Master Your MIND, Detox Your Brain & Own Your Identity w/Dr. Caroline Leaf (Part 1) EP 1127

The Kia Sportage Turbo Hybrid has a bold design, a spacious interior with 232 horsepower and a 12.3-inch panoramic display to keep the adventure going and fit with the way you live. And with SiriusXM every drive comes alive, bringing you closer to the music, the sports talk and podcasts that you love right in your vehicle or on the Sirius XM app. Every SiriusXM equipped Kia Sportage Turbo Hybrid includes a three month trial so the experience begins the moment you drive. Learn more@kia.com Sportage Hybrid Kia Movement that inspires this message is brought to you by Apple Card Apple Card members can earn unlimited daily cash back on everyday purchases wherever they shop. This means you could be earning daily cash on just about anything like like a slice of pizza from your local pizza place or a latte from the corner coffee shop. Apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app to see your credit limit offer in minutes subject to credit approval. Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch terms and more@applecard.com the School of Greatness is sponsored by Capital One. Nowadays, most people subscribe to everything music, tv, even dog food. And it rocks. Until you have to manage it all. Which is where Capital One comes in. Capital One credit cardholders can easily track, block or cancel reoccurring charges right from the Capital One mobile app at no additional cost. With one sign in, you can manage all your subscriptions all in one place. Learn more at capital1.comsubscriptions terms and conditions apply. This is episode number 1127 with New York Times best selling author Dr. Caroline Leaf. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur and each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Linda Poindexter said, one small crack does not mean that you are broken. It means that you were put to the test and you didn't fall apart. And Dan Millman said, you don't have to control your thoughts.

You have to.

You just have to stop letting them control you. My guest today is Dr. Caroline Leaf and she is a communication pathologist and cognitive neuroscientist specializing in cognitive and metacognitive neuropsychology. Since the early 1980s she has researched the mind brain connection, the nature of mental health and the formation of memory. She was one of the first in her field to study neuroplasticity and how the brain can change with directed mind input. She's also a speaker, podcaster and the author of multiple best selling books with her latest being cleaning up your mental mess. She has also created an app called Neuro Cycle which has a five step process to help you take back control over your thoughts and life with scientific research showing it reduces anxiety, depression and toxic thoughts by up to 81%. And in this episode we discuss how important food is when detoxing the brain, how to get your messy mind under control and what happens if you don't, why you should do an identity check on yourself once a year And I loved her thoughts on this. The link between unmanaged stress and the impact on our body. And I open up about some of my experiences overcoming trauma as well. Our conversation was so powerful that I split it up into two episodes, so make sure to look out for the next episode coming in a couple days. And as a warning we do briefly go into the discussion around sexual abuse and healing from that. If you're inspired by this, make sure to share this with someone that you think would be inspired as well. You can copy and paste the link wherever you're listening to this or just use the show Notes link@lewishouse.com 11:27 with all the information there. Again, I'm so excited about this. I hope you enjoy this as well. And in just a moment I bring you the one and only Dr. Caroline Leaf. Welcome back everyone to the School of Greatness. Very excited about our guest. Dr. Caroline Leaf is back on the show. Good to see you Caroline. How you doing?

So good to see you Lewis. I joined our conversation last time and it definitely didn't end. So I'm really, really it didn't end.

I wanted to go for like 10 more.

Me too. You were just so into it.

The comments, the engagement, the results people are getting from your strategies and tools have been mind blowing. And I want to continue the conversation because I think there's a lot we could do to help people improve the quality of their mental health, improve the quality of understanding their minds, their body, their emotions and their life. And the first question I wanted to ask you is how important is food when we are looking to detox our brains in general, how important is the foods we put in our body for our brains?

I'm so glad you asked that question and just quickly to pick up on us telling you just before we started how people are still commenting weeks later, months later after the last podcast on how they love your show and how they loved our conversation. So thank you for the Opportunity. You're a great interviewer and it's just wonderful chatting to you. Food is such an important thing. So basically we know that and but it does have a massive impact. 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.

Non GMO dairy, the whole what?

Yeah. And you. But you're in, in a, in a mood or you're not dealing with something to, 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 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 probably hear me, 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 to do with our intelligence and how serotonin 95% is in the gut and 90% of dopamine. And so all these things is such a relationship. But what we don't always think about is that that thought that you're thinking in your mind is actually activating and growing that whatever you're thinking about and what are you 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 at 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, down the lining of the gut. I mean, this 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, Lewis, 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 you're 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.

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 weigh the body down. Those excess chemicals, they, you know, they cause leaky gut. They do all the things to the cardiovascular system. I mean, 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 on to that and you, 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, 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 the 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 is slowly but surely changing the, 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, the actual practices for detoxing the brain?

So the, so the mind is going to do the detoxing. So the primary, the primary thing is that the mind detoxes. So the brain isn't self generated, generating like genes on it's. There's a fancy terminology for it but basically it means that the genes, 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. And 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 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 an environment and people, the more accurate your prediction. But it's still a prediction, it's not an accurate fact. So based on that, we 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. So it's really interesting. So in other words, messy mind, messy main brain, messy body. So that's really vital. So that could be the first thing, the second.

Messy mind, messy brain, Messy, messy body.

Yeah. So it's.

You can, 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 mind, we do have to eat properly. 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, between them, which we've got.

Has there ever been a time where you, I mean, you've been studying this for decades. Yeah, I mean, when you were like six 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. As I've gone through life experiences, you know, having got four children and the adult 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. 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 competitive culture and the whole deep, meaningful relationship thing. That is such a incredible concept. 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, where I find 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 energy.

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 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. It's a very nice concept.

What is the messy mind? What is it.

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 somewhere 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, if this is the. 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. 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 are psychoneurobiology is designed to do. We're not designed to be these perfect toxic positivity creatures. We are very, 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 so 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 having deep discussions like this where you explore philosophy and explore. That's wise mind. It's if you asked 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 kids and 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 we see 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 that 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 w and that's what toxic positivity is doing. And things like gratitude statements and affirmations, if used incorrectly will 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 kidding 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 differently? How do we use mantras, tools, affirmations, positive attitude without it being toxic positivity? The School of Greatness is brought to you in partnership with Airbnb. The holidays are such a special time to travel and gather with loved ones. Think about some of your best trips, those cozy spaces, thoughtful touches and the feeling of being right at home wherever you are. Now imagine getting to provide that same experience for someone else else. Because when you travel, your place is just sitting empty while you're away. Hosting on Airbnb can be a no brainer. And in a season where new experiences creating lasting memories, it's a unique way to help others make their own. And Martha and I both travel a lot, especially with her family in Mexico and mine all over the usa. So we know what it's like to be on the go during the holidays. And from our experience, hosting has always been easy and straightforward. And whether you're traveling often or just once in a while, it can be a simple way to earn a little extra while you're away.

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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 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. Get a 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 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 bullet 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 immersion gravitational fields that are. And you, they change when there's 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. 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 actually do it in the right place.

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'd been married for about maybe 10 years or something. And he turned on and said to me, you are always so negative in the morning. And he wakes up bright and happy to go away. You're too happy for me in the morning. You know, it's like it was. And he just said, you Always negative in. 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 state. And here I'm doing all this brain research and as soon as I did the research like this, I would go into a high because it immediately, as soon as my work immediately changed, change 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. 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 days 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, 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, she said, mom, you are spoiling this holiday. Because I was going on about all the if onlys 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 like, gosh, I'm 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 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 literally me giving you therapy, taking you through the neuropsych cycle. I use that every day. I mean literally. I mean I know the system off my heart, but I use the active reach reminders because you can type it in. And every day, seven times a day still it pops up on my phone. Remember your. If only. 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 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 in our life?

Nothing will ever satisfy you, nothing will ever give you peace. You will always be looking for the grasses greener on the other side.

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 need to kind of realize. Obviously not the extreme stuff, that's not normal. But my two El were really battled 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 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, 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 from 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 she 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 quote point of like everything. It's like really sweet. And I just trying to make up. 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, 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 acknowledgement or attention or affection or whatever it is. What does 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 wide fill of 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 we talk about 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're constantly growing and changing 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 know, you can't, you know, everyone's got their 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? 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 it's nature, nurture and ifactor. 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 their proteins fold. I mean I held up this tree before. The thoughts that you build 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 interpretations, their own thoughts, feelings and choices around the content we're 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 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, 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 reached a point in their life where they, they can bounce back quicker maybe than someone else who's got more identity issues, who gets crushed. 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 bold the person. This, you're amazing. This is how we get resilience in your brain. And you asked on about how do we make brain health? Brain building is one of the most powerful ways of brain using your mind to get brain health. We never got to that point, so we need to do that. You better keep a note of all these things.

I've got the notes here, I've got the notes here. 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, what's the common ways it shatters? So to interrupt.

No, no, no problem.

A breakup 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 more made that the core of their 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 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's experienced suicide in their family. And, 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 the 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. You see it with people that have been labeled their 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 Lewis says stuff you could do that I can't do. So therefore, I need you and you need me because of what we can, because that's enhancement. And that's when people think, okay, there isn't something I can contribute. The identity can 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, 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 and you will have trauma. That's just, it's inevitable.

So in order, what does the identity check look like for you? So. So you do it once a year or.

Yeah, I do once a year 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 neuro cycle. I'll go and look for all the. I'll. I'll go and gather awareness of all the signals that I'm starting to see like this. Okay. There's a lot of more imposter syndrome than normal because we all get a level 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 how 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 aunts 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 neuro cycle. Now the third and fourth step. By writing the third step, you right 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 neurocycle 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. 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, you know, 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. Mood, 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 would. And 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 I remember if I would have went down that path of never feeling valued for 5, 10, 20 more years. Are you ready to finally hit your target nutrient levels every day? Meet Groons. The daily snack pack of gummies isn't just a multivitamin. It's not just a green gummy. And it's not just a prebiotic. It's all of that rolled into one and then some at a fraction of the price. And they taste great. Here's what makes them stand out. While most multivitamins only cover 7 to 9 vitamins, grooms bring together over 20 vitamins and minerals plus more than 60 nutrient dense whole food ingredients. And those ingredients are known to support things like gut, health, energy, immunity, recovery, cognition and even beauty. Because it's in gummy form, your body has an easier time absorbing it. Also, we have packs in our studio and they've been a game changer for everyone in the studio. We've run out so quickly. No powders, no handfuls of pills, just a pack of tasty gummies. And I'm fueling my body with the nutrients it needs. Use code greatness at GR Co to save up to 52% off your first order. That's code greatness at Gruns Co for up to 52% off. This show is sponsored by Better Help. You know, the holidays can feel a lot like balancing family expectations, travel, work, and trying to make everything perfect. It's easy to forget to take care of yourself in the middle of it all. I've been there and what I've learned is that when you don't make space to slow down, it's hard to actually enjoy the moments that matter Most. That's why BetterHelp is encouraging you to rewrite write your traditions this season by making time for you. Incorporating therapy into your routine can help you pause, reflect, stay grounded during what can be joyful but sometimes hectic or even lonely time of the year. The holidays look different for everyone. Maybe it's baking your great aunt's sweet potato pie, or maybe it's starting something new, like a quiet night with friends. Therapy can be one of those new traditions, too. Better Help matches you with a licensed therapist based on your goals and preferences. And if it's not the right fit, you can switch anytime this December. Start a new tradition by taking care of you. Our listeners get 10% off@betterhelp.com Louis that's betterhelp.com Louis I. I don't know why I would. 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. 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 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. 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 now. It 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 that this is what. And it's not you, but what you're doing. 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, but 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, that'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 could see? Because they are good. They're at the core, they're just learning. They just experimenting.

If you're constantly telling a 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 adult 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 you are modeling back to them all the time that they are bad instead of saying, okay, you do. 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 the 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 live up to what they're telling me I am.

You know, and of that.

Exactly. So we've got to be so careful that maybe a person. Oh, you're 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 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 like that. So get yourself in a safe place that you can actually process it and that you get your own mental health 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 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 the child. You don't have to then break the identity. So kids are going into adulthood. Many bad behavioral issues that have come 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, head ostrich in the sand mentality. Children are seen and not heard. You know, don't you pull yourself together, get up and keep going. Hide your emotions. Don't show the emotions to the world.

It'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. But 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 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 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 adult's 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 version of being a mess, and there's hopefully some growth. And what we should do is model authenticity and say, I am 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, it's my identity. That's what I'm doing. So it's 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. 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, and 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, you know, for the lessons and the process of moving on from this relationship, I can still be sad for the loss of something. The.

The.

Yeah. Something that's not there anymore that was there at one point. And so I just kind of sat with it for 20, 30 minutes and I was like, okay, but I don't need to stop. Stay here. Because staying in sadness is not going to support my joy, my authenticity, my vision of helping people. So I want to make sure that I don't, like, reject these range of emotions, but I also don't want to stay in the negative. Not a negative emotion, but the emotion 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 the language. Yeah.

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 such 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. So there we go. So there's kind of the writing. If it comes up again, you could maybe try and do a metacog and we 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 it, 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 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 reconce sexualized. 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, why am I sad when all this is happening and why am I feeling this? And it ends like a little virus, you know, just starts spreading. And so you caught it there and you allowed yourself. But you also limited. And it's so important with any emotion that is no emotion is bad. Every emotion is telling us a story. But the 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 nonconscious mind will keep driving us to just keep going. So we have to discipline or we 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 instinctively retire. Kick. 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 neuro cycle, 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. But, and that's okay. So you, if you're, during the course of the day, if you, if, 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, I'm grieving a loss, and that's part of it. And then you move on. So it's. 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. So you just did that. So good job.

Thank you. Yeah. You know, 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, overwhelmed, 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, things.

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, 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 free. 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 and 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, are 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. 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. About multiple cycles.

And that's why, you know, it'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 our 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 piece of 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 the.

These.

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 pretty turbulent in terms of trying to.

My whole life was turbulent, but until 30, I mean, still my 30s, there'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 gonna be learning for a long time, but.

Yeah, it'll be a whole lot.

I'm not, 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 you know, know all those things. But I think I, 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. Like, 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 if you're interested in what you've actually done because I think what you, you've, what you've gone through, the story you've gone through is 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 the wiry toxic tree that replaced represents toxic thought as opposed to the healthy green tree. These, the roots over here, this whole thing's formed. The, 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, 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 of the. Here the branches are your interpretation. So you said things like shame and what were the other words you used?

You used security. Shame.

Security.

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 Eunice comes out. But here, this is all not the unis. 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 baling yourself. And then if them come 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, what to do with it. So you just keep going on and you just keep hoping for the best and you keep that. Kids 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 it's 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, 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 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.

Every day I remembered the trauma, I thought about it. But it wasn't until 30 when I had the courage to start talking about it.

Okay, so it was in the. Okay, so what. What you had was the situation of some people completely hide and they don't even know what happened. Then it suddenly comes back. You were constantly.

I was always.

You were living it all the time. Okay, so it was daily.

Or maybe, maybe not everybody. David. 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 gotta.

Be a way to get it out somehow.

Exactly.

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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 increased awareness without processing, it increases anxiety in the brain. So if 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 know exactly what you did over that time, but you may be just always trying to, you said perfectionism. Always trying to achieve you trying to prove yourself in a way.

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 mechanism signal that you're trying to deal with this stuff of.

Something that hasn't been healed yet.

Exactly, exactly, exactly what it is. Because 86 to 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 explodes. It's like a volcano. If you think of a volcano, 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 now.

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 do I express myself? I, 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, 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 when you've never been taught how to express yourself without being shamed, without being made wrong, without being like, don't do that. That's not okay. You can't show this emotion. You're supposed to be a man. Or this, what, 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 pull out. That's what these eventually do. They eventually. And it did explode, as you've just described. It was exploding in your behavior where it was now becoming very in your face and in people's faces and, 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, to 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. 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. I was staying in a certain relationship for longer than it needed to be. And I knew and I started to get. Never in my life have had. 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 keep spreading all over my body, it's now gone. And it's. It's crazy. 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.

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, and fascinating that you've got. You know that you've highlighted a key psycho neurobiological link. And in my, in my most recent book, the Cleaning up the Mental Mess, that one that you about last time, that there. I talk about some of the things, but 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 you know, everything was. So you've all got genetic weaknesses and generally when we under toxic stress and it's come through the generations, it just happens as 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 mental allergy.

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. No, 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 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, 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. And I think a lot of times people will blame others for their feelings, their emotions, their physical manifestations of their mind, 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. 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 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. 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 wake up with your mind. You're sitting with your 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. That is our. We can't change. I keep saying it. We can't change what's happened to us, but 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 persons, 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 implications, 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 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 why, warning, warning signals. They clues. So you become a detective in your own life.

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 signal. 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.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode. If you thought this was powerful, make sure to share this with a friend. Post it on social media. Make sure to tag me and Dr. Caroline Leaf as well. And part two is coming soon. So stay tuned for. For part two and make sure to go to Lewishouse.com 1079 to check out our previous interview with Dr. Caroline Leaf that blew up all over the Internet as well. And if you are here for the first time, click the subscribe button over on Apple podcast right now or Spotify and stay notified and up to date on the latest and greatest from the school of greatness. We'd love to have you a part of the community. So click that subscribe button right now. And I want to leave you with this quote from Abraham Maslow, who said, in any given moment, we've got two options. To step forward into growth or to step back into safety. I cannot emphasize this enough, the mind, the way you think, will dictate your behaviors, your actions and your life. So we've got to be willing to learn how to master the mind. We've got to learn how to understand how the mind works and then use the strategies and the tools backed by science that prove that you can increase the level of your life, the quality of your life, the quality of your thoughts which will help dictate your behaviors and your actions and your life again. You were born to live in peace. You were born to live in harmony, to experience love, to experience fulfillment. And if you're feeling anxiety or stress or frustration or overwhelm in your life, then please use these tools. Make sure to get the book, listen to these resources for free here on the podcast and use these tools for the betterment of your life and spread this message to someone that you think would be inspired by this as well. We all need tools to help us increase the quality of our life. So I hope you enjoyed this and I want to remind you if no one's told you lately that you are so loved, you're so worthy and you matter. I'm so grateful for you. And you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.

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