5 Steps to Clean Up Your Mind with Dr. Caroline Leaf & Jim Kwik

Welcome back, Kwik Brain. Here's your question for today that is extremely timely. How do you clean up your mental mess? When we're thinking about toxic thoughts, we're thinking about stress, we're talking about fear, we're talking about anxiety. How are we gonna be able to clear that so we can go on and have the peace of mind, the productivity, the performance that we desire and that we really deserve? And that's the nature of today's conversation. And I'm excited to have a friend on Today, bestselling author, Dr. Caroline Leaf. She's a renowned neuroscientist who has been studying the brain and mental health for 37 years. Goodness, you have stories. And she has a brand new book that just came out, and it's all about cleaning up your mental mess. 5 simple, scientifically proven steps to reduce Anxiety, stress, and toxic thoughts. Welcome to the show, Dr.

Leaf.

Oh, thank you so much, Jim. It's so good seeing you again. Great to be connecting.

Yeah. Well, I always appreciate our conversations because I always feel inspired and I really appreciate your warmth and your wisdom. Extremely always practical. I encourage everyone who's listening to this, if it's possible, to take some notes. And when we're starting this conversation, what, what, what's happening if we're with everything that's going on? I mean, we're, we're, we're drowning sometimes. It seems like every media, if it bleeds, it leads. And you can't go through life without having this stress or this anxiety, maybe these, these thoughts. What's going on there?

Well, I think it's just, first of all, I love our conversations as well. They're amazing. And so honored to be on your podcast. And great question, because I think what we've done in this era And not I think, from 38 years of being in this field, I've watched how we've moved from really looking at people as humans and their whole story to seeing humans as part of a biological system.

Mm-hmm.

And like, you are your brain. And that's not the case. And, you know, when you reduce, when you have that sort of reductionistic approach, you don't allow the person to experience who they are fully. So we get into a mental mess because mind is prevalent. Mind is always with you. You wake up with your mind, you go to bed with your mind, you eat with your mind, you get dressed with your mind. They're listening with our mind now. And I don't think there's enough attention paid to mind and what it is and how it works. You know, it's kind of been left as the hard question of science and the domain of the philosopher and pushed aside. And we hear things like stream of consciousness. What I've tried to do for 38 years is help— is research what mind is. So what is your mind? Can you manage it? Can you change it? Can— what is the thought? What is a memory? What are emotions? Where does it all fit together, and how much power and control do we have? And I think what really drove me was my initial research began in the years when they didn't believe the brain could change. And I challenged that, and I was told it was a ridiculous question. I have a TED Talk on that talking about the ridiculous question of neuroscience: can the mind change the brain? And by the mid-'90s, we saw that that was the case. But in the '80s, when I was doing this research with people with head injuries from traumatic accidents and that kind of stuff, people with learning issues. I showed that if you can, if you directly and intentionally develop your mind, your mind is malleable, it's trainable, you can actually change your brain. And that was some of the first neuroplasticity research in my field. And then it just became, by the mid-'90s, people were understanding that the mind could change and the brain could change. But then it became the language of your brain made you do it, your brain's changing, and the mind is forgotten about. Meanwhile, if you're not alive, your mind, your brain's not working. So we have to come back to looking at the influence that we have as humans over our biology and the inseparable relationship. So that's kind of where my research went is working with patients of all nature and different socioeconomic classes and people with injuries, trauma, et cetera, war trauma, that kind of stuff. It's a wide range. And I did that on purpose. And I did my research in the field to help us understand mind. So mind-brain for me and the integration, they're separate but inseparable, is critical. And probably before we unpack what mind is and brain is from my research angle, a great way to kind of launch people into this thinking is to think that you, you know, you can go 3 weeks without food, you can go 3 days without water, you can go 3 minutes without oxygen, but you don't even go 3 seconds without using your mind. So if your mind's always working, that means your brain's always changing, your mind's always changing, your brain's always changing. My underlying premise is, well, can you control that process? And the answer is yes, you can. As malleable as your muscles are and you go to the gym and train them, as malleable as your mind is. You know, you can develop your mind and then in doing that you actually change your brain. So that's kind of where the Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess came from and how it's such a— so appropriate in this current time because we've got such a scary scenario of mental health is increasing and people are getting more anxious. And well, that's a very natural response, Jim, to very adverse circumstances. So I prefer to bring in the narrative with MindBrain of saying, yes, it is scary. Yes, we are having depression, anxiety at increasing rates. But goodness me, we faced a global pandemic. That's not surprising. And coming into the pandemic, there was already a major problem. There was already a reversal of trends of people that for years people have lived longer. But from the mid-'90s to the mid-2000s, we saw the trend reversing. So we entered the pandemic with people between 24 and 65 dying 8 to 25 years younger than they should. So people were dying younger instead of longer despite advances in medicine and technology. And then the pandemic hits. So you put those 2 together and you're going to have major, a major strain on our mind, major mental chaos. But we can clean it up. But no one's really teaching us how to. So, well, I'm in the field, you're in the field. There's very few of us helping people to clean up their mental mess. It's all just, oh, you've got clinical depression, take a drug. But that's not the solution. There's phenomenal power inside of us that you and I both know. And that's what I try and bring to people with my work.

So let's delve into this. If somebody is listening to this right now, and they're going through this mental mess, they have anxiety, they have stress, maybe a form of loneliness, they have these toxic thoughts. What would you say to that person who's listening or watching this right now?

The first thing I would say is that embrace them, embrace them, because the research shows— mine, and then some other research just came out of the University of Japan and Texas. And then this is a body of research, but it's becoming more and more showing that if you embrace those emotions, not as illnesses, because they're not illnesses. They're not its. Anxiety is not an it. It's a response. It's a warning signal that there's something going on. So the most logical is that we're in a pandemic. So obviously, there's financial grief, you know, losing a loved one, unknown. That is going to make everyone anxious. So first of all, embrace it as a normal response. Embrace it as a message. And what we see from neuroscience is that as soon as you embrace something, you weaken it. You shift the power back. If we are anxious and we push it down, we actually increase the damage in the brain. And we'll see that in the brain and my clinical trials. I just did some recent clinical trials and I summarized them in the book very simplistically with very simple, this is how the research works for you. But I show direct impact of when we have this mental chaos and we are fearful of it and we don't embrace it, then it tends to control us and it creates tremendous disruption in the brain, damage to the frontal, the both sides, all over the brain and incoherence in the brain. And it creates an imbalance and it down to the level of the blood and the DNA. But you can, with mind management, you can actually catch that and shift the power balance. But Jim, it begins with embracing it. It begins— so my first piece of advice is to people to say embrace it. Like you gather awareness of something, see it as something that you're gathering awareness of. If you gather, then you're in the control seat. You're in the pilot seat. Whereas if you don't gather, it hits you and then you don't have control. So give yourself permission to experience it and understand these a reason. So if you see it not as an illness, but you see it as a response or a warning signal or a symptom of the underlying issues that are currently going on, probably on top of a bunch of other issues, because we all have trauma, we all have toxic habits, we all have things that we, that we need to deal with. We're all going through the day-to-day things of life which are with our mind, which are challenging us, you know, getting in an argument or having this financial challenge in the business or having that challenge or having this family issue. That's just life. We're always up and down. So if we can understand that this creates a sense of mental chaos, that we actually understand, if we can understand that we can control it and direct it, then it's not so scary. But you have to embrace it to do that. And we see from neuroscience that as soon as you embrace it, I mean, are they, is this visual, Jim? Are people going to be seeing this as well?

Some people who are watching this on video on YouTube, they'll see it. Some people listening to it on Spotify and Pandora and iTunes. This will be lovely.

iTunes. Okay. So for those of you that can see, I'm holding up a little toxic-looking tree here. This is literally what thoughts look like in the brain. They're real things. This creates this tremendous sense of inflammation in the brain and the body. But it's real. These are thoughts. We actually built these in response to traumas and so on. And this creates tremendous disruption. And they generate warning signals because our brain is wired for love. And we have this optimism bias in us, which is for survival. So we're drawn to the negative, not because we're drawn to the negative, we're drawn to the negative to fix it because it creates such an imbalance. So if we push it away, if we suppress it, it gets worse. But if we embrace it and gather awareness of it, then with our mind, we look at what we're doing, then we can actually break it down and find out, you know, the behaviors and the emotions. And we can talk about that process. And that's what I've worked on all these years is how do you look at something that is in that mental health sphere that makes you feel, I'm ruminating toxic thoughts, my mind won't stop, it's such a mess in my mind, is, you know, you want to push that away. You want to distract and not face it or numb it. But that's not the answer, because the only way out is through. So if you recognize these as helpful warning signals and embrace them in that way, that enables you then to go into the state of processing and reconceptualizing and seeing it from another angle. You know, so that's—

Beautiful. I appreciate that, because this idea, if we just What will you resist? Sometimes it persists. And it's interesting, this conversation, as people listening to this, that it's— do you find that mental pain and emotional pain is somehow, uh, some— sometimes societally, like, we perceive it as less traumatic than physical pain? It's very socially acceptable to say, oh, I have a stomachache, or, oh, my knee hurts, than it is to say my heart or my spirit feels broken. And then when we suppress that, then that burden feels like it's even more difficult to bear. But once we acknowledge it, it's like a signpost. So is the awareness— I think self-awareness is an incredible superpower. Then you talk about reflecting on that.

Yes. So the 5 steps that I've developed over— and they sound so simple, but it's 38 years of research and meticulous. Every step has been meticulously analyzed in its order and what it's doing in the brain and the DNA and the blood and the body and inflammation. But if you, if you do these 5 steps, you actually then are systematically driving your mind to drive the neuroplasticity of your brain, to drive the DNA reactions in every cell of your body. And we have 37 to 100 trillion cells. So it's very powerful. I mean, this is— you talk about superpowers a lot. This is a phenomenal superpower. So what I've developed is not a new technique. It's not some woo-woo thing. It's totally scientific.

Yeah.

And within that, you can put whatever techniques you want. So like everything you teach, works beautifully within the system because it's a system of how you get your mind to the point where they actually listen to what you're teaching, that they'll study, read your book and read my book and apply these things. So it's how you get your mind in that state. So the first thing, yes, is to gather awareness. And I say gather as opposed to just being aware because we spend half to 3 quarters of our day time traveling in our mind space. So we don't actually, we've got to force ourselves to just think of the now moment and the deliberate intentional discipline of focusing in the now moment is an act of that, it's kind of unnatural, and in the unnaturalness it creates a stress on the body that's good. And but you won't stay there because as soon as you're in that state, your mind will draw on the past and the other present and the future, etc., to be able to make sense of that. So when I say gather, I'm saying gather awareness in a very systematic, very organized, very almost clinical way. A bit like if you are flying a helicopter and you're the pilot, but you are also the co-pilot. The co-pilot's your wise mind, that deep inner wisdom, that wired-for-love nature that we talk about in neuroscience. There's actually neuroscience, we see that there's no structures in the brain for toxicity. There's only for— there's no like fear structures in the brain, for example. It's a learned response. So the brain's for survival. The brain is looking for healthy thoughts. And the healthy thoughts, which I use a tree analogy.

Mm-hmm.

Because the healthy thought is made of all these, it's like a green tree versus a toxic thought. So just to backtrack for one second, we need, we need to understand what a thought is. And a thought would be the consequence of mind. So right now, and then this will make more sense with the 5 steps very quickly. I'm speaking, you speaking, people are either hearing or hearing and watching. So they're receiving sound, auditory sound waves and electromagnetic sound waves and all this, this in this gravitational field. And you with your mind, which is your ability to think and feel and choose, those 3 things. As you think, you feel, and as you think and feel, you choose. So right now, Now, everyone listening and watching at 400 billion actions per second are receiving my electromagnetic and auditory sound waves through the think feel choose mind, and the mind is then pushing that generating and pushing that energy through the brain, and then the brain responds electromagnetically, chemically, and genetically, and converts the words and the pictures into little protein branches with the with the actual information vibrating in the protein branches. But as a tree has roots and a branch and stems. So does that— so as I'm speaking, as we started this, this show, people knew it was something about mind, brain, mental health. That was the seed sown. And as I'm speaking, I'm growing the roots, which creates your perspective or your view, which is the tree trunk or the stem. And then the branches are then how you view what I'm saying. And then that will then produce your words and your actions, which have signals with them. So based on the structure of a thought, the neurocycle will make a lot more sense. And the neurocycle is the 5 steps that I've developed over these years to help you like find the toxic ones using the strong ones to then get rid of the— to reconceptualize, break down, deconstruct and reconstruct the toxic ones. So you've got the wise mind as the copilot and then the pilot can get really messy because it's like flying over this forest of trees. And this actually, your thoughts actually look like trees in your brain. They have an arbor-like structure. So you're thinking, feeling and choosing and building thoughts. Thoughts are made of, like trees are made of branches, thoughts are made of So memory is inside the thought. The thought's the whole concept. So today our thought that we're building is about mind, brain, mental health, whatever you want to call it. But all the information that we're giving is in the roots as I'm speaking, and then the branches are your perception of what you're hearing. So it's quite a complex process. But now you translate that into someone who's experienced grief or death or loss of finance or something in COVID. So now that would be the toxic tree, and the seed would be the COVID and then the what's happening in their life as a result, which is producing this perspective of total fear. or anxiety, and not so much anxiety there. If perspective is how you view, I view life now fearfully.

Okay.

Then that translates into the behaviors which contain emotions, and that then produces warning signals and what we say. And then this whole thing produces what you say and what you do. So you don't just speak. It's every experience. So when you say, I'm so anxious, or you're feeling your heart's fluttering, you can't sleep, and you're really worried, those are, I can't sleep, my heart's fluttering, I'm feeling very worried. Those are 3 warning signals that this thought's generated. The I'm feeling worried is the emotional warning signal. The my heart's fluttering is the physical warning signal. I can't sleep is a behavioral warning signal. And the perspective is the fear. And it's coming from this origin story. So we want to get control over that. Otherwise, that controls us. So the Neurocycle is to gather awareness of this. If it's down, if you can't see it, it's suppressed. And it's— you can't change what's in the non-conscious. But as soon as you're conscious, the conscious mind's tiny compared to the non-conscious. The non-conscious is 99%, huge.

Yeah.

But the conscious mind's only working when you're awake. So you want to consciously use your veto power to say, okay, I'm feeling worried, my heart's fluttering, and I'm— and I am— can't sleep. And I'm also just not maybe focusing as well as I could at work. Those are warning signals. Those are like an alarm that something's going on. So you gather awareness of those, not in the sense of sitting under a huge big apple tree that's full of apples and they're all bashing on your head. Not that sense. But standing back and saying, I will pick that apple, that emotional warning signal, that apple, that physical warning signal, that apple, that behavioral warning signal, that apple, that perspective.

So is that the gathering?

That's the gathering. That's the gathering. And it's so important that you get the perspective of gathering awareness. So you control it. It doesn't control you. I don't want them to hit you on the head. You've got to go into this almost 2-of-you mode. That's why I say pilot and co-pilot, or just 2 of you standing there, Messima and Caroline. Wise mind Caroline, messy mind Jim. Wise mind Jim. And we can do that. We see from the research that, and I talk about this as the multiple perspective advantage. All of this is in the book, everything I'm saying. And it helps you to stand back and observe your own thinking, feeling, and choosing. So you gather awareness. Once you gathered the apples, you're in control. You shift the power balance. The minute you gather awareness, all the little networks, the protein bonds and the chemical bonds loosen. But if I don't gather awareness and I let apples fall on my head, or I just am, oh, this is too much, then I The bonds get tighter, and it's more difficult to loosen them. But by me, in the East, there's a strong philosophy. Eastern philosophy is see messages that are anxiety, worry as helpful. And that's what I found in my research as well. So gathering in this helpful way—that's why I'm stressing it. Once you've gathered in this way, it's much easier to reflect. So you stay in that copilot state—the copilot and the pilot—or messy mind, wise mind—however you want to visualize it—and you start reflect. Reflect is a massive word. If you think of reflecting. light through a prism, it has a lot of color. Or you're looking at yourself in the mirror, there's a lot of dimension and depth. So you— the reflect is, is a huge lot of deep digging, deep, like being a detective, putting the thoughts on trial, ask, answer, discuss. So it's, why do I feel like this? I feel like this because— why am I feeling my fluttering of my heart? And then you answer, and you say why, and then you answer that, and then you say why. So you, you know, you're really getting analytical. Then you, you've got to capture that, and you don't jump any steps. If you jump the steps, you won't— it won't create the same kind of pattern in the brain. And I know we're going to do another episode and we can talk more about the science, but basically when you, when you do these steps in this order, you are forcing your brain to work at the most resilient state that it can, and you're increasing blood flow and oxygen to the front of the brain, and you're allowing an energetic flow that enables you to have cognitive fluency, insight, introspection, all the stuff you need to solve problems, to calm yourself down. So then the write stage is to capture what you've gathered awareness of and what you've reflected on. So you do those 2 steps and then you write. And the way that you, you can write anyway, but the way I recommend, which is in the book, is using a system called the Metacog, which is writing in patterns, which creates a much more deep, a much deeper system in the brain. And a much deeper sort of, when I say system, it pulls information, pulls the 2 sides of the brain to work together. And the mind is working through the brain. So the mind is working harder.

Yeah.

So mind is separate from the brain, brain being the physical, mind being this think, feel, choose, and they work together. So you write down in this format and you literally put your brain on paper. You're literally vomiting your brain out on paper. And then you would recheck that. Recheck, 4th step, is to get some order. What are the patterns? What are they? What's going on here? And then get some sort of antidote. And then the active reach is how you kind of close off that cycle for the day, because you don't want to stay in that toxic state for hours, which is a mistake most people make. You want to limit it to 15 to 45 minutes. And the 5th step step is done at like, you know, it's the last step and it's a little active action where you take what you've learned from the first 4. And it could be that something as simple as, okay, so I know my heart's fluttering and I'm worried because of this and it's okay. It's okay to feel like this. It's normal. We have to often normalize what we feel and then that helps us to calm down. So your active reach could simply be typing into your phone. I've got an app called the Neurocycle app that also goes with the book. And you can just type it into your phone, write it on a piece of paper, and the active of which is to consciously focus 7 times in the day, which takes you 7 seconds, on what you learned that day. And then tomorrow you come back and do this. And so you repeat the neurocycle daily for 21 days. And over the 21 days, you deconstruct this and you reconstruct it into this. So it doesn't mean it goes away, but you manage, you increase your mind management. And that's what cleaning up the mental mess is. You're still going to be sad, you're still going to have anxiety, you're still going to have emotions. It's so normal. It's okay. Give yourself permission. But what you need is to manage. So in my research, for example, my subjects would come in, and this happened in my practice too, come in saying, I am depression. Like that was their identity. Their life's a mess. They suicidal. They giving up. They can't this. They can't— so they took that identity on. But teaching them to neurocycle through, and there's many ways you can use it, you know, for toxic thoughts and for trauma and for in-the-moment stuff. Like you just have an argument and you've got to go and get yourself together. 5 seconds. So there's many different levels you can apply it because you're just basically managing your mind. And our mind's always with us. So what my subjects would say is they would come in saying, I am depression, for example. But by day 21, they weren't saying, I am depression. They were saying, I am depressed because of. By day 63, which is significant, from day 22 to 63, you don't do all 5 steps. You only do step 5. And that's where you actually grow the tree into a very strong tree that it can impact behavior change. So if you want a behavior change in your life, if you want to stop the people pleasing, the ruminating, the overthinking, the constant worry, you can't just do it for one day. You can't just do one neurocycle. You have to do it for 63 to change the habits, and then it'll impact your behavior. So there's a quick overview.

That's it. And I mean, quick is for sure.

Everyone here just got neuroscience, Neurocycle 101, you know, in a handful of minutes, which is absolutely amazing. So these are the 5 steps and people have to honor that. And this is what's happening when there is success.

Yes.

And so when people are battling, you know, and this is so important right now more than ever, is just, you know, falling in love with that person in the mirror who's been through so much, but we're still, you know, you're still standing, you know, and having a process. And I highly recommend the book, I love the book because I love the case studies, the stories, and the strategies, right? The studies, the stories, the strategies on how to do it, because it makes it so much— it's so enriched and it's so very practical. Where can people get— where can they get the book?

Jim, they can go to cleaningupyourmentalmess.com and wherever books are sold. And just a final word of encouragement. What we showed in the research is that if you use the neurocycle, if you manage your mind, you can actually improve managing that worry, people are feeling, that mess that people are in, in their mind by up to 81%, which is phenomenal. I mean, just 10% management will change your life. So 81%. Yeah. So wherever books are sold, but if they go to cleaningupyourmentalmess.com, that's where they can access wherever books are sold.

Astonishing. I recommend everybody take a screenshot of this and, and tag Dr. Liev, tag myself on social media, and maybe share one thing that they're going to do, one thing, one thing that they could do to be able to clean up their, their own mental mess, some small, simple thing. And I will actually, if you tag us in it, I'll get to see it. So I'll actually repost it. I bought a couple of copies of this, so I'll gift out a couple of copies also just to our community as a thank you for listening to this and also supporting Dr. Leaf's new book. So, Dr. Leaf, thank you so much for being on our show.

Thank you.

And congratulations on the Thank you so much. Thank you, Jim. Always, always such a pleasure to see you, talk to you.

Welcome back, Kwik Brain. Your question for today, I want you to meditate on this: how do you manage your mind? How do you manage your mind in these difficult times? And we're excited to have back on the show Dr. Caroline Leaf. She's a bestselling author. She's a neuroscientist. She's been studying the human brain for 38 years, which is amazing. And she's the author of a brand new book, which I recommend to everybody to get, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Fantastic thoughts. Welcome back to the show, Dr. Leaf.

Thank you, Jim. I love being on your show and it's great chatting again. Thank you so much.

Yeah. So I reference, this is the second episode that we're doing and I really recommend everybody listens to our first conversation. So if you're listening to this and you haven't listened to that episode, please listen to that first. There's so much rich information and background schema there from as we go into this. Now, Dr. Leaf, we talk a lot about the mind, the power of the human mind. And some people, they actually interchange the word mind and brain.

Yes.

Right. But I want to talk about how to change our mind to change our brain and also change our world and also the world at large. How would you describe to our listeners the difference between mind and You're asking me—

thank you, Jim. You asked me one of my favorite questions. And you know, Jim, it's so critical. People— it's, it's like, so, it's so key in releasing the superpower of the mind, because the mind is this limitless, infinite force. It's not limited to the brain. And interestingly enough, 38 years ago when I began my research, the mind was much more spoken of as something separate from the brain. And it blended in now, as you quite rightly said, in our current era. specifically over the last 40 years. It's this— I've watched it literally in my career. I've watched this change into this whole thing of mind and brain being interchangeable. And it's one of my most asked questions that people ask me is, what is the difference? So there is a difference, and the most basic simple way of understanding is your brain is your physical. So if you look at your body and you look at your hands, that's the physical. We all know where the brain is, that's the physical. And the brain and the body collectively are made of 37 to 100 trillion cells, a lot of cells, and that groups into the brain and the heart and all the different parts. But that is around about 1% of who we are, maybe 10%. So somewhere in the region of 1% to 10%. And that is kind of— that's the physical. The mind is the force that is actually around and inside the body. So if we were dead now, our body and brain would disintegrate. But the fact that we're alive, able to communicate, it enables us to communicate. We're thinking about what each other's saying. We're feeling and we're choosing. So mind is this, like, gravity. It's literally a gravitational field. It's an electromagnetic force in a gravitational field that is unique to each person. Each person has their own. So I can't take your mind, you can't take mine. It marries perfectly with my physical, yours marries perfectly with your physical. They're separate but inseparable. So they need each other to be able to express. So that one of the ways I explain mind and mind-brain relationship is to think of that old experiment that most people did at school where you take a white piece of paper and then they give you a pile of iron filings. I don't know if you remember that, like just a whole pile. And then you bring a magnet and you put it in the middle, and suddenly the iron filings are no longer a pile, but they've arranged themselves into this beautiful electromagnetic— this beautiful shape. And that is the field, the electromagnetic field. And that's where we learn about the electromagnetic field. So the iron filings are not the field. The iron filings are just following the field. And that's kind of what our mind is like. Our mind is this field. that as soon as that— and it's in relationship with the brain, like the electromagnetic field in a relationship with the magnet. And there's this interrelationship between the two, and we see the relationship by putting the iron filings on the page. So the iron filings in that shape, we can see the relationship between mind and brain by the mere fact that we are communicating. So our communication, what you and I are doing, what we do, what anyone's doing, that is like the iron filings, the actual thing. So what you see is the evidence of the relationship between the field and the magnet is the iron filings between the field of the mind and the brain. The relation, the evidence is that you're a human that communicates and you've specialized in your area and I in mine. And there's something you can do that no one else can do and vice versa. So that's the expression of the iron filings that's unique to each person. So the mind then is this gravitational field and this force which Einstein first spoke about way back when he was— when he won the Nobel Prize, the photoelectric effect, how our body is generating photons. And that's easy to know, to recognize. You walk past someone and you get that electrostatic, you know, when you get a shock from someone. There's a sort of, you know, you walk past, you get that kind of shock, or you hold up a blanket and it kind of sticks to you and you can feel. That's kind of a bit of an idea of this force coming off us. Another more psychological example of mind being sort of but inseparable from the brain and body, is if you talk to someone who's negative and they're just whining and negative and just stuck down and always— you just come away feeling awful. You may have been in the most great mood and then you start this conversation and you feel like you need to go have a shower because you feel so affected, and it can even affect your own mood. So that's an example of how our mind is actually generating this energy. So it's in quantum physics and electromagnetics, we— and different types of physics, we can start understanding a bit more about mind. And it's sort of like it works with the brain, but it's separate but inseparable. So having said that, that's the sciencey side. What is it practically? Practically, it is how you think, feel, and choose. So we're always thinking, we're always feeling, we're always choosing. I used the example in the last interview, and it's great to hear it again. You can go 3 days without food, 3 days, 3 hours, sorry, 3 weeks without food, 3 days without water, 3 minutes without oxygen, but you can't even go literally 3 seconds without your mind working. So if you think of it, you wake up in the morning and you look at your cell phone or you whatever, you are constantly in a state where your mind is working. It never stops. You are always with your mind. So what we want to see in terms of mind-brain research, which is what I've been doing for all these years, Is you have overall thinking, feeling, and choosing. Can we influence it? And that's mind management. Do you manage your mind? You need to manage your mind. You need to manage how you think. When you think, you always feel. And when you're thinking and feeling, you're always choosing. So you want to know how to manage those three all the time. And I wanted to find out, can you? And then I wanted to know, is there a consequence? So if I think, feel, and choose, what happens? What's the result? Just like if you put the magnet with the iron filings, there's a result. You see a pattern. So what is, what is the result? The result is that when you think, feel, and choose, which you do constantly in response to the experiences of life, which is all the time, as soon as you open your eyes, you're experiencing life. You think that experience is being processed through your think, feel, choose mind, and it then gets pushed into your brain. And your brain then is the substance or the very complex organ that responds electromagnetically and chemically and genetically. And the consequence is that you build a thought, a real physical structure made of proteins. And for those that can see I'm holding up a little plant that's got obviously roots and a little stem with lots of branches. So the consequence of mind is thoughts. So you convert your experiences through think, feel, choose, mind, into brain changes in your brain, and those changes are thoughts, and they're made of proteins. These— well, the thoughts are physical substance made of proteins. And you can see that this little plant has got lots of branches and leaves. Well, those branches would be the memories. So you'd have root memories and you would have your perspective of the roots, roots being the origin story, the source where you, where the experience started and the details of that experience, which is then manifested in your, your, your perspective, which are these branch memories and the emotions and everything, which then generates your actions. So the con— that's the consequence of this whole think, feel, choose, you will speak. So we don't just randomly say things, whatever you're saying now, whatever I'm saying now, whatever people are saying to each other now in response to this, that is coming from a thought. So you can track back your words, your emotions, your behaviors, all of those, all your actions, all your behaviors, all your emotions, all your signals, your body responses, because you also stored everything in your body. And from there, you can track back how you were actually thinking, feeling, and choosing, what was your perspective. Right back to the origin story. And in doing that, that's mind management. So, sorry, you want to ask me this?

This is amazing because I would recommend everybody who's listening, just listening to this, to actually— if you go back and review, which could definitely help you to, to learn and retain it better— is to watch it on YouTube. This is where you see some of the visuals that Dr. Alip is sharing. And also, we don't edit the, uh, where our audio is always limited to 20 minutes because it's quick, uh, these quick bites, brain bites, if you will. On YouTube, we put the whole conversation. So you can just search our channel, Jim Kwik, on YouTube. So, Dr. Leibovitz, so you could change your mind to change your brain.

Yes.

If you change that, it changes our world. What happens if people do not use their mind, let's say the word properly, now that they're—

That's good, yeah.

But certainly not to get the result that they're hoping for?

Absolutely, that's an excellent question. So the whole underlying premise is that you, as you open your eyes, you're experiencing life, and that's going through your think, feel, choose into your brain, and it's affecting what you do. So that process, that cycle, is happening regardless. So if you don't manage it, it becomes messy. And that's why I talk about mind management being cleaning up your mental mess.

Yeah.

So what we see as humans is that we can self-regulate. We're very, very, very, very good at developing our self-regulation. But we can get incredibly busy, and our technological age has really contributed to us not self-regulating as well as what we could, and therefore we won't mind manage as well as what we could. So one of the first strategies in mind management, or the first concepts, philosophy, whatever, is we've got to develop our self-regulation skills. And the easiest way to explain that is if people now that are watching or listening, just be very aware suddenly of your hand movements, your eye movements, your body movements, who's around you, whatever. Just be aware of that. And in conversations today, just be very aware of how you say things, what your body movements were, what do you— how do people respond to what you're saying? What do— can you alter your, what you're saying, and then will it impact the conversation? And look at, just look at the responses around you and watch yourself. And if you start that process, our mind is malleable. And so therefore, by increasing our awareness of self-regulation, we then improve our self-regulation. And the little thing that the exercise I've given now, within 24 hours, you will be self-regulating. And if you practice that within 3 3 weeks, you will be pretty good at self-regulating. Within 63 days, you will be an expert. And you will, and it's so useful because as you self-regulate, you can then manage your mind because your mind's always with you. So, mind needs to be managed on like literally 3 levels. The one level is the everyday stuff, the moment-by-moment stuff. You're awake and you've got to work. You've got kids. You've got family. You've got life. Whatever it is that you're doing. And none of it goes smoothly. It's up and down. There's some great stuff and there's some, there's the emails, there's the communication. That's all, you know, that's all happening all the time. And we've got to be managing our mind in those moments too. So the more self-regulated you are, the easier that becomes to mind manage. And then we spoke about in the first session, the Neurocycle.

Right.

You can use the Neurocycle, which is the system that you actually physically do, 5-step system of mind management. But it begins with self-regulation. Then, so that's the moment-by-moment stuff. So for example, I'll be using it. I've got to maybe do a podcast interview and maybe just like, no, I'm in a hotel. I had to do a Neurocycle because we've got no power in Dallas. It's freezing cold and everything's gone, no Wi-Fi. So we had to quickly get, get to a hotel to be able to get ourselves organized so we could do this interview and get Wi-Fi and get some heat because we were freezing at -17. So I had to Neurocycle to calm myself down, to realize, oh, this is like, we have to— well, those are my signals. I'm anxious, I'm worried, whatever. Go through the 5 steps to get myself into a calm state so that I could deliver the information well. There's a simple example. Maybe you get into, into a tizz because someone phoned you and there's some issue with your business, and you've now got to pull yourself back because you've got to stand in front of 1,000 people, or you've got to go into that business meeting. So it's that moment-by-moment stuff, and we forget about that. Maybe you're people pleasing, maybe you're overthinking, maybe you are, you see someone's Instagram post and you have this imposter syndrome and it affects your— you know, we all go through that and in different extremes. Then there's the big stuff. There's— all of us have had trauma, some like from years ago, some more recent. And those traumas, if they're not dealt with, they are causing brain damage. They're causing— because they're physical tree-like structures. So this is a healthy, a healthy thought with healthy memories. Thoughts being made of memories. This is unhealthy. healthy. This causes brain damage, and our brain's wired for survival, as is our mind. So the gravitational fields would see this to be disruption. It wouldn't be a nice smooth wave in the field, it would be a disruption, and that goes against survival. In the brain, the proteins are folding incorrectly, and that affects the chemical balance, and they tend to be recognized by the immune system as a virus. So if you think of COVID our immune system recognizes that as a virus. Our immune system of our brain recognizes a toxic thought, a toxic trauma, toxic habit in the same way. So it also sends out inflammatory factors and the T lymphocytes and B lymphocytes and the macrophages to try and eat that.

Right.

So if you think of it like that, if we just keep it, that means that we constantly have our immune system fighting this thing, but we don't deal with it. Eventually, the virus gets dealt with, hopefully, and it goes out of your body, and then the inflammation can recede. But if you don't deal with your thoughts, if you don't deal with that imposter syndrome, or that, that whatever's causing— you just like live in a state of anxiety. And anxiety is not an illness, it's a state of being. It's a, it's a, it's a warning signal of an underlying issue. Well, the inflammation increases and you're causing brain damage. So you want to manage that. And so you want to say, okay, it's okay to have the depression. You want to embrace it. You want to see it as helpful. So instead of seeing this as a scary mental illness, which is our current message, see the warning signal as something helpful that you can then grab. And that's, so that's an example of the more toxic thing. Then you would work through that over time, which I explained in the first session.

Wow.

And then the other way of using it, Jim, I know we're running out of time, but, and I talk about it in the book, is building your brain. It's one of the most understated ways of building mental health and brain resilience. And it's something that you're actually excellent at. And that is adding, building new information in our brain daily in a deliberate fashion. I spend an hour or 2 a day building my brain, learning new information. But I don't just read it. I learn it so that I can write an exam on it. That level of deep thinking is vital for brain health. So I teach you how to neurocycle for brain building, for detoxing toxic traumas, big T traumas, small t acute traumas, how to break down toxic habits like you're always losing it in traffic or always having that same kind of argument with your husband or wife and the same patterns in the family. You can break those because they're all toxic and doing brain damage and so on. I show you how to use it for building good habits. Like maybe you want to build in a good dietary regime, or they want to make sure that they're building the techniques that you teach them of Limitless in Limitless. So building good habits and over 63 days. If you're breaking down and building, it doesn't happen in 21 days. It takes 63 days to form a habit that changes behavior. And then I teach you as well how to do it in the moment stuff. So it's mind management for across the whole spectrum because your mind is always with you.

It is for sure. It's interesting going through the Neurocycle. And again, I reiterate, everyone should listen to that episode and get the book. And also the byproduct of going through and gathering and reflecting and capturing, going through this process, it gives you, it reminds you of your own agency. That there could be—it could be cold weather, power out, everything. You can't always manage the events externally. Exactly. We could always manage your mind, and now is the most important time to do that.

I always say that that you can't control the events and circumstances of your life, but you can control your responses, and that's what mind management is.

So we're controlling the controllables—you know what we're thinking and feeling, and what we're choosing.

Exactly.

We're managing and conquering that.

Managing that. And I show the science in the book, Jim, because it's so, it's so interesting for people to see. We don't, you know, because you can't see the mind, it's nice to see the effect of the mind. Like I gave the iron filings example where you can't see the mind, but you could see the pattern of the iron filings. So I looked at the DNA in the blood and in the brain using qEEG, and I show, I've got actual colored graphs and things in the brain to help people people to actually see what happens when you manage your mind, how your brain can go from being what we would call a red brain, which is completely all the alpha, beta, gamma, delta are going crazy, which means there's low blood flow and low oxygen, to calming down to a normalized brain. And within weeks, you can stabilize your brain. Within minutes, you can drop— minutes to weeks, you can drop your inflammation levels. And over periods of 9 weeks, you can change 10 telomeres, which are in your DNA, which are the— if you cross your fingers, that's what a chromosome looks like, and my fingernails would be the DNA, the telomeres. And telomeres are a proxy for managing your mind. So the more you manage your mind, the stronger the telomeres, the stronger the health of your cells, because your telomeres are involved in making new cells, millions every second. So literally, you can direct that process. So it's a directed—

Which occurs. which affects our aging.

Absolutely. We showed within 9 weeks that you can lengthen telomeres and biological aging. We had some of our subjects that had biological ages that were 35. They were in their 30s and they had bodies that were 65, sickly 65-year-olds. So here you're 30 and you're sitting with a 60 to 65-year-old sickly body. You've just increased your chance of any kind of disease by 75 to 98%. But by mind management, we— within 9 weeks, we lengthened the telomeres and the chronological biological ages were the same. I mean, that's what this mind management does. And I put all that in the book, those kind of examples of the science.

Well, I highly recommend all our Kwik readers get a copy of your book. Again, it's, uh, Clean Up Your Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, Toxic Thoughts. Thank you so much, Dr. Leaf, for writing that book. People can find it online wherever books are sold.

Yeah, cleaningupyourmentalmaze.com, online wherever books are sold, drleaf.com.

Yeah, and it's a great reminder that the sky is not the limit. It's really our mind. And when we change our mind, we can change our brain, and we can change our brain, we can change our life, we can change our world.

Absolutely.

That's where it all starts.

Absolutely.

Amazing. Thank you so much for being on our show again.

Thank you. Well, I thank you. I thank you for the opportunity, and I love talking to you. It's amazing.

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