This Doctor Shows You How You Can Control Your Biological Age | Dr. Caroline Leaf on Health Theory

when you manage your mind you can change your cellular health your biological age in other words um and so you control that so you literally with your mind control how your dna functions hey everybody welcome to health theory today's guest is best-selling author dr caroline leaf she's a cognitive neuroscientist with a phd in communication pathology who's been researching the brain mental health and memory formation for over 30 years her insights and methodology have helped over a million people to improve the quality of their lives and have made her a highly sought after speaker who lectures to audiences around the world additionally she runs the integrated mind network and is participating in a dc based mental health initiative that is a part of her tireless efforts to reduce the global stigma around mental health dr leaf thank you so much for joining us today oh i'm thrilled thank you yeah of course so um i'm super curious to know if if your um your skype can be believed you are now in dallas texas um how how does one go from south africa and i think were you you were born somewhere else even from there yes yeah i got an interesting history i was born in zimbabwe and grew up in south africa and we've been in the states now for 12 years so we're based in dallas but we travel globally 70 of the month pre-covered post covered and during covert we obviously haven't traveled but yeah our main offer we based in dallas so i'm my mom was english my dad well irish english my dad italian so i'm kind of a mixture and my husband swiss so put that all together and it's it's an interesting mix so i start with that is because one of the things i find most interesting about your work is the whole idea of identity and how important that is for people and i know you work with people a lot on that and one of the things that i have found certainly anchored my own identity and i've seen anchor a lot of people's identity is where they're from and so having that sort of high level of being a nomad and going to all these places one how has that impacted your identity how do you think about identity and you know what are what's your guidance for people trying to solidify a useful identity tom that's an excellent question and it's really a good place to start because when i worked in clinical practice which i did for 25 years it's the first area that you need to work with with people because your identity is your value so if your identity if you know how to manage your identity you can be absolutely anywhere and that doesn't throw you you know you don't attach your identity to a place you attach it to yourself which is a healthy way of doing it and i think probably the work um it's good you i'm glad you asked me about south africa too because my initial research was obviously done there and i would spend three days up to three days a week working in the apartheid era because i mean i'm this is back in the 80s in the transition with mandela coming in and then post apartheid and you know with this everything that's going on currently at the moment with racism i saw firsthand what was happening to people's identity and a lot of my initial brain research was done and that's where i honestly learned most of what i do because i was in the trenches dealing with people whose identity had been removed a classic example of identity is nelson mandela and when he was when he was sent to prison in on robben island one of the things that they did was they the first thing besides you know all the inhumane things they did was that they took their id card away and your id card already in an apartheid south africa um to that id card meant everything and the first thing they would do say take it away and say you you have no value you you have no identity and then they would put them in you know the prison outfits and there was no recognition of identity and that's how they would broke a lot of these spirits and it's interesting how mandela took that and turned that into what we know transformed that experience into something very constructive whereas there was a the traditional i mean the the well-known hema murderer who was um incarcerated at the same time as him and what they would have to do all day long would hit hit these white stones with a hammer and it was there was no no recognition no value for them as a human and they would just do this day in and day out dehumanizing and when when mandela got out of prison we know what he did he transformed the world impacted the world the hammer murder went on to be the hammer murder he actually murdered people and became a serial killer and there's two classic examples of people whose identities were removed and who used that in a different way and transform that in a different way so if i had to define identity it's really simple it's how you uniquely think and feel and choose that's what it is so when i think of identity i actually think of it a little bit differently and i'd be curious to know if we have conflicting ideas on identity if we're just saying the same thing in different angles so i think of identity as a statement that you repeat to yourself about who you are um using actual like those words so in the beginning i the thing i repeated to myself is i am soleieri and i don't know if you know the movie amadeus or not but soleil was the character who was just good enough at music to recognize he would never be as good as mozart and when i saw it i was like oh my god that's me like i'm just smart enough to realize how much smarter other people are and so i had that similar lament of like could you not have made me dumber so that i don't have the self-awareness that i don't recognize that i'm not as good as these people or couldn't you have made me as good as these people right but being in the area where it's like oh man i just recognize where i'm at so i had to switch that and and so a big moment for me was going actually i am the learner and because i could repeat it to myself and i could define what a learner was and what a learner does and it became so concrete and so specific that it gave me a way to see myself that made me feel good and a way to behave that moved me forward is that is that a collision with how you see it is that no it's totally totally complementary so what you've done is you've translated you how you thought felt and chose about yourself from being someone who almost was that that they're almost there to recognizing that actually you are so you basically thought felt and chose in order for you to make a statement it's preceded by um a thought so you had this thought of who you were and then you had to change it to another thought and a thought is a big concept and it's a real thing but thoughts come from an action and that is the unique identity of um thinking feeling and choosing so you had to think feel choose you built a thought and then that thought became encapsulated into a statement can can you tell me what do you mean by choose okay so um as you um what we do at incredible speeds on an unconscious level at like 400 billion actions per second we do on a conscious level at a much slower rate and we have awareness of our thinking feeling and choosing every 10 seconds so as i think i will feel and as i think and feel i will choose choice means that you're building updating your knowledge it's like a wave of of knowledge that's been constantly updated about yourself choosing what to believe about myself choosing yes try about everything it's choice about everything every experience i get right at the moment as you're listening to me i'm giving you information you're thinking feeling and making choices about what i'm saying so the three go together and choice is kind of the it's like it puts the bow on it it kind of collapses the wave if you think of a wave on a beach it's the easiest way to understand choice you think and feel the wave balls and then as you choose the wave crashes so you make a decision and then that leads you to the next bit so let me let me push on that a little bit so you've got you're saying things let's say it's about identity and so i'm i'm having a reaction to that or i'm thinking about it i'm having an emotional reaction to that and then i'm going to make a decision about whether i think it's true or it's false or worthy of pursuit or whatever and that sort of narrows the world of opportunity down into now that i have a decision about it i've sort of catalogued it is that and then the world becomes i've cataloged all these things in all these different places and that creates my what i call frame of reference i don't know um what word you would use for that but yeah you can you can explain it exactly like that and it's not just a one-off thing it's a constant process so there's a lot of little decisions like a comic strip if you think of a comic strip there's a lot of little cartoons and then but we don't see the individual cartoons we see a whole flow so everybody every little cartoon is like that think feel choose think phil choose but put together it's a flow so to get to the point of i am a learner there were a lot of little individual parts of the cartoon little individual think field choose boxes that led up to the uh the identity that you created that you shifted for yourself that you literally reconceptualized so you so thinking and feeling and choosing is mind in action and we're always in action 24 7 and these are these these are a bunch of little proteins that are super computers that are vibrating with i am a learner in the in little branches looks like a tree and every experience that you have daily is being added to that concept because you keep on learning and that's a thought a thought is like a tree filled with memories and it's a thought is a huge concept and it's something that we build from thinking feeling and choosing but within it is an infinite number of branches that you keep growing because of each experience so that i am a learner keeps growing so the identity keeps growing and changing along the way it's very organic so along the way we experience this we have a relationship we meet someone else we learn something new so every time you do an interview every time you prepare for an interview every time you have a conversation with your wife a friend you are adding to that identity because you approach things in terms of i'm learning i'm learning new stuff all the time a lot of a lot of people when that would come into my practice a lot of people that that contact me now the thousands will say i don't know who i am i don't know what my purpose is i've been told by everyone i can't do this i can't do that i've gone through this i've gone through this trauma this brain injury this autism or in the racial south africa that i worked in in this current racist environment the value of well you black so you're not worth the same thing who are you really so we've all got the same brain structures and physiology but the way that you are building this information and the way that your viewers are building what i'm saying now is going to look different we're all building different trees of what i'm saying at the moment based on your unique identity so when we accept okay let's um i want to slow down there just because i want to make sure that people can actually piece this together so i'm going to translate some of this into just the words that i use and let me know if i'm actually understanding this so there's nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so right the sort of immortal shakespeare quote which i think is really brilliant and and points to how humans are meaning making machines so what i hear you saying is that in every moment your your thoughts ultimately come down to a choice that you're making i like the word show if i'm understanding correctly i like the word choice so i had always taken oh i'm not as good as other people and that's just who i am but once i realized oh that's a choice and i could actually focus my i could make a different choice which is that well my brain is plastic and i can learn so i'm not as good as them yet and so the insertion of the word yet became this incredibly powerful life-changing decision that i and i've heard you talk about this in the early days of brain plasticity it was hotly contested people were debating it is it real is it not real and it was you can't teach an old dog new tricks whatever number of neurons you're born with that's what you're going to die with that's it the brain doesn't make new cells and so in the late 90s when i'm sort of sliding towards depression and i'm like man i'm i've taken on tens of thousands of dollars in debt from college i'm not talented i'm never going to be able to do what i want to do for a living and now i'm lost and so it was a really dark place but i find brain plasticity it's hotly debated but i choose to believe that it's real so when you talk about the the tree and sort of the way i think about all the branches is that what you're talking about where these those little incremental things you're constantly changing the shape of this tree as you make these different choices about all these little incremental concepts that you encounter that you then assign meaning to perfect you said that perfectly that's exactly what you're doing when you think you will automatically always feel and when you feel you will automatically choose we do that as humans whether we like it or not so we either choosing we can't never not choose you know that's one of the arguments that people say well i'm not going to do anything that's a choice so you either you're choosing either to actually move in one direction or the other all the time so the three always go together you cannot separate them out so the result that you build is that tree the thought they look like trees in the in the brain we see that they have an arbor like structure which is tree-like structure they're constantly changing they're never the same they're always updating from every experience that you have so you're always growing little branches there's no space limits to the amount of branches that you grow there's no space limit in your brain just by the nature of how the brain actually grows itself um and this this is neurogenesis neuroplasticity which is the research happening for all these years so you a thought then as you think feel and choose and be talking specifically about the thought of identity at the moment which is very core because it pervades how we view everything in life it's a very dominant thought structure that we build into our brain and it kind of is the sunglasses we put on and how we view life that thought when you think feel and choose and you build the tree and if my hand is the tree we can literally imagine that the inside this tree we've got information so on the branches and emotions because we think about information so we build information and also the emotions which is the feeling we experience at that moment also goes into there so this thought has information and emotions and all the little branches are the memories of the thought which keep getting added to so thoughts are real things they occupy mental real estate let's talk about how um nothing can change energy is never lost we know that from newton so your energy is never lost energy is transferred and let's say that you're you seeing yourself in a very negative way like those people that i work with in south africa or my patients or the example you gave of yourself if we constantly think about ourselves negatively we're going against the natural function of of the the way that the energy should flow in the brain as we are going through life so instead of the fate i should though i that'll that'll derail on so i won't um i won't take us down that path but to me whether we should or shouldn't um is certainly we can change the way that we feel we can change even the hard wiring of our brain by getting a grip of our thoughts and i know one thing you've talked a lot about yeah so walk me through like when it comes to changing your identity so you've got this tree you've made all these decisions you've got these emotions associated with thoughts and they sort of in my language will cough up to your conscious mind at the weirdest of times and cause you to interpret situations in in an unhelpful way unless you take control of that and and i love your analogy of it being like a tree because once you get into an organic growth i start thinking some people the way that their frame of reference all those little choices that they've made have built instead of you know like a beautiful bonsai tree it's a bramble and it's you know it's tangled and there's thorns and it's like impossible to get your way through so how do you help people whether it's meditation journaling breathing exercises developing self-awareness like how do you help them take control of that process and begin to build an identity that serves them okay brilliant question so if you use your mind in a very determined way so if you control your choices and you you've said this you've said this both of us that when you think and feel and choose you have the ability to change your choices to control your choices so that thinking and feeling is leading to the change of the choice when you do that you change the structure of your brain because the thinking feeling choosing moves through your brain leads to genetic change in your brain which then builds the little proteins that actually hold the thought which are the and the proteins make the branches of the tree so this is when we talk about neuroplasticity the visual you can actually imagine is of tree branches growing so there is structural change so you are changing matter with mind so what is mind think you'll choose what is matter it's the physical substance or substrate of the brain and the body and then the brain controls the body so how do you teach people to be conscious about that process like for me i always tell people nice and simple the only identity that's going to serve you long term is that of the learner period simple as it's the most foundational i i am very open if somebody has a better answer i will immediately adopt it but it's anti-fragile to use naseem to lebs term where the more you attack somebody with a the mindset of the learner the stronger you make them because their their identity is not associated with being right with being good or worthy or anything that's fragile being smart it's all around cool i i want to know where i'm wrong because i want to improve my very self-esteem is attached to my willingness to learn to stare nakedly at my inadequacies and get better so that's sort of my foundational thing that i hand to people and say look just do that if you build your identity around that you're gonna be golden i give them the phrases to repeat um what's the the scaffolding or process is probably a better way to say it what's the process that you give people for changing their identity in a very specific way okay so first of all learner is an excellent way because learner means that you're always open to change so you're always open to thinking feeling and making choices so learner is an excellent an excellent word to use for that because you can't learn unless you think and feel and and make choices i quickly want to just frame it with related to something that you mentioned a moment ago because it'll make it easier to understand the how our brain should flow you the word should you you paused on the word should everyone's got their own shirt i want to stress that there is no um normal brain yale actually brought a study out in 2018 and i stress that i all my research all my neuroscience research is done looking at people as individual case studies so you are your own measure and the whole mental health movement completely is counter to that because the i'd say the vast majority of the biomedical model because it doesn't look as the individual as an individual in the context of their story and measure against themselves and look at what they've gone through what they're going through and the societal et cetera et cetera it's more these are the symptoms diagnosis symptoms give you a label and lock you into a box and that has been very detrimental to mental health we've gone backwards in mental health for the last 60 years it hasn't worked it's made things worse what we have to get back to is the recognition of the individual so when i say should it's not should against any measure it is there's a certain pattern in the brain that we see when are when we've got a handle on how we comfortable and being comfortable is also being uncomfortable so i have maybe you feel depressed like you express express that you went through depression so if you're feeling depressed or anxious these are not illnesses these are not limiting illnesses these are signals that there's something going on in your life that you need to look at so depression related to identity i can't achieve what i'm what i don't believe i'm ever going to make it i'm just not good enough for it ever all that thought of i'm not good enough had all the little memories of whatever for whatever experience inside of that so that's just frames it so how do we fix that so what i studied was the science of thought so if we think feel and choose to build a thought how does that process happen in the brain and how can i translate that back for a patient who's suffering from depression or child who's batting with learning issues or someone who has an identity crisis or whatever so there's five basic things that your brain goes through but there's a preparation phase first the preparation is the mindfulness the breathing all those things which then prepares the body on a physiological level and a neurophysiological level for the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system to balance and for us to get mindful in the moment as soon as you are they have done mindfulness training for example and some mindfulness work or bit of meditation and breathing you then your brain is then in a phase phase state where the different energies of the brain alpha beta theta data delta nothing weird um are all flowing like in a beach think of a c think of the seed you go far out in the sea you've got the huge swell um and that's like it's deep and it's big and it's massive but it's this massive swell that's delta then you come in a little closer and it's a big swell but it's not as big that's theta and those two represent the deep the the non-conscious mind which is the biggest part of us that non-physical part of us we are intelligences our memories it's working 24 7. it's huge it's churning this is why the c analogy is really good then you've got you come in a little closer to the shore and you get alpha which is now starting to build into more of a way that you can recognize the typical wave form and then you get um high beta which is kind of the top of the wave where you're starting to see the white crest and then you get the beta where it crashes onto the beach and then you get the little ripple which is what we would call gamma so these the beta gamma beta um are all dealing with conscious or very active twenty all of them are active all the time but they become more active when you conscious and awake um and when you are sleeping the others become more conscious but they've got to work together because it's the conscious and the non-conscious mind and the alpha is a state that your brain goes into where you can actually capture and get access to the non-conscious mind by being aware of the conscious mind okay so how do you do it so the first how do we get this wave flowing that sometimes will be a big wave and sometimes small just depending on circumstances you have a trauma you have this you have that it's all normal okay it's all part of life it's all we get up and down anxiety these are all things that we experience so we have to normalize um depression anxiety and yes you have extreme states from extreme circumstances and we can talk about that in a moment but life is is a wave but it's not a perfect wave all the time but what we don't want is to to become a tsunami or a white river rapid you know it's like overwhelming you and you feel like even if it does you can still control it through your choices so we have this phenomenal ability as humans of awareness but and it's a skill that we need to learn so what i'm talking about now in the five steps that i'm going to now summarize for you and it summarizes all my if i have to give you one word for all the work that i've done it's mind management i teach mind management based and i show the evidence of mind management which is basically neuroplasticity happening through showing people that when you do certain mind actions you're going to change your physiology your blood etc even your cells have even shown that your telomeres will grow or shorten depending on how you manage your mind which is incredibly important for biological aging cellular health etc and then also the changes inside of your brain so the first thing that we as humans are very good at but we can get very bad at if we get very distracted is awareness and self-regulation so step number one is developing our awareness our skill of awareness this is something we have to develop and it's something that needs to be grown and it's something that you need to teach our kids in schools can you give like a super quick example of how people can improve their awareness okay so it's being a it's actually using what i call the multiple perspective advantage so it's standing back and observing your own thinking feeling and choosing you can do it with me right now so as we're talking all the listeners and viewers can do this right now be very aware like i'm very weird enough my fingers moving i'm aware of your facial expression i'm aware of what's behind you i'm aware of my own body movements i'm a wave of conversation and the relationship developing how you feel i'm sorry you know i'm aware i'm and i'm watching my thinking i'm feeling and choosing in terms of my choice of words so i'm highly aware which is a state that you will come out of when you in mindfulness when you do my meditation you get into a very aware state of your of your um what you are feeling physically how maybe your toes saw maybe your um your heart beating faster whatever i'm just giving random examples so it's being very tuned in to what's going on in terms of your thinking and your physical and the emotional so what information am i thinking about what emotions am i experiencing what physical sensations and it's developing that with our very mo with our modern era we've become very distracted um they did a very interesting study at harvard and a couple of other universities teamed up with them where they put people into a room and they took away all the iphones any kind of technology they just had to sit the instruction was just to think they had 18 to 75 year olds and they just had to think and they only had to do it for 16 minutes and the majority absolutely hated it they couldn't do it they were they were frustrated they were irritated there was a shocking device in the room it was very well hidden and some of them were so bored that they found a shocking device and they shocked themselves they'd rather shock themselves than sit and think just 10 years ago this kind of the same kind of research was done and people loved it people have in our modern era and i'm not anti-technology it's brilliant but it's mind management of technology when we lose our awareness skill we aren't aware of having a way of you and how you feeling i lose a natural part of me which is empathy awareness is very much related to empathy empathy for myself my identity who i am empathy for others empathy for my impact that i'm making on my having on others um awareness of i'm getting irritated why am i getting irritated not just reacting and being irritated so we see in our current modern era we can't just blame our modern era but it's playing into it it's making it more difficult when we are so busy with um technology and things so accessible or the lifestyle that it's not everything is just on your it and you can just get everything so quickly and we we haven't taken enough time to think and your brain needs to reboot so part of awareness is awareness of what am i thinking at the moment why did i just snap at my spouse why did i feel irritated with that why did i once the interruption of awareness is that the rebooting that you're talking about or is meditating in shifting from say beta to alpha is that the rebooting it's all a process so once again it's a process so it's it's a determined choice once again to stand back and observe your own thinking so you use your choice to observe your choice so you're going into and when people do this we see massive activity in the frontal lobe showing that there's a lot of insight happening so you're watching yourself almost like that scrooge movie where he goes and watches himself growing up as a child where you actually you know that movie is a very good analogy of what i'm talking about that is something we need to develop it's there in us but it's something that we have to grow so awareness is related to that concept it's also developed through thinker moments daydreaming mind wandering but in a sense where you don't let your mind go off on a tangent but you have a fixed amount of time where you let your mind you just do that in the room just think just let your mind think and to be very aware of your thinking and to notice the intrusive thoughts to i mean 95 percent of 95 to 99 of people have got intrusive thoughts and i don't know why they say that in the research it should be 100 because we all have intrusive thoughts but what they're trying to say is that about 94 of people suffer from intrusive thoughts that are actually debilitating and then what we tend to do is um don't we don't focus on them we shove them down but if you shove something down it goes back even stronger than it was before so if you don't deal with something then it creates a very damaged energy pattern in the brain so the energy now now you're going to get too much delta activity and theta activity and that means that when you go to sleep at night you won't go into the the non-rem sleep which is your deep sleep for example and you have to get enough of that sleep in order to release growth hormone factors in order to release telomerase for cells a million different things go on so if we go to if we don't manage our minds i'm just giving a couple of examples and awareness is the first step and awareness is all five steps are about the management right all of them and okay so i won't derail us so um number one we've got awareness and then number two number two is reflection so but before awareness comes preparation so never forget we prepare we've set our brain and body with the meditation building etc awareness then is this whole becoming aware of what you're thinking feeling and choosing a quick example before i go into reflection let's say that we take let's take your example so now you became aware of that you were actually seeing yourself as someone who almost was good enough but not good enough kind of thing that was this thought concept and then you had all these examples and you even gave it a label so that's the first thing if we use just identity as an example this these five steps can be applied to anything you're going through whether it is a toxic habit a toxic trauma an identity issue like we're talking about now um just the day-to-day managing life you can use these five steps because it's mind management it's how you control your thinking feeling and choosing to make sure your brain stays obeys you stays online so that you can manage the next moment and not react um that you can be proactive in your reactions and not not reactive because the reactive will cause brain damage and you can fix it but then it's more work so we can always fix a trauma we can always fix a bad decision so you know we don't have to beat ourselves up about that but we can also learn to be more proactive so the first step is the area the second step is reflection reflection is why did i even think that in the first place what were the root causes of the reason that you felt like that about yourself and i've heard your story before and there's a lot of stuff that you went through as a child that that you could track that back to and if you ask yourself why you thought that which is the reflex step it wouldn't come out straight away it's going to take you at least 63 days it's going to take you at least nine weeks minimum it could be 63 days so okay so neuroplasticity it happens in in various different cycles the overarching cycle is that it takes 21 days to build a long-term memory to get what we call a gamma peak which is the evidence that we're learning has actually taken place i'm coming to your word of learning because i love the word learning learning is what i use for years so that's why i love that you use that word so it takes 21 days to learn to build a long-term memory now long-term memory means i've built a tree with information and emotions and it's there it's in my brain and um i can use it but if i don't stabilize it's like a little plant if i don't water it won't grow so it's built but it's not accessible so within 48 hours or even shorter or maybe within a few days i know i learned that stuff but i can't access it so i have to get it to a deeper level of accessibility i have to make it accessible memory i have to automatize it and the simple word for that is i've got to turn it into a habit and that takes at least another two cycles of 21 days to turn a new thought tree into an accessible memory that it becomes a behavioral change so you wouldn't have done that i'm a learner in overnight no one can do can transform their identity overnight it's the cartoon strips it's going to be a little bit every day so therefore we see certain time points with neuroplasticity we see a change happening day four day seven day 14 day 21 day 42 days 63 very clear what we would see gamma peaks in the brain showing that neuroplasticity is happening that changes are happening very exciting because it's evidence that even if you don't consciously feel like you're changing we have the evidence that on your non-conscious level which is always 10 steps ahead of your conscious level in fact it literally is 10 seconds before you're conscious of anything your non-conscious is already sending you messages to to your subconscious through the via warning signals of you know you feel agitated or you feel your heart beats some sort of physical or something one of the craziest examples of that is people with the they have brain damage that stops them from forming long-term memories so a doctor will go in put a pin in their hand shake hands with this person person jumps back why'd you poke me oh yeah sorry about that they come back in sometimes like three minutes later very briefly and they go to shake their hand and the person will refuse but they can't form long-term memories so they'll ask them oh why don't you shake my hand and they'll give you a bs answer oh people that wear lab coats and make me nervous i don't i don't like yeah people because of germs whatever but the reality is they're not shaking your hand because subconsciously somewhere they have actually tracked that you had that pin in your hand and so there was a sort of emotional memory formation that doesn't reach the conscious part so you don't have a logical explanation but the brain is so desperate to have a story that's cohesive and makes sense that people will cough up these like super random and not at all true reasons for why they don't shake hands that that has always blown me away fascinating that actually that person was going through that shock they literally have um experience they thought felt chosen they went through their little cartoon strips linked for choosing for choose 40 times a second conscious whatever the whole process 400 billion actions per second on an unconscious and they built a tree so it was all on an unconscious level because that's where the work is that's where you're consciously experiencing but you push it into an unconscious so you have your instantaneous memory where you build a temporary short-term memory and that you bring them back in the room and that's what they're operating from bring them in three weeks later or even 72 hours later there's a good chance unless you've reinforced sufficient times you wouldn't have the memory would denature the protein tree converts to heat energy but if you sustain it what we see through learn to learn you have to do repeated little bits every single day and then you get it to the point of the 21 days and thereafter you keep on moving so when i worked in cycle at schools i would arrange the do arrange the the education cycles in cycles of three so that you would do your testing at three weeks six weeks nine weeks so that you keep building and building and building layer upon layer upon layer a little bit every day if you're doing trauma work like you're working through some really major toxic trauma even identity which can be very traumatic is you do very limited time in the day so if it's if it's brain building like school work or learning something there's no limit how much time you spend the more you spend the better it builds resilience in your brain credible for mental health but when you're trying to deal with a toxic thing like a toxic mindset like i'm not good enough i can't i'm just never going to reach that level that you had to shift that you keep to around 37 between 7 and 30 minutes a day why because of the emotional load and people can get so overwhelmed emotionally that you get all these chemical reactions that keep happening over and over and over and you're not giving yourself that thinker break to be able to capture that thought and then it becomes a thought that like an ocd thought or a repetitive thought intrusive that you don't control so mind management is not to allow that to happen mind management is to do very concentrated work on the trauma whatever it is the identity for seven to thirty minutes and then you don't work on it the rest of the day you just have prompts for the rest of the day so let me let me translate this back into the finish the five steps and then we can circle back to this exact example so we've aware where that you've got that mindset you start reflecting on it and so in day one of 63 days you would have day one you discovered this one little branch on the tree and the next day another five little branches and then that remind you these little so each day it builds a little bit little bit we've heard so much about how habits build this is the science behind habit formation that i'm describing you're actually growing the extra little branches and you're making connections across different parts oh that happened there that happened there that's why you're building it into this network in your brain you're building this big oak tree that then has all these like the roots you know the root system of trees tends to go think of in san fran the the the huge um what are those trees called those massive trees they're root systems the redwoods thank you the the root systems are very much like our brain they just they grow across they cross into each other and that's what happens as you reflect so in your reflex stage you are drawing on all the experiences and building it into a new cohesive tree then it's important that you also that you then write so the third step is we genetically write as we choose the wave crashes we switch on and off genes and when that happens proteins are made and those are the proteins that are the little computers that hold the thoughts that's why i say thoughts are real thoughts aren't these ethereal weirdo things those are real physical things that occupy mental real estate like a house occupies physical real estate in land and you build them you control them you change them you can add to them you can they're always able to be updated and they every experience updates them so your tree by now because this is quite a few years back is pretty big because you've now constantly learned and you've shown yourself you now have your identities very clear so across your brain your sunglasses are now of your identity are of one of i am a learner and you prove it to yourself every single day and confirm that message to yourself every single single day and it pervades everything so you've now like a good virus um it spreads across the whole brain it infects the whole brain and it affects it through the neurons through the synapses through the physical structures as well as through the energy that flows through the through the alpha beta delta theta et cetera et cetera and you kind of work out and then you have something will happen it'll knock your identity someone will say something you question yourself you'll have a little wobble and that's great you embrace it so there's awareness now i'm aware that there's something i feel this this person said this it's made me feel this about my identity let me reflect on it become aware let me reflect okay so i jumped ahead a little bit there to give you an example of those two steps but you need to write this down so when we write we all know about journaling and everyone goes on and on about writing it's it's real writing does the most phenomenal stuff in the in the brain you literally put your brain on paper but one of the best ways of writing is to just when you try to work through stuff is to just pour your thoughts on a page it doesn't have to be neat the more messy the better so when you write you actually allow a release of energy you allow the parts of the brain that are called the basal ganglia that are like in the middle of the brain like directly behind your eyes in the middle between your eyes and your nose deep down you allow a flow of energy between the temporal lobe the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex and the dorsolateral p all these fancy areas of your brain okay we get we get all this energy but it flows you get gamma waves flowing from the front to the back of the way brain so we see this beautiful and you're saying this is all happening from writing it's from all of these steps building up and but riding allows a free flow of energy so right you want people to do those three steps like literally time sequentially so i i sit down i prep myself i'm meditating i'm developing the awareness i'm reflecting on it now i'm journaling and so this is maybe over 20 or 30 minutes okay so then what's step four step four then is recheck so now you've written and you've got all this stuff down and it's normally a huge mess and that's better that's great whatever just pull it out that releases all this energy you start pulling up stuff you don't even know is there then recheck is to look at what you've written and try and reconceptualize it see it differently redesigned what have i said what am i saying it's like a when they do an autopsy on someone who to try and find out what's what the cause of death was that's what you're doing you're doing an autopsy you actually just what i'm talking about is brain surgery without the blood you literally are doing brain surgery you pulling a thought up to awareness you are dissecting it and starting the autopsy process through reflection you putting that down on paper in your written point so that you can now look at what you've what you've identified and now you are looking in the recheck you're trying to make sense of that what are the patterns and each day is a tiny step forward so you're not going to solve the identity crisis in one day that's what i keep talking about the 63 days and sometimes you might do multiple because as you come up with one you find oh there's all these things but you will get to a level and then the recheck leads you to um a re-conceptualizing a redesigning of okay i saw myself like this i've been seeing myself like this it seems like this could be one of the causes now what could i do today this is very important what can i do now we tend to do this big thing i can fix this all in in one day you're not going to get there like that you have to take a tiny tiny little bit you have to focus on what you can do today so step five is an active reach from my recheck trying to make sense of this i'm not going to make sense of the whole thing today but something there will make a little bit of sense now i'm going to do something very simple a little of reach which could be as simple as okay well when i feel that i'm useless i'm actually going to tell myself i'm not useless it could be a song that you sing in your head it could be a reach because you're reaching towards a goal okay so i'm actively taking a step towards my goal yes i'm doing something physical and here's the really cool thing is what we found from the research is that when you take a little thing a statement as simple as um if if i feel like i can't do it i can do it a simple statement if i um if i see myself as being not a learner i see myself as being a learner the simplest step even if you don't believe it consciously you have gone through a process of you now rewiring you're building a new pattern in your brain so you've got this toxic tree okay so this i drag around the world it's from south africa it's a little wiry tree but thoughts look like this okay so this is now toxic tree so i'm going to bring this into awareness step one okay then you're going to reflect on this what are these little branches why why why the why why am i thinking ask answer discuss then i'm going to start writing down what i discover then i'm going to look recheck i'm going to look at what i've discovered and then i'm going to develop some kind of little action that little action i in my app that i've developed to to teach the system you can put in like the reminders on your iphone you can type it in to set it to go off and remind you seven times a day why seven it seems like if we have intervals of seven during the course of the day where a little prompt comes up on your computer screen and reminds you you know like you've got to go and do some shopping and you remind you keep in mind until you press complete on your iphone that's what i'm talking about by taking the little simple statement and putting it into your iphone and it just pops up on your screen or you can write it on a journal you can do whatever i just like to use technology in that way i i don't have to do anything it takes me a second to read it but it reminds me so in other words i'm blending my conscious and my non-conscious mind so the work i'm doing in my unconscious mind is being reminded during the course of the day every reminder is a little drop of water to order the plant to give it more energy the more energy i give the healthy there's a healthy one okay there's a nice healthy one the more energy i give this the less energy this has so i'm not ignoring this i'm not doing what traditional methods will say we must just suppress this you can't this never goes away i have to actually redesign this you had to redesign your identity you still talk about your previous identity but you don't talk about it from this angle you talk about it from this angle you used to think like that and there will be days where a little bit of this pops back in but then you can wire it out and catch it quickly and get it out again but the whole point here is that a lot of traditional cognitive behavior therapy identifies a thought and then teaches you techniques to talk it away to try and convince yourself that's really hard work and it's not sustainable mindfulness and i mean meditation and things will get you in the right state but this is these five steps are beyond mindfulness what i've shown from my research is that you can have a boomerang effect if you just become aware and you don't do something you can go back into that state and get worse classic case example is in my most recent research we had a control group and an experimental group the control group were not given the technique which was these five steps in an app form so they didn't get the individual therapy it was all done because i'm a firm believer that you as a person are brilliant you have this resilience in you and you have the ability to give yourself a lot of coaching so what we did was in this in this research study which was double blind random controlled all the gold standard done with um as a single subject design which means i looked at the individual measured them against themselves and then we did do a group we did compare the experimental to the control group so we did a lot of different testing simplified we did three areas of testing and one was psychological i have a scale i've developed that looks at the non-conscious mind how are you thinking etc your awareness self-regulation that kind of stuff we use traditional scales that they use in hospitals and whatever and we used the narrative very important what's your story that's the most important thing what is your story what's going on in your life what is your circumstances most important part of the psychological then he looks at blood and telomeres and cortisol and all the traditional thing telomeres are caps on on the chromosomes x chromosomes on your dna and those little caps are very significant when it comes to cellular health and when people are under toxic stress they shorten and when you manage your stress they lengthen i showed that in nine weeks you can lengthen the telomeres and it's actually almost unheard of except dr apple who's the leading scientist nobel prize winner in this area has started showing that you can make these changes within nine weeks so we've confirmed that with the study that when you manage your mind you can change your cellular health your biological age in other words um and so you control that so you literally with your mind control how your dna functions you control for example we all know about cortisol cortisol drives so many things we saw a significant relationship as people manage their mind using their five steps um um in terms of cortisol dropping to the to because everyone's cortisol is also measured against themselves not against the standard there's a basic standard but would be such a variability within that homocysteine is another one so in other words without confusing everyone we looked at blood we looked at dna we looked at psychological and we looked in the brain using qeg which is very accurate looking at the energy and how the brain is responding so in the control in the experimental group and the control group they all got this testing so everyone was made very aware of that they all knew it was a mental health study but the difference was the experimental group got the technique so what we saw was major difference with day one today 21 in the experimental group there was a significant reduction in anxiety by 81 that doesn't mean anxiety will go away it means that you manage it anxiety will always be with us we need to understand anxiety is a normal human response so it's depression so it's ocd so is our intrusive thoughts there are all signals telling us hey cool down focus take a moment something's going on in your life so what we what i teach people is that this is always going to be with us but we've got to know where it gets unhealthy and how to manage that and it'll be periods in your life where it does get unhealthy that's okay you can manage it and that's what we saw happening a reduction in depression reduction in anxiety up to 81 significant changes in cortisol levels significant changes in telomere length we had some millennials we had quite a lot of millennials on the study that had biological ages that were 20 years older than their chronological age and by the end of the study they were back at their normal age biological age i mean this is nine weeks the subjects that did the process every day and they would spend seven to get through those five steps for a trauma thing you can do this sequentially as as you asked earlier on in as short as seven minutes and so it's a minute and a half per each step so it's not long but then over 63 days that's when you see the change but we saw changes in as early as seven days that doesn't mean you stop and this is always the danger i found with my patients because you see change so quickly you think oh i've got this under control but you'll lose that seven days is not enough to cause to allow the neuroplasticity to take place so changes occurred but all the proteins are unstable they have to get to a stable state in fact what we see in the brain is the little branches where your memories are stored in the trees when people are at day seven for example it's just a tiny bump on the outside there's like a little bump that joins it by day 21 it's changed into a mushroom shape this is work done by dr marian diamond who died at 94 last year one of the leading researchers when it comes to this with that memory stored in dendrites not in synapses and she showed with her work that it changes over time and when you've got a bump shape it's not a strong enough memory that's seven days at 14 days it becomes a lollipop shape the little connector where the leaf connects to the branch and then by day 21 it's a mushroom and it's only when it's mushrooms that we can start automatizing building the habit making something useful inside of us how many times do people say i'm going to do this wellness course i'm going to read this book i'm going to do that thing you teach people about goals all the time whatever wellness change whatever food change diet change exercise change business goal but to make your brain learn that you put it into the conscious subconscious and unconscious to a point where you can actually utilize it it's going to take you you have to go through the proper brain system and that's pretty much what i've researched that's mind management in a nutshell nice well that was incredible thank you so much for walking us through that that that is a lot of life lessons research everything put into a nice simple formula so thank you so much guys if you haven't she's got a whole world of stuff she's written several books on topics about memory and mind management getting this all together so take a look if there's anything that you're struggling with and you can put that five step process to the use do it for sure getting your mind under control is a shared obsession that you and i have uh you guys will all benefit greatly from it dr leaf thank you so much for being with us today i really appreciate it and guys if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care thank you guys so much for watching and being a part of this community if you haven't already be sure to subscribe you're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset cultivating grit and unlocking your full potential you

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

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Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, Caroline Leaf, Health Theory, HT, neuroscience, research, mind, brain, thoughts, mental health, identity, mind management, awareness, feelings, choices, aging, best-selling author, growth mindset, The Perfect You, anti-aging secrets, best anti aging hacks, anti-aging

Id: MekUimXHaDo

Length: 50min 41sec (3041 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 30 2020