Raise Resilient Minds: How to Help Kids Form Better Habits - Dr. Caroline Leaf | 1078 | Dave Asprey

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Formerly you're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today we're going to talk with Caroline Leaf, who has been on the show before, and we're going to talk about helping kids clean up their mental mess, how to have resilient kids with mental health. I care about this because I am a dad, very grateful father. I have two wonderful kids as I'm recording this, they're 16 and 14. And I like to think that I've done everything I could have done. But all parents think that, right? And then all parents also have that, but what else could I have done or should I have done? And all those sort of racing thoughts that happened. So I thought we should have a really cool person back on the show. Dr. Caroline Leaf was on episode 799 of the Human Upgrade and very, very well received. And you're going to find that she's incredibly intelligent and understands things about humans that most people don't. Caroline, welcome back to the show.

Thank you, Dave. It's always so nice talking to you and thank you for such a lovely intro. And I see you drinking your danger coffee. I have mine too, so there you go.

Right on. Well, I, I definitely appreciate that and I. Well, let's start there before we get into your new book and neuroplasticity and memory formation and all the stuff like that. Do your kids drink danger coffee?

Oh, we all do. I think it's. I think coffee is. I don't have blood in my veins. I have coffee that often, literally today. So good for your brain. And as I don't have to sell, use it. So, and we love your coffee. It's amazing.

I, I started giving my daughter coffee when she was one year old and, and it wasn't planned. She, she reached for the kind of room temperature, lukewarm. At the time I was still using bulletproof beans. And she just took a sip and I thought she wouldn't like it. And then she fought me for control of the glass and just wanted to pound it. And she's been a coffee connoisseur ever since. Just an ounce or two when she's younger to get the butter and the fat in. How early would you start?

My kids have been drinking coffees. They're also the same sort of situation. I've always drank coffee. So even all through my pregnancy and everything. And I've had four, four children, so they've been from very, very young and they're all totally addicted in A good sense, they love it. So from young, you know, I think it's up to the individual. There's some people that can't tolerate coffee, as we know, which is the medical reasons. But I honestly think let children be exposed because it's had such bad press. Meanwhile, we know how good coffee actually is for you. That's more than thousand phytonutrients and you know, these. It's really antioxidants and it's. It's amazing.

So, yeah, okay, so there we go. We have an expert in neuroplasticity and brains and kids saying it's okay for kids to drink coffee. I've been saying that for years as well. But it's always nice to be reaffirmed. Yeah, reaffirmed, thank you. That's the right word.

I'm a great believer in coffee.

All right, so no problem with kids in coffee, but we do have some serious problems with kids today. Do you feel like if we were to go back in time 30 or 40 years, that the adults of that time are saying, you know, kids these days, or is it actually worse now?

You know, it's such a good question because if we look at what's happened, every generation has the adults of the generation saying, in my time, this and this. So what we're dealing with really is that we always facing change and there's always something different and we have to adapt to that change. I think there's a few reasons why we have such a crisis in mental health. One of the main reasons that I believe, and I talk about this a lot, is that we're not teaching our kids, nor ourselves to manage our minds in the midst of this current climate of very fast technology and excessive technology. I hate the fact that technology is blamed for mental health because I don't think it's good to blame an external locus of control, but to rather look at what are we doing with what we've got. Because technology is not going away, change is not going away, pandemics are not going away. Things are change, challenges, wars, whatever. That's always part of being a human. So we can't keep thinking it was better before or it will be better in the future. We live now and this is where we at. We've got AI, we've got social media. These are all great tools if they manage properly. So that's a big key. There is mind management of understanding the place at which technology throws information and how to use that effectively so that your mind, brain, body networks, the psychoneurobiological network, doesn't crash. If it crashes, we will have mental health challenges and physical. The other side, Dave, is that 30, 40 years ago, 40 years ago I started out, I've been in the field for 38 years now. When we were trained 40, 50 years ago, the whole concept of human behavior was very different. So if someone was battling, we looked at their circumstances and I'm sure you can relate to this. Adverse circumstances produce adverse responses, which is a normal thing. So it wasn't seen. We didn't medicalize misery, we didn't pathologize childhood. And yet with a biomedical model, which was stepped into being around about 40, 50 years ago, mental health was subsumed into the same model as medical stuff. So if someone has something like Parkinson's or diabetes type 1 or something like that, we use the biomedical model because we know that there's a structural damage in the brain to the substantial negra for something like Parkinson's. We know there's a problem with the pancreas. We can diagnose, we can link it back to a biological cause. That model works for the physical brain and body. But when it comes to our human experience, it doesn't work well at all. And time has tested this approach of putting it into a symptom diagnostic, eliminate the symptom biomedical model and it has not done well at all. So that's one of the other reasons why we're sitting with a mental health crisis for all ages and is also because of the biomedical model which doesn't allow us to process our experiences. It just labels, locks you in. We need to describe, not to diagnose. So those are two main factors that have contributed to the crisis currently. And yes, I can go on and on for hours, but that's two sort of broad things that have really resulted in this change.

So you don't want to blame social media at all for anxiety in kids.

I mean, okay, now that's, that's a, that's a good question. I, I don't blame social media. I blame how it's being managed. There's a very distinct difference. So if you just let your child go on social media all day and, or you don't teach a child or an adult, ourselves to, if you educate ourselves to understand that whatever you think about the most will grow. So if I'm going to spend at all day long and I'm a 13 year old and I'm going to spend all day long scrolling through social media and seeing that that body image is the body image and if I don't look like that I have no value. That's all I'm going to see. So I'm going to wire that experience into my network and it's going to become all consuming. So that's, if I put my fingers like this, that is going to be the viewpoint and I'm going to think about that all the time. It's a distorted view point. The more I look at it, the more I reinforce it. It's getting stronger and stronger in my network. And whatever you grow in your psychoneurobiological network drives how you function. So from that perspective, yes, it's a problem, but the problem is not the social media. The problem is how it's being managed. We need to teach our kids, hey, if you're looking at social media that long, it's wiring in your brain and changing. This is how it's changing. These are the signals you can look for. And also we got to ask questions, help our kids ask questions. Is that really the right way that every single person should look? Is that really the truth? You know, so there's those conversations that are missing and that's what I mean. So social media unmanaged will become a problem and will create mental health challenges. The contagion aspect, the speed, all those kinds of things have to be managed otherwise it's going to be a big problem. But it's not the main cause of mental health issues.

So we say it has to be managed, which is relatively passive. Is it Mark Zuckerberg's job to manage it? Is it the government's job to manage it? Is it parents, jobs, teachers? Who's supposed to manage social media for kids who don't seem able to manage it themselves? Heck, adults, most of them are addicted to it as well, so.

Exactly. So this is where the mind management aspect comes into to adulthood as well. So it comes from both ends. We've got to obviously have policy in place, we've obviously got to have responsible CEOs of things, but that takes time because you know, these are the reasons that they're going to drive it. But on the other side it's educating ourselves and our children. We need to understand. That's why I'm so hot on helping people understand the impact of experience on our, on how we function as humans and whether that experience is spending hours on social media or having some kind of circumstantial situation like an abuse or, or just battling with boss or battling with finances or just social politics, etc, all that kind of stuff, everything from the moment you open your eyes to the moment you go to sleep is an experience that you're having and it's processing through your mind, brain, body, network and becomes part of you. So if that's not. If we don't know how to recognize that that's making a mess in us. We're going to land up with attention problems and hyperactivity and mental health and depression and angst and anxiety and a sense of une ease which is what a lot of the adolescents will tell you that they feel, they just feel something's not right. When you bombard and body with all this unfiltered information, it's going to change us. So this is the first part is education educating parents, educating a parent to help have these conversations with their children. That's at the grassroots level. Hopefully the policies will come into place but it's going to be driven by the adults talking to the children and children being educated about the what's happening.

It seems like relying on your government or your boss to be in charge of your health, whether it's physical health or mental health has never worked out very well.

So that's why you agree with you, that's why you can't rely on that. It's going to happen, hopefully. But you have to be empowered yourself. So that's the focus that I take.

Is self empowerment something that you can't really outsource?

No.

In, in the book you talk about mental messes. As someone who really understands brains, what is a mental mess like? Walk me through the concept.

So a mental mess is. Let's take social media. Let's take that example that I gave of a child getting consumed on social media. That's an a bunch of experience. Experiences, if unmanaged, are being processed by the mind into the brain and are going. And everything that goes into the brain becomes protein cluster of information which is memories clustering into a thought. So it's changed. That's neuroplasticity. So everything that we experience, you know this, people watching know this, but you may not know the detail. It's literally every word I'm saying is broken down into vibrations and group into amino acids which group into proteins which grow into branch networks. Plus there's a change in all 37 to 100 trillion cells of your body. Plus there's a change in the mind networks, gravitational fields, electromagnetic fields, etc, so this embodiment is. Is. Is going into us and then it's influencing how we show up. So basically a mess is if I have a messy. Let's say you have an argument with someone or let's say you get an email, let's say there's a relationship issue, crisis with your child or whatever. That's information coming in and wiring in in this way. And, and because it's not. The messy part of it is it comes the, it's like waves of the sea. This is the easiest analogy. The information comes in. If you think of the waves of the sea, they big, they get close, they kind of build as they get close to shore, they get a little white crest, they crash on the beach and make little waves that get sucked back in. So we want that wave action in the brain. You understand all the brain frene wave frequencies and so on? I do a lot of all my research is done with using QEG and neuroscientific principles, using the brainwave frequencies which are very powerful and very give you a lot of information. So messiness is not a nice balanced waveform across the left and the right side of the brain. Messiness is when we have an experience that's toxic, like bullying or whatever, anything toxic. That energy wave that comes in and builds and collapses in the brain like the beach, like it collapses on the beach. As it collapses it's building these protein tree like structures are misfolded and that then creates this sense that, that capture then makes a mess inside of our brain and our body. Then that shows up in how we feel, what we do and say, how we feel in our body, our perspective. And that combination influences how we function. So that's the messiness I'm talking about. And that mess can be on, on a gradient. If this, if this is one and this is ten, your eight, nines and tens are your most obvious traumas. You know, real sexual abuse trauma, physical abuse, the big traumas, then the middle is more like the habits that we're forming. The not managing social media, getting into habits, creating these patterns in our life that we don't control, bad eating patterns, etc, 1, twos and threes are the minor irritations. Day to day struggles, things breaking little, you know, up and down issue with the siblings. So no major stuff on that scale. Each of those are different levels of messiness. But they're going into us, they build into us and they show up with signals. So what we need to do is be empowered to recognize the signals so that we can track where it's coming from, so that we can deconstruct. So that's kind of messiness.

That, that's something that was the core of why I wanted to chat with you about the New book. Because in my most recent book I talk about your main job is to get the right signals into the body to get the results you want. And sometimes getting a signal in can look like, you know, neurofeedback or it can look like when did you eat? Like signals. Everything you do is basically a signal. Your, your brain is an interpret interpreting machine that really brings in something that you can't see and then it repackages it so you can see it. It's simplifying all the time, right? Because it's picking up things that it just says that's not worth you knowing about that little detail. So it just doesn't bring it to your attention and you, so you don't see it. I've started thinking about listening to a podcast or reading a book or even watching a, a YouTube video or something that has something in it. It's installing a little app in your brain and it's a, a new way of looking at the world. At least if it's, if it's not just mindless content. When you're using social media, an algorithm is feeding you stuff that changes how you see the world. What are the tricks to use social media so that it doesn't make a mental mess?

Excellent question. This is an educational thing. It's really sitting down with your kids. Here, an article on this for the, for magazine, the other for Time magazine. In fact, it's sitting down you yourself and getting information. It's sitting down with you and your kids. It's education. It's understanding first of all how that's changing your mind, brain, body, network, how it shows up in signals and then understanding things like do you know that if you keep scrolling in that page that would you that, that that is commodified, that is there's an algorithm, they're taking your interest and they're making money out of you. You know, you tell that to a child, they, they can, you know, do you want that to be done? Do you want people to be watching your patterns and use that kind of against you to kind of sell more stuff to you and take you down another road? So there's understanding that and there's some really great tools out there. A lot of information. You can just Google information on, you know how this works and have these discussions with these kids. And these kids also are pretty tuned in because they're watching TikTok and that kind of thing. They tuned in but they also, you can so easily get consumed. And that's another thing you need to teach a Child and an adult through literally having the experience and saying, okay, when you get on that page and you look two hours later, you still scrolling that addictive nature where you are maybe even feeling worse about yourself, but you really begging to put that down, let's talk about those signals, let's understand what that looks like. So that's the kind of way that I, that I have approached it with people and how I have researched and whatever. So it's basically education and helping them understand the impact on their network plus the how it leads them down another path. And as you say, it puts these thoughts in your brain and you want to say to these kids and adults, do you want that in your brain? Because whatever you focusing on is growing. Whatever you think about the most is growing in your brain. It becomes one of your drivers. So what do you want to do? You want to drive yourself or do you want to be driven? You know, and it's those kinds of concepts that are very, once you understand them, that idea, it's, it's, it's kind of easy to get through to people when they start knowing how to recognize that, hey, when I'm spending this time, I feel uneasy. I feel this hovering sense of anxiety. I'm battling to concentrate. If we understand that those could be not necess. That's not necessarily now that you have ADHD that wasn't diagnosed, which is the latest trend in undiagnosed adhd. Maybe it's because you are. There's so much technology, so much information, such a speed. Maybe you're just scanning the surface of this, of things and looking at this and looking at that. That's not good for the brain. Your brain doesn't like to do. It gathers information, but it works cyclically. So it likes to have these points where you stop and you actually listen to that whole podcast or select from those 500 things you just looked at and choose one thing that's really interesting to you and read deeply, to think, to understand. If we don't go down and we just go across, we create these tremendous sense of disease in our, in our, in our mind and our body. But we've got to teach the kids about that, the adults about that, and you've got to teach them how to pick up those signals. So it's kind of a three prong approach. If that makes things and it can be done. I've done it for, for a long time now with people.

It, it feels like, it feels like Instagram poisoned everyone's brain when they went away from the old Model, here's a picture. And then read some interesting stuff so you could see something and then go deep and they started punishing you for that. Now you have to play a video which takes 3, 15 or 20 seconds for what you could have read in two seconds. And you go into this zombie state where you see it and then you scroll, but you never go deep anymore and, and people don't even read the comments there. And I've gone from writing about 3,000 articles that are 2,000 plus words on my blog, as well as all the books, which I'm still writing the books, but I, I've spent way less time writing and really carefully structuring thoughts that go in and, and create a new thing to sort of putting a lot of energy into inane stuff like how does my hair look on video? And you know, it's not very good mentally to do that either. But if no one sees it when you do the hard work of writing something and they see it when you put on your tight pants and lipstick or whatever. The thing is, it's encouraging behavior on one hand of content creators, but on the other hand, the consumers, it's like go into a zombie mode for five seconds of video. Scroll, zombie, scroll, zombie. But never going deep. How do you teach a kid to go deep?

That's where you sit down. And it's not going to happen overnight. So to change behaviors, to change behaviors and emotions, because behaviors never live alone, behaviors are linked with emotions and your bodily sensation and your perspective. So it's a cluster. To change that cluster is going to take cycles of, of at least 63 days, between 59 and 66 days. So a lot of the work that I've done, and we've got a big study running currently, clinical trial running currently, on how, confirming how long it actually takes to rewire and to create a new network that'll actually drive you in the direction you want to go. So you're not going to teach your kids or yourself this idea of, hey, that's zombie scrolling, that puts me in that state that's actually affecting my concentration. That's actually that knowledge. You can tell someone that in, you know, you can have conversations over a period of time, but you make that actual change. It's going to take you a little bit of time every single day. And I recommend around 5 to 15 minutes, 45 minutes a day of very deliberate and intentional time that you spend on this concept or whatever, whatever it is that you're trying to change in order for change to take place. And the mistake a lot of people make, Dave, is that, and this is where the mind management aspect comes in. Mind management has as an active ingredient self regulation. And self regulation is not happening when I'm in zombie zone scrolling from one video to the next. So it's a matter of saying, okay, let's look at this, let's look at what you've done. It's actually look at what we've done, look at after go through that show someone. So let's pull up those, those videos and let's see how many we scrolling through in 45 minutes or 15 minutes or whatever. Now let's look at how you feel, let's analyze how you feel, how's it affecting your, you know, your behaviors and so on. You, you can go through and analyze these certain, there's a framework you can follow that will actually be driving energies through the brain, mind, brain, body network correctly. And then you're going to say, okay, well this is how it's making me feel. What can I do about this? What's the good and bad? So there's a lot of this deliberate and intentional and conscious unpacking and deconstruction from observing the in impact of what I'm doing, what am I doing, what is the impact of what I'm doing on how I'm feeling and functioning and so on. How is this affecting my relationships, how's this affecting how I'm functioning at school or at work, etc. It's being very deliberate and not just hodgepodge a conversation now and then. I'm talking about a very deliberate and intentional daily process for nine weeks. And that may sound like hell for someone listening now to how am I supposed to do that with my teenage or my 2 year old? And that's why I write the books and I do, and that's why you and I do what we do. But let me, let me throw this out there before just to capture that thought in that moment. Your brain is changing every single moment of the day. From the time you wake up, you're building in life experiences into your brain till the time you go to sleep. 95% of what's being wired into the mind and body network you're not even aware of. It's in your nonconscious 5% more or less, you're aware of your consciously, deliberately, intentionally so are focusing on. So that means that at nighttime your mind has to work with your brain to sort out what you built during the day. So there's this constant action happening. So it's Happening regardless. And I did some of the first, I think I told you this before neuroplasticity work back in the 80s when they didn't think the brain could change a huge part of the work that I do. So your brain is changing. So now the question is, can you, can you influence that change? Because if your mind, brain, body, network changes in the wrong direction. Messy mind, messy brain, messy body, messy life. And that's what we kind of talking about here. So if I don't do anything and I just keep scrolling or I let my child just keep scrolling and throw up my hands and say, how am I supposed to deal with this? Let me just get that medication to help them concentrate. You are 63 days later. You are even deeper in the mess than you were at the beginning of the 63 days, you know. So therefore my argument is if you're changing anyway, don't you want to be in charge of that change? Don't you want to drive the change in the direction that is healthy for you? And it's just a matter of learning how to manage your network and getting into the habit of doing that. And then you can apply this across the board daily without even. It's no effort. The most effort in getting into mind management is the first nine weeks. And this you can teach. Two year old. I've done, I've had a lot of my kids patients were 2 and 3 old, which is why this current book is ages 2, 3 through 10 and then my other books all from, you know, 11 onwards. So yeah, so this is something we need to be proactive about teaching.

Now I, I'm still blown away. 59 to 66 days isn't something I've seen before. All of the research that I've seen around habit formation and change says either 42 days, six weeks or 40 days, as in from the Bible. In 40 days and 40 nights, those are about the sweet spot. That's the amount of time it takes you to be fully convinced. The vegan diet is amazing forever because you get sick after more than six weeks. So the habit is ingrained, the lens is put in place on your reality. That's what happened to me when I was a vegan. So I've talked with people about that. But where do you come up with 66 days? It's so precise.

Talk to me about the science 59 to 66 days. So there's some leaders in the field field that I've been following for years and I've been doing this research now for time frame. It's almost 38 years now and I've just published a paper recently. I've got three more papers going in this year. I'm doing a huge study on it now. So what they, what the range is, is 18 to 254 days. Those are the numbers you'll see and, and you'll see the 40, you'll see the 42. And there's a major thing that happens at 42 days. So what I found in my research is, and this is very much established in literature too, and I've pretty much confirmed this, but gone a little bit deeper, is that around 18 to 21 days is the more or less the time you'll need for something simple. So trying to get someone to, for example, wash their hands or, you know, not, you know, take your tablets regularly, your vitamins regularly, that kind of stuff, simple stuff, that's more go to make sure you get to that gym every day. You know, get those kinds of things in place that are not too complex. But when it comes to complex behaviors where you're dealing with a relational issue, you're dealing with stuff that you. Social media stuff, which is complex because of the fact that it changes so many networks and it has such a pervasive effect and that's why it's so needed to be managed and can be so useful when managed correctly. That's going to take longer. So what we see is that the 42 day round, 40 days, we see a significant change, but that change is one of moving towards stabilization. At day 18 to 21. If it's a simple behavior, you can get it under control. If it's a complex behavior, at day 18 to 21, you've reached a point where you've gone through quite a lot of pain to get to that point. So for example, let's say that you are working on some sort of a coping behavior mechanism where you just like, you know, very overwhelmed, daily, all the time feel overwhelmed. And when you start digging in, you'll see in that first 21 days, you actually get 18 to 21 days, you feel worse because you're starting to unpack and start seeing what, what's driving you, what is the source of the situation, how are you thinking about yourself, how you feel, all this? It starts opening up your mind to seeing what's going on. And that can cause a sense of depression, anxiety, grieving. Imagine if you've been abused all your life and you, you've suppressed it. This is classic. I've had so many patients like this and in my Clinical trials as well, where you've, where things to cope, you suppress. And that's not sustainable. It's fine at the time because that's how you cope, but it's not sustainable. And you start working and seeing okay, I lost all those years of my life, this is why my life is falling apart, why I'm suicidal, whatever, on an extreme state. And you're grieving for what you have seen that you lost and why you like you are.

In your book you introduce a new concept called the neuro cycle, which is five steps that I've never seen written about even with all the stuff I do in the world of neuroscience about how emotions and memories are put in and how to change them. What is the neuro cycle? What are the five steps?

Okay, so the neuro cycle is a system for how you can be self regulate and drive the neuroplasticity in the mind, brain, body, network. And not just neuroplasticity, it is because your neuroplasticity happens in the physical brain, but it's driven by the mind, mind, brain, body being separate but work together. So the neurocycle is the process of how information gets from the outside into the brain and the body and then shows up in how we actually function. Whether it's work day to day in everything, every aspect. It's something that we're doing on an unconscious level. At 400 billion actions per second. It's got a whole neurophysiological component. What I've done is Dave, is I've taken that and made it very simple because I worked for years with people, with patients and so on. So you can't make things complex. The complexity has to be simplified. So what I found is that we go through three stages. I mean five stages when we are building stuff into our brain. Let's go from that angle first. And then you reverse engineer and you use the same five stages. Those five stages are, are a very focused awareness. Gathering awareness where you are not just general awareness that you get from meditation and mindfulness, that's all brain preparation, but a very gathering of being very focused and specific on gathering awareness about certain signals. We'll go into the detail then. Once you've gathered that awareness, you've actually pulled into the conscious mind the thought that those signals are attached to. So whatever you've gathered awareness of, there's four things you gather awareness of that brings the thought, the thought into the conscious mind. Once the thoughts in the conscious mind, from a neuroscientific perspective, the proteins that that thought is made of and the chemicals, the bonds start weakening. So if the bonds are weakening now, we can start deconstructing and finding root causes and finding, you know, what is going on. What is this driver? What is it made up? What am I saying to myself? Where is this coming from? You can start doing that, but you can't just do that through a meditation. You can't just do that. Meditation will open the door. Let me explain this and then I'll give you an analogy and then it'll make sense. So then the next thing is you. Once you've gathered awareness, you've got to reflect. Then you're going to write, then you're going to recheck, Then you're going to active reach. I'll go through slowly gather awareness, reflect, write, recheck, active reach. Before you do those five steps, you need to prepare your brain. And that's things like breathing, meditation, whatever you want. There's a million different things you can do. I give lots of examples in my book and app and so on. Then you go into the the five steps. The first step is to gather awareness. What do you gather awareness of? The four signals. What are the four signals? They are things that give you information, and they are your emotions, your behaviors, what you say and what you do, your bodily sensations in relation to the emotions and behaviors, and your perspective. It's a cluster of four. And underneath those, you can break those down into a lot of detail. So you literally say, how am I feeling? Where do I feel this in my body? How's this affecting what I'm saying and doing and how I'm saying and doing it? What is it? How is it affecting my perspective? That's like imagine four balloons. And each of those signals is like a balloon. And as you identify them, those balloons have strings. And as the strings are actually attached to a tree. So just visualize this to help you picture this analogy. As you identify those, you're pulling those thought, that thought into the conscious mind. Once it's there, once you're consciously aware of it, it weakens On a neuroscientific level in the brain, it weakens, which means I can change it. Okay, I can start seeing what's there. I can start doing something with this driver. Instead of it consuming me, I'm getting empowered to. To consume it and do something with it. Then I'm going to reflect. I'm going to go a little deeper. Okay, why do I feel that emotion? What other emotions do I feel? How is this, Is there a pattern to how it Shows up in my behaviors. And so you start doing a bit of digging. When you do that, you can imagine you're looking at the branches that those four balloons are attached to and those are the, those are the sort of self talk, the extra other emotions, the patterns. And then you're going to take all of that. And here's really key, you don't spend long in each step. Then the key thing is to now take that and dump it down. Not journal at this point. You can journal at a later point. At this point is to take a big blank piece of paper or open a journal, whatever you want, date it, put a circle in the middle and then just put down all over the place in squiggles, lines, sentences, paragraphs, drawings, arrows, whatever comes up, even if it makes no sense, just get that up. That is. Now those three steps so far have activated a like literally opened the non conscious mind to, so that you can view it. So the nonconscious is what's driving us. Okay, so it's making with excess the.

The first step of gathering awareness in your mind, your body. No, no one ever told me that emotions had a place in the body until I was 30 and many people listening especially. I mean if, if you're a parent, you have little kids, you can go to a five year old and you can say where is the feeling in your body? And the five year old will stop and go, oh, and they'll do. And I did this actually with my daughter. She was freaking out when she was 5 or 6. I don't remember what it was about, but I did this. Thankfully 40 years of Zen stuff has taught me about where these things live in the body. So I said, well, where is it? And she stops and all of a sudden she shifted from whatever she was panicking about to curiosity. Which is behind all of step one is gather awareness. Oh, what, where, where's that? And just, you know, it's in my stomach. And I said great. Does it have a color? Can you draw it? And she came back and she had a drawing of the feeling. And by doing that she totally was like, oh, it's okay, you're having some kind of a stress reaction or anxiety. But just doing that one thing which is similar to what you're talking about completely gave her agency over her emotions. Not that she could control her emotions because emotions are, they're going to do. But instead of feeling tossed about by them, it was like, oh, okay, like I'm writing with it. In her case, the reflection was what is the color in Your process, you actually ask yourself why you're feeling, how you're feeling exactly. What if you're feeling that when you have no idea like because this is.

People make a mistake. We so we so in tuned into meditation, breathing, talking about our emotions, doing all these great things which are great but you have to go through a cycle. And so it's the easiest way to understand this is to think of flying a plane. I know everyone doesn't fly a plane, but people know planes fly and people know that you have pilots and pilots and co pilots prepare the plane, the tower, etc. These preparation before you take off, when you take off that's. So the preparation of the plane is the equivalent of that. Breathing, meditation, whatever calming activity for the neurophysiology of the brain, mind, body that you do, which is very important to do is the equivalent of the preparing of the plane. Then you, then the pilot takes off. That's gather awareness, it's very focused. They don't just randomly take off. There's a, there's a guided process and it has an effect. It gets the plane in the air in the right place. Then they fly the plane which is a very distinct planned and guided process. Then they land the plane and it's a cyclical process. Then they fly to the next place. Our body works in these cycles of prepare, take off, fly, land, prepare, take. So the neuro cycle follows the same thing. Prepare, take off, takeoff is together awareness, the fly, the, the reflect which is the second step and the writing which is the third step and the fourth step which is the checking of what you've written to try and make sense of it. This is what's happened. What am I going to do about it? What's the pattern? What's the antidote? Where's this coming from? Oh, maybe it is the moldy coffee. But as you get to the fourth step, you're starting to make sense of all these things coming up. But there was no magic format, just that I just didn't eat today or something. When you close the thing and the last step is an action that closes the cycle. It's landing the plane. What people don't do, Dave, is all these things in therapies and techniques and stuff. I'm not saying throw any of that out, I'm just saying pack them in the right order because that's what drives the psychoneurobiology. So I've done the research with the time, with the brain, with the. And I've done clinical applications. So I've. My, my, my Career path has been one of the working clinically and doing research, parallel and very strong behavioral research are going in the field. Working with people that are in very, very poor, extreme trauma to people that extremely wealthy and all over the world. So in other words, human. There's a common element amongst all humans and that is the desire to know why am I showing up like this? And you know, and love and those basic things of who am I? And identity. And so the. That's kind of all incorporated. But I don't want to diversify and get philosophical. The essence of this process is that there's a very fundamental neurophysiological need for us to work in a sequence that is ordered. If I just do an affirmation or I just name my feeling, what I'm going to do is take off. Imagine if that pilot that you flying to wherever you're flying. If that pilot, pilot didn't know how to fly the plane, he only knew how to took off or she only knew how to take off, that pilot would crash the plane. So if we only name our emotions, what the research is showing is that people crash if we just meditate and just become aware of the moment. And I'm totally for them. I'm not running anything down. Everything we need to do, we need to meditate. But if you just meditate, if you just become mindfully aware, if you just do a mindful cognitive behavior type technique in the wrong place, you will actually make yourself worse. Because you've got all this stuff coming up now. What do I do with this? What does this mean? Mean how do I solve this all now? Because we in a quick fix mentality. Fast, fast, fast. So I want to fast. I feel bad. I want to fix it quick. No, that's not the way it's going to be part of being. We have to get back to that deep stuff. We have to realize that we've got to go through the pain of the surgery before you heal that concept. And that's where we've got to then get into this correct sequence. So once we've brought it up, and that's why it's so sequenced, it's nice and organized and all ordered and that then helps us not just talk about the emotion, but like you did with your daughter, where is it in your body? How's it affecting your behaviors, whatever. And sometimes it's a very quick process. You do it in two minutes. Sometimes it's, it's longer, you need five minutes, sometimes you may even need 15 minutes and you're going to do this over time because if you've got a pattern emerging in your life or your child's life, you're not going to do one year, a cycle and fix it. You're going to do one and find, oh, geez, I didn't get anywhere today. That's fine. Your active reaches. Okay, I've started. I'll do it tomorrow. And then you pick it up tomorrow and you go a little deeper and you get a little deeper. And as you reach that, as you build through the 21 days, more and more and more is revealed because it's little bit by little bit, you are digging, literally digging the sand away of the roots of the of a tree to try and see what's going on in that process. And in the process of doing this, even when you start finally seeing, oh, it's the moldy coffee, that's a easy fix, just know we got to get that mold out your body, whatever. But let's say it is okay. This is coming from a relationship that I had years ago that I didn't quite resolve. And now I'm in this new relationship and there's something here that's triggering, okay, I can see where it's coming from. You can't understand maybe why that person hurt you. It's not your role to get in that person's head. It's your role to fix your head. It's your role to fix your life. So, but just knowing, okay, that's where it comes from. There's an acceptance that needs to be happen needs to happen, and a release from, okay, I'm not going to get. I'm not going to understand why everything happens, but I can at least know that's what the impact is. That's what's been driving me. So now how can I reconceptualize in for the kids, we talk about going into the roots of the tree and putting plant food on. How can I put plant food on to make this tree healthy? Because whatever's happened to you is not going anywhere. It's happened, but what you can do, you can change what it looks like inside of you. And if you change that slowly over time, it will then show up in a different. How it plays out into your future is totally different. So that child's being bullied, and it's impacted them and it's helping them, and they're showing up with all these behaviors, but you don't know they're being bullied. Through this process, you could potentially find what that element of bullying is and what it looks like and then how you can then work forward towards solving that problem over time and getting the child's identity and all that kind of stuff. All the things that happen with something like bullying, you're not going to fix that in one day. You're not going to fix that in 42 days. But in within the first 21, you're going to start getting to the deconstruction reconstruction. At day 22, more or less to 42, you into a more stabilization phase, a practice phase. You're getting this, this. Imagine the trees this big. So here's this big ugly tree. I heal it. So the ugly part shrinks. Now I've got to grow a nice healthy part that's going to take me the 21 days, more or less, you know, 18 to 21, 23, you know, it's in that region. Then I need to grow that tree, I need to practice it, I need to stabilize it. So I need to give it energy to grow. And, and then that takes that extra more or less 42 days. So 21, another 21 days takes me to day 42. Another 21 days takes me to more or less the sweet spot of where I feel okay, if I'm triggered. And even if it's three months from now and I'm in a new relationship or I'm in a new school or whatever, I've that stabilized energy, strong new thought network is there in my resilience network and I can use it. But if it's small and weak and it's competing still with that potential old way of operating, I'm going to get into a situation where I'm triggered and I could easily fall back. And then that can lead to lots of frustration and anger towards the oneself. Why have I failed again? I followed all these rules. So it's that stabilization is vitally important. So what we see from my work, from Philip Alelli Gardner, all these people, we're seeing that, the complex stuff, we're not going to get that, that sweet spot until around 59 to 66 days. And then you'll have cases where I've had with patients and so on in the past in my clinical trials of people that had had such severe trauma, the eight, nines and tens of one cycle of whatever, 69 weeks, it's just more or less nine weeks. Okay, so anything from 59 to 66 is not going to be enough. It's going to start the process. So I've had some patients that have done 12 cycles over two years before they've really. And each, each day, each cycle is going to lead to more empowerment, more better self regulation, more autonomy, more ability to see that toxic issue from a different perspective. More force, resilience, being unmasked. But it gets to the point where, okay, I feel like I'm getting somewhere and it might take that long. So that's where we get to the, the numbers of things like 254 days and you know, 300, whatever. So you start doing the math. It's combinations. And it's interesting because we see this in our biology too, which I know something I think you've, you and I've spoken about this before. But like stem cells for example, if you, if you had get a blood blister, it takes more or less three weeks for the stem cells to form to heal the blister. But if you're very stressed out or having an argument, there's a great blister study that healing time can cut back by up to 60%. But the point is our biology also works in cycles of healing. That famous Dr. Meltz who spoke about the 21 days and it became a myth that we build a habit in 21 days. Dr. Meltz was a plastic surgeon. He found that his patients were physically healing from plastic surgery in these cycles of 21 days. And so he then said, oh, maybe this is also in the mind, not a bad idea. But then that 21 became admissible. It does do something, but it's not enough. So what we've seen so interesting day from the working with kids, working with adults, and from the doing clinically in a research function as well, research way as well, where you stop around that 18 to 21 day mark and you're working on a patent patterns of things that are more established, anything from the 4 to the 10 range. Okay. If you stop around 21 days, your chance of reverting back to an old pattern or being driven by the old behavior and landing up in that same place increases because you haven't actually healed the whole tree yet. The whole thought network is partly healed and it's. But it's not stabilized. So it's almost. If you can imagine my hand is a Tree and at 21 days, half of this my hand is still kind of toxic and yucky and this side is beautiful and green. So I've got, it's even so at this point, if I don't stay, if I just stop here, this is this there's competition and also it's small so I need to. The network is In a very unstable state. And so you will be different, but it's not. And you will maybe even be excited. But at any point, if, if I'm challenged, if there's any trigger, activator, I prefer the word activator. I could revert to either of these and then if I revert back to the toxic, toxic regrows. And then there's tremendous frustration. I was there, I was getting there, I know what to do, I know the problem, but I just can't get there. That's the kind of frustration that can lead to a lot of mental health challenges. So we have to get this side shrunk and this side big and, and this whole thing bigger. And that's what takes time. That's why we talk about the, the time factor. I need some coffee.

It's, it's really beautiful to see numbers of days and how things happen over these long cycles. Because they're invisible to us.

Exactly, exactly.

They're invisible. Unless in, in the fourth part of your neuro cycle you talk about finding patterns and triggers. And in my case, because I used to have Asperger's syndrome, people who are on the spectrum are really good at finding patterns. And that's because when our brains are forming, when we're young, there's so much static on the system that just perceiving reality takes an enormous amount of work. So I'm very efficient at that. Then when you heal the biology that created the static, you have this massive pattern recognition engine that makes it easy to see stuff that it really isn't easy to see. And so the, the birth of biohacking had to do with me seeing patterns around the emotions, the feelings of the brain fog and all of that long standing patterns. How did you get good at seeing these 200 day patterns and things like that as people were changing their brains?

I think it was through a lot of. I loved your story, by the way. It's always amazing, always fascinates me. And it's just, it just shows the power of how we can really hack our system, our network. It's the utter fascination that I've had working with humans and working with such diverse contexts, from the wealthiest to the poorest, across countries like Rwanda, in the States, in Africa. And just seeing how people respond. People with, in the most severe circumstances, people with brain injuries where they'd been written off as vegetables by neurologists, thank God they don't talk like that anymore. But, but they used to, they used to say, oh, this is like a vegetable. They're Going to be like a vegetable. So it's a terrible thing to say to a human. Seeing people go from that state to becoming top in their field, getting multiple degrees, you know, being able to track that over time, that's. And seeing the regularity. And my patients taught me stuff. Like I would tell them the stuff and then I would see them grapple with this and work through it. And the ones that, that I started observing these time frames and so started seeing this as what am I seeing here? So it was all the experience of watching and working with people and then trying it on myself. I thought, hey, listen, I need to fix stuff, let me test then my kids. And then, you know, just expanded into more and more time. So the patterns came from, I think a lot of hypoth, like a scientist, you hypothesize and then you test your hypothesis and then your, the thing ran away. I said, this is happening. This, you know, this is unreal. If someone, the key thing that may change, change happen in a person was that deliberate and intentional regularity of moving through a very deliberate planned and guided sequence. And that's why I got so consumed with habit formation. Because the science of habit formation is what the networks are based on. That's how you change networks. Whether you're a 2 year old and you can teach the kids this in advance. How fantastic. Or whether you're an 80 year old or a 50 year old or 6, whatever age, there's always hope to be able to observe your signals and reverse engineer this process and change how you function. So at the same time, Dave, what I also do, where this actually started is I wanted to see if I work with people with traumatic brain injury. And I was challenged by one of my neuroscience professors when I was back at university. And I worked a lot with autism, Asperger's as well. And I wanted to see, because we were told in the 80s, because that, I mean, that ages me, I'm 60, okay. So in the 80s, we were told the brain couldn't change change. So you may remember those days as well. And it was only the early mid-90s with the advent of FMRI, that neuroplasticity was accepted. So when I was still doing research in neuroplasticity of some of the first in my field, and I really had to fight to, to show this and I had to use CT scans and things like that to show, hey, this change. Look at the, look at the, you know, the iq, look at the, all that kind of stuff. So cut all that out. A neuroscience professor said to me, I said, hey, your brain must change because this neuroscience, my brain can't change. And I said, that can't be the case. Our brain must change because we, our minds are changing. At that point, they saw the mind, brain as separate. So that was good about the 80s. What was bad is they didn't think the brain could change, only the mind. But I said, hey, that's not right. If the mind changes, the mind uses the brain and the body, therefore the body changes. So this guy said, well, go do research on traumatic brain injury. There's a pointless exercise. He was really being facetious. And this point is because your brain can't change, so it's difficult. That's why there's hardly any research. There was literally no research in the 80s, traumatic brain injury, and also very little in autism, Asperger's, those areas, because they thought, well, it's damaged brain, why bother? So that's why I got so consumed to try and find the pattern of how we can actually drive that change. Long story.

It's so cool because I think Eric Kandel, who got the Nobel prize for discovering neuroplasticity, won it in 1994. But it, it historically took a generation of doctors dying before new research would, would come in. But now we have people like you and we have social media, we have the Internet, we have PubMed. And all of a sudden the speed of innovation is coming out there. And if doctors don't do it, parents and caregivers or people.