Why Mindfulness is Not Enough with Dr. Caroline Leaf

Welcome back to another week of the Coaches Council. And guys, I can't tell you how excited I am today. You're going to leave with a whole new wealth of knowledge, a whole new level of information, and a whole new way to apply that mind, body connection that we talk about so often. And so Today we've got Dr. Carolyn Leaf coming on. If you've ever looked into her work, she has been doing amazing things in cognitive neuroscience and the way in which she applies it, the way in which she makes it tangible, tactical and applicable to our lives, is really, truly amazing. She spent millions of hours, and I take that literally millions of hours, reaching millions of people globally, sharing her time with people such as the TED talks of the world, the O magazines and the big wigs. And so the fact that she's willing to spend time with us today and grace us with her presence is amazing. And I had to kind of start this podcast because we, as we got on, we started talking and talking, talking, and lo and behold, 15 minutes passed and we hadn't even started the podcast yet. So you guys are in for a treat and can't wait to get going deep into this. So, Dr. Carol and Leaf, thank you so much for spending the time with us and really excited to get going.

Thank you, Justin. I'm really excited to be on your podcast and just to talk to you. As you said, we had a really good 15 minute conversation before we even started, so it's going to be exciting.

I'm so excited to chat with you and really kind of dive a little into what neurophysiology really is. If you can explain that to the audience a little bit. Because when you hear these big words of cognitive and megacognitive neuroscience and neuroplasticity and brain change, it sometimes is like, oh, my God, I'm just overwhelmed. I don't belong in this space. I shouldn't know anything about this. So kind of explain a little bit what that means to our listeners so that it becomes a little bit more reachable, if you will, accessible.

I love it. Justin, that's a great question and such an important one and such a great place to start because, yes, you're quite right. Then you throw out all these terms, neuropsychiatric brain disease and everything. People immediately think, okay, I don't need to. It's too hard. I don't need to know about that. I come from the angle of, absolutely, you do need to know about it. So let me make this thing as accessible and simple for you as possible. Because when you understand how you function and what all these things actually mean. You are going to have so much more ability to self regulate and mind manage and have autonomy and be empowered to basically face those toxic thoughts and stress, etc. And actually see them as opportunities and not barriers. So that is my goal. I've been involved in the field for nearly four decades now. It's 38 years. I practiced clinically for 25 and I've done research for 38. Just finished recent clinical trials already on to my next lot. I'm always rolling into the next lot of research and I say that to say is that everything I tell you isn't just pop psychology or nice wellness sort of fads or anything. And there's a tremendous amount of great stuff in all of that. I'm not saying it's wrong, there's a tremendous amount of good stuff, but I think a lot of people don't ground it sufficiently in a nice solid scientific if you do this, this is what's going to happen. Bearing in mind that science obviously does change. So with that introduction, if I may, Justin, I'm going to use some models just to help people understand. And so here we all know what the human brain looks like. But essentially what's happened in our current culture is that we have confused brain and mind so they seen as the same thing. And that's the first place where it's almost like the brain stuff seems like it's not your space. And that's because we don't really understand the difference. So your brain is part of your physical. And I have another model here which kind of just kind of helps us understand this and that is essentially that the way that your brain and your body are your physical and that's around about 1% of who you are. And I mean I say that again, your brain and mind, complex physical, but it's about 1% of who you are. If you did, all of this disintegrates. So what is the thing that's keeping this alive? Because at the moment if we hooked you up to various different types of technology and I know you use heart rate variability, I use QEEG and I use blood measures and look at DNA and all kinds of different measures, glucose monitoring, I mean there's a million different ways that we can see what's going on in the body and measure its different types of brain technology, all of those are simply telling us about how our body and brain are responding to what's going on in your mind. So your mind is this separate but Inseparable factor that is basically driving the physical. And so the physical brain and body are responders, they're not generators. And that's massively different. That's a very good thing to understand, is that your brain and you need your brain and your body. The complexity of your brain and your body is massive because you are complex, we brilliant, complex beings. And that you, this, you nurse this Justin Nissan, Caroline Nissan, everyone who's watching this, that you is your mind. So your mind is this massive ability or this massive, this enormous, infinite ability that we have as humans to think and to feel and to choose. So let's make it so simple. Here's brain and body, 1% physical. Driven by what? What's the 99%? The 99% is you. What are you? Mind. What is mind? How you think, how you feel and how you choose. See how my three fingers are held together? Those three things go together. You. When you think, you will feel. You can't think without feeling, and you can't think and feel without choosing. So you are always thinking and feeling and choosing 247 during the day, you think, feel and choose in response to whatever is going on. From the time you open your eyes till the time you close your eyes, everything that's going on in your life, you will think. You, with your thinking, feeling, choosing, you are uniquely thinking, feeling and choosing in response to everything. And that's a force, like an energetic force, a processing force that you then push through your brain and your body. And your brain and body respond by building what you experience into the brain, into the body and into the mind, which is you, which is your thinking, feeling and choosing, and which we can see from things like electromagnetics and quantum physics and classical physics and epigenetics and various different fields. When you combine them all together, you can understand this in terms of gravitational fields. So here's now to kind of put this all to bed and to make it really simple is mind is therefore 99% mind is how you think, feel and choose. Mind is operating 247 during the day. You think, feel and choose in response to life. And you build. The response is that you build that experience into your brain, into your body and into gravitational fields. And then that's what you from that is what you say and what you do. At nighttime, you're still thinking, feeling and choosing, but you're sorting out the thoughts that you've built into your brain, body and gravitational fields during the course of the day. So it never stops. So if you think of it like this, we can go three weeks without food, we can go three days without water, we can go three minutes without oxygen. But we can't even go three seconds without thinking, feeling and choosing. So your mind, which is you, is always in action. So you are mind, you are thinking, feeling and choosing. And you are always in action, creating. And that creating is changing the brain. So you are directing what we call neuroplasticity. Neuro meaning brain. Plastic means to change. So when I say your mind is 99% think, you'll choose building thoughts into the brain. You're changing the structure of your brain. So you are creating neuroplastic changes in your brain. Your brain is always changing, you are always thinking. So the premise underlying the work that I do is if your mind is always working and if your brain is always changing in response, and if your body is always changing in response, then shouldn't we be managing our thinking, feeling and choosing and therefore systematically change in influencing the direction of neuroplastic change and influencing the direction of DNA change and influencing the direction of change in the gravitational fields? And the answer to that is yes. So that's mind body integration. You can drive, systematically drive your thinking, feeling and choosing and therefore drive the neuroplasticity and the DNA response in your brain and your body. That's the power that we have. And that's the area that I've worked in for 38 years. And that is the area that you work in, Justin. I mean this is doing it from different angles. But I mean I come at it from a very sort of how does this whole thing work? Scientific, clinical, therapeutic, mental health angle. You coming at in terms of personal development and achieving your goals and fulfilling your dreams and really getting to the, to why people are happy, but not achieving. I think I've described your work, you know, with your four steps and identify your struggles and all those things. Those four steps are brilliant. Creating personalized thing, personalized plans, building positive habits. All of that is when you talk about those words, that's you taking your thinking, feeling and choosing to build positive habits to create a personalized plan. You doing that with your thinking, feeling and choosing and you teaching people, you categorize those thinking things into those four areas and you're teaching people how to do that. But behind all of the personalized plan, the identify struggles is thinking, feeling and choosing. So when you do that, you are actually facilitating a process where you are helping your clients direct a neuroplastic change in their brain. And that's what I've been doing for 38 years. I do it from a mental health perspective. You do it from a more personal development perspective. But you essentially, you can drive this process, which is incredible. So neuroplasticity is how the brain changes. You can direct that change. Mind is this force, this thing feels choose that changes the brain. And the last visual I can give you, just to kind of maybe summarize this is think of when you were back in school and think of when you were given a piece of white paper and iron filings, you know, the little iron filings. And they were just this pile on the paper. And then you got a magnet, you put that in the middle and you got all these really cute electromagnetic fields developing. Look a little bit like a spider. And if you bought two magnets in it, change it. But the point is that when you take the magnet away, there's just a blob of iron filings. When you put the magnet back, there's this force. So you could actually say that the magnet is like your brain. And the force that you see generating, that's the shape of the iron filings. As the iron filings are going to a shape. That's your mind, that's your mind taking those iron filings, filings, or the experiences of life, you process them through the brain and you get all these shapes created. I mean only that helps people to just distinguish between the two. And that's the force of the brain. And yet the mind on the brain and the response of the brain to the mind, you need both. You cannot have the brain and body to express yourself. But it's mind controlling brain and body, heart etc, etc, not the other way around. And having said that, sorry, I know I keep saying last thing, but you can, you can have damage in your brain and body, you can have tumors, you can have heart disease, etc, etc, there's obviously a cause of that. But once you have got damage in the brain and the body short feeds back into the mind, there's a back and forth feedback loop. Mind to brain, body, brain, body to mind. You know, this is why we have to exercise and eat healthy and you know, get sickness under control, etc. Etc. But mind still drives that. So the effectiveness for example of medication, for example to treat a tumor or medication for heart disease, or surgery for sore knee, the effectiveness that is still controlled by your mind. So we see that mind will influence how well that drug will work in your body to bring healing, how well, etc, etc. So your mind influences, for example when you're eating, it's influencing your digestive system. So 80% of nutrition can be lost if you're in a toxic state, even if you're eating a healthy meal and exercising. So your mind is actually reducing the ability of the digestive system, for example, the pancreas or something and all the different parts to digest food. Mind is the source, mind is where it begins. We don't understand and manage mind, pretty much everything else becomes just kind of messy.

I love that. And you, for all the listeners out there, I know we've talked about this so often, where your beliefs create your thoughts, create your emotions, or as you said, feelings, and ultimately creates your action which thus creates a result. And by following that path, which exactly Dr. Leif just spoke about, those in turn foster your beliefs that really, what do we call your beliefs? They're not yours. Your beliefs are things that are learned. They're things that over time experiences that we have are continually fostered within to our own mind system in which Dr. Leif just kind of brought together and brought to life for us there. And so now we can start to understand the power that our mind has. The power of being able to think about something and manifest something. And the energy and the aura in which we show up in this world and how all of a sudden the incurable diseases, we believe that they get cured, all of a sudden get cured. The Lance Armstrong's who have 99% of their body covering cancer, is now cancer free and winning a Tour de France. We've got people who are jobless, homeless, looking for jobs, all of a sudden change the way they think, change the way they believe, and lo and behold, they get the job that gets them to the new level in which they were never able to get before. And we see these as miracles, but rather it's the massive power of the mind that each and every single one of us possess. And we have simply chose not to manifest its absolute power in unique ways. So this is incredible, Dr. Leif, and I love how you've brought it to this simple understanding effect. A question I've got for you going from there is how then do we manifest or take the power in which our mind possesses and now allow it to create powerful habits and feelings that will then help manifest those results for us.

Excellent question. So the answer to that is very clearly explained in my book Cleaning up the Mental Mess, which is my new book that's coming out that actually really is a summary of kind of all these concepts because I'm going to be throwing a lot of concepts at all of you. So in terms of the science. Okay, let's answer that question in the most simple way. I'm going to show you some more images and just backtrack for a moment and then this will help you understand how we can start to manifest that we are not on that road.

Dr. Leif, I want you to why you utilize props so much Because I think it's. And for the listeners out there understand this mind body connection. Again, this does not have to do just because she likes to throw things on the screen. There's a purpose behind it. So can you give a real quick description or as to why you use props to help?

Absolutely, absolutely. So if you're going to help people understand change, you're going to give them knowledge. So we're giving you knowledge at the moment in our job discussion, but we have to also be able to shift your attitude and we also have to be able to give you skills. So it's called knowledge, attitude, skills. In order for someone to change, you have to be able to think, feel and choose about knowledge. Think, feel and choose about attitude. Think, feel and choose about skill development. So remember the core, if you had to start with the most basic you're alive. What is keeping you alive? Your ability to think and feel and choose. That's your first core. That's mind. Mind is first core. Mind then is this thing that enables us to process. So I am using tools to give you knowledge, props to give you knowledge that are easier to. So it's not just words but you're getting. I'm stimulating your whole brain. I'm giving you multisensory stimulation. I'm giving you visual analogies, I'm giving you physical analogies that you can take these complex concepts and hook it onto. That helps to shift your attitude and get you excited because you can actually visually see what's going on. And then that will help then with laying the foundation for skill development. Because if you, if I just came in and started this interview with these are the five steps of how you change your mind, you would say oh nice five steps. And you would not. You may use sort of use them but if you understand why and what they are through the use of props to make it easier to understand the impact of mind, brain, body and how the five steps are actually how you release that power that you're talking about. You want to know how to release the power you have to neurocycle. Neurocycle. Neuro mean brain cycle needs to brain. You need to be able to neuro cycle through your brain. So a neuro cycle is a way that you can systematically get your mind under control. So literally mind controlling mind to change brain and body. That is how you manifest the power. But in order for me to really get you to understand what is a neuropsycho, in order to release the power, which is the question you asked me, I'm giving you a lot of knowledge. So that's why the props just make it more accessible and easier to. And it's going to build the memory into your thought trees in your brain in a much more effective way. So I'm going to shift knowledge, establish.

That level of emotion to help further ingrain the memory in our brain. I love it.

Exactly. So think, feel and choose always go together. That's mind. If you think, you feel, you think and feel, you choose. So that means you're always thinking, always feeling, always choosing. It's happening at 400 billion actions per second right now. As you're listening to me right now, you are thinking, feeling and choosing about what I'm saying and what you see and you are that is generating that energy. It's going into your brain. And you are and your brain, that combination of that thinking, feeling and choosing what you're hearing and seeing is moving into your brain. Your brain responds electrically, chemically, electromagnetically, electrochemically, and also genetically. So and then, and when, what I mean there is that it takes all these words and things that you see, does all this chemical, electrical stuff, and there's an end product. What's the end product? Proteins are made. How do the proteins, what do they do? They group together into clusters that look like trees. That's why I use this, this, this little plant. You, what you are building in your brain now of what I'm saying is a thought tree. So every moment of every day, every three seconds and every second, literally you are responding by thinking, feeling and choosing with your mind and building thought trees in your brain. So in any one day, you're building thousands of thoughts into your brain and you have existing thousands of thought trillions and trillions and billions and trillions and however many thoughts in your brain, because every experience is processed through thinking, feeling and choosing and built into a thought in your brain and then in your DNA of every cell of your body. It changes your DNA and then also into the gravitational fields. So you're building forests. So this, what I'm telling you now is going into your brain as trees. These trees are made of proteins. And my information that I'm giving you and that you see are vibrating in little protein in the proteins Forming these branches. At this point you've grown about 100 branches. In the next few seconds it'll be another hundred and so and these branches contain the data of what I'm saying, the facts about brains and neurons and mind brain as well as the emotions that you experience. You have excitement, hope, whatever experiences you are having plus it's pulling up existing memories. So as I'm talking, talking the stuff you know is popping up from your non conscious mind, maybe some toxic trees as well because this is a healthy one, this is a toxic one. So you may have had some negative experiences about whatever we talking. So that could be. So you've got it at any one moment consciously from your non conscious, no, not subconscious, not unconscious but your non conscious mind, these thoughts are popping up. So this thought tree is where the, this process of being able to gather data and convert it into these thought trees and use these thought trees is where the power resides. And that's what the neuro cycle teaches you to do. So you want to release your power. You can take the neuro cycle which is a process and you use that to do the four steps you teach. You would actually is how do you use your mind to learn how to do that? So the neuro cycle is not a technique, it's not a, it's not a four step, a five step process in terms of releasing. It's the precursor to the kind of things that you do. So it's how do I get my thoughts together that I can actually listen to someone like Justin to learn how to do those things. Does that make sense? So where we missing it is we're missing the middle step. We tell people all these things and I know you as a person who works with people and I know, I've worked with people my whole life. There's this thing about this is how you do it, why aren't you doing it? That there's that gap, that space between I know what I should do and there's all this fantastic advice and I know those solutions will work. But here I am and I'm not able to apply it. How do I judge the gap? What's the bridge? Well I need to get my mind right and that's what the neuro cycle does, which is what I teach in the second half of the book. So essentially we as humans are always doing this, doing this conversion process. But most of the time, a lot of the time, not most of the time, a lot of the time we're doing it in a very messy way. So we're Making a mental mess because we not organized enough because we haven't been taught that mind is something that needs to be developed, that it's a skill that needs to be developed and it's a skill that once you've got it then you can use it to go to school, go to university, go and do courses to enhance your self development, go and learn whatever skill, go to therapy, etc. So that doesn't replace the neuro cycle is how you do life, it's how you do all those things. So I've taken a non conscious neuroscientific process or a neuropsychological process and I've made something that is non conscious consciousness so that we can control over control and direct how the effectiveness of that works. So to come back.

Sorry, no, I was just gonna say that's absolutely brilliant because there's a quote out there, Simon Sinek said it and he goes if all it had to do was with the information then we would all be billionaires with six packs. But that's exactly the case.

It's obviously not the case because there's that individual uniqueness, the I factor, the mind I my thinking, feeling and choosing what am I doing with that and then obviously surrounding that are all your circumstances. So we've got to always look at what you've experienced. Adverse child experiences and also even positive child experiences doesn't guarantee that you're going to have a great life in the future. We really have to recognize that we can't control events and circumstances but we can learn to control how we respond. And the neuro cycle, the concepts I teach and have been researching in the mind brain realm teach you. How do I do that? What is this first cause thing? Not what's my heart doing and the neurons in the heart and what's my brain doing? That's all important but those are responses. It's very important. I mean things like heart rate variability, glucose monitoring, qeeg, which are. These are all the measures that we can use to see the impact of when we do get our mind under control and we do get our mind under control to learn how to apply the different things. So this thought tree by May for a moment explain this thought tree. You have trillions of these in your brain. As I said at the moment, you are taking my words and building these into your brain. And as a tree has branches so a thought has memories, so you are building thoughts. Thought is like think of a huge forest and you are growing a new tree in your forest as you're listening to Me, but the tree, first of all, you sowed the seed, which was your introduction to me. So people know this is about beyond mindfulness. Dr. Leaf, whatever. Then we started growing the roots. As I started speaking, as I'm growing the roots, that's generating a tree trunk and branches. And those. These branches contain the result of our thoughts and our feelings and our emotions. I'm sorry, our thinking, feeling and choosing. So our thinking and the roots. The roots are like the origin. As I tell you stuff, as you make sense of the stuff, you grow these, so I tell you stuff, you make sense of it. You get these, I tell you another fact. You grow another lot of proteins and stuff. And then that adds another. Your interpretation. All of these, that level and that level contain information, emotions and choices because you think, feel, choose. So think, feel, choose makes data what you think about your feelings and your choices and that then this is the interpretation. That's what I'm saying. That's what you do. Does that make sense? And these are memories. We always think memories are something separate from thoughts. This is the thought, the thoughts made of memories. These are the origin, source, and these are how you interpret them. Then from here is what you say and what you do. So the person the easiest is like if a person is abused, they have this perspective of they no good or shame, or they can't form relationships or whatever. And that then forms the interpretation of that. And then that's how they manifest. They can't form proper relationships or they get tremendous anxiety or whatever. But that you can. So you can look at what you're doing and you can track it back to the origin and you can deconstruct this and reconstruct it. And that's what you're doing with the neuro cycle. In your case, in the work that you teach, you are teaching people to say, okay, I'm not achieving, I'm not getting my goals. So why, why, what's the route? It's your first step that you take them through is to find out what the root is. So you, you're pulling up this thing of. And it starts with, what are my behaviors? What am I thinking about? What's my perspective? Where did this come from? You know, and then from there you. And you use the neurocycle to do that. And then you'd use the neuro cycle to do your step two, which is create a personalized plan. Okay, what step are you getting? See what I get it, I completely.

Get it makes total sense. And so for everybody out there, because I've Read your book, I've gone into it. And once you guys come off of this podcast, you're going to have to be looking out for cleaning up your mental mass as it's been. Here it is, it's absolutely transformational in the way that you think. I want you to kind of go deeper into this neuro cycle because, and it's five step process in how we activate it, how we tune into it. Because as we've talked about in the health and wellness industry, it's a 4 trillion dollar industry and we continue to see tricks, hacks, secrets, all these things come out that you know what it comes back to? Consistent hard habits in ingraining into our lives that ultimately lead to success.

Exactly.

There's something scientific that has to be built in there. Because if not, then why are, if we're investing $4 trillion into the health and wellness industry, why do we have the rising obesity rate? We do. Why do we have the rising heart disease rate that we do, why do we have the rising insomnia issue? We do. Sleep deprivation, anxiety, depression, all of these things that we can continue to talk about. We're continuing to put more and more money into the health wellness industry, but we're seeing a couple continual decrease in the health and wellness of our actual society. And so there is a major disconnect between information and application and it stems right in this neuro cycle. So can you go into depth with that?

You've really got it. Thank you, Justin, for seeing it that way. If I may just start that question by answering, and I've got it in a chapter in this book, which you would have seen is that whole thing of we've got all the access to this knowledge, but we not use. And if you look at what's happening across globally to people, to humanity, it's actually quite frightening. And this is, I'm not even talking about the pandemic, that the pandemic's just added to the problem and it's going to shift.

The pandemic's just made it aware to people that were.

Exactly, exactly. And it's also going to cause us to go and rethink, which is also a good thing because we have to rethink how we're doing life. But between up until the pandemic there was a very scary thing starting to happen and that's that the trend of people living longer started reversing. And this reversal was first picked up in about mid 90s and then by the mid 2000s it was confirmed and it's continued and what that reversed is instead of people living longer, which doesn't make any sense because we've got advances in technology and medicine, so people should be living longer. And they have been. But between around the mid, between 1996 and the 2000s and now that trend reversed. So listen to what I'm saying, this is almost impossible to process with advances of technology, medicine and all these wellness trends and all these tricks and all these things that you can do, green juice to meditation. And we're going to get back to that. Why has the trend reversed? So people now in today's age are dying what we call deaths of despair. And people are dying between 8 to 25 years younger than they should now in 2021 from, from preventable lifestyle issues and diseases. So that's insane. The trend is reversed, people are dying younger, but everything. So technology and medicine are going forward and humans are going backwards. So what's that disconnect? So we've come out of an infamy, we're in an information era, technological advancement, etc, etc, but yet people are dying. So if we analyze and really cut to the core, we see that people are dying from preventable lifestyle diseases. So what is lifestyle? Lifestyle is what you do. It's how you think, feel and choose about what you eat, how you sleep, your exercise. Those are the most obvious. The others are how are you managing your relationships? How are you speaking to your spouse, how are you connecting with your boss, how are you dealing with people pleasing? How are you dealing with sitting with yourself and your thoughts are going through your head and you're ruminating. How are you managing that argument you've just had? How are you dealing with the traumas from the past that are now impacting your current marriage? How are you, etc, etc, etc. In other words, all that is mind driven and that's not being addressed correctly.

And that is so great to bring up because listeners out there, everything that she just mentioned is what it is. Sympathetic, stimulating, internal within our body. Sympathetic overload is what's killing us. Otherwise known as stress. Otherwise our body doesn't. Our body is amazing, but our body does not know the difference between mental, physical, emotional, spiritual stress. It just sees it as one input. And that is incredible that by having that sympathetic overload, those cumulative facts that Dr. Leif just talked about managing stress is killing us 18 to 25 years younger than we should simply due to preventable lifestyle diseases. I love it. Dr. Leif, keep going.

It's unreal. And you know that stress actually is designed to work for you, stress is a good thing. Stress puts your body into the most, it's a totally positive thing. It does 1400 neurophysiological things. So brain, body stuff that helps you to be more focused, have more clarity, etc, etc. But if we don't manage our mind, those 1400 neurophysiological responses will work against you. And I'll give you a very simple example which kind of brings this point home. Let's say that you've just had an argument and you don't manage it and you kind of go through the rest of the day with this worrying you and you carrying it with you, or you've just got a text from someone and it was really hectic and it was, you just didn't deal with it. So immediately that's putting you, that's a stressor. So your body is designed to manage that. If you do the following. If you say, oh my gosh, this has happened again, I can't deal with this, this is another thing, it's just, it's terrible. And then you just find yourself ruminating around the negative and then, oh my gosh, I've got to get this under control and you start trying, I mustn't think this way and I must think positive thoughts and you get yourself in this tiz. You have just made 1400 neurophysiological responses work against you. One example of the 1400 is the blood vessels around your heart. And I've chosen that because you talk a lot about heart rate variability. The blood vessels around your heart will dilate, will constrict instead of dilating when they constrict in response to you having that mind attitude of that negative what I just described, that means you'll have less blood flow and oxygen to your brain. That just throws your entire body into chaos. You get increased inflammation, your DNA is affected, your telomeres. I can go on and on and on throughout, from the brain to the body. I can describe the full complex negative things that are happening. But if I in an instant say, okay, I've just had this argument, I've now got to do X, Y and Z, or I've just had this toxic text or this conversation or another, whatever you just read the news or something like that that's shown you, I can say, okay, it's making me feel like this. But I'm actually going to see my response as helpful because the fact that I'm responding like that is telling me something about the root of these, a reason it's a symptom of why, of an underlying cause. So there's a reason why I'm responding in that way and there's also a way that I can manage it. So just that kind of language where you see the response as helpful instead of as toxic then shifts those 1400 neurophysiological responses to work for you. So now the heart example, the blood vessels around the heart, instead of constricting and reducing blood flow and oxygen to your brain, they will dilate and you will increase blood flow and oxygen to your brain which has all the other neurochemical and hormonal and beneficial benefits right down to the level of your telomeres. And I showed this very clearly in my research, which I put a summary of in the, in the first part of the book. And there's some really pretty pictures which you can have a look at in a moment of the impact in the brain. But the point here is that the way you see something is going to shift your body and brain to work for you and not against you. And that in itself will not release the power that we're talking about. So the neuro cycle is how you can learn to shift that response, how you can make those brain, body stress things work for you, how you can get your heart rate to actually dilate the blood vessels to dilate. Another thing is glucose. We all understand glucose glucose monitoring devices and you and I had a discussion about how you can have all these wonderful devices but if they don't work, if you don't know what to do with them or if you just get data and you don't do anything with the data, doesn't help you. So for example, I am testing out a one called glucose level monitor called levels and I wanted to test it out with a neuro cycle. I know, I mean I eat an organic farm to table diet. I, I do fasted workouts six days a week, I do all the hot yoga, infrared. So I'm doing all the right things. I know how to manage my mind. But I wanted to see the glucose monitoring effect. In other words, what is the impact on my body if I do and don't manage stress? So in the month that I was wearing this, there were a couple of incidents where we had an acute trauma in our family, extended family. And I happened to notice on my glucose monitor that my glucose levels shot to nearly over 200, which is, is critically dangerous. That means that my cortisol levels would have spiked as well at dangerous levels, my homocysteine, which means my brain and body would have been inflamed, the telomeres on my DNA would have been affected. Every single thing about my body, and I'm not going to list them all, would have been affected in that instant. So what did I do? I did a neurocycle and within seconds I dropped my glucose back down to a normal level, which was 96, which is around 94, 96, which is normal for, for me, which means I dropped the cortisol, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So there is an example. Didn't take a medication. I didn't. I had it. I had to react in the moment and I had to control in the moment. And sure, the incident went on and my glucose went up, but every time it went up, I controlled it with a neurocycle. So I was using my mind to control my mind. Because just in deep down inside each of us we have that inner wisdom, that what we call the survival instinct of people being wired for love. In the brain, we call it being wired for love. So we don't have any proteins or structures or stems in the brain like people always talk about. The amygdala is wired for fear. That's not even science. The amygdala is a library that responds to your perceptions and it stores your perceptions, but it's a responder. It doesn't produce. You don't have fear in here waiting to jump out or depression in here waiting to jump out. Those are simply responses to you responding to life, adverse circumstances or good circumstances circumstances, whichever. So we reverse this whole thing around and recognize that my brain's not making me do it, I am doing it, my brain is responding. Then I keep doing the wrong way, I'll damage my heart, I'll damage my brain. But the good news is when I gather that up and I start neurocycling, which is mind management, I can then change that response in the brain and I can change that in the body. I showed you my research and then I'll go to the neurocycle. We had an experiment, control group, which are the gold standard research, random control trial, all the gold standard statistically significant analyses, etc, etc, and random control just means it's designed, that's, it's a very accurate, it's a very solid way of doing a scientific study where it's more control, there's more controls in place, you can't fiddle with numbers and things like that. And based on that we had an experimental and a control group and the experimental group and the control group were both made aware of their issues. How? We did blood tests, we did DNA testing, we did qeegs. We looked inside the brain at what was happening inside the brain, the energy response in the brain as you're thinking. We did. We took people's stories, we heard the narrative which is the most important. What's going on? Who are you? What's going on in your life? What's happening? What has happened? What are your hopes? Dream? What's your story? And we also did a bunch of psychological measures that are standard plus one that I've developed. So basically both groups of people, the point I'm making is that they had psychological, blood, brain, you name it, they had all that stuff done to find out what was going on, what was the level of the mental state and their physical state in that moment in time. And then we measured this at multiple checkpoints. So day one, day zero, day zero, day seven, day four, day seven, day 14, day 21, day 42, day 63. And then again it's seven. There were seven contact points where we were. And I'm stressing this because we made them all very aware. Those tests made them very aware that there's stuff going on in my life. I've got this issue, I've got that issue. I'm worrying about this, I'm worrying about that. This is that, this is it. So it brought everything into awareness. And when something comes into awareness, then you need to do something with it. Now Justin, you and I had a conversation at the beginning of when we started that the medit you're going to talk about just being beyond mindfulness. When you talk about awareness, immediately people think mindfulness and being non judgmental and aware of your thoughts and feelings in the moment, yes, that's very important. But your mind doesn't stay in the moment ever. Your mind always time travels. You are always connecting the past to the present, to the future. In your non conscious mind there isn't present, past and future. It blends. And it's very complex to understand, but it blends where the three are seen as one interconnected whole with three different parts. So at three quarters of our day we spend time traveling. So when we are mindfully away, we forcing ourselves to go into a state for a moment in time. And that is a good thing in itself. But you can't just be aware and do nothing about it because as soon as you're aware, you won't stay just in that moment, you will immediately, within seconds, start pulling from the past and pulling into the future. So there's a lot of research Showing that you just become mindful, if you just become away, it's actually quite dangerous. It will backfire because if you don't do something with that awareness and that's where we get a lot of the current pop culture and wellness industry coming out with okay, do this grounding and do that and do that and, and these, some of the, I mean, I'm not saying that they bad, they're all helpful, but they are not enough. You have to bring, you can't just do physical stuff. You have to do it, you have to do the exercise, you have to do the grounding, you have to do the meditation. But it's not enough. It's only the first preparatory phase. So here's now the key, all of those things, mindfulness awareness, tapping meditation, mindfulness based cognitive therapy, well that can come in at a later sort of stage. But the breathing, I'm totally pro those, but they are priming the brain and the body. You have to prime the brain and the body. You have to prime your brain and body neuro physiology to be able to do the mind work. So not step number one, but pre step number one is priming the body. And then from there you can get, you can then jump into awareness and then from there you have to go beyond awareness and actually do something with what you're aware of in a very systematic way or it will backfire. And we saw this in our clinical trial. The subjects in the experimental group were given the neurocycle as an app on their phone. And the neurocycles in this book we also have an app called the Switch which is called the NeuroCycle now, which has got tons of information, but it literally does. It's like therapy. So you're getting the audio version. So they work in a complementary way. So the experimental group were given this neurocycle and they would, they would work on it each day for 15 to 45 minutes. And this is going to lead into that habit formation that you spoke about earlier on. And, and they then had a mind management technique to identify the main issue that they work. That is obviously we've all got multiple issues, but the top 10 they had to identify and then take the top of the top 10. And they had to work on that using the five steps every day for 15 to 45 minutes for 21 days. Then on from day 20 and all of this is going to be explained in a moment. Then from day 22 to 63, which is another 42 days, they just practice is the fifth step. Now there's A reason why that breakdown occurs, the overarching reason is that from a way, from priming awareness, from priming the brain through meditation and breathing and tapping and havening, whichever method you want to use. From there you go into gathering awareness and then you go through the five steps. Now, in the experimental group, they were doing this process. The control group didn't do it very important. They didn't get the neurocycle at the end of 21 days, more or less. At the end of 21 days, three weeks, the experimental group using the neurocycle identified, deconstructed and reconstructed into a healthy thought pattern. Okay? So they embraced, processed and reconceptualized and those embrace, process, reconceptualized. Hang on to those words and hang on to the words identify, deconstruct and reconstruct. Okay? That's what they did. So the neuropsychical helps you identify, deconstruct and reconstruct why you are stuck wherever you are with whatever anxiety, depression, etc. And that's through a process of embracing, processing and reconceptualizing. The experimental group didn't, the control group didn't do that. The control group got worse. By the end of 21 days, they were so anxious that we saw red spots across their whole brain. Their homocysteine levels had increased. Their biological age had this separated from the chronological age, which meant that the DNA was very unhealthy, which meant that the body was suddenly now very vulnerable to disease. That's a simple explanation. The experimental group had the opposite. They all started, the experimental and control all started with severe depression, anxiety, traumas, burnout, not coping, not achieving dreams, unhappy, all that kind of stuff. The experimental group, by day 21 was saying, I am not depressed, I am still feeling depression, little bits of it, but now I know why I feel depressed because of. And now this is how I can manage it. My depression has decreased, my anxiety has decreased. So they went from I am depression, I am anxiety, I am burnt out, I am hopeless, I have no control, no autonomy to being empowered to say, now I know why I'm depressed, I'm not depression, but I'm feeling depression. It's a symptom and this is how I can manage it. By day 63, they were managing their depression to the point where as soon as they felt the depression coming on, they could. Then they had a technique for identifying why they were feeling depressed and what to do about it, or anxious or fearful or burnt, whatever it was that they were dealing with. By six Months it had been sustained as a pattern. So the point of the whole thing that I'm saying here is that you can't just quick fix through this stuff. It's work and you have to get your mind involved in the process. So the five steps and the easiest way to apply this is because of the work that people know for you. The five steps of the Neuro. The Neuro cycle is five steps based on 38 years of hardcore science of how do I find this? Change this to manage the anxiety and depression and release the passion and the hopes and dreams and the power inside of me to achieve the goals that I want to achieve to. And it's not even so much about me, myself and I. It's about the role that only you can fulfill. And it's not about you only, it's about the role that you fulfill in the world. Social connection with others, true happiness will come from the realization of this is what I can do that no one else can do. Not in a jealous way, but in a constructive way. And how can I give this back to the world? So that would be ultimately the sort of overarching philosophy of where you're going with that. So each step, even though it's so simple when I explain it now, I laid this big foundation to say that really this is not just some woo woo thing. This is serious hardcore stuff that is so scientifically researched that each step does a million things in your brain. So Justin, what I would recommend that we did now and you can decide this is your show is I could take a very simple example of the five steps and just kind of identify the brain prep, do a very simple example and then of each of the five steps and sort of put it into over the 21 days and the 63 days sort of like simplified because I've given you the foundation, now we can actually get into it. Would that work for you or did you want to ask me some. Do you want to ask me some questions first to unpack anything of what I've said.

There's. It's so, it's so fascinating because Elise, my fiance, she does a lot of this inner work very similar to you. And talking about the seven levels of energy in which people can operate. The bottom two being more catabolic in nature, more breaking down the top five being more anabolic in nature. And as you the biggest, we experience all the feelings, we experience the entire spectrum. But it comes down to being able to understand that we have the choice of where we operate in.

And exactly three affects Us exactly back.

To the response that your body has in going down into that stress state. And thus it's elicited through the different information in which we get which is the HRV metrics, which is the resting heart rate metrics, which is the sleep issues that we start to see. And that's where these trackers or these information pieces actually come back and go oh, I understand what's happening now. I can now make a physiological and mind based change to what I'm doing to thus have a stronger, healthier, more mindful and mindful action in our human body.

Love it. So what you just said there is very key I can make a decision. I is what mind? When we say I am doing something I can make a decision to identify those situations and understand that some are catabolic and some are anabolic. I that's my mind. I need to use my mind to understand those seven levels. I need to use my mind to understand what the HRV is telling me. What I need to understand my mind with what the glucose monitor, my mind is doing the driving. So if you get that, if we recognize that we've got this inner core wise mind we can draw on this. Like as I mentioned earlier on our brain is wired for is full of our mind and our DNA, every part of us. It is anything in our brain or body that is not wired for survival, for love, for the optimism bias. So that is the core. If it's everything about survival is moving in the direction of love, of optimism then that means that we all are. The neuro cycle is going to take all this information seven levels, cbt, ACT theory, your four points, the seven. There's so much beautiful information, information out there. We can use our mind to gather that data in to get deeper levels of understanding of how we functioning. So we would all that kind of information fit in the neuro cycle. It would fit into basically the step five which is the active reach. And I know I'm jumping to step five before I've even gone to the others but I want to just give people the sort of focus. The step five you would use the neurocycle to analyze everything but the step five is an action step. So when you've got to do something, okay, let's now look at those seven different levels and see which one you act and work. That would be an active reach but you've now prepared the brain so now you'll actually not just hear about the seven levels of energy and in the inner work or just hear about the hiv. You'll actually apply it. Does that make sense? So if you don't prime your brain, if you don't deliver, if you don't use your mind properly, it just becomes more data that you just simply absorb into your brain. Because your brain's brilliant, your mind is brilliant. You can just keep stuffing, stuffing your brain. It just never gets full. So but then it's just, it's useless information and a lot of it gets lost, 95% will get lost unless you stabilize it. Okay, so you've got to stabilize it. Okay, so having said all of that, let's, let's maybe jump into the five.

Let's, let's dive into those five steps so that now that we've got this ultimate foundation of how powerful our mind is and what this really is. And so let's go into those five.

Absolutely. So I'm going to go from a big picture to the sort of, to the funnel. So I'm going to go from the outer funnel. So the outer funnel is. The five steps are together. Awareness, reflect, write, recheck and active, reach. Those are the five steps. Each of those is doing major things in the brain. I'll just give you one example of each. So when you gather awareness, you are bringing information from the non conscious to the consciousness. As soon as you are consciously aware of something, the little protein branches, bonds become weakened. So that means that I can change this, it becomes malleable. So conscious awareness, which is the first step, which is gather awareness, is helping to weaken the actual neuroplastic bonds in the brain. They're the protein bonds in the brain. So you can change it. It also allows a balance between the two sides of the brain. So that's just a very, I mean it does a million other things too. And I go into that in detail in the, the book in little charts and things just very quickly. The layout of the book is the science, the mental health, that people dying younger stuff. And then the second half is all the stuff I'm talking about now. So I give you a big picture of the five steps and then I go into detail about how you can apply it. And if you want to read all the science, you can, if you don't want to, you don't have to, but I do recommend it. So in now applying that funnel. So the five steps of those things that I've mentioned, but now how can you use them? So this is also part of the big picture. You can use them in two different ways. The one way is the most, is the most simple and obvious way and that is that if I've got an issue that I'm stuck in, like if I've got a really bad habit that I just keep repeating all the time, maybe in a relationship, or there's something from your past that you just haven't dealt with and it's interfering with your presence, some sort of trauma or you've experienced or you really want to build a new habit into your life. So the thing that. Something like that, the most obvious, that you want to change a big thing, you want to change something big and you want that to be a behavior change in your life. You want you getting stuck all the time with this whatever you want to change that. That's the most obvious use for the, the, the neurocycle. And then there's the other obvious. The other use, which is also just as obvious, but not immediately, is in the moment by moment stuff. And I already gave an example. You wake up and maybe have an argument or you read that text or you now at work and something doesn't quite work out the way it is, or you. You preparing for. Preparing for podcasts. I mean, I did a neuro cycle just before we prepared for this podcast. I gathered information about you and I did the five steps very quickly so that I knew more. I mean, I've known about you, obviously, but I wanted to know more detail about what you actually teach people, which can help me tune inside. So there's an. That took me, that just took me a few minutes to do a neuro cycle to learn about you. So I built information into my brain about you and what you do and how you approach life, which then gave me. I'm better prepared then for. Do you see what I'm saying? So there's the in the moment stuff too, brain building. There's the in the moment stuff. Then there's the detoxing of the traumas and things like that. And then the third major application is in brain building, which I hinted at now. And brain building, it's actually the first application in the second half of the book. Brain building is. It's like critical. It's one of those hidden secrets. It's one of the most powerful tools for improving mental health and mental health, resilience and brain health. And when I was still practicing, I would do brain use the five steps to do brain building with my patients before I went into any kind of trauma work with them or any kind of helping them learn how to learn or whatever they needed. Whatever. If I was working with traumatic brain injury or learning disability or Alzheimer's or something, whatever has worked with war trauma or sexual trauma. I did, I didn't dive straight into the toxic, the hard stuff. I always built their brain first. So brain building, the five steps to brain building are as important as cleaning your teeth every day. Like you've got to clean your teeth every day, otherwise eventually your teeth are going to. You wash every day, you clean your house. It's that concept, brain building cleans up the toxic waste in the brain which actually can make us feel very anxious and depressed and really, really cause problems with brain health, which then will cause problems with full body health. Because the brain influences the gut and influences the heart and the heartbeats. And so, you know, we've got got to have brain. So brain building is a, is a great cardiovascular health boosting thing. You, when you learn, you heal your heart, when you learn, you heal your immune system. So when you brain build which is learning. So the brain, the five steps for brain building. I'm going to just explain that first you. Gathering awareness is actually gathering information. So let's say for example, simple example, let's say you're helping your child study for a history exam. Now there's so many moms homeschooling, so you've now got a child, they've got to do a history test. You can use brain building for that and brain and that would be to take the work that they've got to study and to take a paragraph at a time. And you read that, that's gathering awareness. You read it out loud, all your senses and read it with your finger, all your senses. And then you would reflect on it, which means what is. You ask yourself what have I just read? And you answer yourself and you discuss it with yourself. And as you discussing, you circle, not underline, but you circle the main concepts, which is about 15 to 35%. Then you would write that down. Now this is really key, we all know about writing, but you must write in the form of a meta cog which I teach you in this book and in the app that you can get that goes with the book too. It's I've got a video. A metacog is something I developed 38 years ago. Everything I've taught has 38 years of research. I mean I talk about it has got 38 years of scientific research and clinical application. A metacog is a way of organizing information on the page. It's kind of similar to a concept map, but it goes deeper because you're starting in the middle, you're creating branches Kind of looks like a tree and each branch is connected to previous branches. And so you basically pour your brain on paper in this branched thing. Like this thought comes up and you start from the central bubble, you write that thought and then this thought comes up and then you go back to that thought and that thoughts got these associations and so you basically allow. It allows to you to jump around, which increases what we call gamma activity across the left and the right of the brain, which allows a flow of energy through the brain to increase integration and creativity and pulling all your knowledge together, that increases alpha at the front of the brain, which means I can dig deep into, I can introspect more. That then helps me to pull up stuff that I didn't know was there. So suddenly I'll get bursts of delta and so on and so on. So I don't want to overwhelm you with lots of science. But essentially we'll see a complete change of functioning. Go ahead, go ahead.

People know when we're talking about brainwave states and what Dr. Leif just talked about, we operate all day cognitively in this state, consciously in beta. So that's our beta waves. From there we go to alpha. That's like relaxation maybe, maybe that first stage when we're meditating. Then we go into theta, which is more that REM sleep, that meditation, that deep mental imagery state. And then we can go into delta, which is that slow wave sleep that really physically restoring sleep that we talk about all the time that we're trying to get into. And is that dreamless state. But then the highest level, which is when you're in the zone, you're still conscious, you're in the zone, you're, you're playing a sport, you're writing a paper, you're doing something. That's that gamma wave that she was just speaking of. And I know she's got a big chart in her book as well that she might throw up on the screen for us here, but here we go.

There it is, there's the chart. And these are called head maps. And you've explained that really well. And you basically all of the we in all the waves at all, at any one moment, all the waves are moving through our brain. But as we focus in like as we introspect, then you'll get more, you'll get more alpha and gamma at the front of the brain. And when you have a burst of insight, you'll get a burst of beta in the different parts of the, you'll get little bursts of beta across the brain. So you get, so these are called head maps and what Justin was talking about, Delta, theta, alpha, beta, high beta. And then the gamma is not actually on here, but gamma is your highest and fastest frequency. Your brain is operating at all those frequencies at any one time. But they change and they shift when you're awake and asleep as you've explained. And also like what we see over here, what you're seeing over here is someone, this is from our experimental group. This is a person who at day one was, came in because they were extremely depressed, giving up on life, battling to sleep, battling with their weight, battling that's very suicidal, ready to give up on work. Just like they were desperate, they tried everything. They were the last sort of, this is the last thing I'm going to do before I kind of just check out kind of thing. And they, when we, when we did the blood and all that stuff, this is the, this is the QEEG where we looked at these different waves and what we found was that at each of the different waves at that point there's a lot of blue. You can see there's a lot of blue, which means very, very low energy. So when you're awake, like we're talking now, you don't want blue in your, that's so much blue in your brain. You want a nice mixture of all of them, a bit like in the sea. So for example you want, if you think of the waves, if you go far to sea, there's a big swell and then as you come in closer there's the swell gets a little bit, it's not quite as gigantic and wide but it's still a big swell. Then you come up close to the beach and it starts to go into form into a wave. Then you get your crest of the wave, the white of the wave and then the little waves on the beach as it crashes with the little waves on the beach, the little foss ripples are gamma, the white crest is high beta, the build up is beta, the other one is theta. There's sort of not such a big one and the one far out seas delta. And so you want a nice balance of that if you think of a nice normal waveform. But when people are very anxious that turns into a tsunami. If they very depressed it goes flatline. So all the waves are there but they're not operating and then operating like they should also be one coherence or balance between the two sides of the brain. So if we don't get that balance that causes us, that balance comes from us not Thinking correctly. So what I showed was that when you mind manage the neurocycle the depression may still be there but because you managing it and self regulating it, you'll get those alpha, beta, delta, gamma, those things flowing like they should and you get them under control and they may have burst but you get them back under control quickly as opposed to them just staying flatlined or whatever. So this particular subject started the NeuroCycle by day 21, which is at the three week mark. We you'll see the brain is, it's gray, it's mainly gray with a bit of green at the front. And that is fantastic when that gray color shows us that this brain is stabilizing that beginning, that nice flow that I spoke about. By day 63 it was even, it had stabilized even more. And the green is showing that their identity, the way that they see themselves, the way that they self reflecting and their awareness of being able to be in control, their autonomy. They felt empowered to say, okay, I know what is going on in my life and I know it's going to still have times where I'm going to be sad and I'm not trying to suppress that, but I know what to do about it. That was sustained at six months. So the key things that we seeing over here with the neuro and we'll come back to what the neurocycle, how it does this is the five steps daily over the 15 to 45 minutes a day over by day 21 we have you break down that you find the toxic tree and you break it down and you reconstruct it. You deconstruct and reconstruct it. So the five steps help you to help you to gather awareness of it, reflect on it. When you're writing, you're finding out more to pull it apart and seeing the roots as you recheck, you're going back and looking at what you've written which gives you more insight into the roots and why you're doing what you're doing. There's little roots at the bottom and then the active reach kind of closes is a little action you do to stabilize. And that could be anything from just a statement, I am not shame or I'm going to do whatever simple statement because you're working on one thing at a time. So I'm in this particular graph, I'm showing you what happens when you apply the neurocycle to let's say detox an issue. So this is not all the issues. This person was dealing with one issue. It took three weeks to break it down and reconceptualize it. But that memory would not have created behavior change. So we're seeing change in the brain. But if they stopped there, they hadn't formed a habit. Habits do not form over 21 days. There's very little research done on this. It's a lot of myth out there. So I decided to do hardcore scientific research. It takes 63 days minimum to form a habit. So for this person to turn this new behavior of why they were depressed and why they were not sleeping and what was going on, they found the basic core thought and then within 21 days and reconceptualize it. But to change their behavior, they had to practice using it for another 42 days. So from day 21 to day 63, they were doing step five, which was they were practicing using the new thought every day for around about one to seven minutes a day. That's not a lot of time. At the end of 63 days, that's when they'd formed a habit. In other words, behavior change. Most people give up at day four. Within that, not even. They don't even get to day 21. Some people get to day 21, but they don't get further. Then they wonder. They can remember, I did the work. This is what happened. But nothing changed this. So there was massive change. Here is an example of a subject in the control group. Now, you'll see a lot of red there. When you see a lot of red, that shows a lot of high beta, a lot of excessively high gamma. Everything's online. It's no balance. So all that we're getting a lot of delta. That yellow over there shows that my not sleeping well and my memories are are in my awareness, But I don't know what to do about them. So when you get too much delta, you want more delta at night than during the day. But if someone's not managing their mind, they'll get too much delta during the day. That's too much of the yellow. This person at day 21, day one, became very aware of their issues. By day 21, they had been tested constantly, as I explained, but they had no neurocycle. So they got worse and worse. With the increase in that blue there, the red, that means that they're getting worse. By day 63, they were a wreck. They literally had a red brain. Obviously, we gave them the neurocycle at.

This point, and I'm guessing that they were probably cognitively very foggy. They weren't concentrating.

Exactly.

They weren't sleeping. They're Their cortisol. Highly cortisol.

Melancholy. Homocysteine. Exactly, homocysteine. The telomeres which are your. In your DNA, your DNA is made of chromosome. You put your chromosome out, you get telomeres. Chromosomes look like crosses. And the pink, my pink nails would be the telomeres. Telomeres are a proxy of how you're managing your mind. And they, they are required for cell division. So your cells are dividing based on how you're thinking. So your mind drives cell division.

So that can be expressed a lot through different type of epigenetic processing.

Exactly so. Exactly. So if you are in a total toxic stress state, your telomeres don't do what they're supposed to do. So these people with the red brain, their telomeres were shortening and were getting weaker, which meant every cell in their body was weaker to the point where we had some of the subjects that were in their mid-30s but they had bodies of 65 year olds. So without mind management the cells were getting sick. And that increased vulnerability to disease by 35 to 75% which then.75 to 98%, sorry. Which swings back to one of the early statements you made which is people are dying younger from preventable lifestyle diseases. Let me ask you, if you are 30 and you've got a body of a sickly 65 year old and you've got a red brain, you are vulnerable to heart. You could have a heart attack. You could. Your inflammation is setting you up for immune disorders, autoimmune disorders, you name it. Wherever there's a genetic weakness and this. But that can be reversed. We can by getting our mind under control. And that's what I showed when you get. We had other subjects that had red brains at the beginning, they had gray brains at the end. Red being highly anxious, gray being stabilized. Where you in control, where you recognize that life does have ups and downs. But I know what to do about it. So I'm not saying it makes every neuro cycle, doesn't make it all go away. The neuro cycle teaches you how to manage it and to reconceptualize it so that you no longer are being controlled by the toxicity, but you are controlling and have a new way of thinking about it. You've built a whole new thought with all the new memories. So you think, feel and choose differently. So that's essentially what the steps are doing. And I explain all the different applications in here with the neurocycle life hacks and very clearly laid out.

I love it because that's exactly what we start to see with all of our clients in which we work with the corporations, we work with the athletes, we work with. An example based off what you just talked about is we had somebody come to us. Their chronological versus biological age was 35 years difference. And all of a sudden we started to apply Elise's cognitive process of the seven ways in which they operate and our that's the inner energy piece and then the outer energy piece. Looking at the habits in which they were engaging in and using the wearables to help with habit adoption. And lo and behold, within three weeks we had minimized by 15 years what that chronological biological acers look like. And over the course of six months we actually reversed that aging process to actually be less than what they currently were on a birthday scale. So it's amazing.

It's exactly what we did. It's exactly what we did with these subjects as well. We reversed their telomere within nine weeks. They the chronological and biological ages were the same. The homocysteine had dropped the cortisol. The narrative, their life. The most important thing is they were actually the body was reflecting health but they were also their mind was reflecting. I can deal with life. There are adverse circumstances, circumstances, acute traumas will happen. I've got to deal with my stuff. There was the recognition that there's a lifestyle, it's a lifestyle of neuro cycling. Neuro cycling is really my management. It's how you manage your mind and do fit and then you can fit all these other techniques into, into that, into the vehicle.

It's amazing to say it because it's not that it's going to make everything go away, but it's giving you the power and empowering you to be able to make the decisions that you need to do do to make things better for yourself. So I appreciate you so much. Where can people find your book? Where can people find you? Where can they incorporate with you and interact so that they can really help take control of their mind?

They can get hold of me@drleaf.com the book is available at Doc. You can go to drleaf.com it's available wherever books are sold. You can also go to cleaning up your mental mess.com and that'll also take you to all the links for books are sold. My Instagram handle is Dr. Caroline Leaf and I teach all of this in simple little bite sized chunks on every day on Instagram. So that's a great place to also get access. They go straight to Dr. Caroline Leaf. They can actually get access to the book and my webpage and seminars and all that kind of thing.

I love it. I love it. So, guys, as you're going forward, as you're looking at this, we are living in this world that has an epidemic of preventable lifestyle diseases. And the key word there is preventable. And by understanding that, our brain is simply a responder. But what's truly add, what's truly there that creates change is our mind. And knowing that we can create changes within our mind, empowering ourselves to understand that there is a process that comes and precedes the action in which we can make change in to ultimately prevent those lifestyle diseases is empowering and gives us the choice to make it right again. So with that, guys, stay hungry, stay humble, and we'll see you next week.