan and just to round off sorry to come back to the label thing that eight to 25 years study they show that if you have a mental health label you fall into the 20 to 25 year earlier death record in other words that label literally can chop up to 25 years of your life which is insane i mean that shouldn't be yes i mean i didn't know that last statistic that that's absolutely incredible so it's not just neutral when we as doctors do this to our patients it's actually actively harmful or at least for some of them and you know i don't think any doctor is meaning to do that so i think a couple of problems i can see are short appointment times you know here in the uk it's typically a 10 minute appointment that a primary care physician will have with their patients really not enough time to you know hear their story and see where their symptoms fit into the wider context of their entire life so that's one thing i think the other thing is we're you know i i really do think there's a lot of problems with medical education i i think yeah i i don't it's very hard for me as i as i get older and more and more experienced to not look back and reflect and go you know what actually some of this is highly highly problematic yeah because we're not very good some of us are managing uncertainty so we like you know we're taught to you know oh those symptoms they fit this bot i could put them in the depression box i could put them in the anxiety box and therefore you feel a bit better because it's like oh now i know now i can get them on the treatment regime but i think we have to get good at uncertainty we have to get good at saying hey look i don't know let's explore this together let's figure out what's been going on in your life and i love the way you put it um dr lev you talk about you know burnout or inability to concentrate or depression or anxiety you talk about these things as signals as warning signals for us rather than the labels i wonder if you could expand upon that a little bit absolutely and you're so right there with just to pick up on the 10 minute thing and i really respect and honor that challenge that a physician is going through in those in those time appointments and in the training as you say i've trained medical students it's just as you say it's just let's look at the symptom and then and let's look at the effects in the body where that's coming from which is great for the body and the brain but it doesn't work for the mind and it doesn't tell us about the interrelationship so we have to have another level to deal with that so this is where i believe we can make something very complex a little bit more simple if we understand the process so part of my work has been to try and understand what is the mind as we know what is a thought what are memories because if the thoughts and memories are the things that are driving us just think of the fact that 96 of people which i actually think should be 100 battle with intrusive thoughts those thoughts are then often including limiting beliefs which then impact how a person is moving forward in their life and then that also contributes to lots of patterns and things that emerge if you track back those what are all those things if you track back what they are and you understand what they are and you understand the source that where they come from you can actually have an impact you can change things so that's what my work is so that's a foundational phrase now what does that actually mean simple language it really the way that a person shows up so let's say that let's say that you have a patient that comes to you and that they are saying that i am so depressed i cannot get out of bed i can't do this anymore my life is just such a mess i can't function i can't work i can't breathe i can't eat that's you know the symptom checklist clinical depression etc what about if we say okay i get that but you're a thought detective that's a signal that em what all those things you described about your emotions about your behaviors about how your body feels and about your attitude or your perspective to life those four things that you've just told me now that tell me that you according to the book have clinical depression let's throw that away aside for a moment and let's say that that you're a thought detective and that those are actually very helpful messengers they are warning signals and if you become your own thought detective and step into your wisdom and think okay why do i have those signals i've got my overarching pattern of depression function want to give up on life then as they describe to you they talk about i feel this in my body i feel these emotions my perspective they may not know that they're tilling those four categories but if you analyze it's four categories of warning signals clues that we have messengers and if we take those then you can say okay those are because of they because of a thought and a thought is basically how an experience that you've had is housed in your brain and your body and your mind so then let's say okay you as a person have had x experiences so what is your most recent experience that you potentially had that making you feel like this and so in other words it's about you in life life's impacted you the adverse experiences of life have impacted you what we've already done just in that small conversation is we've removed it away from you are broken you have a neuropsychiatric brain disease you are clinically depressed on top of your heart disease and your cancer whatever else um you've removed it away and you've said hey i see you as a human i hear you i hear you and now and you can do this quite quickly in you know it's not going to solve the initial assessment which is ongoing can be quite quite quick and a person can learn to do this for themselves quite quickly i'm believing it because i'm kind of teaching it but once you have you said okay so you are a person in life it's not about you it's about you in the world world has impacted you so therefore let's talk about your most recent experiences that are impacting covert will probably come back for loneliness or abuse or like women the increase in domestic violence has been terrible over the pandemic or children 16 million children or not have missed out on normal psychosocial development from not going to increased all kinds of emotional issues with our kids and so you know that that's the story so they said this is real you need to talk about that this is not something that can be just labeled and put in a box this is an experience so let's talk about your specific experience what does that look like for you and so then that as they talk about then you can say okay what you are describing is a thought so i'm going to hold up for those that are listening i'm going to hold up a little hot plants i've got a little pot plant in my hand and it's a little green bushy pot plant and it's in a pot and obviously there's a root system holding it into and that's why it's enabling it to grow so this is really what a thought looks like so thought is something that is a real physical thing that is inside the brain that got there through you experiencing a life you experiencing life experiences so each experience we have like this conversation now would be a life experience and this conversation your mind which is your ability to think and feel and choose is taking this experience you thinking and you're feeling and you're choosing about what you're hearing me say and that's being put into the brain by the mind with and that's that creates a response in the brain all this electromagnetic and quantum and genetic energy and then there's a genetic response and when as soon as we get a genetic response proteins are made and those proteins accumulate together now inside the protein the protein has the ability to hold vibrations so my words are actually going to be little quantum vibrations and just track with me here little quantum vibrations inside proteins that cluster together and grow into trees so all the concepts i'm giving you about just just telling you what a thought is are bits of data those datas are that data actually becomes memory so data is memory so your mind takes the data from what you're going through which are the memories and converts it into a physical structural vibration inside a protein inside a branch and the more you hear the more the more details of the experience the more branches you grow but it grows in the root system first so in this conversation everything i'm saying and everything you're seeing for those of you that also watching is going in the root system like any plant you first plant a seed and then you grow roots and then you grow the little trunk and then eat branches it's exactly like that with a thought the experience is the seed then we start putting it into our brain so the root system are my words are conversation the branches that grow from the roots are how you uniquely think feel and choose about what you are hearing so your mind interpretation of what you're hearing based on existing experiences so to grow this i need this and to to grow this i need this but i also draw on my existing experiences so memories are clusters memories clustered together to form a thought and thoughts then enable us to speak and do so i'm now speaking about the brain because i spent all these years building trees in my brain about all the stuff about the mind brain body connection you have thousands of trees in your brain if not hundreds of thousands on your field in medicine and whenever you help a patient you are drawing on that existing thought inside torture inside your brain with that memory data and then that's how you able to work with your patients i'm going on those as i'm speaking now so essentially the thought is the product of the mind it's the mind converting the experience into a physical product in the brain and as soon as it's in the brain then then the brain sends a message to the rest of the body to form a copy of this memory but inside every cell of your body and that shows up in the little cytoskeleton of your cells of your body so your cells body's made of all these cells and the cells have got a little cytoskeleton that holds them in place and we get a change inside there and what's super interesting about the body memory and this relates to what we where you know there's so much yoga and meditation and breathing and body there's so much talk which is wonderful in this day and age now of the importance of recognizing how memory gets stuck in our body and it does and so you your heart memory will actually have a different perspective to your liver to your kidneys to your your skin and then that all coalesces inside the brain and then your mind makes sense of all of it so we that's why we have to work so holistically now how does this thought show up this thought shows up in what you say which i'm speaking now so my thoughts on the brain are showing up and what i'm saying it's also showing up in my emotions at the moment which are excitement i'm positive i'm i'm to share this information it's showing up in my body my body's i'm feeling very energized my shoulders are lifting i'm using my hands so i'm using my bodily expressions to transfer this information and my perspective is one of um of anticipation and excitement to share this information so in other words i have generated this knowledge via four signals and those four signals are my emotions now i feel nice exact same example of excitement my words and my behaviors which are my words and my actions the things i'm saying and doing holding up a plan saying these words my bodily sensations where my shoulders are lifting my body's moving my hands are moving in order to help generate this message and my perspective which is one of i'm excited to share this information now that's on a on a positive side so in other words we have an ability to become aware of our thoughts through the signals that these thoughts generate so if we can learn to tune into our signals and then from our signals we can learn to then those signals are attached they're never just floating they're attached things like little imagine little chains four signals with little chains attached to or little wires whatever you can visualize attached to a thought and so you look at your signals and you focus on those those will take you to the thought neuroscientifically we know that the minute we focus on signals we bring awareness into our mind of concepts i mean of these thoughts with all the embedded memories when you when you cannot dream can i say when you say signals when you say signals do you mean something like okay i feel depressed i feel low um i don't feel like getting out of bed in the morning instead of jumping to the label of depression are you saying when you say sigmas you mean these are signals let's try and figure out the thought behind those signals that am i getting yeah okay so we talk about a lot in the common highlands if we want to put it that way about we use the word emotions emotional intelligence we throw the word emotions all over the place using that is like um not logical so this is kind of split in the way we use our languaging but actually emotions are one of four signals so emotions never turn up alone and depression anxiety frustration irritation anger jealousy grief condemnation shame you name it the thousands of different emotions that are out there are all all clustered under the emotional warning signal and every warning signal emotional warning signal has three partners it's never alone it has three partners in the so whatever your emotions are you're going to always find a behavior attached or a series of behaviors attached to that emotion so the second warning signal is are behaviors what are you saying what are you doing those are very strong indications of of what's behind it so you take the most take the behaviors what am i saying what i'm doing so feeling depressed behavior and withdrawing bodily sensation gut issues perspective life sucks there's a simple version so there's four signals so here i am showing up daily i feel totally depressed and flat i'm backing to get out of bed my body is gut is aching it's loaded it's whatever um i am withdrawing from people i don't want to go anywhere and i just think life sucks we want to grab that and not now currently what would happen is you go to the doctor or you think based on the language of today oh i've got i've got a clinical disease in my brain i have a brain disease i'm holding up a model of the brain i've got something wrong with my brain no you don't have something wrong with your brain your brain is affected because your mind has to use your brain in order for you to express it and everything both goes to your brain so your brain does have biomarkers there are going to be responses in your brain and your body but that's not the cause that's the response so what we want to do is we want to look at how our brain is responding and listen to the messages that the mind brain and body collectively will put together through the signals so your mind brain and body are working as a network and it's this is scientific journalism this is not some weird thing mind is as we can use quantum physics normal classical physics we can use we can we can measure mind we can see you can't see a gravitational field but we know that we're not floating and that's why we know it exists so basically we can use these signals and train ourselves to to to look at the signals because those signals are attached to the thought and as soon as you find the thought you can find what's attached to this drawing it's so powerful because what's really interesting for me right is you showed this gorgeous uh green um vibrance leaves and a plant in this pot right so that looks healthy and you are talking about the brain so i'm guessing that because you've spoken about the brain for years you have wired in this particular tree structure so dr leaf and her brain has a particular structure so when you start talking about the brain that emotion behavior body sensation perspective just gets repeated you know you're energized you're excited you're talking with fluency that's really powerful because i'm guessing that actually you can also have not so healthy trees in your brain disease trees that can repeat the kind of negative patterns the negative thoughts that so many people are struggling with you've got it and here i'm holding up for those that are listening i'm holding up another version of a tree yeah and this is now a wiry looking metal ugly looking tree that's very much alive but it's completely distorted so why i'm using trees dr chatterjee i mean you'll know the neuronal structure is the neurons in the brain look like little trees and these little branches and stems um are that's kind of what the the way that memories are stored in the dendrites not inside the synapses but in dendrites and dendrites are the branches on the top of the tree so if you think of you look at a tree that's literally what thoughts look like in your brain with the root system that's why it's such a great analogy so the healthy green tree what we see in in from all kinds of your brain scanning and i use qeg research and also looking at all kinds of other ways we see that the proteins are folded correctly and we have the correct kind of immune response in the brain and we have the correct levels of homocysteine and cortisol and we have when we activate these kind of responses our telomeres are functioning right down to the level of our dna we are functioning at a higher level so the proteins key here the proteins are folded correctly now you know as a medical practitioner that that's so vitally important in so many neurological diseases and so many functional things that go on inside of our body is that proteins need to fall correctly when proteins fall correctly the whole energy all the electromagnetic fields and all the and all the all the electromagnetic neurochemical etc everything is going well this is a healthy situation in the toxic tree this is not a toxic experience a toxic thought so what when we have like a toxin like maybe an abuse in a marriage or terrible work situation or some kind of trauma as a child or as in covert loss of a loved one or very sick or losing you know maybe you've got long covert or whatever you know they've lost their finances all those things that happened to us car accidents relationship issues divorces these these things that happen those are negative experiences so now they still are processed because just by the nature of the virtue of you being alive you will code life in whether you like it or not 95 of life is coded in non-consciously by 5 consciously and i'll come back to that so this toxic tree that i'm holding now is enough misfolded proteins because the experience was toxic so your mind still took that experience still put it in the brain still generated a response in the brain all the electromagnetics and quantum and blah blah switched on genetic switches proteins were made but because of the distortion of the experience it creates a distorted energy wave which creates a distorted protein and the protein must fall which then creates a disruption so it's still there in your brain but it looks different so now the immune system of your brain is responding so like like we all know so much about covert now it's a pathogen it's a virus your immune system is going to fight it you're going to look at thoughts in the same in the same way they are as physical as something like a pathogen or a virus inside the brain because they're there they're real but they're not they can be changed that's what's vital yeah this is this is the key i mean one of the things i think is so powerful about your work and and your books is this idea that we can rewire our brain right so so i i genuinely think for the majority of people either watching this or listening to this right now i i honestly believe that they probably have never heard before that their thoughts change their brain when they when they think a certain way that forms a particular structure in the brain and for me if we just follow on that um that sort of train of thought a little bit further a lot of people feel stuck right they feel depressed they feel anxious they they think life's hopeless this is who i am right but it's not who they are is it it's actually the current structure of their brain based upon previous thoughts and what you're saying is if you can now become the driver if you can understand that your mind is in charge you can actually start to generate new thoughts and if you are intentional about it if you repeat it consistently then you're gonna start to i guess the diseased tree let's say in your brain that you may not want you're gonna start to what what deconstruct that or sort of almost have that wither away and then you can start to grow a brand new tree with new roots that if you do it consistently enough deliberately enough repeatedly enough then it can actually fundamentally change who you are and how you feel absolutely you've you've tapped on that that's exactly what's happening so it's not easy as we know but it is so hopeful because it means that whatever has happened to us doesn't necessarily be have to be how it is going to play out into our future so you can't change what's happened to you it's happened it's the past it's your story but you can change what it looks like inside of you and that's the neuroplasticity of the brain that's the wiring and the coding because the mind has to use code the brain the mind is coding the brain so every experience is coded into the brain and the brain is way more complex than a computer but it doesn't function if you're not alive so it's the mind that does the coding but there's a huge thing here dr chatterjee that's really vital and that is that we can change our brain but we've got to know the impact we've got to train ourselves to tune into the impact of life and sometimes you get so sucked into the just the feeling of depression and the feeling of sickness in my body and the feeling that life sucks and stuck in the withdrawal isolation we feel so stuck and so hopeless in extreme situations that we don't feel that we can change and it's a matter of really educating and helping people to develop the skill because the evidence is there that your brain is never the same so even if you feel like you're stuck your brain is still changing but it's getting more stuck so it's so the change is more negative so we can make people aware that your brain is always changing based on what your mind is doing this means that you can actually start learning to drive the drop you drive your mind the wise the wise mind can drive the messy mind because we always have a messy mind because a messy mind is because life is messy and it's kind of experimental and that's essentially what we're doing but a massive part of this and i know i mentioned it earlier and maybe if you unless you want to ask me a question but most people aren't aware that 95 and i think it's more i personally think it's probably higher but on average 95 of how we show up every day is based upon what we have none consciously built into our brain and our body and our mind and that's what's driving us yeah this is i i i find this incredibly fascinating right because um you know the idea 95 percent of what we do each day is driven by our non-conscious mind now to me that implies it's non-conscious now but at some points we would have engaged with life in a certain way we would have uh repeated certain behaviors uh even i don't know bringing it to really kind of um day-to-day things i mean how what would you say to this what if each morning you wake up you've had a good night's sleep and the first thing you do is look at negativity and you watch the news for an hour each morning for example you are presumably feeding in is it's this idea isn't it dr leaf that your brain is changing constantly so either you're going to drive that change or the change is going to be done to it and many of us don't realize actually that by not being intentional by not being conscious about how we're choosing to live our life each day or choosing to think actually we're training our brain in a very unhelpful way exactly because your brain can only do what your mind tells it to do your brain is set up to be activated and the mind is the activator so we have this hugely intelligent part of us which is on unconscious not unconscious unconscious as you know it's like you knocked out under anesthesia your brain is still active but it's different that's a state that's the state that your brain goes into but the non-conscious mind is related to the thinking part of you the non-conscious we think is what people often misunderstand and it's the biggest part of you it is 99 of who you are it's the most intelligent part of you it's where your wisdom resides your ability to intuit to dig deep that that that inner court knowing who you are your value all that stuff it's the ability to it it's driving your interaction with the world and it's on your side this is the best part and it works 24 7 and it works at speeds of 10 to the 27 which is faster than 400 billion actions per second so by virtue of being alive your non-conscious mind enables you as a human to take every experience and so there's a certain amount of selectivity and put that into the brain and the body and that impacts us but now not everything's good so your example you wake up in the morning and you immediately put the news on or you immediately grab your cell phone and you start scrolling through the newsfeed and so now you've merged your brain has merged with the environment that you've consciously chosen so your five percent conscious deliberation um of what you're choosing to focus on is now focusing on that but then you go through the day because you consciously focus on that it's whatever you think about the most grows so now you're drawn to all of that so you focus more on that but also there's stuff going on in your nature your nurture your socioeconomic or political the things that people around you are doing just by the nature of being alive in your work environment etc all of that is also performing part of the 95 and has been since a child so what we have to do is our non-conscious mind our brain and our body are wired for love literally and that not is that scientific statement that made by by a nobel prize-winning scientist that are we literally wired for love our mind brain and bodies on our side and it's looking and scanning what of life's experiences are toxic and what level of toxicity are there and what level of impact is it having on you now the most toxic ones are then made brought into another level of non-consciousness which is just below consciousness which is your subconscious subconscious is the bridge between the non-conscious the massive wise brilliant and unconscious then you've got the subconscious bridge then you've got your conscious mind conscious mind is only awake when you're awake the subconscious also only when you're awake the non-conscious is awake all the time 24 7. so here what happens is that the scanning is going on and this is this is not such a shifting perspective that we'll probably have to talk about this a little bit in depth a little bit more in depth but your non-conscious sees oh gosh this is really something in caroline's life that is impacting her day-to-day functioning this is a major issue this is a pattern this is of all them maybe 20 or 30 or 40 things or 100 whatever this one needs attention so the non-conscious pushes that through the subconscious into our conscious mind and tries to get our attention how through those signals so when you feel depression or anxiety or hovering anxiety or frustration or guilt or condemnation don't ignore it embrace it okay in other words the non-conscious will show the impact of your life through the signals coming into the conscious mind and we've got to pay attention to them so we've got to pay attention so that the natural response for many of us these days is when those signals are there the discomfort the frustration the irritation the tension in our back the tension in our neck we either medicate that away so we've lost a learning opportunity i would say or we distract ourselves with something sugar alcohol um online shopping online scrolling right so in that moment where the non-conscious mind is trying to tell us something and and show us something we're saying look i don't want to hear your signal you know what i i've got other options so and that then speaks to this wider point was actually as you were describing that dot sleeve i was thinking okay if the non-conscious mind is there to help us right why do 94 of us also have intrusive thoughts each day struggle with negativity right if it's there to help us what's going wrong is it this these thought trees in our brain that are that are diseased that are not healthy or is it something else i'm so glad you asked that questions one of my favorite questions because intrusive thoughts have had such a bad rap they are one of the most powerful ways that we can start training ourselves to tuning to our signals so it's yeah you're quite quick 94 to 96 of people worldwide battle with intrusive thoughts and that's how it's been pitched battle let's let's look at this from another angle an intrusive thought is your non-conscious on your side looking and scanning for things that have the most energy because whatever you think about most is going to grow big and bushy think of a forest the biggest tree in the forest or the biggest trees in the first those are the biggest toxic okay and then the biggest because we get good intrusive thoughts too we get ones that are healthy too but most of the time the ones that disrupt us or the ones that are these these kind of just make us feel good these will make us feel uh so what we need to do and this is what i would do with my patients is one of the systems that i've developed within the system of the neurocycle is your intrusive thoughts are your best friend because if you learn to read them you can start nailing what the actual thought is and the minute you become aware of a thought this is where neuroscience has been very very really great is that you destabilize the thought so once the thought is destabilized what that means is that when i'm not aware look it's not you can't see it i'm it's in my unconscious it's driving me and i'm doing all these things and feeling hovering anxiety but now i decide okay let me look at this anxiety let me embrace it let me stop for a moment and not be scared and not drown and not suppress and not drag it away or whatever sugar it away or alcohol it away or whatever let me actually sit down and face this the minute i do that i now start this thing starts moving through the subconscious onto the conscious level i destabilize this which means the protein bonds that hold this together weaken they start to denature by the mere fact that we shared a different type of energy conscious mind is a different type of energy to an unconscious mind and it's a very powerful veto energy that enables us to start weakening the blood so this is the malleability we have now we can start changing this now i can't change what's happened to me but i can start going through a process so this is not just mindfulness mindfulness will create this all the mindfulness techniques that are out there but once you're away if you stop at this point you will get worse okay this this is this is this is this is this is just amazing so does this analogy work for you is it accurate so we've all got certain thought structures in our brain from our past experiences right whatever our past experiences have been whether it was how we were brought up you know a bit of bullying here but a trauma there a breakup here a a you know a bad job interview whatever our interpretation of the world the thoughts we generated on the back of those experiences have formed a kind of residue in our brain this kind of structure now some of these structures are not helping us right so you're showing this diseased tree there now we've all probably got let's say the dream scenario for all of us which i don't know if any of us has got or ever got to is that we've got a brain full of bushy green trees that are all healthy like this beautiful forest okay that's the goal but many of us presumably have got little patches in various places of diseased trees and i think what you're saying is if we don't distract if we don't run off to social media or the news or to alcohol or to drugs or whatever it might be if we bring awareness to oh you're thinking like this in this situation you're saying that we're almost like starting to pour a bit of weed killer or or onto this onto this diseased tree and we're starting to weaken and disintegrate it at the branches at the roots so that if we then go forward with the next process that you're going to talk about we start to grow new roots and a new tree is that accurate based upon what you said you're brilliant totally you've hit the nail on the head that's exactly what's happening but every intrusive thought if you if you pay attention to an intrusive thought you can actually and and very in a very determined logical okay i'm not scared of it i'm going to listen to it and you actually write that down and there's a little technique you can do i can explain right off the bat please yeah you take a if you can find a 16 minute block in your day um 16 minutes there's a whole lot of science behind the 16 minutes but around 15 to 16 minutes and you sit down distract distraction free close your eyes and let your mind wander and daydream but have a pen and paper really or your phone or your computer whatever you want to write into and then open your eyes after about two minutes and then write down the thoughts and then close your eyes and do it and repeat that about eight times so it'll be eight times to eight two minute little blocks by the end of that if you look at what you've written you'll be you'll see a pattern you'll start seeing the same you'll see oh that's actually three or four things that i'm consistently thinking about and the 20 things i've written they can be all grouped together so those are like memories coming out of the thought so there's maybe three main thoughts with details attached to those thoughts and then you can maybe order them and see that that's one two and three and that's the most disruptive and then you can start okay i've got a point of departure so instead of my intrusive thought now having been something that is gonna because it can it can draw you into a vortex of negativity that you can go swirling around because your default network of your brain gets very disrupted it's like a a symphony concept that goes wrong and so if you but if you stop and capture the thought you can tune that violin quickly and you can put it aside and you can have the tuned violin you can continue with your day and then you can you know you can or something's broken in the in the orchestra or something like that you can pull it aside and deal with it later but if you just let it run a mock amongst that symphony orchestra it's going to be a cacophony of sound or whatever as an example does that make sense i really like that so so let's say someone struggles with intrusive thoughts and at some point be good if you define an intrusive thought for people as well at some point but let's say you've got them and you do this process over 15 or 16 minutes and you're writing things down so is that the end of the process i mean does that it does that in and of itself help or actually is that a starting point which you then need to continue with something else yes you need to continue with something else because what you do is all the um i've developed a basic system within that these various techniques and those systems are based on um 38 years of clinical research and so on of how the mind drives the neuroplasticity of the brain in the right direction and what i mean by that is how do we find these deconstruct and reconstruct them into something that works for us and not against us this is not toxic positivity because we're not meant to be positive all the time that's really bad for our brain and our creativity we only supposed to be positive moderate moderate amounts of a day of our life so essentially what you would do once you found the intrusive thought you would go through a process and you can discuss that but your ultimate goal is not to completely eliminate this because that once again is never going to go no matter how many cbt techniques you do or how many medications you take this will reappear it's like a volcano until it's extinct it will keep erupting so so until until you have rewired your brain until it will keep coming up at various times which is why we can have a few good days things and then out of the blue we just get triggered by something that someone says we don't kind of know why exactly so then it just it just comes up so what a lot of current techniques do they give you temporary relief um and so you'll have the thought so that's bad and then you train yourself with the technique too every time that comes up to replace with this but this has never been you've never taken the power out of this so maybe it works for a time but as you just said you have a bad day you get triggered and maybe you haven't been practicing this for a while so now this is dominant again so what you have to do is you have to actually take the power out of this so this can't stay on this level sorry for people listening um caroline's holding up the the negative the negative the sort of disease tree at the moment thank you thank you for reminding me to tell the audio listeners that what i'm doing okay so i get so excited and carried away so um okay so what we want to do is we don't want the disease tree to be dominant we want to weaken so as soon as i'm aware i've destabilized it there's a lot of energy energy is never lost energy is always transferred so now this is energy that went into making this i now want to have my energy the sexual life out of you the toxic tree the toxic thoughts we all know that they weigh down on you they weigh more they literally do so we want to take that energy and put that into something healthy but what happens and you'll see i'm holding up the list of listeners i'm holding up a tiny little branch of the of the healthy tree over initially as i start changing this situation to a process and we will discuss the process after once i've explained this basic thing this basic concept what we're going to do is this has got to have the energy removed from it as it gets removed from it it gets smaller and smaller and smaller and eventually it just becomes something tiny you'll just see something tiny sticking out over the bottom of the computer so what people are i mean in the in the window of the computer so for those of you that are listening imagine a tiny little wiry tree next to a tiny little green tree so what i've done is i still have my story i can how is that this is the thing of people can tell you what happened to them if someone's gone through an abuse or gone through the war and gone through whatever they can they can tell you their story but oh and it and they still may have tears and so on they remember what happened but it no longer controls their relationships their life etc if they've done this work if you haven't you permanently in that state where this is controlling you so deep by going from the signal to the thought deconstructing to the root and we'll go through this process slowly in a moment you weaken this it gets down to the point where it's just a little sprout and you now grow this new new way of thinking that is accepting the uncomfortable situation that recognizes you can't find out why someone did something to you you can't spend your life because you're not an expert on anyone else's experience so there's a level of acceptance of what happened and then there's a reconstruction of okay well that's what happened but i don't want it looking like this in my life anymore i want it to look like the healthy green tree so i'm starting to move into how i wanted to play out into my future now a lot of people get this far then they get an in therapies or on their own or whatever then they get to this point where chasm starts developing in your life and by that i mean that you know what you should be doing you can verbalize all the reasons why you can have a good relationship and you know why you were backing with a relationship because maybe you went through an abuse or something like that as a child or you were sexually abused or something and that's impacted your ability to actually form a trust in one relationship you know all of that you've got the course you've deconstructed you've got i want a relationship but you're still not doing it you're still um you're still getting getting into situations like like before what do you how do we change that we have to grow this stronger this has to get to the point where it's going to grow into this size and even bigger i've got a third one over here and that takes time so we have to whatever you think about the most growth so now what i'm holding up with for the listeners is i've got three trees together and that's like covering almost my whole face green trees versus the tiny little branch so if i just stay at this point i'm going to fall back and this can easily grow back again sorry sincerely if you are enjoying this content there's loads more just like it on my channel so please do take a moment to press subscribe hit the notification bell and now back to the conversation yeah and i can easily fall back into those places of tremendous frustration i've tried it didn't work try something else but if you go through the hard work which is really painful gets worse before it gets better you will eventually get to the point where you grow this tree into a victory then as you triggered or as something happens in your life that makes you that similar you know triggering activation event you now have this power of the green tree you remember there may be a little spurt of the past because you remember your story but you know how you now want to act out and this will produce the behaviors and emotions that you want to function yeah yeah an analogy that certainly works for me is you know i've certainly had this experience many people may have done if they move into an apartment or a house and they get there and this happened when we bought this family house in which we currently live the garden was a mess complete mess um there was hardly any grass there there were weeds everywhere and i kind of see this as that's a garden almost like a toxic mine that's wired for negativity and anxiety and disempowering stories and the world's against me and everything feels hopeless but bit by bit by tending to that garden the weeds started to go down um the you know the the plants we wanted to grow and the grass if we feed them and nourish them the right way they start to grow now there's a time when actually what you're saying i think is sometimes we go to therapy or we meditate or we journal or we do mindfulness are we getting awareness and you've already said that that awareness already starts to disintegrate that toxic structure that said that's great but sometimes we stop too early or we think that's enough and actually it's weakened but it's still there so that garden yeah there's some healthy stuff there but there's still also those weeds and if we don't keep tending those weeds will take over again but through and i think this is where your neuro cycle your five-step process comes in that if you consistently do this in a very focused way over time there's going to be much more green there's going to be much more resilience in the garden i guess in the brain and you may still have a few weeds here and there but generally there's still going to be a robust thriving garden or robust thriving brain and the more you do it the less likely that weed is that negative brain structure is to throw your day off and to get you triggered by your partner or your children again i'm just trying to bring it to life in the in the way that i see it that's accurate totally accurate because also that i love that analogy and i often use the you know going through a forest or a garden analogy these i'm going to add to that analogy think of when you when you were weeding your garden if you just chopped the head of the weed it would just grow straight back so you had to actually dig the roots of the weed out you had to up in that weed and hopefully some of the seeds or whatever didn't spread across but they would and then a few more weeds pop up but each time you remove the wheat when you tend the garden you have to take it out by the roots you can't just chop the head off so if we just do a technique or a medication or a um or a or turn to alcohol or whatever or constantly distract ourselves we're just chopping the head of the weed we never resolve the issue and that's what i have um i'm trying to help people understand is that you need to understand we're so logical as humans we're so systematically driven we so um our whole mind brain body connection is systematized it's algorithmic every memory isn't is a complex set of operations and and that nature that we have is a is a is a driving force behind us to understand well how did the weed get there in the first place let me you know eliminate the source so that i can find at least find the source i can't always control it flowers over the from my neighbor's garden into my garden or something like that but i can't do as much as possible keep tending the weeds and pull them out by the roots when they when they come up and that requires a constant deliberate and intentional mind management yeah we have to constantly manage our minds like we have to manage our gardens yeah now i love that and look this kind of really speaks to the title of your latest book which is just fantastic like cleaning up your mental mess i love that because that's what it is many for all of us probably have got some degree of mental mess and you've got this five-step scientifically validated process which is actually very straightforward it doesn't always mean easy but it's very straightforward i think to understand on how we can each of us whatever our mental mass is whether it for us for one person that's anxiety for another person it's depression for someone else that's an intrusive thought for someone else that's an addiction whatever it might be your process the realization i had this morning when revisiting the book was that this is kind of how the system works right and you can use that for whatever you want in your life including how to build a better brain and build more resilience so could you could you explain what is this five-step process so that people understand you know roughly what is the arc they have to go through absolutely and that's a really you know that's really important because we've already intimated that and said awareness is not enough so we're very fully aware using the word away we um as in our society today there's so much wonderful training around meditation and awareness and mindfulness and whatever but the problem is that we have to go beyond so i began my career and developed the system of the neurocycle way back 38 years ago when i was trained as a clinical neuroscientist to work with things like traumatic brain injury and chronic traumatic encephalopathy and dementias and learning disabilities and so it was very clinical and what i was seeing was the need to actually have a systematic way that aligned with the mind-brain relationship and that could drive changes that were needed neuroplastic-wise inside the brain and then i saw the tremendous impact on body changes so health physical health and then i started seeing automatically a huge change in how people functioned across the board cognitively socially emotionally so there's a very long history behind it there's a theoretical base and there's a lot of science and i'm just just in a seven hour meeting yesterday we've got a huge clinical trial running at the moment with nearly 45 000 people that ran over covert looking at what mind management does in terms of health mental health physical health i do all kinds of in this book this clinical trials i say that to say that yes the system that i developed is simple it's based on what you actually know to do which should be because if it's something crazily difficult no one's going to do it and anything that really works is always going to be simple but the science underlying it don't be fooled by the fact that it's so simple that you don't do it properly because there is a good way of doing it and a way so the basic arc of the system is that you need to do this gather awareness i'm going to give you the big picture and then we can dive a little deeper the big picture is that we we have to become aware in the ways you've been saying up to this point through the signals etc but once you're away you've pulled this up now if you leave it there you will get worse because this will go back into the non-conscious even stronger than before because your brain is always changing so it'll just go back into a worse form so we want to then go beyond that and we see this from the mindfulness meditation research generally the studies don't go longer than either 24 hours or three weeks there's only very few studies that go as long as six or eight weeks and what is seen is immediate changes as soon as you have done any kind of mindfulness practice any kind of mindfulness cognitive behavior therapy in that moment is going to be massive change positive change but the sustainability goes after a few weeks so i wanted to find out why i want to do i also was looking at the research in the 60s about the time frame so this five steps is as it only works in a certain time frame and if you do it in too short of a time you're going to have that small tree and it's not going to work so let's start let's start with the five steps and then we can talk about the time so it doesn't confuse everyone so the first step then is gathering awareness once i've gathered awareness what have i gathered awareness of i've gathered awareness of the four signals so it is the emotions the behaviors what you're saying do your bodily sensations what are you feeling in your body because you will always have some level of body maybe you changing your jaw maybe essentially your shoulders maybe your got back issues maybe there's good air but that hot all differently you're going to have different combinations etc but what is your best food what are the bodily sensations and what are your what is your perspective so when you clinically and objectively stand back and observe yourself and gather awareness of your signals those will then take you to because there's these invisible strings that those four signals work together they're attached to the thought which is explanation of the thought that i gave so then the second step is to say okay those signals seem to be pointing to some kind of a relationship thought issue and this is that inclusive thing that i keep thinking of and and then you start seeing some details the interpretation how you are thinking feeling and choosing so the gather awareness is of those four signals it's kind of just statements about you know you just label them back name them put them into a sentence but then they take you to the thought the second step is to start reflecting on what are those signals attached to what are these branches here what am i what is what's my interpretation of my life in relation to this concept which could be relational issues or it could be a problem with a family member it could be con like the example i get earlier can't seem to get into a decent long-term relationship as soon as things get too intense you pull back don't have you know trust issues whatever so what are you so you start reflecting reflecting is a beautiful thing reflect gathers a beautiful thing except let me quickly go back to gather awareness i didn't just say we are together gathers very significant because you want to be empowered you want to feel control people that feel depressed anxious and any kind of mental challenges feel out of control so i want to give you root back to control so you can gather you can choose what you can handle today you do not have to do this in one day in fact you cannot do it in one day you have to do just a little bit over a period of time and i'll tell you the timing in a moment so you gather so it's like going into into now we've got a garden analogy going let's say you grew an apple had an apple orchard in your garden if your god was big enough unless he had one apple tree okay so you go into that garden and you're going to pick apples because they're accurately so full you don't go under the apple tree and shake and let them all fall on your head that would totally overwhelm you and hurt you you stand back and you choose i want that app for that apple so is that dr leaf is that just just so i'm super clear on this is it basically if you go in and shake the apple tree so all the apples fall on you that's all the different emotions all the things that you struggle with in life and you're like oh man there's no way i can do this new i can't do this neurocycle five step process on all of them let me today on a sunday morning i have 20 minutes so you can talk about time frames in a second but let's say you or you have an hour or half an hour and you go right i'm just gonna deal with this specific one particular uh thought or emotion that sometimes bothers me you're just gonna pick that one thing step one you're saying is gather so you're you're taking that apple step two is reflect so you're reflecting on when does that emotion come up well you know what what's the story behind that emotion so far have i got it yes absolutely so you've picked your four apples the four signals so imagine having a basket and you've picked apple number one you see motion apple number twos are behaviors ethyl number three are the behavioral signals in your body bodily signals apple number four is perspective four in your basket now you're here those have pointed that ex that activity has pulled us from an unconscious to the conscious so now it's pointing to a thought but you don't quite know what isn't thought yet it's still two early days you're looking at this you know with like bling you don't you can't see the detail yet it's still is it do you think do you think it would be useful to do this let's say with depression or anxiety would that do you think taking a particular symptom do you think that would would that help here with the analogy you can do so in your apple you've got the first okay gathering step number one the first apple emotion depression second apple and i'll stick with the same example i said earlier on so there's repetition which makes it easier second example behaviors is the second signal behaviors withdrawing okay so my apple ii is drawing apple one is um depression apple two is withdrawing or isolation um not speak too much to people whatever just yeah even if it's one third one is um acid gut issues earlier on so there's the third apple fourth apple is life sucks so there's my four signals now i see okay this then i see oh that's pointing to relationships so there's a toxicity in my relationship so that's those are attached to a toxic thought that is called toxic relationships but you don't know the details yet so now you're going to reflect so take out emotion number one apple number one emotions why ask yourself why why am i feeling this depression in terms of relationships and you answer yourself and you can go ask yourself three or four why's ask answer discuss ask answer discuss be very systematic i would literally talk to charity put two chairs out for my patients and i would say okay you sit in one and you talk to yourself and the other i'm just in the background facilitating this process so you are talking your wise minds talking to a messy mind so your wise mind as soon as you objectify things like that and you create that distancing it's easier to do this so you say okay caroline why are you feeling this depression in terms of your relationships and that'll show you the detail here which is how you are interpreting oh okay i feel depression because i really want to form a long-lasting relationship but every time i get into a relationship and the trust issues whatever you start you know that you start getting a little and why are you doing that i think i've got trust issues why i don't know there's maybe something in my childhood whatever then you go to the next one okay that's enough for now don't try and solve it all in one day you can be overwhelmed really be very strict 15 to 45 minutes that's the time frame okay and you can do less then you go to okay um then you're going to write that down so you've gathered these four and you've and you've done a bit of reflection and that's why i say keep it short two three minutes for each step write that down and when you write that down amazing things happen in the basal ganglia of your brain different parts of your brain which basically start moving the energy around the different frequencies of your brain in a different way that you can tap into existing connected thoughts so it brings up associated thoughts but it also helps develop your intuition so that you start looking down the tree trunk which is how did you process to get to what on earth went on in your life that you're processing yourself from this way that you not worthy of a relationship or whatever and so then you start the writing will start bringing that up but the writing steps step three is chaotic and it should be chaotic you just mind dumb whatever comes to your mind you just write all over the page i've developed a system called the metacog i have a app called the neurocycle which has got all of this and i guide you through the audio video everything in this video on how to do the meta target etc there's also in this book i give you examples of the metacognitive mental message you mentioned um and we adding constantly adding stuff to the neurocycle in terms of um guidance etc so the metacog is is if you don't know how to meet a clock at this stage just do so from the middle of your page and just write all around that circle get yourself out of linear get yourself into multi-dimensional and use colors if you want and don't worry about order it's one of the most revealing processes it'll look like chaos and that's good more chaos the better because you're dragging up things that you're getting into the non-conscious you're digging deep so where we're up to is you've we've done the gather and we've we're going through the example of depression so we've got the four apples depression uh withdrawing um feeling it in our guts life sucks those four things uh we're reflecting on where the they may have come from we're just starting to think oh yeah maybe oh i can see why that happened or oh my mum was like this so that's why i feel you know what you're just starting to open the door a little bit into that conscious awareness then the third step is right so you're kind of right you're writing down on the back of the awareness on the back of the reflection then you're saying things are going to come on there if you start writing them down that does something very powerful right so you have this method called the metacog which people can get in your app they can get through you know the latest book and figure that out but at the moment even if they don't have that just start writing anything in relation to how you're feeling that's step three is that right that's correct you got it perfectly brilliant it's very systematic if you if you jump to step three before you've done step one you won't get the same benefit and this is what i've tested very methodically in my research what's the best i've looked at all the combinations and i've looked at what is happening my brain and body so it's really important that you do it in this your brain systematic you're driving the neuroplasticity you're rewiring your brain it doesn't just it you don't want chaotic rewiring you want to drive the direction you don't want to be all over the road you want to say i want to go there down that path that's what i'm wanting so how am i going to get there as opposed to earth it's going to go all over the place okay so the fourth step now is also writing step but it's where you do what i call it's a recheck it's called the recheck stick for and this is where you go into reconceptualization which is a phenomenal word it's a powerful deep word all the words i chose to have got duty deep meanings reconceptualization is the acceptance of your story it's a this has happened now what can i do about it very powerful step so you take what you've written which is the culmination of your aware and reflect gather awareness and reflection you've got this chaotic mass of words on your page you may have very few the first name whatever it builds up over time and you now say okay what does this mean and you start looking for patterns for triggers for activators for getting some sense out of this so that's starting to show you a root you'll start getting a glimpse into the core so you're getting the you're now because we're looking at that diseased uh tree structure in the brain of course but that's what we and we we're we're looking at that disease tree structure based around depression and all the thoughts and feelings and everything around that and you're saying as we go through this process we're getting now from the branches all the way down to the roots as to where did this start and yes and so this might be for example um you know i don't know it depends on what you've written but could this be something like um oh man yeah this pattern is whenever i see that person and they talk to me like this i then respond automatically which is how i used to respond in that other relationship actually that's just automatic is that what you mean you're just sort of making making sense of it you start making sense of those you start seeing that this is a consistent pattern and then you start as you go as you you're not going to get this on day one it's going to take you at least three weeks if not longer but we'll talk about the time a bit more detail you're going to start seeing okay if i do this consistently and every time that person sees that kind of thing and each relationship exactly like you described it there's there's a cause there's a reason that you're showing up and you're starting to see that root popping out of the ground almost like you've taken a spade and you started digging away there's a really tough root in that garden of yours that you're talking about and you had to take a spa you couldn't just pull it out you actually had to you know move loosen the soil in order to find the see the roots gosh this roots just going on like further and further and some roots are much deeper than others so the more established the trauma the bigger the root the stronger the root the more difficult it is to get that that tree out the longer it takes to see it and that's okay but there's still these cycles of time but yes exactly that you're starting to see at this point you're starting to recognize the way i'm showing up is not a mental health disease i don't have a diseased brain i have had an experience and that experience wired into my brain and over time became an established pattern that has created a disruption in how i run relationships so i'm showing up in this way because of and now through this process you are finding the because of so by the time you get to step four you're in that reaching process where you are trying to reconceptualize this is what's happened i don't understand exactly where it's coming from but it seems like it could be i remember my parents maybe had a bad relationship or maybe your very first few relationships were just really bad you just know how can happen like that you just go into one bad relationship after another and it just becomes a thing there's something wrong with me and that is um a root that's that's the origin story like i started today with the first at the beginning of the interview i said my words are the roots of the origin of the story the words of this conversation every the roots of the toxic tree are the initial experience those experiences of conversation it's going in the root system so the root system is always what was the original experience so eventually that's revealed you know the first time that you do a neurocycle you may only find just one tiny part of the root one little path and as you go through over time you see more and more so day one you may just get to the point where okay well all i can see is that i am not crazy i'm not insane there's this depression is actually telling me something and this is amazing i can actually do something about this there's a reason why i am having problems in my relationship which is really making me depressed because as humans we want a relationship you want to be loved it's almost core basic need you know it's that kind of maybe languaging that you may get to start saying to yourself which then leads you to step five which is the act of reach and that is okay i've done a lot of work i've done my 15 minutes maximum 45 and really try and stick to those time frames or you will you will peter out your energy your brain is like a cell phone and your mind your conscious mind like a cell phone it gets tired your unconscious mind never gets tired so we have to bear that in mind you still have a day's day to get you still have whatever you do as a person parenting medicaid medicine etc um podcast you can't just spend all your life all day on that so very very strict about 15 minutes is apple 45 minutes max so i end the session with what did i learn today what can i take away from the session and how can i encapsulate that into a statement that i can train myself that each time the intrusive thought of i'm useless i can't form a relationship i'm depressed i'm you know i'm diseased any time those things come up i can go back to my active reach which is a statement of no hang on the way i'm showing up is because of something there's a big cause of behind this and just saying that yourself each time the inclusive thought comes up you capture it with that active reach yeah so so basically what i love about this it's a it's a self-contained complete exercise that just slowly just enhances with regular repetition someone's awareness of what's going on and and i think really the the really powerful thing there i think for people is that they realize that oh the way i feel and the way i think is not who i am it's who i became in response to something right and so now it's not the real me but now i know why and so could and just just to finish off that depression example could the active reach potentially be next time i feel like this instead of staying in bed um i'm going to go for a 10-minute walk yes or even yes even that or i'm gonna put on a a temporary distraction i'm gonna watch a happy movie i'm gonna watch friends or something like that so that i get into a better mindset or anything or something it might be as simple as sometimes people are so depressed they can't get out of bed it might just be you can try and get from the bed to the couch or the you know something like that yes so it's not so it's very unique to an individual yes there's no set reset i mean there's examples i can give of what we've just done now but the the real recheck the active reach benefit will come from what do you need in that moment what's the full stop of the sentence that you need to keep you going today and to keep you moving forward in the day and not allowing yourself to go back to that problem because we can't what happens when we get it stuck into a severe depression or um an anxiety attack or something or overwhelmed burn up this burner isn't a result of is we stay too long in that because we don't know what to do we stay in the chaos so here i'm saying allow the chaos it's okay to be a mess you're allowing that expression but then you're moving on so by the same token once you've got this going on day one we should quickly talk about the timing and then also how you can use this in day-to-day struggles today i'm going to have my active reach something like that but you just said i'm going to get out of bed or i'm going to tell myself and each time during the course of the day if my mind goes back i'm going to say that active reach because you tell yourself tomorrow you will come back and you'll do it again so your active reach could also be a statement plus a visual so maybe you love sunsets or you love puppies or whatever and you say okay i'm going to watch a puppy video and tic toc each time i feel anything like that just to keep it's discipline your mind to not go back to that place and pour more water onto this and then and the key thing there it's intentional that's that's the big thing right isn't it instead of the the your thoughts driving you you are taking charge you're going hey listen this is not me i know what's going on i know this is going to come back and next time it comes back i'm going to make a different choice a choice that i have made intentionally that is incredibly empowering isn't it totally empowering so you're using your veto power you have veto power you are able to override that thought so you at this time that doesn't go in a day it goes in time but yes you are you are driving when it comes up and it's controlling you you now have a system to control it and then over time because it took time to wire in habits don't form in 21 days we've all heard that there was a missile in the 60s promulgated by a surgeon and it became very popular but it's not scientific very few people have done research on the numbers that's one of the fields that i have worked in and so how long does it take to form a habit at least 63 to 66 days and so that i've shown with neuroscientific research and so on and i'm doing more studies on that now so essentially what we see and i saw this in in as a clinical neuroscientist too that to do this process if you just find all these roots you're going to have to spend at least 15 minutes for at least three weeks 21 days and it's only at that point have you spent enough time taking the energy away from this making it small and then you've got that small little where did my small one go here my little small one that's good what it's going to look like after three weeks and at this point i now know all that stuff that i've learned and i may have realized that you know a lot of the root causes could have been you know trust issues in in in your parents relationship or something however you would you define had a level of insight into the course what you won't have and i'm going to say this up front is don't get stuck trying to separate why did they do that to me remember you're only an expert on your own experiences in understanding that because of you looking for the source but you can't understand why people do what they do you can't control people events or circumstances you can only control what's inside of you and how you want that to play out into the future so a lot of people get stuck there in their own self mind management and also in therapy don't try and find out why we can go down rabbit holes so by day 21 it's small so then what you have to do is you have to spend at least another 42 days but you only spend five minutes today going through the five steps of the nearest cycle but only in five minutes so this is where the app's great because the app i'll walk you through video and audio for for the 15 to 45 minutes and then they script for the days 22 through 63 and then also it's described in the book and that's just the five steps very quickly where you're taking this and you're growing it into this does that mean not to leave that let's say there's one particular thought pattern and therefore tree-like structure in our brain that is negatively affecting our life if we identify that and through what you've said and there's a lot more detail in your book in your app of course the people who are really interested in diving deep but they can take that 15 minutes minimum a day for 21 days or going through that five step cycle just 15 minutes it's actually not that long so that's 21 therefore there for the next two cycles of 21 days to 42 days you only need to do five minutes a day and then at day 63 effectively are you saying that that disease tree will no longer be there and instead you'll have a fresh new vibrant green healthy one is that what you're saying it'll always be there because your story you'll always remember what happened to you you'll remember oh that's an abuse or that was whatever um but it's shrunk and it's small and it's weak the sting is gone it has no power it's simply converted into look i've shrunk it and i'm putting this on top can you see that for the visual it's transitioned from dominating to being dominated so we're still there it's part of your experience of life but but it's not dominating your day-to-day life and yeah we've mentioned all about negative things so far and of course that's affecting people towards the end of the book there's a very powerful chapter on building your brain building a healthy brain building resilience and i i really want to just briefly touch on this because i think this shows the incredible power off that five-step process yes you can use it to manage anxiety depression stress you know addiction whatever that might be but you can also use it to actually develop your brain and grow a more resilient brain and i think one of the examples she gave was listening to a podcast and i thought that was really beautiful that actually people can listen to a bit of a podcast let's say this one or i don't know your podcast or i know on fridays i have a 10 minute bite size podcast with some of the best bits from previous guests and i thought this is a really useful exercise so maybe could you talk it through that lens because i think that's also quite empowering way to finish this conversation for people glad you brought that up because when i was working with my patients the first thing i would do would be brain building because you've got to activate the resilience and ins which is all of us we all have natural resilience it's not certain traits in certain people every human is resilient we just have to develop the skill so brain building is one of those unspoken mental health tools that is absolutely vital and it's so powerful i've shown you my research that you can get an 81 handle on depression anxiety all these things and 75 improvement in your intellectual capacity and things like that when you do brain building alongside the detoxing it's the same five steps but if you think the detoxing you're deconstructing and reconstructing brain building you're constructing you're building from the get-go you're growing these things and so these two types of brain building it's the same five steps but you're learning new information you're growing networks into your brain so if you take like a podcast or you take something interested in and i think podcasts are really great because it's it's a medium that you have to listen and then stop and then make notes and it's oh my gosh that is doing the most phenomenal things in your brain my traumatic brain injured patients we got from literally being written off as vegetables to getting degrees by doing brain building using the neurocycle it is so powerful and it puts you in a in a state of brazilians because you're growing networks in your brain that are healthy and strong so think of a beautiful green garden you go all the way back to your garden think of how beautiful and and healthy it is now now you you can go in that garden and if you are feeling if something happens or there's a one weed you are not over the weed doesn't overwhelm the garden because the garden is strong so brain building is building the beautiful flowers the grass the constant beauty you're growing that so in between when you're detoxing the weeds you are focusing on the resilience so it's the resilience growth and you can do that with that as you say you listen to the podcast stop it after about a minute and then basically go through the five steps gather awareness think about what you've just heard write it down um check does it make sense um you may want to rewind and re-listen to compare and then maybe do a little bit of discussion and this may sound like a laborious process but take your 10-minute one i love it it'll take 10 minutes of one of mine and 10 minutes of that exercise stopping and starting and doing that it is so powerful and then there's other ways of doing it i call it insurance policies yeah it's amazing it's really powerful because they could so listening to let's say a 10 minute podcast let's say right let's say they listen is that the gathering is that there or is that is that the preparation but that's it's a bit of both isn't it it's kind of you quite right you listen for about a minute same kind of exercises that earlier one with the intrusive thoughts so listen for about a minute just pause it have your paper or you're working your computer and then pause it and ask yourself okay what have i just heard repeat it to yourself so do a bit of ask answer discuss so gathering is to listen the reflect is ask answer discuss writing steps we write that down then look at what you've written you may want to quickly re-listen and compare what you heard to what you've written and then say okay this is what i heard press play and continue and you repeat that cycle for 10 20. could the active reach be depending on the topic next time i'm in this scenario in my life or i'm overwhelmed with choice oh i've just realized actually this is a great framework to apply there so i'm i'm going to go through this process next time when i have to make a decision for example absolutely or could i also think the active reach is something i've thought about putting this the end of my podcast i haven't yet just saying what if there's one thing you've learned why don't you teach that or share it with someone else that's active reach right that's a positive action that will help rewire exactly so when i did a lot of do a lot of work in schools that a lot and train teachers and in a school environment when a child's learning and their work they go through this process which i've just described the the read the active breach in education terms is re-teach and so basically what you do is you explain back what you've learned so it's a reteaching of what you've learned in that process and so that's exactly what it is you act you just you can explain back tell someone what you've just heard on the podcast tell yourself phone a friend text a friend or draw on that content because if you do the podcast that you're interested in stuff that you want to learn stuff about you can do on that content in a further situation and we are also use it as if i'm very very overwhelmed or i've had a shock or there's been some traumatic news and i've dealt with the emergency i've triaged i will then to get myself in a place of creativity where i can handle the situation more effectively i will go and blow brain build i've taken some of my research because i'm using research trials and i'm writing journal papers i'm always having to learn new stuff i will go in your cycle and it calms me down it is one of the most common exercises but that's like another whole amazing it is yeah and i do want to i really would encourage people to take a look at the book cleaning up your mental mess because it's i think whatever you are dealing with in life there is a structure there and a framework to help you process and move through it and move beyond it and what i love about the neurocycle you can use it for chronic trauma things that have been bothering you for years but you can also use it in the moment to deal with something and i think that's really powerful um don't sleep at the end oh please example sorry just stop that in the moment because people thinking well 63 days how do you use it in the moment it's basically they help me crisis in the moment i'll give you an example i had to go to a research meeting with my um team yesterday yesterday at seven it was a seven hour meeting and i had to go to the dentist before and i was on a flight so i had all these things back to back and everything was delayed so i was delayed for my team and i was getting very anxious about this because i'm running the team so i did a new cycle to calm myself down so i could work out what to do get my team started so that they didn't have to wait me so i could get there so i did i gathered awareness of my emotions i allowed myself to feel them i reflected on this is why logically i just walked myself through the process wrote down a few ideas of how i'm feeling rechecked to work out okay what's my plan active reach phoned my team one of my team lead team members and said okay start this this set it up and i was calm and i could enter the meeting so that's an in the moment question yeah i love that and i guess the more people practice it maybe as part of a morning routine i guess um the more able you're gonna be to quickly zoom through that five-step process like in the moment like you had to do yesterday that's that's really powerful and when we do a part two we'll definitely go into that into more detail before you go dr leaf um i want to acknowledge you for the incredible work you've been doing for decades now to bring awareness to this field you are literally helping hundreds of thousands millions of people around the world understand themselves better give them autonomy awareness you know real agency over the course of their lives which i think is one of the the greatest gifts anyone can give somebody else is that sense of autonomy and agency many people around the world are struggling at the moment yeah this podcast is called feel better live more when we feel better in ourselves we get more out of life just to finish off for people who are struggling who think that the way they are currently is the way things are always going to be and they can't see a way out obviously i hope there's been some inspiration during our conversation what would you say to them at the end i'd say that you can't change your story but you can change how it looks inside of you and how it plays out into your future and you have that autonomy in that and you can learn how to do that it's harder to totally acknowledge and the other thing is to bear in mind that you can't control events or circumstances or people but you can learn to control your response and it's a learning notice i'm saying learning which is very encouraging because i'm not expecting you to just automatically do it i'm saying that it's a skill that you can learn and once you learn it's one of those skills that just grows exponentially it's kind of hard to get going but once you're into it it just grows exponentially and it doesn't mean you're going to live an avatar life that's not normal as i said being constantly positive is toxic and toxic positivity is totally toxic i'm talking about embracing all of your humanity celebrate that depression and that anxiety because you can at least feel as a human and when you see and allow yourself to be a mess because behind that nest is the message i know that's so cheesy but seriously when you embrace those signals that depression etc you are going to find what is attached to you and you're going to be able to reconstruct your life if you enjoyed that conversation on healing your mind i think you are really going to enjoy this one about a powerful daily habit to stop procrastination so many people get stopped by procrastination you know what you need to do the issue is how do you make yourself take actions

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 37,083

Keywords: the4pillarplan, thestresssolution, feelbetterin5, wellness, drchatterjee, feelbetterlivemore, ranganchatterjee, 4pillars, drchatterjee podcast, health tips, nutrition tips, health hacks, live longer, age in reverse, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, motivation, inspiration, health interview

Id: gI8DEL_tLe4

Length: 100min 1sec (6001 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 08 2022