5 Steps of Neurocycle Can Clean Up Your Mental Mess – Dr. Caroline Leaf with Dave Asprey : 799

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You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. What would you do if I told you that I found a communication pathologist and cognitive neuroscientist who specializes in cognitive and metacognitive neuropsychology? Well, the first thing you'd say is that, Dave, I can't believe you actually read that without stuttering because I had to do it three times. But I found someone who's really smart and since the 80s has been researching, researching the mind brain connection, where mental health comes from and how memories are formed. Someone who's the first in her field to study how the brain can change. That's neuroplasticity with direction from your mind. And we're gonna talk about how she's doing that with a new five step scientifically based process that was the basis for a new book she's written. I'm talking about Dr. Caroline Leaf. Caroline, welcome to the show.

Thank you. I'm so thrilled to be on the show with you, Dave. Thank you.

All right.

I need to thank you for that nice intro. You did really well with all those weird words.

You're gonna have to define them all. Communication pathology is a new term for me. Unless you mean people who stutter or is there some other kind of pathologist, like people who speak when they're dead? I have no idea. What's a communication pathologist?

Well, basically it's a term used for someone who looks at people's. Any kind of communication and then tracks that back to what's going on in your thought life and what's going on in your brain. And we train to work with. So it's got neuroscience in and psychology. And it's a field, it's a. It's a profession that's crosses over the medical profession. And we work with people that have mental health issues and dementias and Alzheimer's and learning disabilities and traumatic brain injuries. So it's a big word for. It's a. It's a field that basically, as I said, looks at people's communication and then tracks back to what's going wrong in the thought life and then what's going wrong in the brain and. And then to try to help people to fix that.

That is super cool. And there's so much to learn when you look at. Okay. When things break, it oftentimes highlights what we can do for brains that maybe aren't broken but could use a tune up. So there's so much wisdom there. Okay. Now I also, I think most people know what a cognitive neuroscientist is. You're studying like how we think and all, but cognitive and metacognitive neuropsychology also has me a little bit flummoxed. All right, what's that?

So I, when I first started my career, I started working, looking at the elusive question of what is mind, what is consciousness? And that's elusive in terms of scientists and philosophers talk about that as being the hard question of science. So that challenged me and I wanted to try and understand mind and how mind was separate from brain. So, so when you look at mind and you look at brain and you look at the mind brain connection, you then start delving into cognition, which is thinking and mind, and then you delving into metacognition, which is defined as thinking about your thinking. But it's actually a lot more than that. It really starts tapping into the depths of, of the different levels of mind, like the non conscious level and the subconscious level and the conscious level. And so I started doing that kind of research and I started working with a group of, of people that, that was, there was not, not much research done about them. And that, that was people with traumatic brain injuries, so people with head injuries. And in the 80s when I was doing this research, we were told, you know, once someone's got brain damage, that's it, your brain can't heal. So in the 80s, I know we don't believe that now, but in the 80s that was the, that was the going philosophy. So trying to study mind and then the mind brain connection. I looked for a population that there was no research being done on. And that was a tr People with traumatic brain injuries. And the reason there was hardly any research being done on them was because they believe, well, what's the point? Your brain's damaged. So why study? How do you improve a brain? And my challenge was, hey, I don't believe that's right because we keep changing as humans. So I'm going to see if we can work on people's mind in a very deliberate way, like literally to use something that you familiar with, the concept of biohacking. If we can use our mind, we can biohack our brain. And that's what I showed back in the early 80s, mid-80s, around and into the early 90s, that you can change your mind mind, you can change your brain and you can improve people's cognitive and metacognitive, cognitive being, thinking, metacognitive being, dealing with that very intelligent part that is at the core of who we Are and tapping into that non conscious wisdom and you can actually change your brain. And I showed that. So that then led to 25, with nearly 30, actually 38 years now of research in the field. I spent 25 years going, right, dealing with people in. The research I did was not in laboratories. The research I've done is with real people in the real world, in extreme circumstances, from more torn countries to people going through post apartheid and pre apartheid and in south from South Africa and people that have extreme brain damage. And so I chose what I considered were the most challenging populations and then I looked at other populations to people that are in different positions, executives from, to try and see what mind is. And that fast forward to where we are today. I just did clinical trials over last year, still do research and just did a set of clinical trials pulling together what is, how can we direct the neuroplasticity of our brain? And so that's where the neuroscience, the cognitive, the metacognitive mind brain connection all kind of comes together. Does that make sense?

It makes sense, but what doesn't make sense is how it's possible that you were doing research in the 80s because you don't look like you're doing research in the 80s. Did you become younger when you made your brain work better? What's going on here?

I think definitely your brain gets better with age. So that's the one organ in your body that doesn't actually get worse with age. It gets better with age if you know how to manage your brain. So yeah, that's a huge part of it. And I do some of the things you suggest. I'm into bulletproof coffee and exercise and fasting and everything, which I think helps.

Well, I mean, when you say, oh, I was doing research in the 80s, I'm like, you were still a teenager in the 80s is what that was going through. I'm like, how's this possible? So you're definitely handling your aging like a boss, I gotta tell you.

Oh, thank you, that's so kind. Thank you. You're welcome. You too.

Now, I love it that you just said, okay, look, in the field I'm seeing people with brain injuries. You have to be able to heal them. Clearly they get some healing. But you were one of the very first people to step up there and say neuroplasticity is real. And eventually there was a Nobel prize awarded for discovering that, you know, oh, it's real. Did you feel vindicated when it finally just got acknowledged?

Definitely, because I, you know, in the 80s I had professors Telling me, you know, this is a ridiculous question you're asking. Because I'm asking, can the mind change the brain? And they say, but the brain doesn't change. And so I said, okay, well give me the worst population. And so I started working, as I mentioned, with people with head injury. And I, my. One of my first research studies was on someone who'd had a car accident and was in a coma for two weeks. And this particular girl was a really very average student and she's battled with academics and that's very significant if you hear what actually happened. And so I started working with like the parents contacted me more or less a year after the accident and she, sorry, it was just within a sort of six to eight month period after the accident. And at that stage I was very wary of working with anyone because it was very early research and they just desperate. She had gone from being a 16 year old going into her last year of second, last year of school, had the accident and was back down at a. Literally, she was a vegetable. They had written her off, her doctors had written her off. She was determined to, to. She was just so determined in her coma to survive. She heard people talking around. It's very interesting. Anyway, she fought through, she came back to, she came, became conscious. And long story short, when they contacted me, she was on, I'd say second grade level and she was now going on 17 routine. And so now he's thinking, okay, and the traditional thing is, oh well, that's it, she's not going to get beyond this level. Why are you bothering to work with her? And she'd been written off as a vegetable by the neurologist and the parents had not given up. Anyway, they came to me and I said, all right, well if you prepare to experiment with me and research with me, we can try this. This is what I believe can happen. If I teach you how to use your mind, you're going to change your brain. Within eight months. That girl not only went from a second grade level, she actually finished school with her peer group. She was this really average student. Before the, before her accident, which I stressed, she actually went off the IQ scale. Genius. I had external professors and things come in and actually test her because we couldn't believe the results. She had become a genius with brain damage and her cognitive, social, emotional, et cetera skills had improved 35 to 75%. And so when I saw that, and she went on to get a degree and she had voice damage and that kind of thing from the accident. But this girl went from Non functioning to functioning at a very higher level than prior. When I, when I spoke to some of her previous neurologists and the neurosurgeon, they, the one specifically said to me, oh, you were just lucky. I said, well, I don't think luck plays into this at all. This is, this girl was determined. She worked with me, her parents supported her. She, she chose. It wasn't some magic wand that I waved. It was hard work. We worked.

What did you do?

I, I taught her this technique that I've actually got in this, my new book. Cleaning up your mental mess that you read from. It's a. What I wanted to do was to see how can we, how can, how do thoughts form in the brain? What are thoughts? What is mind? What is mind made up of? So I had been researching all of that and I had developed a process that is basically how you can. That directs neuroplasticity. So process that. It's a mind. These five steps are basically, I call them a neuro cycle. They are how you manage your mind to change the structure of your brain so you can direct your neuroplasticity. So it really is a biohack. It's using your mind to biohack your mind to biohack your brain. And I use that language because it's just such a great word. And so essentially I trained her to, she used her schoolwork. I always, when I work with my patients, I would always say, okay, what's your most pressing need? And hers was to get back and finish school. She really wanted to finish school and get back to academic status. So we use that as the material. And then I taught her these five steps and we spent hours, three times a week and she spent hours on her own tying these five steps to her schoolwork. And that then changed the neuroplasticity of her brain. So she went from being. In eight months, as I said, she went from being a second grade level to. And then that, that just replicated. So she wasn't the only one. I mean I worked with people that were written for years past the head injury recovery and head injuries say if you haven't what the research used to say and still says there's still a lot of people believe this, that one year post head injury, if you still, if you. That's kind of as much as change is going to happen in your life. So if you don't get your patients before that first year, there's not much hope. I work with people that were five years post injury, six years, 10 years 15 years, and we saw massive change. So it was very much teaching a person, this is your mind. This is what your mind is. This is how you manage your mind. And, and it's hard work, but this is what you can do. Use your mind to manage your mind and it will change your brain. So, yes, when neuroplasticity was accepted in the mid-90s, with the advent of brain imaging, FMRI, MRI technology, it was wonderful because back in the 80s and late 80s, we were told, that's crazy. And I had neuroscientists training me, fortunately. But neuroscience was one of those words that was, don't talk about it. It's not really true. So it was great in the mid-90s to actually turn around and say, hey, listen. Yeah, this is, you know, this is a fact.

It, it's probably more applicable than a lot of people think. I have a, a neuroscience company that does what's called brain upgrades. You know, this is non medical, but it's, it's increasing neuron firing speed where necessary and increasing voltage. And a couple neuroscientists, and we built our own hardware and software to do advanced meditation states and all that. But most people who come through have electrical signs that they hit their head at some point. You can see, oh, you hear yourself over here. And it's more common than not because, you know, when we're kids, we just run into stuff and we think it's fine. And we, we discovered, actually, I think from, from Dr. Amen's work. My wife, she was unconscious for three days when she was a kid. She fell out of a, like a second story building. Her language processing center is gone, has no metabolic activity. But she speaks five languages and she can simultaneously translate, which is an exceptionally rare thing to be able to hear in one thing and write or speak in another.

Incredible.

And it's because her brain's like, I gotta talk. I guess I'll just spread that processing out everywhere. So she kind of developed a language superpower because of injury.

Incredible.

How common is that? Where people, the way they compensate for brain injury actually gives them more than they had before. Is that super rare or does it happen more than we think?

It happens more than we realize because most people are walking around with some sort of trauma that they've experienced to their brain. Because your brain is like on a stem and it moves around. So if any kind of bashing on your head, you are sending shockwaves through your brain, which causes what we call diascasis, which is sharing of axons through the brain. And that affects us and it can cause, cause all the different patterns. Like I use QEEG in my research, so we can see that. Okay, so you understand the qeg, so that can show the different wave patterns. And I showed with my clinical research that how you can actually shift that you can actually control how your brain waves work through your mind. So this is not some weird spaced out thing. It's actually very real. Not technology based, it's mind based. You can train your mind to train your brain and that changes how your, the plasticity works in the brain and the firing of the brain. So yes, it can happen. Your brain is so neuroplastic, it's so adaptable, it's always changing. It's every, every moment of every day, it's changing 24 7. Your mind is working through your brain and your brain is responding. So the brain is a responder, it's not a generator. We, we. There's a lot in the current scientific research that talks about the brain made me do it looking for the neurobiological correlates of, of depression and anxiety, which is billions of dollars down the drain because that is not the correct way of doing things. Your brain doesn't produce, your brain is, it is, is not a generator, it is a responder. So it's got to be stimulated. Because if someone's dead and I hold up a brain and of a dead person, it's, you can stare at it all day, it's not going to change. But in your head at this moment, and whoever's listening and watching you've already really changed and built new, new little dendrites in your brain. Probably up to 500, if not 2000 by this stage. So your brain is never the same. So my argument is that we can direct that neuroplasticity. You can be proactive. If your brain's always changing, what is the stimulus that causes the brain to change? And obviously diet, exercise, these are all factors, and I talk about all of those too. But you need to actually, to listen to you, for example, and to do fasting correctly, for example, or to eat properly, you still have to have your mind involved. So your mind is the first thing. It's your, it's the first thing, whatever you're doing, it's your mind that's driving us. So you. And it's your mind that will connect the dots and it's your mind that will read the book and actually apply the book, or read the book and not apply the book. It's, it's. But you Are your mind. So to my argument is that you may as well understand your mind and you may as well learn how to manage your mind. So I talk about mind management and then you can then change your brain. And that's really what I was doing with my patients all these years and different populations and Alzheimer's and very, and autism and every, literally every situation was extreme. And that's why I eventually went into doing, writing up all these techniques to make them available to people. So yeah, that's kind of. So it is, it's common. But you can change your brain. We've got, we've been sold such a lie that your brain controls you. Your brain is this hungry organ that 247 you building thoughts. So during the day you think, feel and choose and build thoughts. And at night you sort out the thoughts that you've been building. So you just never stop. So if you can, you can, you can even prepare your brain for bed and you can even prepare your brain what you how you want dreams to end. There's so much that we can do that we almost scared to realize the power. Okay, so here's the brain and you are not your brain. As you mentioned earlier on, your brain's phenomenal and we're learning more and more. But we've got to be careful of thinking that this is it, you're not your brain because without you being alive, this wouldn't work. So being alive implies that you are very unique in the way that you think. So then you have to look at mind. What is mind? Mind moves through brain and brain responds to the mind. So your mind I always define as how you think and how you feel and how you choose. So that's what I've kind of researched for all these years is mind is how you think, feel and choose. You're always thinking. When you think you will feel, they go together. And when you think and feel, you will choose. So you're doing this at about 400 billion actions per second on a non conscious level. But you experience it consciously around about every 10 seconds. So it's very fast. On a conscious level, we're doing it at 2000 actions per second, 400 billion actions per second on a non conscious level. But our experience of consciousness is around about every 10 seconds. Your non conscious mind is the biggest part of your mind. So if you think of your mind, Let me start from simplify this. Your mind is how you think, how you feel and how you choose. So those two always go together. Mind is divided into three parts. The biggest part is your non conscious mind. And your non conscious mind is the uniqueness of you, your value system, your wisdom, your day, the unis. And it's your truth value and it's your, it's hugely intelligent, it's infinitely intelligent, never stops changing, never stops growing. We understand a little more about the huge nature of it through quantum physics. So with quantum physics we start getting, which is, by the way, one of the most accurate sciences and most fundamental sciences which you would know. But through quantum physics, we can start getting a bit of an understanding of mind. Quantum physics is often referred to by Christopher Fuchs and various other quantum physicists as the law of thought. So the mind is the law of thought and we can use quantum physics to understand the phosphate, the infinite nature of the quantum nature of, of the energy of the mind. So this energy is unique to you and you, it needs your brain because without your brain you can't express this. So there's a relationship. And it passes through your brain. Your brain responds and then your brain then sends messages to every cell of the body. You have somewhere between 37 to 100 trillion cells in your brain and body. And in an instant, as you're listening to me now, the message that my words, the audio visual, these sound waves, electromagnetic waves, are going in your brain. But first your mind is taking them into your brain. So if you think of your mind as kind of capturing them, taking them into your brain, your brain responds electromagnetically and chemically and genetically. So it creates the environment you spoke about earlier on. We defined biohacking, which is creating an environment. So my work comes in and okay, well that environment's what I'm interested in. This thinking, feeling, choosing, can I change the environment? Because the theories and the research shows that the, that energy that moves through your brain sends a message, changes your blood chemistry, changes your neurochemistry, affects your right down every cell of your DNA instantly. So fast we have to use quantum physics to explain it. We're talking about speeds faster than 10 to the 27. So no standard theory of brain function can explain the speed at which thought travels and the impact of how, when we think how it impacts our body. So then we look at things like how quickly you put some food in your body, or you fast or you put creams on your body, anything. All of those are creating environments. So your mind is your biggest environment creator. It's your biggest epigenetic factor. It's your biggest thing. And so your mind has got this. If you come back to the three parts, this mind, huge epigenetic factor, this thing that's actually switching your brain and your body on and off, affecting genetics etc. Is also has got these three parts. So the unconscious is the biggest 90% of who you are. And then you've got your subconscious which is between the conscious and the nonconscious. People often mix up the subconscious with an unconscious, but your subconscious is a bridge between the two. And it's that tip of the tongue phenomenon that I just like there's something coming up that I can't quite put my finger on it but it feels like a warning signal or it's a little. You just these, you walk in a room or someone says something and there's just that, that, that's your subconscious, that your non conscious sending a message through your subconscious subconscious and calling attention to your conscious mind. Conscious mind is very small. It only operates at about 2,000 actions per second. Only works when you're awake, but your non conscious and subconscious are working 24 7. And everything that you. So then you think and feel and choose in response to what you're experiencing. And that thinking, feeling, choosing is really interesting because that's this mind action. So you're listening to me now. You list you looking, you seeing and you're thinking, feeling and choosing at 400 billion actions per second. But you experiencing something every 10 seconds. I mean you can train yourself to actually be aware every 10 seconds. And that's part of the sort of principle that I teach. And as you, as you in this think, feel, choose, cycle, as you choose, you switch on genes. When you switch on genes, you make amino acids which make proteins. So you then create structure in your brain. So everything that you are exposed to 20, 24 7. But during the day, as you're exposed, this goes in. The brain creates this effect electrochemically, electromagnetically and genetically. And you build a thought. So here I've got a little thought that's really what they look like. But it is very similar. Thorns look like trees. Literally they look like trees. They have an arbor like structure.

It's rosemary, right?

It is, yeah. So it's a. But it's great because it's so similar to a neuron. And so these little branches over here are dendrites and this is a thought and all the branches are memories. So people also get muddled up between thoughts and memories. So we think, feel and choose. And as you think, feel and choose, we generate energy through the brain. The brain responds electrochemically, electromagnetically and genetically. And all that's encapsulated and Then we have a representation which is we build a thought. And so each time, each, as you listen to me now, this thought is about you interviewing me about this mind brain stuff. So that's the thought tree. But as you, as I'm talking, we're planting a seed and we growing a root system. And very quickly the tree trunk is forming and the roots start, the branches start appearing above the ground. And as you're listening to me, root, branches, roots, branches. The leaves are like little emotional, the emotional component because your mind is think, feel, choose. So as you think, feel and choose, you're adding memories to the thought. You can have thousands, millions, depends on the more you think about it, the more the thought grows. But these are memories. So thoughts are made of memories, root memories, which is the origin and then how it manifests. So at the moment there's more roots that you're growing as you're listening to me. But already it's starting to manifest because you're making connections of experiences. And so you're starting to. And that's growing connections to that. So I always like to explain it. Like the redwood forest in, in, in San Francisco. Their root system is phenomenal. That's what our brains like this phenomenal root system where we connect and make connections to others. But this is always changing. So that's a thought and that's what you build into your brain and that's neuroplasticity and you can direct that process. So the five steps, the neuro cycle that I developed 38 years ago and developed theories and then applied clinically and research wise and eventually wrote all 19 books about this and simplified it, and I continue to try and make it more and more accessible for people is how you direct this process. So here's the interesting thing. So let's say now you have an adverse child experience. So you raped as a child or you bullied or something. And then so this, because it's an experience, you'll think, you'll choose, you'll build a route that's the experience. And it will start manifesting as these branches which are the memories. And these branches then produce behaviors. So what you say and what you do isn't random. Everything you say and do is going to be a thought. Nothing can come from fresh air. It comes from your experience. You've built in and that produces. So here's a unhealthy thought, there's a toxic thought. So this would.

And what you're showing there for people who are just listening is basically a tree made out of Wire that doesn't have any weight.

Exactly. Yes. It's a tree made out of wire. And I'm pretending it's a toxic thought. So you can see the very obvious difference between a healthy and a toxic thought. So it's just symbolic, but very, very accurate in terms of what thoughts look like in the brain. So here you've got your root system, you've got your tree trunk, and you've got your branches, memories and memories. So this is a thought. Let's say it's the trauma. There's the experience, all the roots, and lots of different experiences related to that. And that then produced that. The perspective. Fear of relationships. Fear of whatever happened.

Fear of being hungry.

Yeah, exactly. And then you've got your behaviors of the top of the tree is. Is built to it, man. This is manifested in the branches, which are memories, and then those memories produce your words and your actions. So it's this whole thing. So thoughts are real things. They occupy mental real estate. Neuroplasticity is building these. So if we've got something from early childhood and we've never dealt with it, it's. It'll. It's pervasive. Toxic thoughts. Trauma is very pervasive, so it influences how we function. So that's kind of a big picture. And if you want to climb in and unpack some of that.

I've experienced a lot of times where there's a feeling, and then because the feeling exists and the brain thinks it's real, you make up a thought to make the feeling valid. For instance, I'm feeling uncomfortable, therefore the person in front of me is a jerk. So it kind of feels like feel, think, act. Well, I kind of have believed that that's the predominant thing. Dr. Joan Rosenberg, who's probably one of the few bulletproof radio guests who hasn't endorsed your work. I think you have seven guests who've been on the show have endorsed your work, which is really cool. But she's. Her opinion, after years of clinical experience, was that two thirds of thoughts were feelings that became thoughts and one third was thoughts that became feelings. Where are you in that spectrum of what percentage of this is a feeling before it's a thought versus a thought before a feeling?

Well, a thought can't source the end product. So let's look at it this way. So thoughts, the end product. So think, feel, choose. Those three go together. So in other words, if you have ever. If you have that experience that you're feeling, like you described just now, that there's a feeling, that feeling is very interesting because that feeling is a warning signal that's coming from your subconscious mind. So what you're doing is you're experiencing through your mind something that's making you feel something. So what's happened is that you have had input coming in from the environment. You have thought, felt and chosen. You've been thinking, feeling, choosing, and you have immediately built because you can actually, as you've done that, you've immediately planted a seed. The instant you're exposed to something, you are growing a thought. So that thought then encompasses the result of thinking, feeling and choosing. So here are the emotions on the leaves of the branches. So the branches are the information, the leaves are the feelings. Because feelings have a very interesting neurochemical weighting. They work with the nonconscious mind. And because they're on the easiest way to understand it, the branches are on the inside, that leaves are on the outside. When you look at a tree, you see the leaves first. So feelings are in your face before the information. So those feelings are very obvious, they're very in your face, they generate signals. And so what we are experiencing is we've done a whole process and built a thought. And then by the time, and this all happens unconsciously because our non conscious mind is more much faster than our conscious mind. So by the time you consciously aware, you've already built a thought. And what you're consciously aware of now are these feelings emitting signals. So you're responding to the signals, the feeling signals that then if you pay attention to them, you'll track back and realize, okay, that's the information, that's the perspective and that's the root. You may not have thought of it in that sequential process, but it will, it'll go from the feeling to the bit. But just being able to say, I feel that you've already built a thought because you can't do it without having built a thought. So you've got to make the distinction between the end product, which is this whole complex structure and what it generates and what you are experiencing. So your non conscious builds it. Then you then this then shoots out signals like little fireworks. And that's what you're aware of consciously. And then you track back to the non. Conscious. So nonconscious precedes consciousness.

Okay, that makes sense.

Does that make sense?

It does make a lot of sense. And it's really interesting because when people are doing work on trauma and all that stuff, it's such a mix of thoughts and feelings. And I've done a lot of work on that stuff. And so I just became curious about it. Something else that drew me to your work and wanting to interview you is when I started Bulletproof, I was like, guys, I had Asperger's syndrome, right? And I grew up with it. It runs in my family. There's a reason my grandmother's a advanced degree nuclear engineer. You know, all of the men and women seem to be drawn to these engineering and they all score, you know, 40 something out of 50 on the initial screening test for Asperger's. So. But I don't really have it anymore. You know, I make eye contact. I know at least some people's names. That's still not the easiest thing for me. But I'm very different neurologically. And people get really mad and they go, that's not possible. You didn't have it. These are the same type of people who say, you didn't really weigh 300 pounds. You're lying. And I'm like, I don't know. There's a photo of me from on Turner magazine when I'm 23. I look 300 pounds. What do you want to say? But it's that same thing you dealt with, which is neuroplasticity doesn't exist, therefore it can exist, which is not science. That's religion.

Exactly.

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Okay, so I worked a lot in my initial career with autism. I worked in a school actually initially when I was doing my initial research. And I worked with autism and cerebral palsy. And it's very interesting because the cerebral palsy children that were battling with that, they did, their intellectual skills were very obvious because it was physical in their body so they could express it. Whereas your autistic children were physically much more able. But then they had this intellectual constraint. And then obviously, and when I say intellectual, let me rather change that word and say social or connection, let me completely cancel intellectual. That's the wrong word. Communication constraints. So they didn't seem to be communicating the same as other people. And obviously there were extreme situations where you've got to look at something called comorbidity, which wasn't analyzed sufficiently in early days of trying to understand autism. And it's kind of also been bit muddied. The waters are muddied recently. So essentially what I'm saying is that the very extreme cases, if we had a look at those that were really battling to completely communicate and we'd see there was very often severe brain damage and other things going on as well. My view on autism from the experience I've had and from the autistic people, patients that I worked with in my practice, is that anyone can learn how to learn. And you've also evidence of that. And I have seen people go from being vegetables to being academic. Unbelievable. One of my patients had autism, had a terrible brain damage, terrible car accident. I saw them five years after the accident. I only worked with him for three months. This particular patient for three months because we move cities and it was just not possible to keep contact. It was just physically impossible. In that three months, that young man went from being a high school level, which he was stuck on for years and years, to getting becoming one of the top criminologists in South Africa and off within three months of learning how to learn how to use his brain and is interviewed and all kinds of things. So the autistic tendencies and things, they have shifted and changed. So I'm not going to say yes, if you do this, you are going to go from high functioning autism to low functioning, or you're going to go from low function to high or you're going to completely correct it. What I do know is I have seen enough people and enough different cases of people that have been trauma victims, war victims. I've worked with a lot of trauma that present as literally sometimes autistic because they've shut down changing and it's a long process, but I have seen changes. So I am absolutely 100% convinced that if we focus more on Mind and understand that we have a level of control, that we use our mind to change our mind. We can change our brain and our body function. Doesn't mean we going to. And that looks different for everyone. That's what I want to stress. It looks different for everyone. But I totally believe in change. And you know, so what you're telling me is I'm not surprised you did that. What I saw key with my patients and I've seen it key over the years with people because I don't practice anymore, because I don't have time. I do this, I talk and I teach and I.

Showing your life's work is worth the time.

Yeah, exactly. So now I, I, I get, I get people sending me emails that have never met me and I'm not really, I do not want to sound like I'm punching myself. I'm not. It's, it's, I'm so excited about helping people understand their mind that you don't have to work with me directly in order to be able to understand your mind. You just need to understand your mind and people. The stories of people that were labeled with the worst things out and be very good at labeling in this current climate, which I hate, the mental health climate, giving people labels which locks them in and reduces lifespan. But people that have been stuck in that cycle, getting out of that cycle and changing. So yeah, I've seen too much. I've seen people, I've seen too many situations. People top CEOs having terrible accidents, not being able to function anymore as engineers, going and becoming nuclear scientists. You mentioned nuclear scientists. That's what I worked with. So many nuclear scientists that changed careers. I was with us working with Impellin Pelindaba, which is a place in South Africa that works with nuclear. I worked there a lot. Okay, so now I'm just saying I, I have seen people that are, that have been labeled with autism, that have got those degrees, that have, have changed the learned how to deal with their communication and change their communication and not just autism. Honestly, people with head injuries, people with Alzheimer's, even change, you know, people. You can't, at some point, you cannot reverse Alzheimer's because we don't have that technology. But early, if you catch Alzheimer's early enough, you can certainly delay the process.

In a major way. Dale Bredesen came on the show. His book, the Interaction.

Yes, I've interviewed him too.

You did? Okay. What a great guy.

Oh, fantastic.

And I was like, thank you for talking about toxins because it seems like if you remove toxins the brain heals faster.

Exactly. He talks our language, Batman.

Here he does. And something else stands out. You talk about brain injuries in high functioning executives. Okay. I like to think I'm high functioning at least some of the time. And maybe four or five years ago, I don't remember how long I took a titanium knee to the head at high speed in a story that I'm probably not going to tell on bulletproof radio, but it was a lot of fun. However, I got a pretty serious bleed in the brain. I couldn't play Go fish with my kids. My working memory was shot and I was angry all the time. I remember I sent Tim Ferriss this angry email that he probably didn't deserve because like I was kind of out of my mind. And like when I fixed my brain I was like, sorry about that Tim, but. And he was very gracious about it too. But the effect on relationships, the effect on my ability to focus just. It was really a big deal. And okay, I'm lucky. I know exactly what to do biologically and I have a neuroscience answer. Somebody plugged me in and I did a bunch of neurofeedback and I was okay and I did hyperbaric. But if I hadn't done that, I mean my wife seems to like me a lot so I don't think she would have left me. But I was like a super jerk and I was addled but I really couldn't see it.

That's very, very, very common after head injury.

How do you get through to someone like that? Because it's pretty common. How do you make them know that they need to. Do they need to manage their mental mess, to quote your book?

Well, that's. I'm totally. It's an excellent question because it is. There's not, number one, there's not enough education around how to manage or deal with someone who's had, had a head injury because in your first few months that's very typical relationships. The anger, the frustration, the. And not being able to self regulate. Massive. Yeah. And then this, then the awareness starts coming that this is how I used to function but I can't do that anymore. So there's tremendous frustration which manifests other anger and so on. So I would work with families and help families to understand the process. A lot of education with a family because it's really hard on the family. And then I would work directly with the patient but I wouldn't work directly on that problem. I would find what they were interested in. So for example, I know you're Interested in biohacking and all these different technologies. So I would have taken, if you were my patient, I would have sat with you on the mind side because you were doing all the other side correctly. But as you say, not everyone has access to that. So if you just had access to your mind, which everyone's got access to because you've all got a mind, if you just had that and nothing else, because your mind doesn't cost you anything, you just got to use it properly, I would have sat with you and said, what are you interested in? And you would have told me technology and biohacking. So I would have found everything and coffee and why it's good for you and, and, and found your interest levels. And then I would have taught you the five steps and I would have taught you how to build brain resilience. First. First thing I do with my patients, before any trauma victim any. And I've talked about it in my book cleaning up your mess. The first thing, the first major mind thing to work on is you've got to build brain health in, you've got to build mental strength, brain strength in mental strength, brain strength. So let's not get muddled up between mind and brain. You've got to use your mind to build mental strength. So one of the easiest ways, or brain strength, I should say, brain health, brain resilience is to build your brain. And that's using this, these five steps to learn. So I would have taught you how to literally study a very complex, the more complex thing you could choose, the better that you could, depending on where you were at intellectually, because you obviously go through stages. So at first it might have just been something very short, very simple, and that would have been complex. And then you would have progressed to something as your, as your mind, as mind was working through your brain and as your brain started using neuroplasticity to restore. And I would have taken you through the five steps and learned, taught you how to learn first. And then I would have used the same five steps because it's not any magic trick, it's just basically a process that controls how, how the thoughts build. So from the signals to the root to the branches and leaves to the tree trunk to the roots and back and forth. So how do you control this process? How do you unwire toxic and rebuild? So how do, how. So I would have take, I would have taken you through the process of understanding where, you know, the five steps teaches you how to grow a healthy thought. I should actually bring this one up. A healthy Thought so I wouldn't have focused on the trauma. I would have focused first. Well, that's what I did do, focus first on building your brain. So then you would have, I would have done sessions with you where I taught you how to learn to the point where you could actually be my teacher on that subject. That's the level. And then I know that I'm building good stuff in your brain. And I know from my research that that then changes the, the, the alpha beta gamma delta data, it changes how gamma's flowing. So that means. Because I saw in my most recent research, we identified the gamma peaks happening at 21 days, 42 days, 63 days. I showed you my most. Yeah, so I showed you my most recent research, which I started years ago, but I did in my most recent research, I showed that when you build your brain, you're going to take 63 days to build structures that are actually usable, not 21. Everyone talks about habits forming in 21. That's a must. It takes 63 day cycles to build. So I would put my patients through those kind of programs of 63 days and build the brain. And then depending on where you are at emotionally, I would also give strategies for brain preparation to actually ground you, control the anger, the emotions, et cetera. Also all the time learning through the. Basically the process of how we build the brain. So the five steps. So build the brain and then detox the brain. So then there would have been a lot of trauma from trauma memory starting because traumatic brain injury brings trauma because of knowing how you didn't. The conflict of not knowing how, I mean remembering how you used to function and how you're not functioning there again and relationship issues and learning to self regulate. So I found what was key is building the brain taught self regulation. Once I had a person self regulating, I could then start working on the emotional aspects. And then I would work with the family all the time. I did family therapy. That was kind of how I would tackle it. And that's what I've written in my book. Build your brain first, then you detox.

Well, you talk in cleaning up your mental mess, which is. You said that was your 12th book.

19Th.

Oh, 19th book. Geez, that's so impressive. I'm only on like six or seven.

You did well. It's hard writing a book.

I'm not complaining, I just know how much work they are and wow, at 19.

No, it's a lot of work. Yeah.

The good news is I like to think that when you practice something for a while, you get really good at it because your new book is really good. But you talk about something called a neuro cycle in there and this is where those five steps are. Can you walk me through the steps in order? I think that would be really helpful.

Absolutely. So I'm going to tell you the five steps and they're going to sound so easy and then I'm going to just jump to a little bit of science so people and see. Okay, so the first thing that we see from. Okay, let me give you the five steps. First you've got to gather awareness. And this is a lot related to the conversation we're having. When you, when I talk about gathering awareness it's becoming self, a self regulator because you want to be proactive in managing your mind. You can't manage your mind if you're not aware of what you actually how you thinking. And that sounds crazy because we often think. Well, I do know how to think but very few people self regulate their thinking. People are reactors, not responders. So I am. A huge part of my research is teaching people how to be a responder. When you're a responder we start seeing a lot of the gamma peak happening and we start seeing what we call flipping in the brain. Between the left and the right side of the brain you start seeing the gamma happening. It's all balanced. It's like waves in a sea. So let me come back to that. Then the second step, once you've gathered, but the gather is unique because it's not just oh, I'm away, it's actually embracing. So it's taking the depression, the anxiety, the frustration, the anger, the irritation, whatever the emotion is you're embracing. Embracing means bringing it into your fold. It's like a loving thing. So it sounds weird. Why would I embrace a negative emotion? Because the research shows mine plus others that when you aren't scared of those and you embrace them, you weaken them. So now I have paid attention to the signals. So my non conscious mind is sending balls of energy. This toxic toxic thoughts create balls of energy and it's sending it through the subconscious mind to your conscious awareness to bring balance. Because you're you. You wired for love, you wired for survival. Your mind is, has an optimism bias. So anything that's out of the norm creates bundles of bubbles of toxic energy and that is pushed through the nonconscious mind to. Through the subconscious mind to the conscious mind. And you want to gather awareness of those bubbles. Think of sparkling water and think of it when you just make it in those you know Those machines, you can make it and as it comes out, it goes, you know, it makes it a little.

You made me think of sparkling water.

I'll drink some. There you go. Have some. Gathering is gathering awareness of that. That. What is that signal? What, what is going on? And it's standing back and observing yourself, learning to what am I feeling? Why am I feeling like this? What do I look like? What am I? What, what are my eyes? What is what? How am I expressing myself? How am I, how am I expressing myself? How am I functioning in this moment? What is my impact of my words on others? So you eventually want to get to the stage where you are monitoring yourself. So embracing starts training you to do that. We see from neuroscience that, okay, here's this thought. Now you can't see it if it's suppressed, I can't do anything about it. It's in my non conscious mind. Something in the non conscious mind is a driver. This toxic thought in my non conscious minds created tremendous disequilibrium and that's going to be sending this popping signal through the subconscious saying hey, wake up, wake up. And that's going to. That popping bubble is things like anger, frustration, irritation, depression, anxiety, all of those emotions. Now if you view them as something by embracing them. Embracing implies I view them differently. What's my view? My view is, hey, those are helpful, they're not scary.

As soon as I do that curiosity, what is this thing? I'm going to embrace it. It's a useful data source instead of something, something scary.

Exactly. The minute you do that, you shift 1400 neurophysiological responses in your brain and body. You shift the stress response to work for you, not against you. You start dropping cortisol, you start rebalancing cortisol and dhea, you start dropping homocysteine, you start increasing, dropping things like prolactin. So information, I can go on and on and on. Prolactin is good, but you don't want high levels. It's a very good indicator of emotional stress and it's becoming a marker for. A very strong marker for when people are not managing their minds. Same with telomeres. That's also something I've researched in my most recent trials. Telomeres are the caps on the ends of chromosomes. And when your cells replicate, then the telomeres shorten and if they are healthy, they then grow back again and you can do the cell replication really well. And when. So mind is one of the best ways of lengthening telomeres. I showed in like periods of just nine weeks. With mind management, how you can actually significantly strengthen and lengthen your telomeres, which is incredible because we thought it was five years. So it's actually you can make changes within three, six and nine week periods. So embracing is affecting even down to the telomere level. So I'm not seeing those things as unhelpful. I'm seeing a message inside of the, the signal. So traditionally now in the last 50 years, if you have anxiety and depression or anything like that, those are seen as negative emotions to control and suppress. I'm saying no grace, gather awareness of them because there's a message inside of them. It's your non conscious mind telling you that something needs fixing. It's a symptom of an underlying something going on that needs attention. So then your second step. And you do these steps, by the way, Dave, in seven to 15 minutes. When you first learn them, it takes about 30 minutes. You do them deliberately and consciously once a day if you're working on like toxic trauma or toxic habits or if you want to build a new habit. But you can also use what I call a life hack, a neuropsychical life hack. It's kind of a biohack where once you understand the five steps, you can do them whenever. So you might be in a conversation and someone's like spewing toxic words over you, or you've just had an acute, you just had a terrible phone call and something terrible has happened, or you've got to like really be sharp because multiple things are going on around you. So you can do those five steps in five seconds. So once you understand the process, you can constantly self regulate and direct how your mind is then changing your brain.

Okay, so first we gather.

Gather.

Step two is reflect.

Step two is reflect. So reflect is not just thinking back. Reflect is a digging. Each step takes you deeper into an unconscious mind. So each first I've gathered awareness of my signals. Now I'm going to reflect on what are those signals? What are they telling me, what information are they telling me? Why, why do I have those emotions? Why? Ask, answer, discuss. So the reflect is an ask, answer, discuss process, which is by the way, how we develop intelligence, which is very interesting. So it's a reflection that takes you deeper inside of your mind. We want to get you to, we want your conscious mind to connect with your non. Conscious. So these five steps are teaching you to connect the non conscious with the conscious, which is why we will see an increase in alpha. Okay, so alpha is like a Bridge and alpha, the alpha wave in the brain. For those of you that aren't familiar, the alpha wave in the brain is basically a wave that's supposed to calm the brain down, but it's also a way that opens your insight. And so when you start having, when we see alpha increasing, we see people having more insight and being able to access the nonconscious mind to find the trauma memory, find the causes, find the roots, because we've got to deal with those. We can't keep them there. They don't, they don't go away. These are real until you fix them. They just keep changing and getting worse if you don't fix them. Okay, so reflect takes you now to the point where I can start asking the questions. Ask on to discuss, ask on to discuss. And it starts showing me my perspective and it starts get, I start getting a glimpse of the roots, which is the origin story, which is the thing that was, as you had the experience, a seed was sown and the roots grew and the plant grew, and then it just got stronger and stronger over time. So what we're doing is we unpacking from the signal to the roots and then kind of back up and down. That's what the five steps are doing. So when we gather and reflect, what we've done is when we gather, we've pulled it up. As soon as I'm aware of it, it weakens. And this is fascinating neuroscientifically, when something's in the non conscious, it's very, very strong. It can't be changed. And your non conscious rejects that. So does your brain, because your brain, it creates new brain damage, literally brain damage. That's where you'll see tsunami, Tsunamis in the wave pattern. So the alpha, beta, gamma, delta, theta, it's all flowing like it shouldn't flow. Okay, so we see tsunamis in the brain with a different waveforms. Too much delta, too much, too much theta, not enough alpha, too much high beta, et cetera, et cetera. So they're different energies because those energy waves are responding to how your brain is functioning. Okay, so as soon as you are gathering awareness, you've brought this into the conscious mind, you've shifted the power balance. So as I gather, step one, I've shifted the power balance now I have weakened this. So neuroscientifically, as soon as you're aware, the protein structures, the connections, the neurochemicals, the entire state of this, this becomes malleable, changeable. So if I embrace, if I look at this and say hey, this is helpful. It's scary. It's making me cry. I'm freaking out. It's like, that's okay, get it out. Because if you don't get it out, it's controlling you. So now I'm away. Now I start reflecting. Every step now is making this weaken, weaken, weaken. I'm shifting the power to the point where I can change. I can't change what happened in the past, but I can change how it's going to play out into my future. These things decrease intelligence, these things decrease physical and mental health, these things. But if I catch them and change them, I can start restoring. And that goes along with. Okay, so then you, then once you have started that reflect process, it's very important that you start capturing it. And you go to the traditional thing that everyone talks about. And that's writing. That's very important. That's step three. It's really important to write. And writing goes along with visualization, but writing does, it activates it. There's a million things it does. But essentially the simplest way of understanding writing is you're getting your brain out. You're getting what's in your brain onto paper. So now you are even more in control and you can start being much more analytical. So you're kind of doing a mental autopsy. This whole thing is brain surgery, but without the blood. You know, you're gathering awareness. Is the scalpel that you gathering is the scalpel that cuts it open and brings it up for reflection. Is. I'm now really starting to look for that tumor. I'm starting to dig around the brain. And then as I'm going deeper through the, into the right process, I'm really analyzing what's in front of me. What am I seeing? Let me write down what I've written. Because when you write, you go to a completely different level in your non conscious mind and you start bringing up stuff that wasn't there. I've developed a technique called the metacog that was unbelievably powerful. It is still not that it's changed, but when I worked with patients, especially people that had split personalities, for example, not especially. It would work for everyone, but we could show someone who couldn't see that they were shifting. By just doing this metacog, which is a way of writing patterns on the page, you can actually watch your mind shift and you can reconnect the different parts of the mind, which is phenomenal. So people disconnect when people have a psychotic break. That's not a mental illness. That is the mind trying to cope with an adverse circumstance. So the mind has reordered and then the brain reorders in response. So if you reorder, but if you're only reordering that you know is toxic, you'll have a psychotic break. Doesn't mean you're mentally ill, it means that you are. Your mind is totally constrained. It means that you need to bring, you need help reconnecting the different parts of the mind and reconnecting the different experiences. So this is the process I would use for people who are going through that. So once you've written, I mean, writing also then activates a beautiful flow between all the different wave patterns, patterns, alpha, beta, gamma. And I explained the wave patterns and I'm going to do it quickly now with the right process. If you think of the sea, if you go out on a boat and you go right out into the middle of the sea, was in the middle, deep into the sea, you'll get massive waves. That's your delta. Then as you come in a little bit closer, you get theta. Then if you go closer to shore, the wave builds beta. Then you get to the top of the wave and the crest forms high beta. And then it crashes on the beach and you get ripples gamma. And then it flows back in. And that's the flow we want between the two sides of the brain. We want coherence between the two sides of the brain. So that's what this neuro cycle I've been testing for all these years. And it's very adaptable. It's not a technique, it's a process. You can put anything into that. You can put any therapy technique, any cognitive behavior technique, any biohack, anything. It's simply how you package information and process information. So when you're writing, you actually allowing the brain to reset. You digging around and finding and pulling up memories, you're allowing parts like the corpus callosum to allow a bit of flow between the two sides of the brain. Because the corpus callosum is in the, in the middle of the brain. That's the corpus callosum, the white little piece over there. You're allowing the basal ganglia, which are structures in the deep part of the brain, to be able to start flowing and more efficiently. You see, your brain does what you tell it to do, okay? It grows on your mind telling you, okay, so then writing does all those and million other things too. It's just phenomenal. If you can't write long terms. A lot of people in high trauma hate writing. So there's other ways of getting around it. So I started with, for example, visualizing and then getting people to write for them. And when you use the metacog, it you get to the depth, you get to the roots so fast. So often for my patients, I would do the writing for them and then I would teach the family how to. Then eventually the patient would be able to get to the point point where they can write. Then you recheck. Rechecking is now even deeper.

So step four.

Right, step four. So rechecking is now. Now we really have got a great connection. The conscious mind's really digging into the nonconscious and unconscious is very willing to share its wisdom. So your nonconscious is always trying to get stuff out to help you survive. We built for survival. Any kind of disequilibrium affects that survival. So we drawn to the negative, not because we have a negativity bias, but because we have an optimism bias. Anything toxic threatens our survival. This causes brain damage. This puts you at high risks of inflammation, which cardiovascular health, neurological health, and I can give you a million other negative things. Cortisol levels, etc. Immune system, the whole bunch. But when we. So our brain is drawn anything toxic, our brain, our mind, our brain knows it's toxic because we see the damage. We actually can see the damage and we see it in the body. And your mind is saying, hey, that's negativity bias. I must fix. So we hear a lot in the media about we drawn to the negative because we have a negativity bias back to front. We're drawn to the negative because we are drawn to the negative because we have an optimism bias. We're trying to fix this. This threatens our survival, so we have to get rid of it. So taking a drug to suppress it is increasing your chance of not surviving. And in fact, research shows, and I talk about that in my book, that since the mid-90s, we have been going backwards instead of forwards. So if anyone understands technology, you do, and you've seen the advances because it's been your dedicated life goal. So with all the advances in technology, Dave, people are actually not living longer. They are living. People are dying. The trend of people living longer has reversed. So people are now dying between 8 to 15 years younger than they should from preventable lifestyle diseases. In their peak between 25 and 64 is the age group most affected. Okay. And then in addition to that, if you have a mental health label, it increases, it adds, can chop off another up to 10 to 20 years of your life. And this is why we've seen people drive in it. And this is, these are facts, this is people are dying from a lack of hope, they're dying from diseases they can that are preventable. So, and it starts with the mind. We have to. So what? And one of the main reasons that I propose and I'm getting to step five now is that we, when we become so biologically oriented, when we become so neuro reductionistic that I am an avatar controlled by my brain, we forget all about mind. And mind is the biggest part of us. Mind is this incredibly flexible thinking, feeling, choosing that drives the biological. So you can't sacrifice the mind for the biology. And we've done that because biology is dependent on mind. So we've got to bring mind back into the narrative. And that's what I'm trying to do with the neuropsychle. So it's kind of, as I said, biohack your mind with your mind with the neuro cycle.

So we've got gather, reflect, write, recheck and what is active reach the fifth step.

Okay, well quickly with the recheck. Recheck is checking what you've written. So it's a checking process, just reading through it.

Okay.

It's looking back at it and it's got a lot of. I'll be giving the board. There's a lot more to it, but basically that's the essence of it, is what you look back at what you bought out of your head. What did you just vomit on the page? What have you just expressed? What have you just spoken about? You can do this verbally too. So I would do these five steps verbally with my patients. You can do it verbally, but it's good to eventually get to writing. So recheck is now a serious mental autopsy. Okay, I found the tumor. What is going on? Oh, I see that, that, that. So you're starting to look at looking, you're looking for the origin story. When I find the root, I can pull the tree out the ground. So Dave, what we want to do is land, land in this forest with our helicopter and look at the tree. And then we want to analyze the tree and we want to dig up the roots. Eventually the tree flips over and now the roots are out the ground, the tree's going to die. Energy never ever just gets lost. Energy is always transferred. So this thing is kept alive by energy. Energy as you think you are giving it energy, whatever you think about the most grows like you water a plant and a plant grows when you water, water it. When you keep thinking about something, you're watching that. So if I change how I think about it and I now bring it into this malleable state together, gather, reflect and write. And now recheck. I have made this. I'm removing the energy from here and I'm starting to reconceptualize it. And I'm including my story, which is the Kintsugi principle, which I'm sure you're familiar with, where you are replacing the shattered pieces of your life and rebuilding them with gold lacquer. So you. But you are reconceptualizing to. Into something that is. I can manage. It will give me mental peace. My story is still in there, but I've now shifted the energy from pure toxicity to something that I can manage. Still going to cry, still going to be upset, still going. But I have a management technique in place. So the active reach is phenomenal because let's talk about if you're doing this for trauma, it's never a good idea to work on trauma for long periods of time in a day and let your mind keep going on about it. You can't handle that. So trauma at work must be limited to I recommend under an hour, 30 minutes, 45 minutes and then the rest of the day you mustn't think about it. You need to have a temporary distraction. So this is distraction in the good sense. Your active reach, which is step five helps you with that. It's like the little full stop. Okay, I've done my work full stop on the sentence and now I'm going to go into the rest of the day. It's very hard to working on trauma but this is being dealt with and you literally start reasoning with yourself. So the active reach is a little action that comes out of the previous four steps and it's something as simple as a statement. So it could be. I'll give you an example of something I worked on that is changed my life. I was an if only person, I would do something and I would think if only I did it that way. If only I said this. If only that in my old days, prior neuro cycling through dealing with this, I would have ended this conversation with you and thought if only I said that today I should have, would have. Those are the ugly cousins. Should have, would have, could have are the ugly cousins of if only. If only steals joy. You lose all the joy of the moment and you spend your life ruminating on something you actually can't change. So there's a lot More to it, that was a huge part of my life and it took me and I use this example in the book, it took my kids and my family saying mom, we've just been on holiday, we've just had a great meal and now you're saying if only we went there or went at that I would spoil every moment and I would torment myself. And yeah, I'm in the brain game and I'm doing this. Okay. So I decided to do a neuro cycle and do it over the 63 days every day for seven to 15 minutes, go through those five steps. And I found that going through that, that I found the root cause. It was perfectionism, it was this desire to please and all kinds of stuff. Okay, so my active reach that, that I, that I created in the first sort of you have an active reach every day you can have one you can change daily was to type into my phone on my reminders function. I actually have an app called the Switch app which we rebranding as a neuropsychical app. We walk people through all of this that I'm telling you. And I've got a reminder function on that. So I put in the reminder function. Practice your if only today. That statement was my active reach. So every time I wanted to slip back into if only I said this or did that or could have, would have, should have, that would pop up on my phone. I set it to pop up seven times a day and I would leave it up there and then push it away when I, when I felt, you know, I knew just whatever, you know, you could decide it away the function. But I would read that it would remind me bring into my conscious mind. I removed energy from the toxic thought even more. And I practiced building this over 21 days. This will be destroyed and rebuilt. But this is really weak. So before I explain that the active reach, then not only did I say if only practice or if only today and just read the statement. So it's literally find a statement that encapsulates what you're working on, type that out into the reminders function on your phone or using my app and then you just read it. When it pops up, it takes you seven seconds a day. So seven times a day you can do it as many times as you want, but a minimum of seven times a day is sufficient for watering of the new way of reconceptualized thinking to help keep it in the forefront of your mind, which is what you want. After 21 days, this toxic energy has been removed more or less 21. And you've built a new long term, a new long term thought with its memories. Remember the thoughts, the concept, and then those are all the memories. It's made, made of memories. So then the active reach, you also attach some sort of visualization. So it could be I attach a white rose, there's something about white roses that I love. So it's such a simple thing. But that builds in a lattice. Think of a lettuce if you're growing plants. And that's also what brain building does. A lattice is what you put and then the weak ivy, initially it's very weak. So you kind of put it on the lattice and it can easily fall apart. And then eventually it's so strong you can't pull the ivy off the lattice. But initially started with that lattice. That's what your active reach is doing. It's the taking, it's building a lattice that you can actually then practice using the new memory that you're building. And that then eventually over time becomes very strong. What most people do is they get to day four is a good. And they give up. Day seven is another point. Day 14 and day 21. So those are danger points along the cycle where people think I've got this. And then they go back in the same habit, the same toxic trauma. You've got to push to day 21 to break down and rebuild. And then you've got to practice using this new thought, watering, getting. It's very weak. It's not strong enough. It does not have enough energy yet to move from the non conscious to the conscious mind to impact your behavior. So another major hack in this whole process is you've got to practice using the new thought for another 42 days. And that's where we saw gamma peaks at 21. But they weren't strong yet. It was only at day 63 that we saw what we call automatization happening where the memory shifted down into 90 conscious. And when it got, when that pattern was created, people were now changing their behavior cognitive, emotionally, socially, intellectually. So that's kind of a big story, kind of sort of summarized.

Wow. It's pretty amazing. And it's very clear in your book, you know how to go through this. And this is something doesn't cost anything to do.

Exactly.

What blew me away was that you talk about doing a clinical study with an 81% decrease in anxiety and depression.

Yeah, that's what. And I put those results in my book and there's also white paper on my, on my website and we're busy with our publications at the moment. But essentially yes, what we saw was that when you teach our country we had a control and experimental group and we did what we call double blind. So it was gold standard research. Okay. Very strictly controlled, et cetera. And those in the experimental group, they got the five steps, the control group didn't. They both got the same set of testing, a lot of psychological testing. A lot of the biggest part of the psychological testing was their narrative. So looking at the person's story, their context, how they see life, very, very important. And then we also did blood work, DNA stuff and then we looked in the brain with using the QE qeeg. So it was a very extensive study and over, over a six month period and then these 63 day cycles. And what we essentially found was that the experimental group got the, got the, the five step, the neuro cycle and their ability to manage anxiety and depression as well as other stuff, toxic thoughts, toxic stress, burnout improved by a factor of 81%. So they felt 81% more in control of being able to deal with this stuff. So they would make comments like I'm still battling with sleeping but it's so much more improved and I know what to do if I can't sleep. And I'm still battling with anxiety and depression but I know what to do now. So it doesn't control, control me anymore. I embrace the depression. So they've learned how to use make depression and anxiety work for them and not against them. So that was and the telomeres lengthened. We had people with biological ages of they were in their mid-30s, for example and their biological age was in their 50s. So the chronological and biological age were out of sync. Now you and I both know what that means if yours, if your body age or biology is 20 to 30 years older and it's sickly than what you actually are, you are setting yourself up to die young from preventable disease. So we showed with no, I didn't change diet, I only taught in the neurocycle. So you can imagine if you add all the diet etc to that as well, their biological ages caught up. We closed the gap. We had to literally. And that's in nine weeks. We closed the gap and it was sustained at six months. So it's very exciting. I mean this is hardcore science. I'm not just saying woo woo stuff, wellness woo woo stuff. This is real hardcore scientific. 38 years of research of managing your mind to change your mind to change your brain.

Wow. All right, I'm going to Practice this with you. And I want you to tell me where I make mistakes. So let's say like a lot of people listening, I'm a little bit triggered by the fact that I've seen a lot of media accounts, that there's this lurking virus that has me interfere modality all the time. And I'm recognizing, gee, maybe this is ruining my sleep and ruining my life and I'm doing all I have control over, but I'm still just losing it. Okay, so what I would do is I'd become aware, oh, I saw a news article, right? And now I'm feeling fearful and you know, instead of wanting to hug someone, I'm running, wanting to run away, whatever. So I've become aware of it, right? And then I reflect on that which would be step two. So first I took the feeling and now I'm curious about it.

Good Grace.

I reflect on the feeling and kind of figure out where it's coming from. Then I write down what I'm feeling specifically. I kind of journal about it.

Ask, answer, discuss, whatever you can find out. Why, what the implications, everything, whatever comes.

Up, okay, just whatever comes up, write it down. Then I recheck it by at least reading my stuff or talking it through with someone. And then active reach would be using your app or something similar. So at least seven times a day I'm reminded basically, am I losing my, you know what right now? Because I just saw something that was triggering me about this. I saw a mask or I saw, you know, a news article or whatever, right? And then at the end of that, if someone started that now within 63 days they could reach that state of oh, I'm still safe in my skin regardless of whether or not there's a virus around.

Exactly. That you brilliant, you've totally got that. So the active reach would be something that would help them when they read that next article or hear that next thing. It brings them back to a safe mental space. It's an anchor, it anchors you back in that safety that I can't control this virus, but I can control what I do with my life around that. So you know, let me get the data. And that may lead to another whole neuro cycle where you brain build where you say, I'm going to study this, I'm going to learn whatever I can. So you then take the fear neuro cycle where you're detoxing and you take the same five steps and you then build brain because build your brain with knowledge. Because the more knowledge we have, the more in control we Feel. So it kind of works together.

Well, Caroline, it's fascinating. I mean, you spent your life's work on this, and you've boiled it down into your 19th book, which is highly readable. And I've been looking for ways for listeners who are saying, look, either I'm not in a position to spend any money on this. I'm not willing to, but I want to get better. And there's a lot of data, just a lot of science behind what you're doing. And it's evolved from what I'm just going to say, an intelligent, highly learned person who spent decades working on it. So it's a real act of public service to write a book like this. And thank you.

Thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you so much. I love it. And I've seen the impact. I think that's where my passion comes, is that I know it works. I've seen it. I've seen too many lives change to not know that it works.

Yeah. Once you see people change, you feel a moral obligation to at least make sure people know about your work. Okay, well, guys, if you thought this was interesting, as interesting As I did, Dr. LeaF-R-L-E-A f.com has everything that you would want to know about Dr. Leif's work. And you totally want to read her new book. It's called you'd or it's called cleaning up your mental mess. But it's a blue book cover. Is it says your mental mess in big letters. You know, I oftentimes, you know, read a lot, and I have authors on the show a lot. And sometimes it's, you know, there's a new book, and sometimes it's, you know, this is my 19th where I've really put it all together. It's actionable, it's useful. And particularly right now, if you're stressed, there's ways to turn it off. And this is completely free. You just have to do the work. And it's not more than 15 minutes a day, which is super cool. So you guys want to learn about this? Definitely. Cleaning up your mental mess is the title. DrLeaf-R L E A F dot com.

Thanks again. Thank you so much. Thank you. You've been amazing.

And one more thing, guys. I have two requests of you. One, if you decide to buy cleaning up your mental mess at the same time, if you haven't already, order fast this way. So that way they'll show up together on Amazon and people will find the good books together. And the second thing is that if you don't leave a review after you've read a book, it's because you're a bad person and you should do a neuro cycle about that. Just saying.

I love it. I love it. I second that.

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