BREAK THE ADDICTION To Negative Thoughts & Emotions By DOING THIS...| Dr. Caroline Leaf

When you wake up in the morning, as you're going from sleep to wakefulness, there's a massive shift in neurochemistry and brainwave activity. And if you don't manage that moment, you can.

What was the biggest challenge for you to overcome mentally with your messy mind that was holding you back? You know, something that was. Took a long time for you to finally like, okay, I know the science, I know the research. I've been teaching this, but I still haven't been able to do this myself. What's that been for you?

Two things. The complaining in the morning, waking up, very negative in the morning.

And how long were you doing that for?

Oh, for years. I remember from. I remember the. What it was like all through the first few years of my marriage. And I remember as a. At high school to wake up in the morning on edge and anxious and so for years. And I remember one day my husband saying to me, we've been married for about maybe 10 years or something. And he turned around and said to me, you are always so negative in the morning. And he wakes up bright and happy. Go away. You're too happy for me in the morning. And he just said, you're always negative in the morning. And I didn't until he pointed that out to me. I hadn't realized I was doing it, but it affected the first half of my day and would keep me in a kind of negative statement. Here I'm doing all this brain research, and as soon as I did the research, I'm like this, I would go into a high because it immediately, as soon as my work immediately changed things because it's brain building. And that's really important for mental health. Brain building is something that we definitely need to explore in this discussion because it's phenomenal anyway. So brain. So complaining was set because it basically creates neurochemical chaos. Now when you wake up in the morning, as you're going from sleep to wakefulness, there's a massive shift in neurochemistry and brainwave activity. And literally things that were flowing this way now flow that way. And the brain waves, all that delta is very high now. Suddenly it drops down and theta will change and beta comes on board. And so there's a whole shifting pattern. And if you don't manage that moment, you can set yourself up for failure for the whole day or a miserable day. And everything just becomes so much harder. So it's just a matter of mind managing it. And I trained myself. It took me Multiple cycles of 63 using the NeuroCycle to train it. But it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. It actually took me. It honestly took me about. I think it was two cycles, if I stand corrected, two cycles. So it's 18 weeks, which is not that long if you think. I've been doing it for maybe 20 years. And the other thing that held me back, which I've been doing from a child as well, was if only I was. I used to say if only to everything and I used to only this.

If only I would have got this opportunity. If only this would have happened to me. If only, whatever.

If only I said it this way.

If only I did it that way only we had this much more time on this holiday only. And one day, one of my daughters, and I've got four kids and my second daughter, two, three of my daughters actually work for me. The one who's my producer, Dominic, turned around to me and she said, mom, you are spoiling this holiday. Because I was going on about all the if only as we were leaving the holiday and it was once again, it took a person in my, close to me to actually turn on, say, you know, we should stop. And it was a child. I was having this impact on my child and I went into a. And that took me much longer because I had been doing it for so long, long. And that was even now on my. I have an app called the NeuroCycle app and it's. It's on itunes and Google Play and it's always literally me giving you therapy, taking you through the neurocycle. I use that every day. I mean literally. I mean, I know the system off my heart, but I use the active feature reminders because you can type it in. And every day, seven times a day, still it pops up on my phone. Remember your if onlys. So I no longer do it, but I still remind myself and I now can just glance and remember and I can catch myself like that. So I've become 81% more effective in managing something that was so toxic to my mental health that it has completely revolutionized my life. I cannot tell you how that's changed my life.

I can imagine. When we come from a place of if only, what is that saying about us and our life?

Nothing will ever satisfy you. Nothing will ever give you peace. You will always be looking for. The grass is greener on the other side.

Man, that sounds exhausting.

It's exhausting. You constantly can't see what you've got because you're always thinking what you just lost and how would it Be better. I think, I think a level of, you know, once I did the work, it came from, from a desire to be, to be perfect. Perfectionism, which comes from a very poor identity basically and need to prove myself. I was the youngest of four kids. I had a pretty. Okay, so I had my two elder sisters. I mean my family are amazing, but like any family, every family has crazy things going on, which is very normal too. That's something that we all to kind of realize. Obviously not the extreme stuff, that's not normal. But my two elder sisters were really baffled a lot and they just. And I was the youngest and I was kind of had to prove myself, you know. And so I went out in every aspect from academics to sport. And I was always the top academic in the top sports. And I drove myself to a point where it was just too much. And it was, I was always trying to please. And my mom was very British and very. You don't compliment children. You don't give them a big head. You don't. So I remember going up to her as a little child and she knows the story, so she's good with it. We've talked this through and I have a great relationship, relationship with her. But I was maybe 6 or 7 and I drew this picture and I went up to her and I said, mom, don't you love Mommy, don't you love my picture? And she said to me, that's vain. Don't ask me, don't look for compliments. And it shattered me.

And six or seven, that's tough.

Yeah, it shattered me. It completely. And she wasn't intending to shatter me, but it shattered me from that day. I never asked, I just proved and I drove myself. And I was never good enough. Nothing was ever good enough because she never complimented me. Now as a, as an 85 year old, she never stops because she's changed and she's apologized. And she said, I realized I didn't because she started doing it to my kids and being hard on them. And I said no. I said, because she said, you compliment your kids too much. I said, you never complimented me enough. I said, my kids, when they do something that's great, I am going to be their biggest cheerleader. And she saw that and we had this whole discussion around that, but that's where it came from. And now it's sorted out. Now she's, I mean, she makes a point of like everything. It's like really sweet. Now she's trying to make up for it, which is great because you do. You can Forgive and forget. You can't change what's happened to you, but you can change what's in you. But that's where it came from. And once I had made peace with that, it definitely. Once my mom and I had that discussion, it freed me. It was definitely a massive part of my healing. Wow.

How do. How impactful does perfectionism or how impactful is perfectionism on the brain in holding people back? And how does someone let go of this idea to be perfect when they feel like maybe they had something similar with you or they feel like that they need to be perfect to be loved or accepted or get acknowledgment or attention or affection or whatever it is. What is perfectionism do to the brain and how do we let go of it?

That's really. That's an excellent question. It's very distorted because it goes against your natural white fellow nature. Because when you are. And it's all. All to do with identity.

So it's.

And it's all to do with. And when we talk identity, we've got to talk about it as a verb as opposed to a noun. It's something that's organic and growing. So you are Lewis, but you constantly grow and change from life experiences. When you're growing into yourself and you're growing and as we go through messiness and repairing growth, it's enhancing and growing and getting better and better all the time. And perfectionism is sort of non. Acceptance of that. It's like I haven't had a chance to really see that my identity is good enough. And so it's like you've got to always do something. And there's something that's happened. It's generally you, you can't. You know, everyone's got their own narrative. But at some point in our lifetime, we've had something that knocked us. And I. It seemed to be for me that that was where that knock happened. And so they're growing up in that kind of environment when there was never any compliments. And not every child needs that sort of thing. So you, you. It affected my identity. I always felt like I had to prove myself in every instance. And it became a very big thing. I was like living for approval until I could accept who I was. So perfectionism, what it does.

You never accepted yourself probably.

No, not totally. And it's, it's. And I think a lot of us battle with that identity is one of those very. I always recommend that people do regular identity checks that you go. And at least once a year you do a Full on identity check and just find out that you haven't been. Because it's so easy to be shaped by experience and because we it's nature, nurture and I factor there's the nature part of identity. That is you have your genetic makeup, I have mine. You have your own unique way that your proteins vibrate. They don't vibrate the same way as mine. Even though we have the same brain structures, we have different protein vibrations and the way that our proteins fold. I mean I held up this tree before. The thoughts that you built look like trees. The roots are the source, but the branches are your interpretation. So every listener listening to this, now they're hearing the same source. So the same roots that they grow in their brain. But every single person is growing their own interpretation, their own thoughts, feelings and choices around the content talking about and that's identity. So those, those are proteins and the vibrations are different. So our wiring is unique. Nurture wise, nature wise nurturing we have our environment impacts us whether we like it or not. Culture, religion, where we love, the philosophies of the day, all of that impacts us. But overriding both of those is the I factor. And that's your growing identity, the perception.

We have of ourselves. Yes, the I look like in the mirror.

What we look like in the mirror and how we perceive the world that can, that is very malleable, it's very strong, but it's very vulnerable too. And it gets very influenced by very, very strongly influenced by nature nurture. And that's why it's so important that people an identity. So people that are confident, people that seem to get like no matter what happens, they just seem to bounce back. Even they will have identity issues but they've reached a point in their life where they can bounce back quicker maybe than someone else who's got more identity issues, who gets crush. So for me that was when I was practicing, still practicing. I would spend a large portion of my work with my patients on identity because most of the time they first would be the first sort of thing that I'd work on. And then I would do brain building and then I'd do emotional work, you know, so it would be to first build the person. This, you're amazing. This is how we get resilience in your brain. And you asked earlier on about how to brain health. Brain building is one of the most powerful ways of brain using your mind to get brain health.

Did I hear you say that there, there isn't a mental health disease. It's more of just A, a pattern that, or something that we should be mindful of. But it's not an actual disease.

No, it's not a disease. And I know this counters, this counters the current philosophy, but if you look at the science, there's a large body of science, in fact, if you interpret all the science around this field and you really look at what's being tested, you actually will see it's not a. They've been looking for the neuro, neurobiological correlate. So they've been looking for where in the brain is depression. And for years we've been told about the serotonin imbalance causing depression. I mean, that's not even. It was a theory never proven, great for marketing, for selling drugs and also a simplistic way of telling someone, hey, you're depressed, don't worry, it's chemically imbalanced. Let me give you a drug to fix it. You know, we want this quick fix mentality. So as medicine has advanced and technology has advanced, so we've become very caught up in the quick fix. But life's not like that. Mind is not like that. Mind is separate from brain and body. You can apply that kind of thinking, not quick fix, but you can apply a symptomatic diagnosis, treatment approach to body, to physical brain and body. But when it comes to mind that there's this gravitational field, this force, this think, feel, choose thing, it's not going to go. A medication is not going to change how you're thinking, feeling and choosing. It's not going to get rid of this. It's just going to numb your brain. So maybe you don't feel this for while it's working, but at the same time as then, when that drug weighs off, this is still there. This is still being recognized by the immune system of your brain as a problem. So this is increasing your vulnerability. The longer it's there, the more you increase your vulnerability to disease.

Oh my gosh.

You know, and this is what gets you stuck. And these are the patterns. So no, it's not an illness. It is a normal human response. Here we all know that everyone's going on about the next pandemic is mental health.

We.

Mental health has always been an issue. Nurse. From the beginning of time, mankind has battled with life, with issues, with death, with fighting, with war, with whatever. So mental health's not on the rise. But the mismanagement of mental health, making it a disease, has created a whole new problem. So here we sit with before the pandemic, they started doing a population study in the mid-90s. And this is when I was still practicing, early days of my practicing, sort of 10 years into my work and I started seeing this trend of. And I was watching the study where people were the decades long trend of people living longer. So we know, we all hear this message, this is what we've heard. People are living longer because of the advances in medicine and technology. None of us question that. But something happened in 96 that did start questioning that. By the mid 2000s it was an established, researched fact that we don't live longer anymore, that the trend of people living longer has actually reversed and that we have a pandemic of deaths of despair where people are dying from preventable lifestyle diseases and the age group most being affected but are between 24 and 65. So people at the beginning of their career, in the prime of their career and through that that age group are being, are dropping down dead like flies. And it's death considered deaths of distinction spare by preventable lifestyle diseases. So we have to look at the lifestyle. Disease means that there's something in our body that's, that's weaker. Why lifestyle which is mind driven. How am I eating, drinking, sleeping. But more than that is what's my mind behind all of that? How am I actually managing the day to day moments? How am I managing the patterns, the traumas, the established toxic habits? What am I doing about that stuff? And that's when we ignore all of that because this current trend of science is saying, oh those don't matter. What matters is the symptoms. Let's just look for the symptoms, checklist, diagnose, label. When you label someone, you chop up to 10 years more of their life. You know, it's like it's adding on. They've shown studies of people with a mental health diagnosis have a chop up to 20 years off their lifespan. People on psychotropic drugs, because of all the complications and the changes in the brain and the body, chopping up to 25 years of their life. I mean this is serious. So here we have this already existing. Then the pandemic hits. Now another year, they say that there's an additional year being chopped off people's lives. But there's such a contradiction because they're saying, hey, there's this adverse circumstance, grief of loss of people, uncertainty, medical and not knowing if you're going to live or die and how long is this isolation going to go on and economic impact and whatever, the whole lot that's trauma. And they're saying that when they're saying but this is the way to treat it. Let's label it, let's diagnose this, let's medicate it. So here we've come into Covid with a problem with that stupid philosophy that's created such a lot of problems. And scientifically, this is all being researched and shown. And now we've got the pandemic, and now they want to carry on that system that didn't work to this, which is going to make it even worse. So we've got to shift our narrative completely and we've got to stop. Stop saying that mental illness is on the rise and that there's 1 in 4 people on antidepressants who are depressed. 100% of people are depressed and anxious and concerned about this COVID pandemic. 100% of people in the world at some point in their life have and will be anxious and depressed and in grief and sadness and terror and despair. And one of the others, a large percentage of the population, and I'm not sure the exact percentage because no one's really done this kind of research, but estimates it's probably 30, 40% of people will have extreme trauma of it from abuse, war trauma, that kind of stuff, where they'll go down the continuum to sort of the minus 9, 10, 8, 9, 10. If you look at a continuum of 0 to 10, 0 to minus 10, and have things like psychotic breaks and hearing voices and extreme states of distress, mental distress, which are still not diseases. They are simply in that traumatic situation, you're having a traumatic response. Think of someone who's a war vet. I just interviewed a Navy SEAL the other day who was trained snipers. And I mean, the things that he had to do and that his teams had to do, you know, they come back and try and we all know the problem of trying to, you know, reconcile back into civilian life after you've broken. I mean, you know, this is what they'd be experiencing all day long. Stuff that's completely against survival, completely against our human nature. And now they. Instead of them being allowed to process this trauma, they're coming back and being told that they diseased. And he would tell me that what they do with a lot of. We don't hear this sort of thing, but he told me this. They will inject things like risperidol, which is an antipsychotic, into the spines of war vets because they're a bit psychotic. And they. And they psychotic for a reason. It's their coping. How do you deal with this? Of course, you're going to be angry, you're going to be frustrated, you're not going to be able to love like you did. You have to be able to embrace, process, and reconceptualize. Giving them a drug is not going to make it, not going to help it. In fact, it constrains the brain, it restricts the brain. You can't. There's no chemical cure for that. This, this is. That's not. That's just going to add fuel to the fire because your mind's got to work through the brain. So now you put chemicals in and now that's not going to. That's not going to facilitate change. We have to do something. So it's like a narrative.

Do you feel like there, I mean, is there such a thing as a chemical imbalance in some people? You know, when they say, oh, I have a depression, it's a disease, or bipolar, or I have this mental health disease, or I have a chemical imbalance, I was treated with this. Don't try to say I don't, because this is who I am. Is that. Do some people have that or is that.

That's a result of.

Go ahead.

The narrative of I have a chemical imbalance and my depression is from chemical imbalance is a narrative that is the only explanation that people are being given. They're not given an alternative reaction. I mean, an alternative narrative. So the most important thing is that. Anyone listening to this podcast, I want to validate your depression, your anxiety, your grief, your despair, your ptsd. Whatever label you've been given, I want you to. I want to validate that. That doesn't need to be validated with a disease label. You're not diseased, you're not a broken brain, you aren't. Your brain isn't defective. You are going through. Through something. So you aren't something, you aren't that. You are going through something, you're experiencing something, you're experiencing something and you're experiencing. And you've coped in the only way that you could cope in that moment. So it created this adverse response because it was an adverse situation and you were just trying to cope. So what we have to do is go through a process of embracing and processing and reconceptualizing. So the important thing here is to recognize that chemical imbalance isn't the cause of your disposal. The cause of your despair is what you've gone through and what you're going through and learning how to not knowing how to manage it and how to deal with those thoughts that are driving you crazy. And those flashbacks and the trauma of the flashbacks and going back into those situations of the rape or the abuse or the war trauma or the. That it will drive a person crazy. And that's not crazy in the sense of illness. It's crazy in the sense of your mind is like this eradicated tidal wave around you and it's going through your brain and you've got these and your immune system and everything screaming out you and saying, hey, let's fix this. So a disease label invalidates it. And for a moment it might be nice to know, okay, well, there's a label to how I feel because it kind of gives us a bit of. Feels like we've got a bit of control. So initially that gives you comfort, but don't see yourself as that. It's better to say, I'm experiencing post traumatic strength stress issues because of what I've been through versus I am PTSD or I had the sickness of ptsd. It's better to say I'm experiencing symptoms of bipolar, these intense swings because of my whole story than saying, I have bipolar, I have a chemical imbalance. I mean, just researchers coming out the other day showed that we've got to stop saying this. The top psychiatrists that lead this field will tell you we've got to stop saying this, that these. There's no ways that serotonin imbalance, you can't even measure that. There's no gene for. There's no genes or serotonin imbalance causing it. It's what you've experienced that's the cause. And then that moves through your brain and your body. So obviously your brain and your body respond. So we will see changes in the brain and the body. We will see neurochemical chaos, not necessarily serotonin imbalance. That's just one. Sometimes it's dopamine. And if dopamine's down, serotonin is often then in anandamides off. And I mean, I can give you a list of big chemical terms, and that's gonna change every function in the structure of your brain and your DNA and your telomeres and 1400 neurophysiological responses are off. So, you know, that's the response, though. And that doesn't mean that you have this thing hidden inside of you, the scary thing that's controlling you. And that invalidates, if someone comes back from war, someone's had a sexual trauma, to tell them that the depression or anxiety they're feeling is an illness is an insult to what they've gone through. But if I say to you, gosh, that's terrible, tell me about it, I want to hear your story, I want to support you. Your depression and anxiety that you're feeling is a signal that there's stuff going on, there's an origin story, there's a source. So can I listen, can I help? Can I support you in trying to recognize the signals and go through the process to find the origin story and then to reconceptualize it? And that takes time. It's not a 15 minute appointment where I can give you a label that takes time. That's not also, it's also not the conditioning kind of treatments that are in place, that some of them work if they're used in the right place, but to try and put a veteran who's gone through something back into the situation to try and condition them. You can't condition, you have to reconstruct construct. So it's kind of like an algebraic equation. X is, is the situation, Y is how you should want, you want to function for mental peace. So you've got X plus Y. And so here we are in our X situation where we are the sort of human experiencing life. We're supposed to be at Y. And you put the two together. And what the current treatment says is that, okay, now we're going to create Z, we're just going to ignore X and Y, we're going to create a new thing. And that new thing is you diseased. But that doesn't work. It's actually X plus Y equals xy. X is what you're going through. Y is where you want to find mental peace and you want to put the two together, to live together so that you can change how the past plays out into your future.

Oh man, this is powerful. Gosh. I want to go back to what you said. When you're experiencing this traumatic event in the family you had recently where you were wearing a glucose monitor and you mentioned that there was a process. You realized the monitor went through the roof. Heart palpitations, stress. You could feel your physical, your body changing into this stress response, this protection, tightness, whatever it was, fear, anxiety, all these things you were experiencing in the moment. What was the process that you broke down to bring it back to more normal levels for yourself of feeling more peace, groundedness, calm.

Okay, so it's the process of the neurocycle. Excellent question. It's the process of the neuro cycle, which in this, it's in the second half of the book. So the neuro cycle is five sign.

This is the five steps, right?

Yeah, this is the five steps. This is what I initially developed for people with traumatic brain injury was my first time that I developed it and developed my theory. And then from there I refined it to all the different types of, you know, situations I worked with. And then it's been refined over the years. This is the most updated research. So a good scientist should keep learning and changing and improving, which is what I've tried to do. So in this book is the updated version of the neurocycle. The neurocycle is how you get your mind, which is always working under control. If in a state of acute trauma like I was in. In that moment, acute trauma creates a red brain. I showed you that picture of a red brain. That red brain means that I have a tidal wave in my brain going on, or that there is the left and the right brain will be out of harmony. I'll have a drop of blood and oxygen to the front of my brain. I'm going to have things like that. Delta. We've heard of things like delta, theta, alpha, beta, gamma. All those waves are supposed to flow like waves in the sea. And if you think of the sea, you've got the big swells, which is delta, slightly smaller swirls, which is theta, they build, which is beta, the crest, which is high beta, and the gamma, which is the ripple on the beach. And so we want that through the brain in this nice kind of even way that's kind of the. The Y state. X plus Y. X is what happens to us. Y is that state. So X happens, and then that Y state gets thrown off. So in that moment, that's what happened to me. So what we want to do is because mind works through brain and body, and mind is experiencing this. This trauma, which is a mess, our brain and body just do what the mind's doing. So then there's a mess in our brain and our body. But if I have that kind of chaos, I can't think straight. I'm not gonna have any wisdom. I'm gonna fall apart. And in this situation, I would have and I have in the past. But now I've learned how to deal with this. I talk about there that this neuro cycle can improve how you manage anxiety and depression by 81%. That's a massive claim. And I've shown it scientifically. Okay? So what I did was to try and get myself back under control. Now, in that state, you don't know what to do in a tremendously acute traumatic state. But I knew from my science and from my knowledge, so I'm proactive. So I could go into two zones. So I went into two modes. The one mode was the mental mess that I was in, which is the pilot. Because I'm driving, I'm in this time. Imagine yourself being in a helicopter that's like a time capsule and you flying over this forest and the forest is your mind with all these trees and this acute trauma has just grown because it's instant. So here's this terrible. And your helicopter is drawn to this because you are in shock and terror and fear and deep panic and anxiety. That is all the smoke signals. So I, my, my pilot's going like this. The co pilot is also me, but it's my wisdom because inside of each of us is our survival and that's our instinct that you know, when you give someone great advice and you just think, oh wow, where did that come from? You know, you get that it's that depth. Like we know what we know, we know how much we can handle. We will say, I know this, that kind of thing. That's the co pilot, this wisdom. So what we want to do in those states is to get ourselves into the co pilot. Remember the co pilot and the pilot and you use you language. So here you flying this plane all over and the co pilot saying, okay, let's calm down, let's land it at that tree. So you land the plane, you land this time capsule, whatever, and you get out, but you with the co pilot, so you're safe. So you've created a distance and this is, I'm explaining in detail and obviously you train and it's all in the book and it's all, I've got an app that explains it too. But this is the mindset that I have trained myself to come into. So I can go into an acute trauma in that mind. I'm still crying, I'm still freaking out, right? But I'm freaking out in this zone where I now know, because I know that I need wisdom, I need to be able to tap into that. And I cannot get through this chaos if this chaotic brain and body, if and mind, unless I've calmed it down. So I have to get through this because I'm stuck in that black tree and I'm stuck in this chaotic brain.

So would that be considered like fight or flight? Whether it's someone.

Yes.

Cutting you off in front of you in the, on the street, in the car, or someone yelling at you, or someone, whatever, an event's happening which is causing you to react in Fight or flight. Whether it's a massive T trauma or little T trauma.

Exactly, exactly. Or an acute trauma, which is the. And the blind signing stuff, the stuff you don't expect. Expect that just hits us out the blue. Yes, absolutely. So you're going into a level of fight and flight. So everything physiologically, 1400 neurophysiological responses are activated to help you focus. But they can't work for you unless you do what I'm telling you to do, which is to shift your perception. So this is the how to. Because as soon as you shift your perception in an instant, because I told you within seconds I brought the glucose monitor down and I mean, I didn't expect it to work that fast. I was amazed. And as it cycled through the 12 hours of the, of the trauma, I was able to manage it more and more. So I mean it really. And this is not the first time. I mean, I've done this my whole life. But it was just so interesting seeing it in real time.

Sure.

And seeing the reaction. Okay, so.

So step one is to get the co pilot state of mind to, to land the plane.

That's the preparation. You haven't even got to step one. So this is preparation.

Land the plane first.

Yeah. So that's it. So recognize that you remember there's a co pilot, which is your wise mind. You the crazy pilot, going all over the place. Land the plane. Let the co pilot tell you, okay, land the plane. And you land the plane where you need to, which is at the issue. And what drew you in to land the plane to find the issue was your emotional. So this is step one. You're going to gather awareness. And gather means you controlling it. You're not sitting under the apple tree and all the apples are hitting you on the head. You are standing back and you picking the apple. So there's control, there's a sense of autonomy, a sense of agency. So in the midst of chaos, you can create agency mentally because your mind's driving it. So you stand back and you say, okay, I picked that apple. So that's my emotional warning. Signals, terror, despair, utter, totally traumatized. Like whatever they are, you pick those apples, you put them in your basket. So you're gathering, then you gather awareness.

So this is gathering kind of your awareness. This is how I. This is how I'm feeling. This is what's happened. This is what's like, this is the event.

Yes. This is getting.

It's almost.

Yes, it is. But you're getting in very four little distinct packages because the More organized you are, the more, the less chaos we bring. Very systematic.

So what are those four, what are those four things?

So you gather awareness of your emotional warning signals. So the despair, anxiety, whatever, panic attack. Then you gather awareness of your physical bodily response. So here's your co pilot saying, okay, how are you feeling? Gather that apple, gather that apple. What is your physical flattering in the heart, panic attack, tension, gut wrenching adrenaline, flight, whatever flight and fright freeze mode you're in. Then your behaviors. What are you saying? What are you doing? You know, I mean how are you.

How are you responding? How are you responding?

Yeah, action. Yeah, what's what you saying? What are you doing where you're, you know, what is actually happening? And I'm grabbing this, I'm grabbing that, get this, get that, you know, so what is that and is it working? I mean like you. Well just doing this changes how you do things. It's amazing. You immediately go into this different mode. Fourth one is perspective. What's your perspective? This is doomed. This is terrible. This is sucks, this is end or okay, this is bad. But you know what? So gather, you gather. Then as soon as you've got those, you then going to reflect. So it's very systematic. And then as you've gathered and done all this preparation thing, you've got the two sides of the brain. We've got coherence again. You've got blood flow back to the brain, you've got oxygen back to the front of the the brain. When you've got low oxygen and low blood flow at the front of the brain, which happens in a, in a trauma, in an acute situation, in those sudden things, it drops, then you are impulsive, you're going to make bad decisions, you're going to react incorrectly, you're going to create incoherence. Your alpha wave in the brain drops and becomes more active on the right side and that's on the right side, which is not great because that means that we now not going to have insight. So by doing what I've just said, you change all of that, you bring back coherence, you increase alpha and it may not be excellent yet, but you've started the process. Then as you move forward through the five steps and I've put all this brain stuff in the book and what happens? And so I'm just giving you the overview. So then you start now reflecting. Okay, what have I got in my basket? So number two, reflect. Reflect is an incredibly beautiful word as is gather awareness. Gathering awareness. I just want to point out in the earlier on I said that we mustn't be frightened of despair and anxiety and trauma and I mean, and anxiety, depression, those scary. Don't be scared of them because they are messengers. They're helpful messengers that are telling you something. And if you respond to them in that way, you then control them. But if you respond to them in fear, they control you. And then you're not going to move forward. You're going to get very stuck and then stuck in rumination and the patterns will just get worse. So get the control. Even though you can, you can be crying, screaming, swearing, I don't care what you're doing, but just get the control. You're at the tree, you're doing the stuff. So gather. Reflect is when you think of light going through a prism. It reflects all the colors of the rainbow. So there's depth, there's that one thing means a lot. And so reflect is this process of being a detective. Okay, well, why am I having that reaction? Why am I now? When it's something in the moment, we pretty much know why. I mean, I knew why I was so I didn't have to do too much reflection, but I had to the reflection in terms of why, because I knew the cause. But the difference was I needed to reflect to say, okay, if I react like this, this is going to happen. So it was questioning, what are you doing with that emotion? What are you doing with that behavior? Is that behavior helping? So the reflect in that situation would be different to a reflect for someone who is having a complete and utter imposter syndrome attack. And it's a pattern and they keep doing it. So they're now working sequentially through the process. So they're gonna have to start finding why, what does it track back to what level, what sort of self esteem issues are, what is the origin story of it? So that the reflect in that case would be, you know, ask, answer, discuss. Why do I feel this? Why, why, why? And so it's a different. So these. But reflect is to just, you know, get meaning, but in a very comprehensive way. Because there's all these patterns of meaning in that acute trauma. It's quick, I'm doing the five steps quick. If I'm working on a pattern over time, I'm going to spend longer. Third step is you write. And the writing step is obviously I was in the midst of a trauma, I couldn't write. So I would visualize. So the quick stuff, you can just visualize or if you can write, write, writing. I recommend if you write, write, write in the form of a metacog. I teach you how in the book. And I have a video of a neuropsychical app that goes with this.

What's a metacog?

A metagogue is pattern form of writing that stimulates. It looks like a tree. You start in the middle and you work on branches and you put words and you don't write whole sentences. You basically just pour information and you literally let it just come out in this pattern format. But each one of the key things is to, is to group as you as a thought. As something comes up, you put it on one area and as something else comes up, you put it wherever. So you have these clusters of information and every word's on a line and every line goes out of the preview previous line. And that format is unbelievable. It just drags the two sides of the brain together, digs deep, and you start getting insight into what you didn't even know was there. And then the fourth step is to then go and sort out that chaos that you've just written down. So the fourth step is to, okay, I've gathered awareness, I've reflected, I'm writing. What does this mean? What's the mental autopsy? What's the, what's the pattern? The activators, the antidotes? What's. How can I reconceptualize this beautiful word? Reconceptualize? And then you end off the cycle with a little action. And that action, if it's in the moment, like in that five seconds or whatever, it's okay, I'm going to actually take a deep breath and I'm going to act like this or I'm going to say that, or I'm going to do this. So it's a little action that anchors you back in a state where you can function in the next moment in that acute trauma or in that impostor moment and imposter syndrome moment. And you've now got to go and into a business meeting. You're feeling like you can't because you're, you know, the imposter syndrome fraud sort of set up. So in doing it in the quick moment by moment, you're going to have a simple quick action in the big stuff where you're working out the pattern each day. You will have you do your work for a limited amount of time. And I say do the work because it's not a quick fix. If you're looking for a quick fix, nothing related to greatness is a quick fix or mind it's time and you Know that you experience that with your whole story. And so essentially, you would do it for around 4, 15 to 45 minutes a day when you're fixing up the big stuff. And you would do it, Lewis. The big stuff, you would do for 63 days. So that's why.

63.

Glad you asked that. So we've all been told. 21 days to build a habit. Well, that's a complete myth. I put it in. I wrote about it in the book, too. It's not. A neurosurgeon, a surgeon, many years ago was talking about the physical cycles of healing that our body goes through. Like if you get a blister, it takes about three weeks for the stem cells and everything to form and the immune system to do its job to get rid of the blister. That's assuming that your mind's not a mess. If your mind's a mess, you can chop off 60% of that healing time. It'll take 60% longer, up to 60% longer. If your mind's a mess, you're healing.

If your mind is right.

It does. It does it on time. It does it on time and sooner. It depends. It depends on the level of damage. And sometimes you'll need one cycle of three. Sometimes you'll need multiple. Multiple. That's for physical healing. Mind healing, however, needs a minimum of three cycles for behavior.

Really?

How do we.

Is this scientifically proven or is this.

So there's very little research in the 21 day myth, so I decided to research it. And there's a few studies. There's one from University College London. I put them in my book. There's my one that I've just done recently over the. In 2019. Over 2020. Where I tracked. And we tracked in the brain, what happened. So 21 days, you get what we call gamma peaks, which means that you've taken this, you've deconstructed it, and you've reconstructed it into something healthy. So you've changed this thought, but it's xy, so that's in there. But it's in a different. It looks different. It's like if you take an ugly old house that you're going to renovate, you take lots of photos of all the mold and all the ugly carpets and you bash it down. You build a beautiful new house. You still remember how it was, but you've reconceptualized it. You're living in that new space. You remember the old. Okay, so that's what I'm talking about. That takes 21 days. So you create to break down and build a thought with memories. Because a thought is a tree made of memories. Memories are what, like a tree is made of branches, Thoughts are made of memories. So to make something that's got a level of sustainability takes about 21 days. And in that 21 days after that, if you stop there, it's a tiny little plant in your forest. It doesn't have enough energy to move from the non conscious mind. N O N. The non conscious mind operates 24, 7. It's where all your experiences are stored in thoughts, all your belief systems, your nurturing, everything about you and that is influencing your conscious mind. Conscious minds only awake when you're awake. So right now as I'm talking, everything that I'm saying is stimulating thoughts from your non conscious mind to move into your conscious mind to make sense of what I'm saying and to build all this new stuff into thoughts in your trees. So non conscious mind for a thought to move from the non conscious to the conscious through the subconscious. So non conscious, subconscious is the bridge. Conscious is when you're awake, non conscious 24, 7. Infinite, huge, massive. And where our wisdom is as well. So the wisdom is through the middle. If you want to imagine a forest, you've got the beautiful dark green strip which is all your instinctive wisdom, survival stuff, wired for love stuff, optimism, bias. And then everything we experience in life is around the edge. Little trees, big trees, dark trees, green trees. The small, smaller the tree, the newer the experience or the newer the memory, the weaker the memory. The big established trees are the ones that influence, so those things are powerful. So if it's a big dark tree and it's influencing, it's going to jump into your conscious mind and influence your view. So track backtracking to get something that's good that you've rebuilt. To actually influence how you view something, it has to have more energy put into it. Energy is never lost. Energy is transferred. Quantum physics talks about energy. These things are proteins with energy vibrating in the little protein structures. So you want that they're weak, so.

You'Ve got to strengthen, you got to water it, you got to feed it fertilizer totally.

And all you do is. It's so easy. Oh my gosh, it's so easy. From day 22 to 40 to 63, you simply do step number five for about a minute a day. That's how simple it is. It's 42 minutes over 42 days. In my Neurocycle app, I've actually got an active reminder function that you can type it in so it pops up on your phone and you can remind yourself to do this just. And you literally just read it and it keeps, just reading it reminds you to do it. And then you're building your strength and you're turning it into behavior change. So to go around the theme of your podcast, to get to greatness requires behavior change. So real behavior change, if you really want to build a good habit into your life, you're going to have to spend the 63 days doing it. So not only is that 63 days, I mean, I've shown it scientifically and so on. Not only is it for detoxing, the patterns, the traumas, the toxic habits, the small T, big T, as you mentioned, the acute stuff, the bad habits we've developed, but it's also to build new habits. So if you, if you know, you identify. This is an area that I want to grow in my life, to go to the next level of greatness, whatever that is, you need 63 days at least, and sometimes more. Sometimes a trauma is so embedded and it's blocking your greatness that you might need multiple cycles of 63. There's no cookie cutter design, but the more you do that and the more you practice it in the moment by moment, the more self regulated you become. Which brings us right back to the beginning of the conversation, which was that mind is always in action.

What is the difference between the mind and the brain? And does the brain control the mind or does the mind control the brain?

You've asked one of my favorite questions there. That's a really great place to start. I've got some props. Is that okay? Can I use some props to show you?

Show me, show me, explain. I need to understand in a simplified way.

Okay, so here's a brain, not a real one, in a skull. And the terminology for about the last 40 years is that the mind and the brain have been used interchangeably. So motion. People think when you talk mind, you're talking brain, or when you're talking brain, you're talking mind. And the most of the popular literature, even the scientific literature that the media tends to put out talks about how the brain produces thoughts or the brain produces the mind, but your brain actually can't do anything on its own. So if you did, and if I was holding up this, if this was a real brain and I just took it out of someone's head, which I wouldn't do, but if it was bleeding and whatever, and you looked at this brain, we could see, stare at this all day long, but it would never do anything. So what is the difference between a dead brain and yours and mine and the listeners and the viewers is that you are actually thinking, feeling and choosing. You're alive and your aliveness is your mind. And your mind is this ability, that of what you're doing right at this moment as you're listening to me, you are processing the auditory sound waves, the electromagnetic light waves, through your ability to think and feel and choose which is mind. So your mind is like processing, unique, brilliant processing field, gravitational field around and through your brain and body. And you convert what you're hearing and seeing into actual meaning. And that meaning is formed from trees that you actually grow into your brain. So at 400 billion actions per second, you're using your mind to translate auditory and visual signals into protein tree like structures in your brain to make sense of what I'm saying. And then each new thing that I say, you're going more and more. And everything I'm saying is in the root section because it's the source of the information. And the tree trunk and the branches are your interpretation of what I'm saying. And you're linking it to other existing, whatever, whatever I'm triggering at the moment that, that you know about whatever in your life related to a subject and that keeps going. And that's what we do all the time. That's your mind is always with you and your mind works through the brain and the brain then responds. So here's a little model. So your mind is the gravitational field. And this is not woo woo science, this is hardcore Nobel Prize winning science that this discovery of the gravitational field. In fact, Einstein spoke about it back in the early 20th century, how we each human has this gravitational field, this electromagnetic field around us and that is basically through us. And when you die, that's not there anymore. And that's the thing that's kind of keeping you alive. And that's the thinking, feeling, choosing the psychological version and the sciencey version is this gravitational field. So it's a little bit like a magnet. This is a super easy way to understand it. If you imagine a piece of white paper and you put a whole lot of iron filings on the paper, you may have done this at school. And then you bring a magnet and you put that in the middle of this mountain of iron filings and suddenly you've got this beautiful electromagnetic field. The iron filing arranges itself, itself into this field around the magnet. So you can't see the electromagnetic field, but you can only see it because of the iron filings, it's invisible. But the iron filings follow the tracing of the field, and therefore you can see it. So the relationship between the magnet and the field allows the iron filings to express themselves in that pattern. The brain is like the magnet, and the field is your mind, and the relationship allows you to express your behavior. So the little pattern is your behavior. And. And the biggest core thing is that that's the primary source. You never stop thinking. Your mind is always going. You wake up with your mind. You eat with your mind, you choose your clothes with your mind. You're doing the podcast with your mind. You go to sleep with your mind. So mind is the source, and if you don't understand and manage it, it's changing anyway, then it's a mess. And if it's a mess, your brain and body are a mess, and you can't achieve greatness. So to achieve greatness, you need to understand mind.

There you go.

There was a mouthful.

Let's. Let's just end the podcast now. Wow, that was perfect. So how wide can this. So the mind, your thinking, your ideas, your thoughts, is a field, an energetic field around you, inside of you, connected through your whole body, and then outside of your body. Is that what I'm hearing you say?

Exactly.

Totally.

How far does the field extend? Is it two feet in front of us? Is it six feet? Is it football field? How far can it go?

We don't really know, because when you're talking about quantum physics and gravitational fields, there's a lot of interaction that occurs. But what the science seems to show is that it's kind of a. Almost how, you know, like around us, sort of this.

Like a halo field.

Yeah. And it's probably more because. But it interacts because everyone's got this field, and we.

And we.

Then we live in gravitational fields. So you. Everything around you is a gravitational field. So everything's interacting. And. And so that's why, you know, when you come up to someone, an example would be like that electrostatic shock when you. You know, when you brush past someone and you get that on a more psychological level, you can experience that that field is like, maybe in a really great mood. And then you get into a conversation with some friends and they're so totally depressed, and you come away from there thinking, I feel awful. I need to go and have a shower. You feel so. So their field has interacted with yours and impacted you, because those fields, that field is coming from your mind, which then uses the brain and converts what you experiencing into These thoughts and then these thoughts are generating, you know, there's this whole relationship, the iron filings concept. And this is back and forth. And this literally is photons. Einstein showed us that we're literally generating from our thoughts as we talk from our thoughts, which we, that you can't talk without thoughts. You build thoughts and then you, your actions and behaviors and communication come from the thoughts. So this would generate healthy. It's a nice healthy green tree and here's a toxic one. So this would be a toxic, you know, the depression or whatever, you know, being negative or whatever, that would generate toxic photons. And these are the ones that would make you, you know, you feel it, you feel that negativity. This is a sense of. Around a happy person. And you just feel like amazing, you know. And so this is, it's very real. This is not some ethereal thing. It's. We're talking about the non physical sciences of quantum physics and physics and things like that. But it's real and it's, there's an impact and an effect and we can control it. That's, that's the interesting thing.

What is the, what is the definition of quantum physics? What is that in relation to the mind?

So quantum physics is considered to be one of the most fundamental and accurate sciences and at its most simple level because it's really had bad press, but it's been around for very long and it basically just deals with the unseen than the. When you talk about particles and waves and the subatomic level. So what we can see now looking at each other is, would be what we would consider the classical physics realm that you can see and touch and feel and hear.

So it's very.

You can operate on it. You can.

Yes. Yeah. So it's the physical. But if you, if you actually and you see from studying at the atom that things get smaller and smaller and then you've got the subatomic level, then you're entering the quantum. So once we go into the subatomic level, we actually see that the atom is not really an atom. You know, particles change according to their waves and in their particles only when you actually look at them. So it's considered the observer effect. And it's really interesting because it means that we have these waves of energy and as we make a choice, we create reality, which we do. So as you think, feel and choose, you change your brain. Because everything, every time you choose, think, feel and choose, choose, those three things always go together. Always thinking, always thinking means you're always feeling, thinking and Feeling means you're always choosing. And it's happening at like 400 billion actions per second constantly. So we processing this world around us through this think, feel, choose and then we build thoughts. So there's this structural, this structural consequence. So thought is actually a physical response of the think field choose. And quantum physics kind of is helping us understand, understand that. But quantum physics is real, is easier to understand with classical physics. So classical, physical, quantum, the sort of non physical world to work together. Does that make sense? It does.

When we feel something, when something happens, there's an event in our life, someone touches us. Do we feel it first? Do we think that we're feeling something? How is that connection to the mind, body work?

Very good question. So it's think, feel, chew. So like as we.

So I touch you on the shoulder, you think at first, you feel it first.

It's, it's going to happen pretty much simultaneously. So there's going to be the. Because there's the sensation and it immediately will stimulate think and then feel and then choose. So the feeling, the, the think, feel, choose, work together to make sense of the physical impact and what it means and if it's threatening or not threatening. And all kinds of decisions are made in your mind. And it happens super fast. So it's think, fill, choose, think, fill, choose in cycles. And it's really, really fast. You know we talk about 400 billion actions per second, but it's actually 10 to the 27 and faster, which is an inconceivable speed. So what I've done with my work is to try and understand this, you know, what is a thought and what is memory and what is mind and what is brain and how do they interact and how do they influence and do we have any sense of agency over the, this process and what does it look like?

Yeah. Can you explain it all?

Absolutely, I can certainly try. So I spent 38 years studying this and I started out in the world of working in more clinical. I practiced for, clinically for 25 years. And I initially started my research in the 80s. And funny enough, in the 80s the brain, we were taught that the brain couldn't change. So all my lectures were around the.

Brain is fixed fix mind, fixed brain, fixed mindset.

Yeah, so they said kind of that's that you've just got to learn how to kind of, you know, work around it. And so that's just. And compensate more of a compensation kind of philosophy. So I remember thinking in one of my neuroscience lectures that this does not work for me because we're changing and growing as humans. So I said, no, I'm going to start researching this. And I was told by my professors that's a ridiculous question. And I actually did a TED talk on this, the ridiculous question of neuroplasticity. So in the 80s I said okay, well give me the worst thing situation. What's the worst situation? They said, okay, it's traumatic brain injury. Once someone's had a traumatic brain injury, and I mean your dad went through one, that's it pretty much that's, you know, written off. And we were trained, as I said, to compensate. So I said, okay, well there's hardly any research in the 80s on brain injury and on how to comp, how to treat it. And so I thought, okay, well I'm going to start there. And so I worked with people that had been in comas for like longer than two weeks. And at that stage, if you in a coma for, for longer than eight hours, the brain damage was considered irreversible. Now in this day and age we know that's not the case, but in the 80s that was the going philosophy. So I was completely swimming upstream when it came to this concept. Anyway, I showed with, with my subjects that with using your mind in, and not in any weird way, just a very systematic, deliberate, intentional mind management in different ways and different brain building and dealing with emotions and just different ways, same sort of process that you can actually change this. And so some of my, my, the first, my very first case study was a girl who was 16 at the time of accident and she had lost a whole year of school, written off as a vegetable. I mean that's what the doctors used to say in those days, which is terrible thing to say to someone. Anyway, long story short, after eight months, not only did she manage to, she came around. I started working with her when she was, when she was conscious and functioning sort of at a second grade level. And she wanted to, her goal was to get, her goal of greatness was to get back to finish 12th grade. And with her peer group now that was an impossible task. All the doctors said, don't even go down that road. Not, not even worth it. So I said, well, I was a new scientist then, very young, totally into this. Well you, you know, go with me, let's do this. And she, within eight months she caught up to a 12th grade level, finished school with her peers and went on to get a university degree. And one of the coolest things was that she was actually a really average student and not even good at math. After after the accident, using her mind to change her brain, she became like a math genius. You know, I mean this was like, and I can tell you story after story. And that really motivated me to work across the board with. Now I really have to understand what's going on. And I happen to be living in South Africa where I grew up at the time. I was born in Zimbabwe and grew up in South Africa and in the apartheid era. I mean this is like, it really ages me, doesn't it go back into those. I worked through the apartheid era, the transition and the post apartheid era. So I was seeing all the socioeconomic trauma, the racism trauma. And I worked in that three days a week in those environments with terrible poverty and whatever. And I worked in war torn Rwanda and I worked with the wealthiest of the wealthy, heads of CEOs of corporations, schools everywhere, that my laboratory was the world to try and understand humans and mind and get away from this scientific context. That consciousness is the hard question. And no one is really doing anything. We're just talking about it as being as this elusive philosophical thing that we will push aside and one day promissory science will do it one day. And I thought, I can't do this because I am mind. You are mind. So if I don't manage it, I mean, you can go three weeks without food, three days without water, three minutes without oxygen, but you don't even go three seconds without using your mind. So my underlying premise was, okay, well if that's the case, what is it and how do we manage it? And if it's, if I don't manage it, what I did from my research, you can learn to manage it. Mind is malleable. You can direct the neuroplasticity of your brain. I did some of the first neuroplasticity research in my field in the late 80s, early 90s, before it was accepted. By the mid-90s, neuroplasticity was, well, that's it. And I showed that my underlying argument or thesis was, well, if our mind is always changing, which it is. So you wake up, you're experiencing everything, conversations, the emails, the pod life, politics. You're immediately immersed in life and you're processing that through your mind, you're growing it into your brain and you're doing this every moment of the day. So if I don't control it, it's a mess. But if I do control it, then it isn't a mess. Now I know we can't control events and circumstances. We all agree with that. So I'm not into this whole law of it. I'm not talking about law of attraction and you know, saying 15 positive affirmations and that's going to fix your story? No, I'm not talking about that at all. It's not realistic. I'm talking about the fact that you cannot control events and circumstances, but you can learn to manage your mind, which means your responses. So you can, yes, the things are going to happen, Covid, trauma, death, life happens. But how you manage it and you, I mean, your case is a classic example. Your life was turned upside down and your family's life was thrown upside down and you managed your mind and got yourself back going. So you were doing this concept anyway, you know, greatness. That's why I said greatness comes from us managing our mind. And greatness doesn't necessarily mean that you've got millions in the bank and you, this famous superstar, it means that do.

You have mental peace?

Are you actually growing? Are you satisfied as a person? Are you. You know, that's the sort of where we want to go as opposed to this very externalized version of it.

So, yeah, wow, this is really powerful. So how do we learn to manage our mind in response in a more positive way to the chaos, stress, traumas, dramas of life around us? You know, obviously we, we can maybe influence certain events to manifest in our life, but we can't control the things that are happening around us necessarily, just how we're respond, like you said. So how do we learn to reframe our mind or rewire our mind and so that we can have inner peace when there is trauma or pain around us?

Brilliant question. It's a skill that we learn. So that's really nice to know. The sooner the. It is never too late to start, but the sooner we start, the better. So I have four adult children. They learned this, they grew up with this stuff. And as I've learned new things, they've been my lab rats. So they've been trained and literally. And my husband and they all work for me, by the way.

They're either, they're either all amazing kids or messed up kids.

Totally. Yeah. Yeah, we'll have to ask that question. Well, Dominique's my producer, so I think she's sort of doing okay there. But yeah, no, the thing, the biggest thing with the mind and managing mind Lewis, is to accept that depression, anxiety, even the scary words like bipolar and schizophrenia and then going to the mood sort of things like that, we can accept grief, anger, etc, these are not illnesses. This is the biggest message that I Probably have the second biggest. The first is that mind is the source. And if you don't get mind right everything else, you can read all the great books you want and go to all the great seminars and self help. But unless your mind is right, you won't even use that stuff. It's just data. And so you do these that there's another step missing. And it's understanding that autonomy, that sense of agency that we have to manage what's going on around us. And to accept part of mind management is not to make the bad stuff go away, but to know how to live in the bad stuff, because it's not going away. So despair, anger, depression, anxiety, these are all completely normal responses. In fact they're very helpful. They're helpful messengers and warning signals as opposed to being scary illnesses. They are not neuropsychiatric brain diseases like we've been told. They are actually responses. And because they are responses of our mind in an in the world, we use our brain and body to express them. Because we've got the mind has to have the brain and body to build the thoughts. And then we use that to speak. We're using our physical to store what we've processed and to convert and then to speak. So obviously if our mind's a mess, our brain and our body will be a mess. But because our brain's neuroplastic and if we manage our mind, we can change our brain, we can change our DNA literally. That's what I've shown in my research. You can literally change your DNA, your blood markers, literally, if you change your mind. If you change your mind, you can immediately influence your biomarkers. So for example, if you in acute trauma, for example, and you go just okay, let me explain it in a very simple way. I'm testing out a glucose continuous glucose monitoring device and for some research purposes and I happen to while I was wearing it, because you wear it and then you know, you track your levels. And I wanted to see for in terms of mental health and the neurocycle that I've developed, I wanted to the see impact and I happen to be going through experience a very acute trauma in our family over December. And in the moment of the trauma I happen to see on my glucose monitor that my glucose had shot up to 240. Now that's heart attack level. And I immediately managed my mind through the neurocycle, which is the concept that I've developed, which is just a system, anyone can learn it. And I dropped my glucose levels within seconds back down to A normal level. And as it cycled up, up, it's cycled. I could manage it. And in. If glucose is at that level, your cortisol's shot up at that level, your DHEA is dropped, your homocysteines up. All that means is that your immune system is going crazy. Exactly. You've got a cytokine storm like we talk with COVID And in fact your, your brain's immune system and your body's immune system will recognize that traumatic event or that established trauma or that mismanagement of whatever, that it will recognize that as an invader, like a virus, like Covid. So you get the same response to a mind thing, a thought, which is the consequence of mind. Think, feel, choose. You build thoughts. Thoughts are made of roots and trees, branches, which are the memories. So thoughts are made of memories, like trees are made of branches. This is toxic. It will stimulate the same response in the immune system as if I had Covid, or if I had a flu virus, or if I had measles or something, or any kind of damage in my body. The immune system sees that as threatening survival because we, we are wired for survival. So this is not survival. So your immune system says, hey, that's a threat. Let's send out the army. T lymphocytes, B lymphocytes, macrophages. Let's go fix this thing. And it creates inflammation, which is a temporary state of healing. So initially inflammation is to isolate. Exactly, isolate. And then you're supposed to, you know, fix this up and sort this out and find the root cause and then this goes away. And then the anti inflammatory factors come in and the inflammation goes away. But if we don't deal with the stuff and we don't deal with our past traumas and we don't deal with those patterns in our life that we are enacting, that the constant arguments or these certain, you know, we all have these toxic patterns or no one's immune. And the signals of those are things like depression and anxiety. And those are simply telling you, hey, there's a pattern. It's either a trauma based pattern or it's a toxic habit you've developed. But that pattern is actually putting your body under tremendous stress, even to the point where your DNA is affected. And I showed in my research that, you know, if you think of the DNA ladder, if you pull out a chromosome, it looks like an X. And where you see my fingernails, pink fingernails, for those of you that are listening, the pink fingernails would then represent what we call telomeres and telomeres are a proxy for how you are managing your mind. Very interesting.

Aren't they also based on how long you'll live as well?

Exactly. Totally correct.

So those are under attack and dying. You're probably physically going to die as well.

Exactly. That's exactly what I showed. So we had subjects at the beginning of in my clinical trial that I put in this book we had subjects and I've actually got a picture of this person's one of the subjects brains. This is inside looking inside their brain. And the blue represents someone who's totally depressed. Flatline brain flatline literally. And this person's. All their biomarkers were up there in cortisol, inflammation etc but this shows that the energy levels in the brain are very flat. Blue means a very very depressed. This person was. The narrative was tremendous torment in their life. They were offline, they were battling with work, relationships, a lot of stuff.

Everything was off.

Everything was off. Sleep, you name it. They were at like ready to check out.

What page is this on?

This is on page I should tell you. I should know the page of my heart 161.

Okay, cool.

I think you've probably got it in black and white in that version that you've got there. So this person's telomeres, when we looked at their DNA, we looked at their telomeres they will tell you how the shorter they are, the weaker your cells, the shorter your lifespan, the more vulnerable you are to disease. So they were sitting. So that will show in terms of your biological age. So their telomeres were short and unhealthy. They, their ages were in the of this particular subject. And we had a group like this as well that similar. They biologically chronological. The actual age was in their mid-30s but their biological age, 70 or something. Yes, a sickly 70 year old. That's crazy within crazy within nine weeks of mind management. Note I didn't work on. I don't use drugs. I do talk about diet and stuff but in this particular clinical trial it was pure mind management, just the neurocycle. Just get your mind under control. And that gray means that their brain stabilized that the brain waves that they were actually managing. So here they were saying I am depression, I am hopeless. All the biomarkers DNA here they saying I now know why I feel depression. I'm not depression, I now know why. And depression is simply a signal of an underlying cause. It's not who I am. It's not an it, it's not an illness by 63 days. And these numbers are very Significant. They were actually seeing behavior change in their life. They were saying, okay, so I know I'll still get depressed, but I know why and I know what to do. And there was changes in their behavior. They were back at work. They were back sleeping. 25% improvement in sleep. And I mean all kinds of like their relationships. Not suicidal anymore. And I mean that's. I can go on and on and on.

Wow.

This subject over here was in the control group. So they could got no mind management. And what you'll see is a lot of red and a lot of chaos. And that red shows complete brain. That is like a tsunami in your brain, which the biomarkers were terrible. This person's DNA telomeres were very short. And so with mind management, in nine weeks, we showed how you can literally change your telomeres, which are your markers for aging and for health, mental health and physical health. You know, that's pretty unusual because most of the work on telomeres has been done around diet and exercise, which are.

Very like, you know, leafy greens and plant based.

Exactly. Which is significant. And also there's been some work on meditation, but there's been. No, no, I think this is the first study that's been done on actually doing deliberate, intentional mind work to change. And then we saw significant drops as well in inflammation markers and blood markers. And. But the biggest thing was the narrative, the person's story. So if you go away from the person biology for a minute and we listen to the person's story, that person was offline, they were online, they were living again. And even though. And they had also had this acceptance and this is what I wanted to kind of circle back to when you started was life and managing your mind doesn't mean that it's going to be one big rosy, you know, put on rose tinted glasses. That's crazy. It is actually the ability to be okay and at peace with having moments of depression and actually looking for the message and seeing them as helpful. We have this really weird philosophy which has been about 40 years in the west now, where we look at depression and anxiety and those kind of things as illnesses and neuropsychiatric brain diseases and as bad symptoms that we must suppress, like cancer symptoms you must suppress. So it's been lumped or misery of life has been medicalized, to quote a brilliant psychiatrist and Joanna Moncrieff. So we've got to really watch out for that. But actually the real truth is that those depression and anxiety are not illnesses. They are just survival instincts. It's Telling you, hey, pay attention, there's something going on, you need to go.

And something's not working, something's not working, something's not working.

And it's manifesting as a pattern that needs to be addressed and that'll block the greatness.

Food is such an important thing. So basically we know that and. But it does have a massive impact. But what's so much. So what for me is so interesting about the food side is the fact that our mind controls the digestive system. So our mind is our aliveness. So the difference between you and I and a dead person is our mind. So for our gut to function and to be able to digest all the parts of our gut, to be able to digest food, our mind's actually running the show. And most people don't actually think about it like that. But if you're eating a really healthy, organic, sustainable farm to table local all the right to know the real food, the whole what? Yeah. And you, but you're in a, in a mood or you're not dealing with something, you know, you're not dealing with an issue that's like a relationship issue. You're just in a bad state of mind as you're eating. You will. You could lose up to 86% of that nutrition just by the state of your mind. Because your mind is driving your. Your mind is basically that whatever you're thinking about is activated in your mind, in your brain and in your body. And then your enteric nervous system, the whole thing is activated. And your enteric nervous system, which is the connection between the mind and the brain, this feedback loop is driving the whole process. So being driven by your mind, so it responds very, very quickly. There's a very quick direct link between mind, brain, gut, very, very fast. It's throughout the whole body, but it's extremely fast to the gut. And the gut has as many neurons in as the spinal cord. So we have about 300,000 neurons in our gut as we as which is about the amount we have in our spinal cord. So you would have heard of it, the gut brain connection and these. In the last 10 years, it's become a huge field of research in the microbiome and all that stuff and how that's very a lot to do with our intelligence and how serotonin 95% is in the gut and 90% of dopamine. And so all these things, there's such a relationship. But what we don't always about is that that thought that you're thinking in your mind is actually activating and growing, that whatever you're thinking about and whatever you're adding on, changes are happening in the brain that's going to your gut. And everything involved in the process of digestion, including the pancreas and the gallbladder and the different parts of the intestine, the stomach, everything is being driven by these energy waves from the mind. So if our thought is toxic, you can, for example, let's just take one of the organs that. The pancreas. The pancreas secretes 20 different neuropeptides that are required for the assimilation of food. And if you are in this mood or worried or anxious or not dealing with something or having a fight with someone, those 20 neuropeptides won't be secreted properly, or maybe only a few of them. And that's going to impact everything else. And then you just don't digest. The bloating people get, the gut issues, the sore stomachs or leaky gut. Constantly not dealing with our stuff wears down the lining of the gut. I mean, it just creates inflammation. The gut bacteria get affected. Your good bacteria go to hiding, and it's like a million different things. So that is so important. So I like to talk, Louis, about the mindset behind the meal as opposed to just the meal. And we focus so much on the food and diet that I think we've forgotten the most important component, which is mind. So I think that should be. We should manage that first and then use that to manage.

So can you. So can you eat bad foods and still have a good mindset around it and process those foods in a healthy way so you actually take the nutrients out of it or it doesn't affect you, your gut or your building fat cells or whatever? With this greasy, fried, sugary, processed foods, could you still have a healthy body with the right mindset, or do you also need the right nutrients and the right mindset to get out?

You need both. You need both. Eventually that junk food is going to accumulate in your body. And, you know, we know that we are eventually going to create an environment because our brain and body are the environment for the mind to operate in. So if the environment of the brain and the mind are affected physically by, you know, junk food, and as you said, the processed foods and things, it is going to wear the body down. Those excess chemicals, they, you know, they cause leaky gut. They do all the things to the cardiovascular system. And we know there's just so much research around that. So it's both.

It's both What I'm hearing You say is you could have all the healthiest foods and be thinking toxic thoughts or in, you know, abandoning yourself over and over or staying in the wrong relationship or not speaking up for yourself or not forgiving something from your past and holding onto that and it won't do much for you to have those healthy foods or it might create inflammation still or have leaky gut. Because of the mindset. Is that what I'm hearing?

Exactly, that's exactly what I'm saying. And that's an aspect that people don't recognize and it's not spoken about, it's not studied enough. It's, you know, we always talk about four pillars or three pillars. People talk about diet, exercise, managing stress as though they're three separate components. Meanwhile, the driving force is your mind because if you did, none of those other things matter anyway. So your mind is your aliveness and it drives all the others. So we've got to focus on the mindset because you maybe. How many times do we hear of people that they are in their early 50s and they've been exercising and they've been eating well and they seem to have, they're always smiling and they seem to be fine and they drop down.

Dead or they have a heart attack or something.

Yeah, yeah, they have a heart attack or they, you know, they. Yeah, something like that. And think how, I mean they're so healthy. So your mind overrides that benefit. So you've got to think of mind creates the changes in the brain which then, which and the changes in the body that are either strengthening, strengthening the environment of brain and body or weakening. And if you cumulatively don't manage the toxic issues in your life, your body's slowly but surely changing. The brain, body, environment slowly but surely changing in the wrong direction. So we move between this percentage of 35 to 98% increased in vulnerability to disease. The more we unmanaged, the more we have an unmanaged mind.

So I have two questions. The first one I ask is about what are the most important practices for first detoxing the brain and then I want to talk about the mind afterwards. But what are the actual practices for detoxing the brain?

So the mind is going to do the detoxing. So the primary thing is that the mind detoxes. So the brain isn't self generating like genes. There's a fancy terminology for it, but basically it means that the genes can't switch themselves on, the brain can't change itself. And we often hear, the brain often hear in the media things like the brain can change itself. But if you did give me a dead brain and show me a change and it doesn't change. But if I put qegs and fmris on you and I right now in this conversation, we'll see massive changes happening inside of our brain. So the first aspect is brain health is very reliant on mind health. And that is, that is very primary. And so mind health is very much around keeping a messy mind managed. So I'm not sure we spoke about this in the last interview because you spoke about so much stuff, but how I explain it is that we've got a messy mind and a wise mind. And that's like coming from. We can define each of those, but basically your messy mind is experimental. Every moment is an experimental moment in the life of a human when you're awake. Because if you don't know what's happening next, we can't control people, events or circumstances. So everything is chance that's coming up in the next few moments. We can predict to a certain level of accuracy what's coming up. And the more familiar you are with environments and people, the more accurate your prediction. But it's still a prediction, it's not an accurate fact. So based on that, we often are very experimental. And that is okay. We have a psycho neurobiology mind. Brain body is very geared to experimentation. It's very geared to hypothesizing. So we live a very hypothesizing type lifestyle. It's all happening very fast on an unconscious level. And so we hypothesize in experimenting. And we make mistakes. But that's okay, because in a mistake, if you're managing it, you'll. You'll take the messiness and you'll repair it and you'll grow. So it's kind of experiment, mess, repair, grow, experiment, succeed, don't. Then you grow and you kind of doing this all day long in everything that you do. Relationships, work, relaxation, sport, whatever. So that process is something that we are designed to go through. The problem is that brain health is. And that's, that'll be brain health and that'll be body health. Because it's mind, brain, body. But if we all have a messy mind only, and we don't manage it, or we only manage it intermittently because our mind's always working. It never switches off until you die. So it's working at night. You dream with your mind. You can even train yourself to dream differently. I mean, that's how powerful the mind is. You can, and I'm about to do a research experiment on that where you can train your mind to train your brain to actually change things like nightmares and things like that, which is super interesting. It's really interesting. So in other words, messy mind, messy main brain, messy body. So that's really vital. So that's the first thing, the second.

Messy mind, Messy brain.

Messy, messy body. Yeah. So it's.

You can't detox the brain or. Well, I guess you could detox the body a little bit by. Not by the physical environment, the substances you put in your body. But what I'm hearing you say is if you don't learn to detox the mind first, you won't get the optimal benefits of environmental substances.

Exactly. So, for example, if you go do a workout, but you go and do a workout with an attitude of I just got to get it over and done with or I hate this, or I wish it was over. And if you never let yourself do that when you're working out, because as soon as you do, you send a message to every DNA, every part of every cell of your body to actually go into like, almost like a freeze mode. You know, when people are starving and then their body hangs onto food. If you send that message to your body that you don't want to be here while you're exercising, you actually reduce your, the DNA's functionality and it drops down. Your benefit drops in the exercise routine. So you may be doing the most amazing workout, but your mind will determine the effectiveness and the benefit of the workout. So it's got to be. But we do have to eat properly. And I've written books thinking eat yourself smart. I, I am an avid, avid believer in eating healthy and, and we can talk about that real food and exercise every day. I'm just come out of hot yoga two hours ago and sauna, infrared, saunas, I do it all. I do everything that I can do, possibly because I am looking after the organs through which my mind works. So I'm trying to create a very compatible relationship between them because there's a magical relationship between them.

Has ever been a time where you, I mean, you've been Studying this for 38 years? Yeah. I mean, when you were like 6 years old, you started studying this. So was there ever a time during your intense research where you knew this, but you are practicing something different? Maybe you're eating clean and you're working out, but you're like, gosh, I don't want to be here, or I'm stressed out by this or my work or whatever it is. And you. You saw the negative effects of that. And then. Was there a time when you switched it? I'm assuming there was. And you never went back and you started to see other benefits?

Definitely. It's been up and down. I've always been very driven, so I've always been very into exercise and throwing myself into everything. So everything I do, I throw myself into 100%. But as I. As I've gone through life experiences, you know, having four children and they had our children. And that comes with its own incredible joys, but incredible challenges. And as you would know. And so there's been times where you, you know, even. Like, I've been married for 34 years and we have an incredible marriage, but we've had our ups and downs. So whenever there's been. It's the relational stuff that's grabbed me the most really.

And it seems like relationships are the things that bring people the most joy and the most pain.

It's because we are enhanced by each other. And that's something we should talk about. Enhancement versus complexity, competitive culture and the whole deep, meaningful relationship thing. That is such a incredible concept. And it goes beyond Darwin back to Lamarckian theory and that kind of stuff. But it's really. And it does impact. So to answer, it's a great thing to discuss it in terms of. I mean, there also. There's been like, over the years, business stuff and things. But I think the thing that's affecting me the most, I found myself maybe working out at Orange Theory or something. And something's happened in a relational situation. And I find myself so absorbed with that that I'm exhausted on the treadmill. I can't. So then I focus.

You don't have.

No.

Yeah.

And I'm just not able to do.

What I could normally do. So then I immediately will switch back and say, okay, I'm here now for myself, for this. I need to. I need to. I can't help others unless I'm actually building my own body up. And I discipline my mind. I catch it, push it back into that mode of totally focusing on what I'm doing, and it shifts completely. My. Suddenly I have all the energy in the world. And there's a difference.

Is that part of getting rid of the messy mind?

It's managing the messy mind. We never get rid of our messy mind. We need to be friends with our messy mind mind. It's a very nice concept.

What is the messy mind? What is it? What's it feel like?

The messy mind is the experimental mind. As I was mentioning. So basically it feels like I don't know what I'm doing or someone I'm kind of like, I'm not sure what I'm doing. I don't know if this is right, if this is okay. This is the. It's. It's also things like someone says something to you and you react and you realize, oopsie, I said the wrong thing, or I misheard or made an assumption, or I'm being. You see a pattern in your, in your life where you keep on reacting to certain things or you see that you're waking up in the morning complaining all the time. And you know, that's messy mindsets where we find ourselves feeling discomfort, feeling like something's just not right, feeling ourselves irritable, worked up all those emotions. Those are messy mind. And those are totally fine here. This is so fascinating because those are fine if they're managed. So what we need to do is own them, give ourselves permission to experience them. Because you cannot grow unless you understand what they feel like. So get irritated. I'm not saying choose to get irritated, but if you get irritated, own it. And then say, okay, well, why did I do this? What can I learn from this? How can I grow from this? That's a managed mind. That's what our psychoneurobiology is designed to do. We're not designed to be these perfect toxic positivity creatures. We are very. Be very normal. Yeah. We're not supposed to be these. It's okay to get. It's okay. It's way better to actually get frustrated and say, I'm so sorry. I got frustrated because of. I'm not going to do it, I'm going to do it less next time or whatever. That's normal.

What's the difference between toxic positivity and wise mind?

Okay, so wise mind is the ability to recognize I don't have, I don't know, everything. I need other people. I recognize I've hurt other people. I recognize it's okay to cry, it's okay to be sad, it's okay to be depressed. I recognize that anxiety, depression, these are signals. And when my body aches this, that's telling me something. It's the wisdom to stand back and see another perspective. It's the, it's having deep discussions like this where you explore philosophy and explore. That's wise mind. It's. If you ask me for advice on something or I asked you for advice on something and you gave me advice. Wise mind. When you talk to your, your kids and your, your Your partners or your friends, and you say, hey, this happened. What do you think? And they give you advice. Wise mind. So wise minds in all of us. But we don't tune into it sufficiently and it's at the core of our being. And, and we see the, this playing out in the neurobiology because we don't have any proteins or. Right. Let's take it from the organs to the cells to the parts of the cell, down to the subatomic particles. We have nothing in our entire physique, physical body and brain that is for toxicity. What we have is for managing it. So that's so different. So in other words, we have grace to make mistakes. And toxic positivity is all about like kind of almost putting a band aid. It's like a band aid on a wound. It's one of my friends says band aid on a bullet wound. I mean, you can't put a band aid on a bullet wound. And that's what toxic positivity is doing. And things like gratitude statements and affirmations, if used incorrectly, will, but are very much tools of the toxic positivity movement. But if you're not dealing with your issue, you can't just slap a positive affirmation on or a gratitude statement or practice. It's not going to do anything.

So how do you yourself. So should we use mantras and affirmations? Is there a way to use them in a positive way? That effective way, I should say, or definitely, how do we use mantras, tools, affirmations, positive attitude without it being toxic positivity?

The way that I explain that is you do it in step five of the neurocycle. So the system I've developed for over 38 years, which is basically a delivery system for how to. It's not a technique, it's a delivery. Like Amazon. Amazon's a delivery system that works brilliantly. Even if you don't like Amazon. It works. The system works. It delivers anything, anywhere, anytime. Then the concept of the neuro cycle is a system of how we can directly manage our mind, our wise mind, talking to a messy mind, to direct the neuroplasticity of our brain to be able to then move in the right direction and accept the ups and downs of life and get that sense of peace, which is not toxic positivity. It's actually a sense of peace. It's an acceptance of the uncertainties of life, life and so on. So what I have found from my research is that if you have an issue in your life and there's something that you're betting with. So maybe it's just that you wake up complaining every morning or something. I'll take something like that because it was discussions recently I had with someone and something I used to do. I used to wake up like worked up in the morning and I got that under control and it changed my life completely because it wrecks your brain. Totally wrecks your brain, wrecks the day. And you can chat about that too in more detail if you want. But that's so what we, what I, what you've got to do is you've got to recognize that if you are in, if you are, if there's something you're trying to work on. So let's say that there's a complaining thing just by saying, okay, I'm going to wake up in the morning and I'm going to say 10 gratitude statements instead of 10 complaining statements. That's going to work for a time. It will not be sustainable because all you're doing is slapping a band aid on a bulletin or you're chopping the head of the, of the weed. And it will grow back. As we know, if you go chop the head of the weed, they will grow back.

So it's not, it's not getting to the root of.

You have to.

Why don't you just feel appreciation at all times? Not try to act appreciation.

That's it. It's not a being, it's a doing. And so you've got to find out why whatever you're doing is a reason. Because at your core, your identity is this wired for love nature. In our neurobiology and in our mind, we see that in the love waves of the physics of the mind and the gravitational fields and things. We see that in the, that literally the, the quantum physics has shown us that the immersing gravitational fields that are. And you, they change when these negativity. So when people are angry and fighting, it's different. When there's a lot of war, you can feel it. You can walk into a room and you can feel that stuff. So essentially our environment is very, it's all very. This is all very deep stuff and it's all very real stuff too. And it's. And it's not something that we can ignore because it's very. We all experience this. So, yeah, you can't just go and say 10 gratitude statements. You have to find out why I am complaining. These, these. I'm showing up for a reason. There's a reason why I'm doing this. At my core, I'm this wide full of person. So if I'm waking up complaining or I'm always irritable in certain situations, this triggers me all the time. Or if I have certain patterns, there's a reason. Don't be hard on yourself. Be kind to yourself. Give yourself grace and just find the reason. And it's such an easier way, so much of an easy way to live, Louis, than like beating yourself up or forcing yourself to be something else. Just say, okay, I wake up complaining. Why? And then go and solve it. And that's where you can then work through the process of solving it. And it's a very sequential time process. That's why these five steps you do over time and when you find the root, then you can do the positive affirmations. It becomes the step five. Then it works because you're actually doing it in the right place.

How do we truly heal the trauma of the past that causes a lot of our thoughts? Because I hear like the. I'm hearing you say that I'm feeling the traumas, the memories of the past that we have had from the event. And we're holding onto the memory, the idea, the thought of the event. And sometimes we, we. And a lot of the times I would go to say, you know, I'll speak for myself. And I'm thinking, most of us, probably an event happens and our memories after decades and years build it up into something bigger and more extreme. Potentially the event actually was. And we're holding on to now, our mind is coming up with memories that weren't even real that caused this reaction in us. So how do we really. Is it healing the trauma of the past? Is it healing the memory of the past? Is it healing all of it? What's going process, what should we do? Is it only through therapy can we do it alone? Through journaling?

You can do it alone. You can do it with therapy. You can do it. I would never do anything completely alone. I would make sure you have some sort of support system. If you can get to therapy, it will definitely help it. Therapy is a catalyst. It's not actually. And it's your place where you can unpack the pain and get the guidance for how to manage the next step. But you're still living with yourself 24 7.

You got to do the work.

Yeah, you've got to do the work. And this is where having a system of mind management is so vital. So what you've described is the whole thought tree and that thought tree. Let's take the incident of what you went through as A child. And that would have been, you know, what the actual incident would have been. Been is the root and then your. The event and, and the details and the timing and the. All the everything. And that then builds your perspective of how you viewed yourself and, and how you viewed this whole, which this is your. Your emotions and the data. And that manifested in how you actually lived your life.

Yeah.

So that's a trauma from the past. There's no guilt in this, even though it's toxic because that's all you could do to survive. It's a coping mechanism. So this toxic tree is a coping mechanism. So we've got this inbuilt thing in our mind and our brain that in a system that enables us. Because this should wipe you out, you shouldn't even be alive kind of thing, if you look at the natural biology. But there's this protective system in place that kind of cocoons it for a season until you're ready to deal with it. So that's, you know, there. And then something will come in event will come in your life where now you have to deal with it. And sometimes we ignore that. We ignored it a few times before we do. And then eventually. So there's kind of a cocoon. So it's protective, so it is damaging. But because you're not ready to deal with it, it's not wiping you out, it's still causing problems, it's still creating a few shock waves there in the ground and that kind of thing. But when you're ready to, you know, then suddenly something will happen in your life and it's being put. It's slowly infiltrating. It's a slow infiltration. So it's sending out little tendrils, you know, it's growing that you're still surviving, but things are getting worse and worse. And eventually that eventually this cocoon starts breaking down and it explodes in your mentally, physically, in something, in a relationship, in a work environment, in a. It builds the cascades and little things happen and eventually there's a big explosion. That's this thing, the cocoon, starting to come off. As you are maturing and getting older and doing more with your life and experiencing more. This has to then get sorted out. So your body gets to a point where it has to reject it.

It has to.

The pus has to go. For want of an awful analogy, but it's a good example. At some point you. It can't stay there anymore. And that's when it explodes. And when it explodes, these are all the memories as you recall it. This is the concept of the abuse as a child. That's the thought. This is the detail of the story, and that's how you experienced it. And so you've got to go from your, those fawnings signals back to the data here, how you experience it back.

To the actual moment.

And then you reconceptualize. So how do you make it play out in your future? That's always part of your story. But you change how. Like you've already done it. You, you said it earlier, you can talk about it now without falling apart. But at some point, you could not talk about it at all. And so you rewrite the script. Yeah, you rewrite and that, and that takes time. That takes these cycles of 63 days. You literally re. Reconceptualization is rewriting the script. So, so eventually this goes. You then have this and that now instead of being toxic, is. Can you see some of these leaves are shining a little brighter than the others. Okay, so there is that in that it's reconceptualized. I can now talk about it. I can now. It's. That'll make you cry. But you've now turned it into a part of your, You've, you've redesigned it, You've. It's the, it's the beautiful new space. That's how it was. But now you, you've, you've made it work for you instead of against you. So that is then the trauma of the past, which is there's no excusing that. There's no forgiveness even in that. But you need to be released. Because if you still connected to that trauma, kept the kid, keeps you connected in the quantum world literally to the, to the abuser. So until we release. So there's a connection. So you literally hears your brain. Here's that person maybe 10,000 miles away. But because of entanglement in quantum physics, there's no space, time, dimension. And because of that, it's a toxic entanglement. But when particles are entangled, and you may have heard of this somewhere with someone saying this, but when two particles are put in a relationship in quantum physics experiments, no matter how far apart they are shot, they still are in relationship. So this one turns this way, this one will turn this way. So until you release, until you reconceptualize, you're still connected. So that will always be controlled. So when we talk about. People say forgiveness, I think release is a better word because how do we forgive these, these. Going through this process over time as you reconceptualize you slowly cutting the ties. So as you. So by the time it's in this format, no longer is that invisible tie there. You know that you've cut the tie. When you can actually talk about it and you're not excusing that person's behavior, that can never actually. What they've done can never be forgiven if you think of it, but you can release it. So we talk about forgiveness as being part of a healing, but we've got to. I had this discussion with someone the other day. We've got to be very careful of using the term forgiveness loosely because when someone's done something wrong, that wrongness, even whatever you've done wrong to someone, that wrongness is always there. What is forgiven is what. What's. What should be done is we should release. We should realize that that was a moment in time, it was wrong. The person needs to own it. But it's not your responsibility to make that person own it. They have to unpack that wrongness and kind of work through that. What you have to do is be released from it and to put that into your past. And that's kind of easier thing to do because a lot of people keep getting stuck because they think, I can't forgive, I can't forgive. How can I forgive someone who's. How do you forgive someone who's raped you? How does your parents forgive someone who's hurt their child? You know, how do you. How does the. How. How does. When you've got someone's murder, you know that. I'm not saying that you have to keep that and not, you know, the. You. You have to get. You have to release yourself from that, and you have to accept that that event, maybe that person was operating out of trauma, so the reason for them doing that was trauma driven. And it doesn't make it right. It makes it. But we can't ignore it. And what I think we've also tried to do with a lot of sort of psychological approaches is, oh, forgive. Especially in the religious community. Forgiveness, Forgiveness. It's all gone. It's all gone away. It hasn't. It's still there. It's part of your story. I think the Kintsugi principle explains it the best. You know the Kintsugi principle, the Japanese art, you know, when a. When a vase shatters to the ground and it's in a thousand pieces, they don't sweep the pieces away. When you were raped as a child, your life was shattered, okay, but you didn't sweep the pieces Away every. What they did was they collect every piece and they meticulously rebuilt the vase with gold lacquer and platinum. So now you have this beautiful new vase with all the gold and platinum represents what you've gone through. It's enriched you who you are as a person. Now you are helping others through your story. You are teaching others. You as a leader are one of the 3% only that are enabling others to talk about their trauma. Only 3% of leaders are talking about mental health. 3 globally. That's terrible. So if we as leaders don't talk about it, how do we give permission to those that are following to talk about it? So as a leader, as you talk, you've now taken the Kintsugi principle. You are showing us your gold cracks, the shining light in the leaves and it's the. The trauma is shocking. We never forgive. That is wrong. We can never say that's right. It's never right. But what you've done with it is right. And now you can turn it into. To helping others go into greatness.

Yeah, absolutely.

That's kind of the transformation.

Wow.

I'm curious. How do we. What's the process of protecting our mental health on a daily basis? Whether we've. It sounds like first we need to be aware of and do the process of healing the past or the traumatic memories of the past, however you want to call it. But what's the process of protecting the present and the future so that we don't fall back into a dark space that kind of keeps us there for so long?

Absolutely.

Is there a process you recommend?

There is. And it's self regulation. It's being very, very self regulated. We see from neuroscience. And I actually have a little quote in the book where I think I've got it. I think I actually had it open because I was re. I did it. I actually did a little alive on it today. But you can every. I can tell you what it is every 10 seconds. Here it is every. I thought I had the page open. Every 10 seconds you can be consciously aware of what you're thinking, feeling and choosing mental peace and keeping yourself in a state of mental peace comes from being aware every 10 seconds. Now, I'm not asking you to set your watch and your time on your phone. I'm just saying that translate that out. It means all the time that as when you're awake, you need to be standing back and observing your own thinking. You need to be thinking, okay, what am I thinking in this moment? How am I reacting this moment to. I Want wake up, I feel great. And then I read an email, I feel lousy or I wake up feeling on edge. Why I'm talking to this person, how am I reacting, how am I responding? I'm doing this email, I'm doing this work. What's my like? It's constantly monitoring and that may sound exhausting but it's not. It's the most natural thing in the world. It's one of the most brain healthy things you can do. So that's the one key is self regulation. It as you neuro cycle, as you get into the habit of neuro cycling, your self regulator regulation skills are trained to a level where it changes your life. Honestly, if I had to say what protects my mental health, it's my increased self regulation from constantly living a life of neurocycling. Then the other thing in the neurocycling that is phenomenal for protecting mental health, which no one speaks about, I don't happen to anyone except me speak about this. And it's called brain building. And there's a whole section in the book on brain building and that's taking the five steps of the neurocycle to learn new information as humans.

What does that mean?

A new skill or a new everyday new data. So for me I will take my scientific research every day. I spend at least an hour looking at neuroscientific or scientific studies related to my field of work. Studying new information, the latest. So I study it to the point where I could actually give a lecture on it or I could write an exam on it. So I take the five steps and I study information every day. When you wake up, you have millions of new baby nerve cells and they nerve cells look like trees and they are waiting for you to be to, to like lattices to strengthen the new cells, the new thoughts that you build into the the neurons of your brain, these little branches, these thoughts and if you don't use them, they become toxic waste. So that affects your sleep at the end of the day and affects your dreams and cumulative over time they affect your health of your brain. So when you, when you brain build it's like cleaning your teeth. If you don't clean your teeth every day, eventually you're going to have a real problem with your teeth and your brain because it's going to cause all kinds of issues in your body and so on. Same thing with brain building. Brain building builds mental and physical resilience. So by learning something we actually think deeply that when you neuro cycle to brain build what I'M doing is getting you to think super deep. And when you think deeply, you make all these great things happen in the brain. The left, right side oxygen and all that stuff and you. And that's the only way you can actually grab those new, those new baby dendrites. They respond to deep thinking, they don't respond to shallow thinking. They don't respond to scanning through headlines and hurry sickness and rush, rush, rush and data capturing and never doing anything. They respond to oh, that's scan the headlines that interests me. Let me read that article and study it as though I'm going to write an exam or I'm reading the, this great book or take my book and study it. You know, study that every day for an hour. You'll get, you'll not only get the tools, but you'll be building your brain. Whatever. Take anything you're interested in. If you love cooking, if you love whatever you are interested in self help books, anything, don't just read, study them. Use the five steps. Take an hour a day. If you can do more, do more and you will transform your mental health. All my patients, when they came into my practice, I would obviously evaluate and do all that kind of thing. We'd work out sort of where the issue. But we would always do brain building first. Sometimes for a few sessions I would only do brain building and get them to a state where I could recognize they're starting to get more resilient and self regulated. Then we would start doing the trauma work and the learning disability work and the work with trauma. You know, working with traumatic brain injury, we would. And in fact all the traumatic brain injury and stroke work that I would do with my patients, like if I was working with someone like what your dad went through, I would teach the, the patient and the family brain building. We would take. What are you interested in? And like if your dad was interested, let's say in whatever. Let's say he was interested in. I don't know, what was your dad interested in?

Into playing piano, singing, sports, running. Yeah.

Okay, so you could take maybe sports and you could then use the brain building. You can do this with him now. You can take the brain building and take out sports. And you don't just read it, but you actually study it. You do the five steps and you study it as though you are now going to give a lecture. Dad, you're going to now teach this. That's what I would do with my patients. And then we would slowly restore function because that changes them. It orders the gravitational fields, orders the Brain changes and directs the neuroplasticity and healing comes and you start transforming. I had CEOs of top companies in South Africa have terrible car accidents and completely lose their function and not be able to function, do this brain building in the whole for over a period of time and go back and become something else. So like the one guy was an engineer but went into management and became the CEO of a huge corporation, had this terrible car accident, ended up going back and becoming a top engineer with brain damage. So I mean like I've had pilots that at 82 that couldn't fly anymore, that have become accountants. I mean I could tell you story after story when I'm in the most distressed state. Like that night of acute trauma that I told you about. Besides the glucose monitoring, besides doing the neurocycling, what did I do? I did brain building. I sat there brain building to calm myself down in that state. So I would shift between the, the management neurocycle to the brain building neuro.

Cycle to try to learn and understand something. Yeah.

And that, but that built resilience. So it calmed me down. If I'm worked up, I'll go to brain building. If I'm really un out of it and I'm not managing and I'm feeling like I'm getting super anxious or depressed or something, I will even go into 10 minutes of brain building. I'll grab a study, study it, do the brain building and I've immediately increased my resilience.

Does brain building only happen when you're studying and learning something or is it more of like okay, I'm going to play like ping pong or play a sport or do an activity to help like hand eye coordination.

Yes, no, definitely you can do that too. So ping pong is fantastic for the brain, brain. You know, anything that really challenges the brain to coordinate is definitely going to be a brain building exercise. So you know, racquetball, tennis, tepping pong.

You know, things that are whatever.

Yeah, yeah, you can do those two. So do those, those are more physical related. So I would balance, I would balance the physical with the mental so that you do the cognitive as well. I mean both are mental. I shouldn't say that. Sort of text and physical. Make sure that you brain build with combination.

You know, I feel like a lot of parents in general don't have the tools to have conversations with their kids around mental health. You know, I don't remember much of my parents, although they're amazing. I don't remember us talking about mental health and These, these challenges that might arise, these emotions and these feelings that might arise for us at different times in the ways of how to manage it properly as like the tools that are now being discovered and researched like you have today. What conversations should parents be having with their kids around mental health in order to make them feel safe, seen and loved with the confusion that they have maybe as teenagers or young adults in today's world.

I love your question and it's so important we should be doing this from basically. So when a child comes home from school and they may be three or four years old and they said they don't have the language, but to be able to actually notice and validate, I see you feeling sad. Why are you sad? And what you give them toys to be able to act out the older they get. Never overlook a child's emotion. Always validate, I see you sad. Do you want to talk about it? I see you. So it's, it's I see you. Do you notice I'm saying I see you. And you can find your, your own wording of that? But it's to acknowledge which validates and never to judge or say, oh, you don't need to feel like that. What parents do a lot, unintentionally, I'm a parent of four. I did it even with all my knowledge I have. So we make mental messes. I say we make mental messes all the time. But it's very important. Not someone, your child comes to you and says, I I'm really worried. And, and then you say, what are you worried about? I'm worried about this one. Doing something that you see, think is totally irrelevant. Oh, that's not so bad. You don't have to worry about that. That is the worst thing you can do to a child because what you've done is invalidate something that for them is now they feel shame. So now they've got this confusion of worry. They don't know how to process it. And you know what?

Parents do that and you haven't accepted their feelings or their thoughts.

That's it. So it's very important. Even if you don't think that it's valid, you're not helping them. Saying, and I know it's done often with the intention of, oh, it's not so bad, it'll be okay, calm down, don't do that. It's rather, sit down and embrace it. Say, okay, let's talk about how you're feeling. Why do you think you go through the five steps I've actually got in my NeuroCycle app. I've got a whole thing on how to use neurocycling for children. And I'm writing, I've written books in the past, but now we're doing the updated versions of neuro cycling for Babini tots. Neuro cycling for young kids, teenagers, whatever. So exactly how to have the conversation. But it's openness. One of the things that I have as a parent and I mean I've worked with. I used to do a lot of family therapy when I practice and as the advice I always gave parents and that I've tried to apply as much as possible. If you don't want to talk. Of depression. And it was quite an interesting way of phrasing it. And my response to that was, well, help them process it. If they're a professor of depression, what can you learn from them? If you feel that they are so good at depression, that's a symptom or a signal of something going on. You need to acknowledge that and say, I see you feeling depressed. Can you explain more? And then work through the whole, get those, you know, the five steps, work through it systematically. You can use a lot of visuals with kids. I mean, I've been doing this with kids when I was practicing and training in schools and things as young as three. And I would take the brain, listen, three year olds respond to this and I'll say, this is in your brain. And we'll take a tree. Okay, so now this is this happy tree, the sad tree. And you work through, okay, what are you feeling? What's the, what's the sad. Give me. And you give them the words and then let's see, what are you doing? And you work through systematically through the process and you say, okay, so this is where it's coming. And it might take a few days, same. So it's the same process, but you're orientating them to their level. And then what you're doing is you're modeling what to do. At the same time, don't hide your feelings as a parent. You know, there's so much.

Don't act perfect.

No, because it's in the mess that they see European grow. Mess is how they learn. So you make a mess, you get mad at your child for no reason and then you feel guilt and condemnation.

That's.

Don't do that. If you get mad, explain why you're mad. Say, I'm really mad. I'm sorry, I said the wrong thing. I didn't mean to do that. This is why I did It. But this thing that you mustn't let a child grow up. Oh, you, the mother, you chose to have me. Therefore, you've got to be perfect. And if you fail, you've messed up my life forever. That's not healthy for a child. And that's what happens. And it's bad for the parent and the child and the parents pretending, oh, no, everything's fine. And, you know, meanwhile, behind closed doors, you and your husband are having a huge fight or you and your wife are having. That's so confusing. When my husband and I have an argument. We, the kids grew up knowing why we explained, okay, we were wrong. We shouldn't have said this. This is why we argued and this is our solution, you know, and it's so. It's that authenticity and that honesty. And you know what? They may not like it always because it can be quite scary, but life is scary. And you've got to give. You've got to give people, your kids, the tools to know that, hey, this is how I'm managing it. And I'm an adult and I still battle. So when they're an adult and they're battling, they don't think, oh, gosh, I'm an adult. I'm supposed to be like my mother who was perfect. No, my mother still cries, my dad still gets upset. But they've got a management plan. So it's that authenticity and honesty. Does that answer the question?

Absolutely. I've got. I'm curious about the identity check. Then. What does an identity check look like? And how do we build our identity to become more confident, resilient, loving, energetic human beings?

Absolutely. So when we, when we, when identity shatters, we start. You'll see a difference in the vibrations in the brain. You'll see a different in the energy flow in the brain.

What's the common ways it shatters? Sorry to interrupt.

No, no, no problem.

Breakup, nurture, environment, experience something happens, a death in the family.

Those, those will shatter. But it's, it's more when. When you are told you're broken in some way, even if it's not direct. So it's like if someone tells you, you know, you've gone through an adverse circumstance and you're feeling depressed and someone tells you, but a brain disease that will shatter your identity because now your identity is, oh, I'm broken, I'm a broken brain. I'm a useless person. Or if someone feels they're not valued, a statement is made that the core of the humanity, who they are, is not valued. They're not valuable enough. We see this a lot with gender issues. People that aren't allowed to identify with what they believe their gender is. Tremendous, tremendous attack on identity. That's why there's such an increase in suicides in, in that kind of environment generally. I've worked with a lot of suicide survivors and a lot of suicide families of suicide victims and who experienced suicide in their family. And the core is identity. Because if you don't feel you valued, if you feel that what I can bring to the table isn't enough, no matter what, why should I even be alive? And that for me is so important. I did a whole podcast recently on identity and then importance of identity. And it looks different in the brain when your identity shatters your energy. We can pick that up on the QEEG to qeg. Technology doesn't read detail. It's very crude. But it does give you an idea of the level of anxiety it creates. So when you're not being yourself or you feel that you're not valued, we will see asymmetry, for example, in the brain. We'll see a lot of low energy in the front of the brain. Very, very low energy in the front of the brain. We see it with people that have been labeled the energy blood flow. It's asymmetrical and it's very low in this, particularly this part of the brain. And then we have 200 specializations across our brain that are unique to each of us. So it's designed because your brain's only limited in size, your skulls limited in size. You can't keep growing your brain, so you can't do everything more. Can I. So there's something you can do that no one else can do. And that's, that's within these 200 specializations of our brain. But it creates a need because there's this stuff you can do that I can't do. So therefore, I need you and you need me because of what we can can because that's enhancement. And that's when people think, okay, there isn't something I can contribute. The identity gets broken. So we see that in those changes. And when you get that change in the brain activity and inflammation and blood flow, we're going to see an increase in the immune system inflammation. The immune system will respond and react because now your survival is threatened. So you're going to get inflammation. Then that has a downstream effect in your endocrine system. Then your telomeres and your chromosomes start getting shortened, which then ages your body. And I mean, it's it's, it's. I can go on and on.

It goes on and on.

Yeah, the neurophysiology, neurophysiological effects are enormous. So an identity check is critical because the only way you're going to bounce back from what is going to happen because life is traumatic no matter what we, what we would love to know, we would love the world to be perfect. The reality is, no matter what you've had traumas that you will have, have trauma. That's just, it's inevitable.

So what does the identity check look like for you? You say you do it once a year or.

Yeah, I just want to hear whenever I feel that I'm out of sync. Where if I start feeling like a very quick recognition of identity check is if you're starting to feel envious and jealous of others and if you're starting to feel that something, you know, that you're just not good enough. Imposter syndrome, you know, the typical, those, those are very key that, hey, I must stop and do an identity check. So then I do it with a neuroscientist cycle. I'll go and look for all the, I'll go and gather awareness of all the signals that I'm starting to see like this. Okay. There's a lot more imposter syndrome than normal because we all get a little of it. So it's okay. It's when it becomes an invasive pattern. So you look for the invasive pattern signals that are affecting who I feel about myself. And so I recognize, I know how to recognize the general unease. And then you'll start working through from the signals and then start reflecting why, what's happened? You know, ask aunt and discuss with yourself what's happened to get myself to this point. And then I'll take time to write it down. The third and fourth step, it's describing the neuropsych. Now, the third and fourth step, we're writing. The third step, you write in the form of a metacog. And a metacog is one of the most powerful things out there to get into your non conscious mind and find out what's really going on, to really tap into the wise mind, you want to get your conscious and unconscious mind talking to each other. And if you go through these five steps that I'm describing, the neuroscience cycle sequentially, you are training and forcing blood flow. Those 200 areas of specialization, the different structures of the brain, the neurons, the neurochemistry, the endocrine. So you, you are forcing it to actually work for you. You're kind of making all the ducks line up in a row, if that makes sense. And when you're in that state, you're much more intelligent, you're much wiser, you have more clarity and more perspective. So that's the objective of the five steps, to really give you that level of clarity that can help you dive down deep into an unconscious mind and find out, find the toxic issue that's caused this identity issue, because it's going to affect everything. Your identity starts shattering. It affects your work, your relationships, your mood, your energy, everything. Energy, exercise, diet, everything.

So step one is reflection of your identity is what it sounds like, very important. A lot of these things. It's interesting you're saying this because when I was younger, I've said this on the show a few times, but when I was younger, probably like 7, 8, 9, I would get in elementary school, I would get in trouble a lot, or at least this is the stories I remember. I remember getting in trouble and being sent to the principal's office, maybe not that much, maybe, I don't know, half a dozen times or something in a couple of years, for whatever reason, acting out or saying something or. And I remember kind of being scolded or being told that I was doing something wrong by the principal. And I remember saying vividly like, I wish I were dead. Like, I just remember saying this as a kid over and over. Like, when I would get in trouble, I was like, I wish I were dead. And I. Hearing you say this now, I feel like I just never felt valued, you know, I'm sure people valued me, but I think I didn't know how to receive it or I didn't feel it. And I. And I think, thankfully I never said that after those. Those years, but. And I don't feel that anymore. But. But I remember if I would have went down that path of never feeling valued for 5, 10, 20 more years, I don't know why I'd still be here. I don't know why I wouldn't. I'd be building a case of what's the point of my life? Why should I be here? No one cares about me. No one values me. No one sees me. No one acknowledges me. I'm pointless, I'm worthless. I have no meaning, so I might as well end it.

It.

And so I have a. I have a lot of, I guess, compassion for people that feel that because you can kind of get sucked into it, and you can easily get sucked into it from a major breakdown or breakup or heartache or something. You can get kind of sucked into this. Well, I don't matter if this person doesn't love me, and I don't matter if I'm not good enough for this job. And I don't ma. We can kind of get sucked in if we're not taking care of our mindset.

From what I'm hearing, that is that I'm so sorry that happened to you. And it's, it's. You reflect so many people that have gone through that and you managed to kind of adjust, but the fact that you could actually recall that incident shows you that it's still, you know, maybe now there'll be more healing. But it impacted your life. And how many kids. Yeah, and how many kids go through that? In fact, there was a post that I just happened to. I put up a couple of days ago, and I just happened to scan through. Because you get so many comments. I try and read as many as I can, but I don't. But one caught my attention. And it was literally what you saying was someone saying how they were as a child told that, you know, you're not good enough and you know, you have a bad attitude. And it was just like disciplining a child without. And what we don't realize is when you do that to a child, you actually breaking them. And I remember my mom saying to me, my mom comes up with this thing saying to me that when I would tell my kids, hey, listen, that's not right. But you do this, right? This is the good. But this is what. And it's not you but what you do. So it wasn't. And I was so emphatic on trying to. And I don't know if I did it every time and I'd have to go ask my kids. I really was conscious of not saying, it's you that's bad.

You're amazing action that you did. The behavior is not good.

But yes, there's separation. And I remember my mother watching me doing this one time. She said, why are you doing that? Why are you telling them if they've done something wrong that they good because they are good. They're at the core. They just learning. They just experimenting.

If you're constantly telling a child, child all the things they're doing wrong, they're going to believe they're wrong.

Exactly. That's the perspective that they're building because you the. You the adults in their life, you the caregiver, you're the person that they look up to the most and you're shaping them. And so they relying on you to model behavior. So if you are modeling back to them all the time that they are bad, instead of saying, okay, you're doing this, there's a reason why. And that's what I used to always do with the patients in my practice when parents are not helping with behavioral. Because I work with a lot of adolescents that were behavioral, juvenile delinquents and that kind of thing. We would always look at. I'd always explain it like this. The way you turn up or the way you are, what you're saying and what you're doing are simply signals of an underlying issue. It's not the person. You can't say, little Johnny is a behavior problem. That's a terrible thing to say because you shattered that child's. And they'll just think, oh, what's the point? I may as well. I may as well live up to what they're telling me I am. You know, and more of the. That. Exactly. So we've got to be so careful that maybe a person. Are you always so aggressive? You know, when you say you always. You never.

Those.

You actually.

You're building an identity.

Exactly.

You're shaping an identity, and the person's becoming more of that identity.

And you're not giving them any skills to change. So. But if you rather say to them, okay, what you've done is actually pretty aggressive, I know that's not who you are. Let's see why you did that, because why you did this, a reason why. Why you did that. And honestly, I cannot tell you how many times I've been saying this recently. We've got to keep. Give people grace. We've got to give ourselves grace. If someone in your environment or your work environment or your family are being impossible or difficult or whatever, instead of getting mad at them, remove yourself, create a boundary, but change your perspective. There's a reason. There's a reason why they're like that. So get yourself in a safe place that you can actually process it and that you get your own mental health under control and then go back in and try and say, okay, look, that really hurts me the way you do this, but I understand that this is not who you are. Can I help you? You know, get through this? Is there something that's going on and that shifts things totally, because you're immersing people in kindness, which is something I did a podcast on recently. It changes that kind of thing, Changes the way that the brain functions immediately in both parties and you can get to the core issue. And that goes back to the Child. You can do the same thing with a child. You don't have to then break the identity. So kids are going into adulthood. There's so many bad behavioral issues that have. Out of generations of bad parenting. And we do. I mean, I don't. I'm. I'm much older than you, I think. I don't know how old you are, but I'm 57. How old are you?

I'm 38.

I'm 20 years. Almost older than you.

Okay.

So my parents parented me in a very different way where it was very much, you know, hit ostrich in the sand mentality. Children are seen and not heard. You know, don't pull yourself together, get up and keep going. Hide your emotions. Emotions. Don't show the emotions to the world.

That's so hard when you're developing.

Oh, my God.

Brain that is developing. It's hard to.

It's very.

Emotions.

Exactly. So I'm part of the baby boomer generation, and we grew up like this. And that's where you see a lot of issues in the baby boomer generation. And a lot of us have carried that on with our own kids. And hopefully I didn't because I recognize and I'm doing the work, thank God I'm doing what I'm doing. So I could change that. But that's. That has created a whole breed of people. And if you don't change that, we then impact the next generation and the next generation. So we have to. But yeah, you've got to be able to express yourself. And one of the things, when I was working in therapy with doing a lot of family therapy, I would tell the parents that you've got to be authentic. You've got to explain, hey, I'm sad today, Mom's sad, and it's okay to be sad. And this is why I think I'm sad and I'm working on it and I'll be better. So you've modeled now for a child that you said if your parent is sad or worked up or irritated or angry or snap you and you don't explain to a child, the child will immediately say, think I'm bad. Their identity gets attacked. So if you don't explain to the child why their identity is affected and then they think, okay, that they only adults are perfect. So adults. A sad adult means that I'm the bad person, the adults the good person. And that's the worst lie out. All of us are a mess. No matter what age you are, adult or child, you just happen to be an Older version of being a mess, and there's hopefully some growth. And what we should do is model authenticity and say, I am so sad today or am depressed today or yes, I yelled at you. I'm sorry. That was wrong. It's my bad. I did it because of this. So then you model to the child. That's, oh, okay, it's okay. If I get mad, then they start saying, mom, I'm mad because instead of I am mad is my identity. It's not mad. My identity. That's what I'm doing. Not a being.

It's interesting because this morning I woke up and I was feeling a little sadness, and I didn't know why. And I remember thinking, okay, let me just sit with this for a minute, minute. And I don't need to stay here, but I can be here and reflect on it. And I remember just kind of like chatting with a friend. I was like, yeah, I'm just kind of feeling sad. I don't know really know why. Maybe I'm feeling like a little, you know, I went through a transition in a relationship lately. I'm like, maybe I'm, you know, a little bit of sadness from that and missing this experience. And I was like, okay, you know, but there's. There's a reason why the transition happened. And even though I'm grateful that for the lessons and the process of moving on from this relationship, I can still be sad for the loss of something. Yeah. Something that's not there anymore, that was there at one point. So I just kind of sat with it for 20, 30 minutes and I was like, okay, but I don't need to stay here because staying in sadness is not going to support my joy, my authenticity, my. My vision of helping people. So I want to make sure that I don't, like, reject these range of emotions. But I also. But I also don't want to stay in the negative. Not a negative emotion, but the motion that maybe will hold me back from helping people or having a positive attitude. So I think it's so good.

You just. You just. Sorry, I didn't.

Go ahead, go ahead.

You just did a neuro cycle.

You basically gathered in the language.

Yeah, you did. You gathered awareness of your sadness. You embraced that. You were okay with it. You gave yourself permission, and it's so good because it's really okay to be sad. It's totally normal. Then you reflect it. So you gathered awareness. You then reflected on why you. You maybe didn't do the writing steps, but you visualized it. So this.

I was talking with someone I was talking with someone about.

So you talk.

So you just. So there we go. So there's kind of the writing, if, if it comes up again, you could maybe try and do a metacog and you didn't get to finishing that. But the different types of writing just can take you deep if you need to. But you basically did that as a visual discussion. And then you got into. You, you reconceptualized that. You said, okay, there's a reason you said the breakup, you're moving on. And then it's okay to be sad because it's you, you grieving the loss. And that's part of it. And now you're moving on. And so your first step was you've accepted it, but now you're moving on. And you're quite right that. So you've given that sadness. You embrace processed and you reconceptualized. So you turned. What if you didn't? If you pushed it down, it would have grown because whatever you suppress will get bigger and then it's going to permeate other parts of your life. And then there's confusion because you think you why am I sad when all this is happening and why am I feeling this? And it ended like a little virus, you know, just start spreading. And so you caught it there and you allowed yourself, but you also limited. And that's so important with any emotion. That is. No emotion is bad. Every emotion is telling us a story. But there were these certain emotions that make us tired. Our brain is our brain. Body and conscious mind are limited in energy. The non conscious mind is unlimited in energy. So the non conscious mind will keep driving us to just keep going. So we have to discipline or you have to literally create a discipline, almost like boundaries between the, you know, the conscious and the unconscious. So we have to. So a wise mind is saying, okay, if I stay your wise mindset, if I stay in sadness, I'm going to get drained. You. You instinctively recognize. Yeah, exactly. So that was your wise mind telling you. So you put a cap and you put a seal on it. And I always say that with the neuropsych when you're going through the process and you're working through a 63 day cycle, you sit for 15 to 45 minutes, not longer. And you limit and you have an active reach, which is then what you did, you reconceptualize and you said, okay, well this is, I'm moving on. I'm just, I had a moment of sadness because I'm grieving What's happened and that's okay. So you, if you're, during the course of the day, if you, if you found yourself going back to sadness, you can, instead of allowing yourself to go and revisit the whole transition, you can go to that statement and you can build on that statement of it's okay to be sad, that I'm grieving a loss. And that's part of it. And then you move on. So you're training your mind to discipline itself, not to stay in something that will drain you, but to see how you made it work for you. Because you can't change what's happened to you, but you just change what happens in you.

What does the neuroscience say behind positive thinking versus negative or toxic thinking? And I think, I don't know what the stat is. It's 60,000 thoughts a day or something like that we have and 80 or 90% of them are the same recurring thoughts. I'm probably off there, but something.

No, no, there's a, there's a lot of stuff like that out there. And you're not far off in terms of what the, what the, what the media is saying in terms of the people. I follow people that are heavy into understanding the numbers of, you know, the, from a various neuroscientific perspective. And I've done my own calculations. The. We build around about 8 to 10,000 thoughts a day. So we building. So that's sort of how many events we experience. It could be more. These are very, very, very, very, very average numbers. It really is. So it's somewhere, so it's somewhere between 8 and 18,000 that we build. So we build in response to what we experience. So whatever's new is built. But then to build you also have the thoughts popping up. So at any one moment. So you, you know, we can work in 10 second blocks. That's what neuroscience shows us just to give you some kind of tangible thing to handle. Hang on to. In any 1/10 moment you can literally have anything from 1 to 13 thoughts that will move from the non conscious and maybe more and in as well and also build a couple of thoughts in that thought with one thought but with multiple, maybe a hundred memories in that. So these, that's, that's 120 odd things happening in any tense second block and multiply that by 60 seconds, you know, times six. So in one minute. So you can already see the numbers as they multiply. So that's where we get anywhere between 8,000 we build and then probably about another 10,000 are coming up. So 18,000 seems to be a more but whatever the number is, it doesn't really matter. It's a lot.

We have a lot of thoughts.

We have a lot of.

And a lot of them are more negative it seems like, right?

Not necessarily. If you look over the only reason it feels like that is because the negative get more attention. Not because they are, not because you wired that way but because they have created complete disruption in your brain.

So we see stronger physical reaction. Right.

You've got to get rid of it. It's against your survival. So you're going to pay attention to whatever's threatening your survival. Think of it. If someone's at your front door and they're trying to bash your front door down and you've got your family to protect, you're going to pay attention. You're not going to sit and watch tv. You're going to pay attention to what's catch what's, what's a threat to your survival. That's why we. So it's not that we have more.

Negative thoughts when we're relaxing, calm, we're not thinking I need to fix this, that's we're just relaxing and hanging out. But it's when there's a thought that's negative, we put a lot of attention on.

Exactly. It's the big tree in the forest. It's we whatever you think about the most will grow. So you may have if this huge infinite forest of green, the strip through the middle is the wise mind that can't ever change. The majority is green, small trees, big trees and you're going to have clusters of the black in between. Some people will have more because they've had more abuse. You know, as I said 30, 40% or sort of 20, 30% of the population depending on where you are, which country would have more experience, more trauma, socioeconomic abuse, war, etc. So war torn countries will find more PTSD higher percentage than in somewhere like a less war torn country and that kind of thing. But on average the forest is mainly green. But whatever is getting the most attention in your life, if you're living in war torn something or if you living in an abusive situation or you're living in with a bullying boss or you living under the threat of someone in your family who's really ill, that's what's going to dominate. So it's not that we have more negative thoughts, it's because that is survival threatening our survival. It's creating brain damage. We've got to get rid of it. We've got to manage it. It's a call to management. Paying attention to the toxic is a call to management. It's created disruptions in the gravitational field. Think of those, those. I need to get an image. There's a movie and I don't know which one it is, but it's those, you know, you get that ripple effect moving through like, like a field or something. And you can almost, you know, they create, with the movies, they create that ripple effect. Do you know what I'm. Can you, you visualize something like that? Okay. That's what's happening with the mind. So we've got these ripples. It's not just trees that are standing still. There's these ripples. But even now and then that ripple is toxic. So it's like it's going to be very disruptive. And that sends out this. It upsets the neur. The balance in the nonconscious mind. And it's linked to a physical, so that the, this gravitational field wave disruption storm is linked to one of these in, in the physical brain. So it's in the storms, there, somewhere there. So maybe it's there and then it's also there, this thing in there. So those are linked and those are threatening your survival. So they will get your attention and your attention is to go fix. So if we suppress.

So if we suppress in terms of what? Not pay attention, not be aware.

Yeah.

Medicate, take drugs, drink, whatever the addiction is.

Exactly.

As opposed to address it, what happens?

Well, so essentially. I'm glad you brought that up. So addiction is not a disease. We're not caught by the chemical. And the chemicals do change your brain. I've just explained that. But your mind can override any biological change because your mind's more powerful than your brain. And that's how we, you know, you can always draw on that internal survival instinct, which is that internal strip of green trees, just for the analogy's sake. So addiction isn't a disease. Addiction is a response response like depression. It's a warning signal. It's trying to take something that's painful and taking something to numb the pain. So as you said, the sex, the pornography, the alcohol, the drugs, the smoking. Yeah. So you often find. Exactly. So if you find someone who was talking to someone yesterday who had a tremendous battle with cocaine and alcohol, but it wasn't those that grabbed them, we get the impression that, oh, you're brain's diseased, therefore you're vulnerable to those and you can't control it. Nonsense. That's taken all the hope. People are dying from lack of hope, Louis. That's what that statistic I spoke about earlier, the reversal of trends. People are dying from lack of hope, deaths of despair. When you take away people's sense of agency, you're taking away the most core dynamic of who you are as a human. Your mind is all about agency. Think, feel, choose. You control that and you're moving that agency from someone by saying, hey, you can't control the fact that you're addicted to alcohol or that you're addicted to. That's terrible. But if you say, okay, I see that. That is where you finding your coping strategy at the moment, that having the alcohol is numbing the pain, having the, you know, the pornography, the repeated whatever, the abuse of whatever abuse of anything to hide it. The opioid addiction, it's, it's just to numb the pain. So, so once a person is in a loving, supportive environment where they can start seeing that change, then they can start seeing why. Then you can take them through the process of, okay, well, let's see, maybe that signal has got a cause. And let's start finding. And when you start working through the neuropsych, I can tell you now, most of the time they're still addicted to something because the pain's so bad. And they're denying this is a disease because it's easier to accept that initially. But they deny, no, I, I'm not addicted to alcohol. I know I'm not addicted to, to whatever, the cocaine, I'm not addicted. But once you start lovingly showing them, okay, well, let's talk about, forget about the substance. Let's talk about you, what's going on, what's happened? And when you start doing that, then I'm depressed and this and this. And then the things start coming up. And as soon as you start getting that cycle happening, then the person is more able to say, oh, I see, I've been trying to, to numb my pain. And then you can start getting the release. 86 to 93% of people that are addicted get out of addiction through choice. And that choice is stimulated by a supportive, a super supportive loving environment that is help helps people to see what's going on because it's very hard to face that stuff. So we can live in a state of denial. And so that's what takes a lot of good supportive and good therapy and good intention environments, you know, supportive environments. But to tell someone, I'm always an addict is one of the worst things you can say. You're saying, okay, you have no power.

Right, right. I'm a victim to this chemical imbalance or whatever it might be.

Yeah, but that's not the case. And it's. And it may take you years. I mean, I was speaking to someone the other day who was, as I said, a cocaine battling with, I mean, all kinds of stuff and now is one of the most amazing people helping other people doing the most incredible work. That person, person had been raped multiple times as a child by. Came from a very wealthy family and a babysitter who looked after him when he was. Parents were so busy working, was repeatedly raping this child through his childhood and then got, I mean it happened again at university and this and this in different work environments and, and in different parts of the world when he traveled to the different parts of the world and that's where. So he had to get to the point where he realized he was numbing the pain. You know, so, so that's. So if you see we have to shift the narrative.

Absolutely.

You know that this is, I mean these are extreme cases, but there's also the day to day. I mean, we've got to live with ourselves. Someone the other day said to me, well, that's all in, well, relationship big extreme. What about just sitting here with myself and I can't sleep at night and I'm worrying about like, you know, the things that on. I can still get through life but I'm ruminating and I'm overthinking and I'm stuck in anger and you know, that, that too. We've got to manage, manage all of that.

And that was my, that was 25 years of my life because I, I talk about being sexually abused when I was five and having anger and resentment and frustration and rage for 25 years until I was, until I actually started opening up and talking about it, until I did therapy, until I did, you know, emdr and yeah, I mean I did every type of therapeutic experience I could do and it, it really truly gave me the, the environment of love, support and peace to, to begin the path of setting me free, setting the pain and the trauma free by giving it a voice, by expressing it, by doing the work. And it didn't happen overnight. It's eight years later. It's still an ongoing thing of healing.

And it will be.

Yeah, it's much easier and I can have a conversation about it with ease where eight years ago I would, you know, be crying talking about it.

So that's xy. That's the X plus Y equals xyz. You've reconceptualized, you're able to talk. So I didn't mean to interrupt you, but that's what you've done. You've been neuro cycling without knowing it. Now if you formally start neuro cycling, if you start a daily program, you're gonna start unwiring it even more. You're gonna get even more control over the accumulation of all the things that happened. I mean that's just what I would recommend that you try it out.

For sure? For sure. So what should we be thinking when toxic thoughts about ourselves. I'm not good enough. I'll never amount to anything. I shouldn't try this. This person doesn't like me. Drama, stress, anxiety, whatever it is. When we have a toxic thought that doesn't support our dreams, it doesn't support the betterment of our future and our vision. What should we be thinking in terms of replacing that in terms of the process? Or is that something we shouldn't be rejecting? Negative thoughts, we should be analyzing and being aware. But how do we do it without consuming our life?

Okay, so you, you kind of answered the question, the second part. That's what you do. The only way to get control is to embrace and to process and reconceptualize. And you do it in a very accepting manner. So it's like get into the helicopter and be the messy pilot. Be the co pilot.

Yeah.

And get, get into that state of mind because then, and then it's very non judgment, judgmental that you start by telling yourself like the very first thing as you're getting in the helicopter. Whichever point when you're in is to say it's okay, it's okay. There's been a million billion people who have been in the same position as you that are battling. In fact, most people battle with self esteem. It's very few people that don't for some reason battle with self esteem. For example, just take that example thinking I can't do this or I am ashamed. Because every toxic experience we have completely rips at the core of who we are. And the core of who we are is I'm needed, I'm valuable and I have something to contribute to the world that no one else can contribute. So when someone tries to take that away from you through an abuse or that attack the core of you, so you kind of hide amongst shame and self esteem comes out of this. I shouldn't be feeling this. But especially a young child like five to be abused, you, you don't know how to process that. So the most immediate thing is because it's so against survival, because the adult in your life who's supposed to be the protector, everything's assorted. You don't have the language, you don't have the brain power yet, the mind power yet to process. So your coping strategy will be, well, this made me feel bad, so I am bad. So you tend to have this pervasiveness. Sexual trauma tends to create a pervasiveness of shame. And that comes out in all kinds of behavioral manifestations, whether it's withdrawal, whether it's being difficult, aggressive and it's pervasive. And that attacks self esteem because something at the core of who you are has been attacked. And that's why it takes time, as you spoke about, to go back and find that. So in terms of what do you say to someone, the first thing is to get to the point where we have to change our narrative. We have to forget what the world said about all these scary words and see those as very helpful. For It's a complete 90 degree or 360 degree change. Despair, anxiety, shame, thinking I am shame, thinking I have no self esteem, thinking I can't do this, that's okay. Because as soon as you say that's okay, as soon as you can admit you're feeling that you've controlled it, you've now promised you've got the power back, you've got the power back, you've shifted the power balance. So instead of this is now in the non conscious, it's this trauma, it's the five year old, it's gone through the years, whatever, and there's been this, and I'm not saying you did this, but there may have been a period that you suppressed because you didn't know how to process it till maybe 15, 16, 17 when you were getting more cognitive, metacognitively able and started seeing things, maybe it was older. Very often it hits around between 1822 where early childhood trauma, where we start seeing those patterns manifesting and a bit of awareness coming. So now that when this comes into consciousness in the brain, this thing is now weakened. So these protein branches which are the memories and the emotions, the data of the event which was that right is now weakened. So the minute I through my tears say, okay, I feel, I feel shame, I feel like I've got no self esteem, I feel like I'm useless and I'm ugly and I'm this and I'm dead and I can't even achieve anything. The minute I can accept that, I can look at that. Objectively, pilot, co pilot. And the co pilot can say, what do you feel? I feel okay. Let's now see if that's real. And that whole calm. Just the way I'm speaking, calm. It's okay. Own it. It's fine. It's okay. Now we can fix it. That's weakened these chemical bonds, protein bonds. I've started changing the structure in my brain. I've now shifted 1400 neurophysiological responses to work for me instead of against me. I've now started recreating balance in the brain. I've increased blood flow. So I'm setting myself up to be more resilient, to do the very hard work of unpacking. And it gets worse before it gets better. And one of the really good things that I have presented in my work and in this book is to know that scientifically, I've shown that even if you feel worse, which you will, when you unpack this and you start seeing stuff that you suppress, it's terrible, it's heartbreaking. It can make you feel like you just want to die.

That's how I felt when I started talking about it. I was like, this is the scariest, hardest thing that I've ever done. I'd rather. I almost rather die. Like, it's the feeling that you have. You're like, if anyone ever knew these things about me, if I had to truly face these things, it's the most scary, challenging thing I've ever emotionally had to deal with. And it feels like you're dying. I don't know. I mean, maybe that's too extreme. Maybe that's too extreme. But I think you're thinking or feeling like I'm going to die. Because if I process this and if people knew this about me.

Yeah.

How could they ever accept me? How could they ever love me? I'm going to be alone for the rest of my life. Like, your mind. My mind went through these thoughts.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And there's, like, no meaning and there's no purpose, and what can you do? And it's a waste of time. And I can't live with myself like this. And so 10 terrible. And I just. I can't do this. And then you start rejecting people around you or you make wrong decisions. It's totally normal. That is normal. You need to accept that about the process. It will get worse before it gets better. And that's okay. And, and. And that's totally what you've gone through is normal. And, and we can't go and label that and medicate that. Then I invalidate your experience by you being able to talk about your experience. This format of having a podcast where around the world, world now where people are being much more vulnerable and opening, it's bringing this into the open and it's enabling us to then be able to weaken that you've shifted the power balance and it does get worse. As you said, you want to die. It's so bad. But then the shift starts happening because look where you are today. A shift happens at some point when it really gets dark. You may even have tried to commit suicide or you may even have got to the point where this is it, I'm out of here or something traumatic, really traumatic. And then you suddenly there's that shift, there's that awareness and then you can start rebuilding. And you know, that is a time process and that's. That shift is real. It's what we. You asked me about. What would you say to someone who's in that state? Where do you start? You start by giving yourself permission. You start by getting into the co pilot. Pilot seat, by letting that pilot fly like a maniac and you know, crash the plane. It's a time capsule. You can get that plane going again. But helping, leaning on the power and the comfort of the co pilot to say, I'm really scared of that. I don't want to land my plane. You land, but I will. And you land your plane and there you take out your spades and you start the process of getting to eventually digging this whole thing up and slowly as you're ready. That's why I say 15 to 45 minutes a day. You don't do longer, you do a little bit at a time and you do as many cycles as you need and eventually it gets to the point where you have recovered, conceptualized.

I just feel like so many years of my life where I would stay in sadness, anger, resentment, what if statements where I ruminate on these emotions for days, weeks, months, years. And it only left me with a lack of sleep, with stress, frustration, overwhelm, never feeling good enough, asking why me? All these things. And I never felt peace when I stayed in the emotion and I allowed it to consume me as opposed to be a momentary or an hour thing, as opposed to exactly days, weeks, months thing.

So you literally had to rewire your brain because you. Because we get into patterns of allowing ourselves to do that ruminating. And I can honestly relate to what you're saying. I did it too. And you know, as I've learned more and more and Done more and more research in this area. Yes, I've got an advantage because I'm seeing it directly with the research I'm doing. But it's just so freeing. You get so much mental peace when you recognize, okay, I'm in that state. And yes, you can. You can have a concern in your life. You can have a concern that is. I mean, you're not just going to not think about a transition in a breakup. You know, there's going to be a lot of time that you spend on that because it's different processing, but it's how you do it. You know, each little moment, is it a rumination on a hamster wheel or is it a growth, a messy repair? Messy repair, hypothesizing, messy repair, you know, you moving forward. And that's what's. What's so good. Because if you get stuck, like in the. If only like you said, and those negative emotions, we creating so much neurochemical chaos in our brain and our body and increasing inflammation. We aging. Our body, we aging. We just start doing everything we shouldn't be doing and we don't have to. That's staying in the messy mind. The wise mind catches that and disciplines and trains it. But it's also not going to happen overnight. And that's where people in this technological age think, okay, well, I've done it once. Why am I still doing it? No, you're going to have to. It's going to take you probably nine weeks. If you had to actually look at the time you spent to break that cycle, which meant that you rewired your brain, it would have. It's weeks. And if you have breaks, months.

Yeah, well, back in the day when I had to go through that.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Multiple cycles.

And that's why, you know what's interesting, it was like eight years ago is when everything started to really shift for me when I turned 30, because I don't know if I mentioned this in my last interview, but I've talked about it on the show a lot, where I started to truly address and heal the root cause of a lot of my pain, anger, resentment from sexual trauma that I went through as a kid, from other things that happened that I never expressed, that I never brought to the surface, that I always kept hidden with shame and insecurity and frustration or anger. And when I started to process the root causes of a lot of my insecurity and shame, that's when everything started to rewire. So if I would have just said, okay, I'm going to process These things on a surface level for a certain amount of days. I don't think I would have ever found that ability to create that peace within because I was always holding on to some type of trauma that I was unwilling to talk about. Whether it was a big T or a little T, I was unwilling to talk about it out of shame. And when I started to share was freeing. And I'm not saying everyone needs to share these things publicly or whatever, but just talking to a friend or therapist or a coach, it was allowing me to start rewiring. Okay, I can process these heartbreaks or these tragedies or these moments in life that bring me stress and pain and grief and sadness. I now don't need to hold on to this pain from my whole life and add to it. I can process it and move on.

That's beautiful. That's amazing that you did that. And it's interesting that you did that. Around your 30s and your 20s were very turbulent in terms of trying to.

My whole life was turbulent, but until 30, I mean, still my 30s, it's been some ups and downs, but it's been. I've been able to process and I've been able to emotionally have a more tools to experience and process and not hold on to. And I think I'm still learning because, I mean, I'm going to be learning for a long time, but yeah, it'll.

Be a whole lot.

I'm definitely not perfect because I still make a lot of mistakes and I still stay in things longer than I should and want to make sure I give it my all and all those things. But I think I've gotten to a place where I know when to walk away from scenarios as opposed to be the perfectionist, make sure I do whatever it takes to work. I'm like, okay, if this situation isn't supporting me or the other person, like at some point we gotta, we gotta transition the situation.

So that's incredible. And you've done so much incredible work. Then you've literally. What's. I mean, I can explain to you scientifically be interested in what you've actually done because I think what you've, what you've gone through, the story you've gone through is like especially having the sexual trauma as a young. How old were you again?

Five.

Five.

That, that's like. You think of it like this. As a five year old, you look at your caregivers in your environment as your heroes, as your people that look after you. So the distortion is so, is so. Absolutely. It's just Such a distortion. So what's happened? If I use my toxic tree and for those that are listening, I'm holding up a wiry toxic tree that represents toxic thought as opposed to the healthy green tree. These, the roots over here, this whole thing's formed. The root part over here is the source of the pain. So that's the source of the trauma. So that's the actual events. All the data, the emotions, the memories. Yes, the memories. So a thought is made of memories, memories, root memories and branch memories. And so the memories are that all the. All the things that actually happened and all the emotions that went along with it. The full data as it's happening simultaneously, we interpret what's happening. And then if these repeated patterns that happen, you. This, this part over here, the branches are your interpretation. So you said things like shame and what were the other words you used?

You used security, shame, insecurity, resentful.

Resentful or. And seeing yourself, your identity was broken because you didn't see yourself as having value. All those kinds of things because of that complete distortion. Now as a five year old, you cannot process this. So this was the way you cope. This always is the balance to that. And even though this is a distortion, you do this to balance that. I mean it's healthy, it's all great, it works out because the you ness comes out. But here, this is all not the unit.

So there.

That would account for when you were at school, maybe you were called to the principal's office. A lot of those behaviors would have come from you not badly yourself. And then if them coming in heavy again just added more fuel to that. It was just another. It was just another layer.

Added more anger, more frustration, more. Yeah, everything.

Yeah. So instead of them looking at why Lewis is doing this, they just told you you were wrong and punished you. That would be the worst thing in your situation and that would have just made it worse and worse. So that then we push that down because we don't know what it is, what to do with it. So you just keep going on and you just keep hoping for the best and you keep that. Kids just seem to be so resilient. But this, this is building and building. So in your non conscious mind, this whole. These thoughts that we have, these experiences that we have are building through our mind into our brain and into our body and into our mind. So this is not only a thought tree in your brain, it's also in the DNA of every cell of the body and it's in the gravitational fields of your mind. So it's in three places. That's why this whole psycho neurobiological impact, that's why it's this whole effect that it has on us. It's a whole body experience. So when you do things like EMDR therapy. Did you ever do EMDR therapy or.

I've heard great things about it. I haven't tried that yet.

So when you went, you've done a bit of therapy over the years?

I've done a bunch of different therapies, things to things, emotional intelligence experiences and workshops and.

Yeah. Which have helped to pull the stuff from your body to your brain into your mind. So we work. So we work both ways. You get from body, brain, mind, mind, brain, body, and your neck kind of all works back and forth. But if these aren't dealt with, they get suppressed. They get suppressed. They get suppressed. And then maybe only when you're 30, like you said, then you started actually doing the work or maybe during your 20s. I don't know when you started first remembering the, the trauma. I'm not sure what age you were.

At when you started facing every day. I remembered the trauma and thought about it, but it wasn't until 30 when I had the courage to start talking about it.

Okay, so that was in the.

Okay, so what, what you had was the situation of some people completely harder and they don't even know what happened. Then it suddenly comes back. You were constantly. I was always living it all the time.

Okay, so it was in the year, maybe, maybe not. Every day at once a week. I probably thought about it, you know.

Okay, so this was constantly moving from the non conscious to the conscious. So the awareness was increasing. So when we have increased awareness but no management and no processing, there's got.

To be a way to get it out somehow.

Exactly.

So it's coming up, but you're not processing. So it keeps coming up, down, up, down. Each time goes back down stronger than before. And we see when you have increase awareness without processing, it increases anxiety in the brain. So we had to scan your brain at that time. We would have seen a lot of red pockets of high beta energy across your brain which would have made you be quite edgy, you know, like looking for things to constantly like keep you busy, distractions on the go, whatever. I don't, I don't know exactly what you did over that time, but you may have been just always trying to. You said perfectionism, always trying to achieve that. You're trying to prove yourself in a way. Of course.

Constantly. Yeah. I mean I threw it in sports So I was just playing sports, practicing, trying to, you know, get better and achieve my goal.

And then that would have given you a lot of release of adrenaline.

Absolutely every anger, frustration, everything you channeled into the energy.

So it's almost like you use that to cope, almost like an addiction. But in a sense, it was a coping mechanism because addiction is not a disease. It's purely a coping mechanism. It's a coping signal that you're trying to deal with the stuff of something.

That hasn't been healed yet.

Exactly. That's exactly what it is. Because in 86 to 90, 98, 95 of addicts get out of addiction through choice, once they are ready to do the work, to find the root cause. So you channel for a time into that energy. You also got things like anandamide being released in your brain, which would have given you the bliss hormone, would have given you a sense of excitement, and you would have had dopamine rushes and all those things that were being drained. So this was draining all of that. So you're doing sport to put it back, but eventually it explodes. It's like a volcano. If you think of a volcano, well.

Then sport and well, then sport ended. So I was like, well, channel my energy. That's when everything started to come to the surface, where I was like, oh.

You got to deal with this.

I'm not liking my personality in these scenarios when I'm feeling triggered and people aren't liking my personality around me. And it wasn't. It wasn't fun anymore to be around me for, you know, a year or two when I was like, I don't know how to get. I don't know. How do I get how to express myself? I know happy and angry. Like, I don't have a range of emotions. Like, how do I learn how to express? And I think a lot, and I empathize for a lot of humans, but I mean, men in general who are kind of built and raised in the same type of dynamic. I'm like, it's. It's when you've never been taught how to express yourself without being shamed, without being made wrong, without being like, don't. Don't do that. That's not okay. You can't show this emotion. You're supposed to be a man. Or this, whatever it is.

Toxic masculinity.

Yeah. For women as well. Like, you need to be this, this, and this, and you can't do this. It's just a challenge because then you're always suppressing something.

It's always suppressing and you have to go back and, and that's volcanic in nature because like a volcano will bubble, eventually explode and the lava will pour out. That's what these eventually do. They eventually. And it did explode as you've just described. It was exploding in your behavior which was now becoming very in your face and in people's faces and that's in these. That was then signal. So all of those behavior patterns, the emotions, the behaviors, the perspective on life that you had, the physical sensations in your body, those were all warning signals that your body was trying to restore balance. So your non conscious mind was trying to draw your attention to the fact that you need to identify the source. Your immune system was sending out all kinds of signals to that. This actual physical experience in your brain, this physical thought in your brain, your body trying to get rid of it. So it's trying to eject and get rid of this thing that's causing imbalance. And it comes out in our emotions and our behaviors.

Well, it also comes out physically. I mean, I was, yes, yes, I was going through a challenging scenario where I knew a relationship that I was in needed to end, but I was staying in this certain relationship for, for longer than it needed to be. And I knew and I started to get. I never in my life have had this, but I started to get like eczema breakouts on my skin in different parts of my body. And I was like, what is this? And I was like, never had this in my life. I started doing all the allergy tests. I had no allergies. I was like, maybe I'm having too much almond butter or freaking, I don't know, gluten. What is it? Dairy?

What is it?

Yeah, eliminating all these foods, nothing is changing. And I'm like, well, maybe it's just. I'm just gonna live with this forever then. And okay. And literally, I kid you not, once this, the dynamic of the relationship shifted and, and transitioned. My body had. It's going away and I was just like, this is crazy. Like the physical symptoms is gone. This eczema outbreak or whatever, which I thought was going to kill, keep spreading all over my body, it's now gone. And it's, it's crazy when we like you're saying we, we need to be aware of the signals. We need to be aware of the emotions, the feelings, the frustrations, the thoughts, the sadness, the anger and be aware of them. And we also need to be aware of our physical symptoms.

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

Am I drained? Am I emotionally tired? Am I frustrated and triggered all the time. Do I have eczema? Is my hair falling out? I don't know, whatever. Am I losing my vision? Like something. Am I getting heart palpitations? Like you've got to be noticing the physical symptoms as well from the emotional stress.

Exactly.

That. That is so important what you said and fascinating that you've got, you know that you've highlighted a key psychoneurobiological link. And in my, in my most recent book, the Teenager Maker Mace, that one that you interviewed me about last time, I talk about some of the things I didn't put my whole clinical trial, but I talk about some of those impacts. But there's so many, so many studies around the link between unmanaged mind and unmanaged stress and the impact on our body. So it's directly like this. You were going through this relationship that was not good for you. You hadn't dealt with these issues yet properly. So that combination was. Your mind was an unmanaged mess. And that would generate a lot of basically toxic energy waves, gravitational fields, electromagnetic fields literally through your brain and your body. So therefore nothing. Your. You would have had high gamma, high. Too much high gamma, too much high beta, probably not enough oxygen and blood in your brain, constricted blood vessels around your heart, all things that you know. The immune system would have been autoimmune because that's eczema's autoimmune response. That. So everything was. So you've all got genetic weaknesses. And generally when we're under toxic stress and it's come through the generations, it just happens. It's mutations that happen through generations and they dormant and this activated and the mind is the activating factor. So it manifests in so many different ways. So definitely you've kept the nail on the head. You go for the allergy test. It's not the allergies because we immediately think purely physical, but the physical is dominated by the mind. The physical, you don't, you don't have any. You can't have eczema if you're dead. You can only have it if you're alive. And generally if it's not a food allergy, there is a mind, an undeal, a mentality. Yeah, exactly.

The mental allergies.

Literally, Literally mental allergies. These are literally mental allergies and they threaten your survival. So your. That eczema was your body saying, hey, Lewis, please pay attention. There's something in your mind that you need to deal with.

Yeah. And it's interesting because, you know, I take full responsibility for my Thoughts and my. And staying in something that I know I'm not supposed to say in something or for not speaking up or for abandoning myself. Like so yeah. As I reflect and throughout the entire time, you know, I'm in no place to blame someone else. I take responsibility. I take responsibility for what am I doing to be a co creator in this, what are my thoughts doing to manifest this physically? And how am I responsible for. For choosing something different? And it might be a hard decision, it might be a courageous decision that I've been afraid to make, but that's the one my body is telling me you need to make or you need to shift something. You need to shift something within this relationship experience. You need to whatever it might be something. And I think a lot of times people will blame others for their feelings, their emotions, their physical manifestations of their mind and, and maybe they're a part of that experience. But you can't blame someone else for the way you're thinking and you're feeling. Or can we?

You, you could, you could hit the.

Nail on the head. You can't.

You can.

These two aren't parts of that answer. Our environment affects us. So when you were abused, you were a victim. There's no lesson to be learned in that victim. That what you, you enter as a victim. There's only healing that needs to take place. And, but so then you, but that's what you are responsible for, is your healing. And that always sounds so hard when someone's been s. Sexually abused to say that you're responsible for your healing.

No one else can heal me.

No, no, people can support you. That's the difference. And that's that whole enhancement culture. We need each other. So you need someone cheering you along. You need the therapy, the coaching, the counseling, whatever version of that, whatever combination of that. But you all, you also need to know how to manage your own mind because at the end of the day, you're not in therapy 24 7, you're not in coaching 24 7. People go to sleep, you're awake at night, you, you, you, you wake up with your mind, you're sitting with your anxiety, anxiety, your thoughts, what do you do? So mind management becomes absolutely essential in us being able to cope with anything that we've gone through. And yes, that is our. We can't change. I keep saying it. We can't change what's happened to us. We can change what's happened in us. So that abuse that you went through, there's never anything that can excuse that. And you are not there's no lesson to be learned. And you were a victim, and that person was wrong and needs to be. And person or person, you know, they. They need to be punished. And that. Those are facts. Those are facts. But for you to be disengaged from that is extremely important. And the only way you can disengage from that is through embracing, processing and reconceptualizing. So it's a deconstruction, reconstruction process. Otherwise, you keep this in your brain and this drives you and it controls you like it did for so many years every day. This was controlling you, coming up and controlling you. So until you did the work, which you did, to start recognizing the. Those signals, the physical signals in your body, the eczema, whatever it was at that time, the heart palpitations, gut issues, the emotional signals, depression, anxiety, panic, frustration, whatever worry, the perspective signals. How are you looking at life? What is your general view of life? And then also looking at. Which one have I left out? The physical. Emotional is for emotional. Physical perspective. And why am I blanking on the fourth one? There's four different areas that we look at. They'll come back in a moment. So once we gather awareness of those signals, then what we do is we can then start. Once we've gathered awareness, we can then start doing the reflection, the why. But you've got to do very sequentially, you first got to pay attention. So the signals are warning. Warning signals, they clues. So you become a detective in your own mind.

Why is this happening? Okay, let me start. Get some tests done and realize, okay, I'm eliminating this, I'm eliminating that. Then where's the root cause of that thing?

So you've got to start there, but you've got to start with your signals. So these, these are the four Emotional, what you're doing. Behavioral, physical, what's in your body and perspective. Okay, so emotional, physical, behavioral perspective. And you've got to. You've got to find those first. As soon as you're aware, you then pull this up and you change your. You change 1400 neurophysiological responses in your brain and your body. You shift the resilience of your brain, and you start now enabling yourself to be stronger, to face that stuff. And your mind, brain and body know it's going to be hard because treatment and healing is awful. It's hard. It gets worse. I put a case study in my book of one of the. One of the subjects who was in the beginning of the study, they said. They literally said, I am depression. That was the identity.

I am not. I'm depressed. I am depressed.

I am depression. Yeah, I am depression and I can't sleep. My life's just the whole narrative with just everything that was terrible. They had tried everything, every drug. They were, they were. They were at the end of the road by within 21 days of mind management they were no longer saying I am depressed. They were saying I. And they were no longer saying I am depression. They were saying I am depressed because of. And that is major. And then they said so this is not. They understood now. They were saying depression is a signal. It's telling me something. Then they said something so important, interesting. They said I'm even more depressed and even more anxious than I was when I started the trial. And. And I said yeah, that's a good thing, isn't it? They said yes, because the depression and anxiety is different because the depression and anxiety shows me I've done the work because now I know why I was depressed. They had suppressed for nearly 30 years what had happened was also sexual trauma and a lot of physical abuse and it had been so bad that they pushed it down and completely obliterated it from their memories. And that was coming up so that just remembering what happened made them more anxious and more depressed. But it was a different kind of. It was a controlled depression. It wasn't a depression of I just. I'm hopeless, I can't do anything. There's no meaning. It was I now know why I'm depressed and this is what I can do. And then by 63 days because it takes a full nine weeks to start changing behavior. They were sleeping again. They were able to get back to work. They were able to start seeing. Okay, well I found this part. Now I need to go back in and find this part, this part and this part. So there's now a pat a a plan in place for managing their mind and knowing what to do during the day when it hit them. That a terrible. And you can probably relate to this that terrible like how it grips you that sadness with that anxiety with a panic attack out of the blue, just an all consuming or someone just says something to you that looks at you funny. Your whole identity shattered.

Yeah, yeah.

And you triggered so that that is key. And, and that is why we've got a very, very. We've got to think if we've been thinking a certain way for so many years because of an experience or accumulation of experiences, you're going to have to do the work of unwiring it and to unwire you have to get control. So by gathering awareness of your signals, which is the very first step, you are then bringing this into the conscious awareness and you weaken it. And that's really key what I'm holding up the wiring tree for the listeners. You then weaken the top toxic thought. As soon as you've weakened the toxic thought, you have now got agency or control. You still feel depressed, you still feel confused, you still feel all those things. But there's a shift and the shift is that now you are taking control, you're empowered. And Louis, I used to tell my patients, get two chairs, put two chairs next to each other, sitting one and that's the wise mind. And the other one is you messy mind. And you are talk to yourself and use the, you use the pronoun you and give yourself their therapy and create an environment that you would love, which is kindness, grace, acceptance. And it's okay, everything you do. And you keep telling yourself you really are at your, you know, I use that. I always give them the science of saying listen. Neurobiologically you're wired for love. Your mind is an optimism bias. When you feel this negative toxicity, this is simply your body trying to restore balance. There's nothing about you that's bad, it's what's happened to you that's an adverse circumstance. And you've just try to cope. So your behaviors are simply coping signals, you know. So when you keep telling yourself that and then you work through very systematically through the five steps, you're getting more and more control. You're using mind directed thinking to direct the neuroplasticity of your brain that changes. So you rewire your brain slowly. And it's not a quick process, it's a slow, deliberate process over 63 days. So in the first 21 days it's 40, 15 to 45 minutes. Then you, the second phase of 42 days, you're just going to spend one to seven, seven minutes. And that cycle. And I've tracked this now all with, you know, brain studies and, and blood and DNA and I've used so many different levels of studies. And you're busy publishing all these papers at the moment, but there's a summary in the book and I've got a white paper on my website. And we didn't be doing a national study now, but what I wanted to show people was that taking this attitude, this kind of picture I've just painted of what you did with yourself, basically that and I'm just giving you more specifics, you are actually directing the new neuroplasticity of your brain. You are taking this toxic tree. You are deconstructing it. You're taking the energy that is in vibrating in those branches, holding your interpretation of the self, which is not the truth. You're taking that trauma that happened to you and you're changing all of that. And energy is never lost. And this is all energy in these proteins and it's only transferred. So you're taking that slowly every day and you're transferring and this is getting weaker and weak and weaker and weaker and you're building up a healthy reconceptualized version. So by day 21, you've got this beautiful healthy green tree. Now watch. I'm going to pull a part of it out. I'm pulling a tiny little piece of it out. There's a little piece of green that I'm holding that is that converted into this. It's now shrunk into a green version which is your very terrible sad story, which still makes you sad, still makes you crush. Never have happened, but it did happen. But you've now changed what it looks like in you. It's no longer this toxic thing that's causing your immune system to send out T lymphocytes and tissues, B lymphocytes and macrophages and treated in the same way as the coped virus which is damaging your brain and body, whatever. It's literally the same thing as a. It's not the same as copavirus, but it's also protein. So it's recognized as a threat to survival by the immune system in the same way Covid viruses. And you are, you've changed that and now no longer is it a threat to your survival. You now have a new coping mechanism so you remember why. So when you triggered this is what you revert to. Not, not that toxic tree. But to get to the point where you revert to this, the green tree, you have to do that extra 42 days of work because habits only forming those cycles. And I've had patients nurse that would sometimes take two years to get to the point where they were kind of had sorted out all the stuff. Some people will do one cycle, some there's no cookie cutter anything. This is not a technique. All I'm giving you is how you get your mind under control so that you can unwire these things and rewire them. And it's different for everyone's narrative but you can do it. It's hopeful we can do this and it's hard work and it's difficult and It's. And it's traumatic and you need support. And these times where you're going to get so depressed, where you maybe can't get out of bed for a few days because of just the awareness of what's happened, but you will keep. That, will progress. I remember having patients that were, like, had gone from suicidal to ups and downs, to seeming to cope, to, like, back together, then suddenly crashing into deep depressions, and then everything is progress because every. At every stage, there's another level of awareness and then getting to the point, okay, I can cope. I can move forward now. I can start. Which is what you did, right? Yeah. You know, you've done that now. You've channeled all that energy into helping others.

It's all process. It's all a process. And there's always going to be new lessons to learn, I'm assuming. And.

Oh, yeah, it's like.

It's that messy grow. It's that messy repair grow. Messy repair grow. Give ourselves permission. It's okay to be messy. It's okay to be depressed and anxious. It's not an illness. You're not a broken brain. You are just. Those are all signals. Be Poirot, be. Be Sherlock Holmes, you know, be your. Be your own thought detective.

There's so many things I want to make sure we go over still, but I want. I want to go into relationships in a future episode and a fantastic interview. So. So if you want us to leave a comment on the YouTube channel and just put relationship. If you want us to do another interview about the brain connection in intimate relationships and how that affects our mood and energy and all those things, I think it'd be fascinating. So leave a comment there if you guys are interested. I want to go over brain building. I also want to go over what you do for the ultimate mindset training in your morning and evening routine to set yourself up for success for a day. But I also. And I also want to go back into identity check and.

Oh, yes, we didn't quite finish.

Figure out, what do you do when you are checking your identity? And how do you reprogram your mind to build confidence in your identity moving forward?

Okay, so where do you want to start? There's three things there.

What do you do do when you're doing a identity check? What are you doing personally? What does that look like for me? Okay, right there.

So I. I tune into, once again the signals. So I'll be going along and I suddenly notice, for me, I've got certain key signals that tell me I need to do an identity check. One is imposter syndrome. When I start feeling like, oh, my gosh, I shouldn't be talking about what I'm talking. I don't even know what I'm talking about kind of thing, then I know that that's nonsense because I've got 38 years of research and I know what I am, and I don't know everything, but I. So I have to. So as soon as I start feeling like that, that I will. I will say, okay, that's. And if it. And I watch it, then I watch. So they. I watch for imposter syndrome. I watch. If I start getting perfectionistic, if I'm feeling like, this obsession to be perfectionistic, if I start feeling. If I like, maybe hear someone's. If I start feel little bursts of. It's not like jealousy or envy or bitterness, if any of those. I mean, like, I own it all. I'm not scared to tell people if I have those, because it's so normal to have those. It's. What's not normal is to keep them. I never see imposter syndrome, perfectionism, jealousy, envy. I never see those as evil, terrible things, and I'm now a bad person. I only ever see myself showing up as those because of something. And so those are my key things. If I start feeling twinges of envy or jealousy or imposter syndrome or perfectionism, then I know, okay, so there's this. And then I watch. Is there a pattern? How often am I doing it? Is it daily? Is it weekly? Is it just now? And then, if it's now been, I'm okay, But if I see, okay, hey, this is happening daily, and I'm being triggered by everything. So I look for frequency. So I know my signals. Then I look for frequency, Then I say, all right, now it's time. This is happening. This is happening way too often. I need an identity check. I need to sit down. And then I will actually sit for 63 days every day. And I do it well. I'm always working on something. So if I see it's an identity check, I'll finish whatever I'm working on, and then I'll start, start, and I'll start. And I always do my neurocycle for anything when I'm getting ready in the morning. It's just the routine I've set up in my life. So it's. So then while I'm getting ready, it takes me about half an hour.

So.

So it's great time. No one comes in the. In. In the bathroom. That they ever notice. That's the mom alone. That's leave. Leave me alone. That's when I have my space. So I have a routine. So then I'll start with. Let's say it's day one. I'll say, okay, those are. I'm seeing. I'm doing impostors. And I see that whatever the four signals. Then I break it down. Okay, what are the emotional signals? What are my feelings? So I'm feeling a bit of envy, a bit of jealousy, a bit of frustration, whatever. Then I'll say, okay, behavior. What am I doing? I'm definitely not smiling as much, maybe. So I look at my behaviors. I seem to be a bit short. I keep talking about this. It's coming into conversations. People are actually commenting. Why do you keep talking about this? So I look at my behavior. So emotion, emotional warning signals and behavioral warning signals. Then I will look at my body. I'll look at. I'll sense my body. What's different? Wow, I'm getting more gut aches. I my gut. We have such a genetic weakness in our family with gut very common. I'll notice that. Foods that don't really make me bloat. Suddenly I'm bloating more. I'm suddenly getting incredible cramps in my lower colon. I know immediately there's a certain pain that I get in my colon that is related to emotions. Also I get tremendous pain in my heart when I'm very toxically stressed. Like, it really feels like pain. Pain. It's sore. I can feel the pain. So I notice those things. I'm very aware. Then I'll look at my perspective and my perspective is, why am I doing this? Or something. So it's kind of in a negative. It's moving to a negative zone. So I gather those. But I gather them Lewis, like I'm gathering apples in a.

In a, you know, in an apple orchard.

So I literally will do. Yeah, I do. I literally, in my mind, I am two chairs. I am using the Yule language. I'm very kind to myself. I'm very accepting. I speak, set myself up correctly. So my whole mindset going into even before I gather those four signals is one of. It's okay. You really are amazing. There's no one can do what you can do. So a little bit of, you know, motivational boosting. But I'm also kind to myself. It's really okay. It's really not. You're not the first person who have done this to be feel envy or jealousy. This is not that you're a bad person, there's a reason. So I just remind myself of those things. A couple of little prompts that changes my neurophysiology. I know from the science that I've done that I've now got 1400 neurophysiological responses working for me. Just before I start the process I'll do a brain preparation and I've. In my app I actually do this. I have some physically walk you through audio video.

What's the outcome?

Neurocycle. It's called Neurocycle and it's on and I've got it one for identity in there. So it's, it's the whole 63 day process. I literally give you therapy and then we have many neurocycles, so many Neurocycle guides. So like if you're feeling imposter syndrome you can press that. I'll give you a neurosurgeon neurocycle identity check anxiety. So yeah, it's really cool. We're growing it all the time and I'm building in a neuropsychical lab so people can actually get coaching and get coached through different issues, which is fun. So then I'll do. So I'll do a bit of brain preparation. So set myself up, the kindness, all that stuff and then I'll do a bit of brain preparation. I love to do the 10 second pause. I write about that in my book. And that's just a very common breathing technique. But I do it with a bit of quite a lot of difference. I breathe in very deeply for seven, seven counts. But like, I mean three counts very deeply. Like you know the yoga kind of breathing where you really move your belly. Wim hof type, you know your chest is. And then you breathe out for seven counts. But it's also that sort of yoga type reading where you push, you've got to really rush it out. The extended, extended exhale pushes oxygen to the front of your brain and blood flow to the front of your brain. So I almost have to shake my head because I feel lightheaded. So that's how intensely I do it. Then while I'm, I'll do the first couple just breathing. Then I add a cognitive dimension and I start saying think, feel in the inhalation and then choose in the exhalation and I do it out loud. So I add in the verbal component to the ex, the actual physical. So now I've coordinated, I've created not just a physiological response but I've brought mind, brain and body. I've brought all three Responses together. So I've calmed down neurochemistry, I've calmed down blood flow. I've increased blood flow to the brain. I mean, I've done. I can go on and on. I've just given my telomeres a boost, which are the ends of chromosomes. I mean, it's just my immune system is not primed. Every. I've given my whole body the message, it's okay, you don't have to be now making stress work for me and not against me. So even my blood vessels around my heart would have dilated and that I would have got more blood flow to my brain. So immediately I'll feel this pain in my heart immediately, because I've now calmed my whole body down. Because that pain that I feel in my heart is coming from the trauma that's in my mind, the identity trauma in my mind. Anyway, so then, then I go into the five steps and then I'll gather those things like I told you, the four different areas. Emotional, physical, behavioral perspective. Then I go very distinctly to step two. And the gathering is like picking apples off a tree. So I don't go stand under the apple tree and just let all these things fall on my head. That's totally overwhelming. I stand back. So visualize yourself, stand standing back and selecting. And I do what I can on that day. Sometimes I can only pick maybe just envy that day and maybe just not smiling as much. And maybe just perspective. Seemed I. I seem to be a bit down or negative things that I'm not as hopeful because I'm a very kind of positive, hopeful person. But it's not there. So maybe I could just handle a bit. I don't force myself to do too much in one day. And then I'll go to. Once I've gathered, then I take each thing and I okay, now I'm going to refresh, reflect, ask, answer, discuss. What does this mean? Why? Why? Why? And I discuss and ask. So I'm starting to find the meaning. Then I'll write it down. So either I do it in a metacog and a metacog I started talking about earlier on. A metacog is a way of organizing information that looks like a tree. I mean literally like a tree grows branches and another branch and another branch. Every branch is connected to something else. You grow branches on a piece of paper and on each branch you write a word or a couple of words or a little phrase, but nothing's floating on the page. This is so important. And you start in the center and you just build you can either go clockwise or anti clockwise, whatever you want to do. You can keep it all clockwise and turn your page, whatever you want. Lewis I developed a system about 38 years ago and I've constantly improved it. I would do this with my patients. I would work with people, for example, with personality disorders and using the metacog technique we would actually they would be able to see the different personalities and react, integrate them and find the trauma source and that kind of stuff to get your conscious mind working with your non conscious to find all the trillions of thoughts that are in your non conscious mind where they stored to get that depth. Because your conscious mind is only working when you're awake, but your non conscious mind is working 24 7. So it forces these five steps going into the meta cog, which is the third step. Force this integration and this connection between the conscious and the nonconscious. So then I start writing down what I've gathered and what I've reflected on. But in this meta cox, it's a mess. It's just like words all over the place and you literally vomit it on your page. And you start seeing things that you can't believe that you. I mean every time I do it, I'm astounded at what I see. Then the fourth step is a recheck and I'll go and sit down and I'll look at, take color and I'll look at what if I, what am I saying here? What does this mean? And I try and get order, I look for triggers and patterns and antidotes. Big thing is antidotes. That's reconceptualizing. You said that's a state of antidote or reconceptualized statement. Earlier on when you spoke about this morning, the sadness that you felt and you said you gave yourself permission to feel the sadness. And your antidote to reconceptualized version was it's okay, I'm feeling sad because this is a transition in my life and it's okay to feel that. And then you moved on into the day. That's what you look for in step four. You look for what can you, what is the antidote? Yes, you're feeling this because of this. And you start. So as you go through those stages, you start seeing the reasons why, especially step three, three starts pulling that reason, the root of why I have this identity thing. And you start seeing, wow, I thought I had dealt with it, but I haven't. This is still an issue. I still need that approval because of this This I still, why do I need that approval? Do I really? And then you start saying, actually I don't because of this. So step five, then that builds into step five, which is then a little statement that I'll hang on to for the day. And that's where your gratitude statement or your positive affirmation or your whatever summary of what, what you've achieved that day, it could be as simple as, okay, our identity's been knocked. I'm feeling this end. It's okay to feel that. And maybe that's your statement. It's okay to feel this. I'm finding the reason why. And that may be all that you do. So in the app I would type in, it allows you to type in your active reach reminder. You set it to go seven times in the day because it takes this research shows that if you can see something consciously be prompted seven times, at least during the day, you then operating energy to the positive and taking it from the negative. And so you're transferring, you're weakening this and you're getting the healthier one strongest. You're weakening the toxic, making the healthier one stronger. So I'm now re energizing and I'm just disciplined. Big thing is disciplining my mind not to go back and give energy to the toxic pathway, but to actually take energy from it so it weakens. Just because you have a certain memory today doesn't mean that that experience, good or bad, will remain good or bad. Our positive vibe right now can be made negative. Our negative vibe right now can be made positive as we look back at our day to day.

Really?

So when you see memory that way.

Then you say, okay, wait a second.