Neuroscientist REVEALS How To COMPLETELY HEAL Your Body & Mind! | Caroline Leaf & Lewis Howes

People are dying from lack of hope, death 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. I think you gotta have a dream.

The School of Greatness.

Really? Yeah.

Please welcome Lewis Howes. Welcome back, everyone, to the School of Greatness podcast. Very excited about our guest. Dr. Caroline Leaf is in the house, a cognitive neuroscientist specializing in the mind-brain.

Connection, who's been in this field for many decades. I'm very excited you're here.

Thanks for being here. Thank you. I'm so excited to be talking to you, Lewis. It's great.

Thank you.

And I love that you're in this field of understanding the mind-brain connection and how it plays into our thoughts and our emotions, our feelings, our mental health, and everything else that's happening in our lives. My first question is, 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 the 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 most people think when you talk mind, you're talking brain, or you're talking brain, you're talking mind. And 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 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 the electromagnetic light waves through your ability to think and feel and choose which is mind. 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 growing 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 I'm triggering at the moment that you know about whatever in your life related to our 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 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 science-y 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 ion 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 ion filings and suddenly you've got this beautiful electromagnetic field. The ion filing arranges itself into this field around the magnet. So you can't see the electromagnetic field, but you can only see it because of the ion filings. It's invisible, but the ion filings follow the trace 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 behaviors. So the little pattern is your behaviors. 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 do 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 just end the podcast now. That was perfect. So how wide can this... So the mind, your thinking, your ideas, your thoughts, is a field, an energetic field.

Yeah.

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 a football field? How far can it go?

They 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 so that's why, you know, when you come up to someone, you, an example would be like that electrostatic shock when you, you know, when you brush past someone, you get that and 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 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 that field is coming from your mind, which then uses the brain and converts what you're 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 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 you're around a happy person and you just feel like amazing, you know. So this is, it's very real. This is not some ethereal thing. We're talking about the non-physical sciences of quantum physics and physics and things like that, but it's real and there's an impact and an effect and we can control it. That's the interesting thing.

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, 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 in here.

So it's very... You can operate on it.

Yes. Yeah. So it's the physical. But if you actually... And we 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 world. 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 then 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, those three things always go together. 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're processing this world around us through this thing think field choose, and then we build thoughts. So there's this structural, there's a structural consequence. So thought is actually a physical response of the think field choose. And quantum physics kind of is helping us understand that. But quantum physics is real, is, 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 and body work?

Very good question. It's think feel choose.

I touch you on the shoulder. You think it first or you feel it first?

It's going to happen pretty much simultaneously. There's going to be the sensation and it immediately will stimulate think and then feel and then choose. the feeling, 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, feel, choose, think, feel, 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 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 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. All my lectures were around the brain is fixed. It's fixed.

Fixed mind, fixed brain, fixed mindset.

Yeah. So they so kind of that's it. 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 eighties, I said, okay, well give me the worst 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, we've 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 treat it. And so I thought, okay, well I'm gonna 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 had a coma 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 my subjects that with using your mind 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 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 a 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 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 even worth it. So I said, well, I was a new scientist then, very young, totally into this. Well, you know, go with me, let's do this. And 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 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 socio-economic 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, CEOs of corporations, schools, everywhere that my laboratory was the world to try and understand humans and mind and get away from this scientific concept 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 plasticity 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 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. trauma, death life happens. But how you manage it and you, I mean, your case is a classic example. Your life was thrown 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 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, it's 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 in literally at my husband and they all work for me, by the way.

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

Totally, yeah. Yeah, we'll have to asked the question, well Dominique's my producer, so I think she's sort of doing okay there. But yeah, 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 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 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 we, 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 are in acute trauma, for example, and you go through just. Okay, let me explain it in a very simple way. I've been testing out a glucose, continuous glucose monitoring. nice and for some research purposes. And I happened to while I was wearing it because you wear it and then you track your levels. And I wanted to see for in terms of mental health and the neuro cycle that I've developed, I wanted to see the impact. And I happened to be going through, experienced a very acute trauma in our family over December. And in the moment of the trauma, I happened 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 neuro cycle, which is the concept that I've developed, which is just anyone can learn it. And I dropped my glucose levels within seconds back down to a normal level. And as it cycled up, it cycled, I could manage it. And if glucose is at that level, your cortisol's shot up at that level, your DHEA's dropped, your homocysteine's 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 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 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 and fix. Exactly. Isolate and and then you're supposed to 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 in enacting, that's a constant argument, or these certain, you know, we all have these toxic patterns, no one's immune, we all, and the signals of those are things like depression and anxiety those are simply telling you, hey, there's a pattern. It's either 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. New research aren't they also based on how long you'll live as well? If the telomeres are longer?

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 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. And this person was, their narrative was tremendous turmoil 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 like, really to check out.

What page is this on?

This is on page. This is on. I should tell you. I should know the page off my heart. 161. Okay, cool.

I think you.

You've probably got it in black and white in that version that you've got there. But 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 yourself. the shorter your life span, 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. Their ages were in this particular subject, and we had a group like this as well that similar. They were biologic, their 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. No, I didn't work on, I don't use drugs. I didn't, I do talk about diet and stuff, but in this particular clinical trial was pure mind management, just the neuro cycle. 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're saying, I felt, 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 got no mind 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. And that's pretty unusual because most of the work on telomeres has been done around diet and exercise, which are very significant.

Leafy greens and plant-based.

Exactly, which is significant. And also there's been some work on meditation, but there's been 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. But the biggest thing was their narrative, the person's story. So if we go away from the biology for a minute and we listen to the person's story, that person was offline, they were online, they were living again. And they had also we 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 Dr. Anna 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 Some is not working and it's manifesting as a pattern that needs to be addressed and that will block the greatness.

So are you saying, am I hearing, did I hear you say that there isn't a mental health disease? It's more of just a pattern 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 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 neurobiological correlates, 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, you know, for selling drugs, and also a very simplistic way of telling someone, Hey, you're depressed, don't worry, it's chemical imbalance, let me give you a drug to fix it. You know, it's, it's, we want this quick fix, so as medicine has advanced and technology has advanced, so we've become very caught up in the quick fix. And 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's this gravitational field, this force, this think field, choose thing. It's not going to go, a medication is not going to change how you're thinking and 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 a while it's working. But at the same time as then when that drug wears 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 bond. 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 human response. Here we, the pandemic, we all know that everyone's going on about the next pandemic is mental health. Mental health has always been an issue. 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, what 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 are between 24 and 65. So people at the beginning of their career, in the prime of their career, that that age group are being or dropping down dead like flies. And it's considered deaths of despair by preventable lifestyle diseases. So we have to look at the bone 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 managing the patterns, the traumas, the established toxic habits. What am I doing about that stuff? And that's when we, 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, you, 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 their 20 up to 20 years of 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 in other years 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 How long is this isolation going to go on and economic impact and whatever, the whole lot. That's trauma and they say that when they say, but this is the way to treat it. Let's label it, let's diagnose it, 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 saying that mental illness is on the rise and that there's one in four people on antidepressants or 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 or 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 from abuse, war trauma, that kind of stuff where they'll go down the continuum to sort of the -19, 8-19 if you look at a continuum of 0 to 10, 0 to -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 gone through 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're 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 Risperdal, which is an antipsychotic, into the spines of war vets because they're a bit psychotic 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 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 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 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 despair. 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 can 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 erratic tidal wave around you and it's going through your brain and you've got these and your immune system and everything screaming out to 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 stress issues because of what I've been through versus I am PTSD or I have 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 imbalanced. I mean, just research is coming out the other day, showed that we've got to stop saying this. The top psychiatrist that lead this field will tell you, we've got to stop saying this, that 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. 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's off, and then anandamides off, and then, I mean, I can give you a list of big chemical terms, and that's going to 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. that doesn't mean that you have this thing hidden inside of you, this 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, and it's also not the conditioning kind of treatments that are in place that some of them work they 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. So it's kind of like an algebraic equation. X is the situation. Y is how you should want to function for mental peace. So you've got X plus Y. And so here we are in our X situation where we as a sort of human experiencing life it's 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.

Man, this is powerful. Gosh. I want to go back to what you said when you were 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 physicality, your body changing into this stress response, this protection, tightness, whatever it was. Fear, anxiety, all these things you were experiencing in the moment. 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 neuro cycle. Excellent question. It's the process of the neuro cycle, which is in the second half of the book. So the neuro cycle is five steps.

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 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 swells, which is beta, the 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 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 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. And 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. 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're 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's 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 pilots 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? Or, 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 the you language. So here you flying this plane all over in the co-pilot saying, okay, let's calm down. Let's land it at that tree. So you land the plane. You land. and this time capsule, whatever, and you get output, you with the co-pilot so you 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 to tap into that. And I cannot get through this chaos, this chaotic brain and body 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 let's consider, would that be considered like fight or flight, whether it's someone cutting you off in front of you on the street, in a 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 a little T trauma.

Exactly, exactly. Or an acute trauma, which is and the blind siding stuff, the stuff you don't 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 bought the glucose monitor down. And I mean, I didn't even expected to work that fast. I was amazed. And as it cycled through the 12 hours 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've done this my whole life, but it was just so interesting seeing it in real time.

Sure.

And seeing the reaction. Okay, so step one is to get.

The co-pilot state of mind to land the plane. That's the preparation.

We haven't even got to step one.

So this is preparation.

Okay, 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're 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 pick 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 pick 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 baskets.

You're gathering.

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

Yes, this is gathering. It's almost, yes it is, but you're gathering in very four little distinct packages. Because the more organized you are, the more, the less chaos we.