Dr. Caroline Leaf: What is a Mental Mess | The Authors Unite Show #972

All right, everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Authors Unite show. Today we have Dr. Caroline Leaf with us. So welcome to the show.

Thank you. It's great to be with you, Tyler Wagner.

Of course, grateful to have you on. If you want, start us off actually just with like a little intro, a little bit more about you and what you do.

Absolutely. I'm a cognitive neuroscientist and communication pathologist. And what that big mouthful just basically means is that I've spent the last 4 decades almost studying the mind and the brain and the mind-brain connection and what is mind and how is it separate from the brain and what are thoughts and emotions and do we have any control? And the answer is yes to all of that. So you have control. And this is my 19th book that I've written, The Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess. And it's my— So I still do clinical trials. I'm a scientist. I also practice clinically for 25 years, working with people with traumatic brain injuries and autism and learning disabilities and trauma from abuse, war, you name it. And also have applied this into many different situations like academic environments and corporate and that kind of thing. And now I basically write books and teach people around the world how to manage your mind because your mind is always with you. You wake up with your mind, you go to bed with your mind, you eat with your mind, you talk with your mind, you're using your mind now. And it's the one area that we don't, that is very hazy I see in general discussions, people kind of mix it up with the brain, but it's not. And once we understand the separation, we can get into mind management and that changes people's lives completely. And then I also deal a lot, obviously, with mental health.

So let's start from the beginning. How did you, or what interested you in this? How did you get started in this topic?

I always had such a fascination for the brain and was from a young girl, was going to go into becoming a brain surgeon. And as she got into med school and was on that track and then meant to just realize I wanted to study more about mind. And if I'm doing brain surgery, I'm not going to be really studying mind. You don't as a neurosurgeon. So I wanted to understand more about mind. And I kind of got into a degree that was a combination of medicine and neuroscience. And actually, it's sort of a test degree that they had just put together. And they don't actually have it anymore. They really split it up because it was so taxing. We were working 7 days a week because they tried to sort of squash 4 years of— 7 years into 4 years. And but I say all that to say, I'm so I'm so glad I did it because at the time I thought, wow, I'm insane. This is crazy. I can't even breathe, let alone finish a degree. And I did finish it. And now, you know, I'm so glad I did because it launched me into where I am, which is really, you know, understanding mind, which is an area that's very, very misunderstood and not researched enough. And through this, we've reached millions now to help people with understanding mental health and mind and stabilizing and normalizing emotions and mental health and bringing a narrative to the table that's much more scientific and much more helpful.

Yeah, the one thing I've always thought about with like studying the brain or the mind that's so interesting is that it's, it's really the, it's the only thing that you have to kind of study. It's like studying itself. Right? So, so I feel like that's, that's what makes it the most difficult. I mean, if you study your body, any part of your body, you are studying yourself, but you're like using your brain and then thinking about another part.

Exactly.

But the brain's like on the brain. So it's like, I don't know, that would, I would imagine, make it more difficult because, yeah.

Well, that's an interesting statement you've made, and it comes to a core basic principle, and that is that the mind is not the brain. So the mind and the brain are separate. So that's a key thing. And once you understand that separation, then it still is, and you still make an interesting point because you're basically using mind to study mind to study impact on brain. So to a certain extent, you're not wrong at all, except that the mind is not the brain. So that's maybe something, a good place to start. I can define that to explain the difference if you'd like. That would be awesome. So I've got some really nice props here which I can show. Is this all video? Is there some audio as well? Do you want me to describe it in case you've got some people watching by listening by audio only?

Describe a little. Yeah.

Okay. So I'm holding up a skull with a brain. It's not real, so don't worry. Okay. But this is a— you are not your brain and your brain is actually controlled by you. And so what are you? You are mind. Mind is your aliveness. Mind is this thing external to the brain but works through the brain. So for example, if If someone is dead, if you're dead, your brain and body disintegrates. They go. They can't do anything. But the fact that right now you and I are able to have a conversation and people are listening and watching, that means that what is the thing that's a difference between an alive person and a dead person? It's the mind. The mind's the difference. So the mind is your aliveness, this energetic force. I'm holding up another model now of the brain and the body, a typical sort of medical model of the brain and the body. And the brain and the body collectively would be about 1 to 10% of who we are. But the brain and the body are energized made alive by the mind. So the mind is this gravitational field around and through the brain and the body. And before people think, wow, that's weird, this is 150-year-old science that we just have kind of forgotten about or pushed aside or— and not forgotten about it. Still, there's 150 years' worth of science. But the current sort of trend of science doesn't really look at this in quite the same way enough. And that's been to its detriment. Because if you don't consider mind and you just think mind is all biology, you're actually looking at about only 1 to 10% of who we are as humans. And that eventually will backfire, which it has done. So this trend of the, as we've advanced in understanding the brain and the neurobiology and the biology of the body, we've become very, what we call neuro-reductionistic or biomedical, which is that if you can see it and touch it and feel it, then that's what we should be focusing on. And yet there's a whole world of non-physical, which we can explain through gravitational fields and through Einstein's work on electrostatics and electromagnetics and the photons photons and the photon effect and quantum physics, gravitational fields. I mean, just a couple of years back, physicists won the Nobel Prize for their work on gravitational fields. And what we see as humans, each of us, you, me, everyone listening, watching, we all have our own unique gravitational field around us that is also moving through us. But if you're dead, that goes. And that gravitational field is being studied more and more and more. And that is basically what the mind is. The mind is this gravitational field and it's a subatomic, it's at the subatomic level. So we look, talk about it in terms of waves and energy waves. Waves and that kind of thing. And you can use things like quantum physics, as I've mentioned, to explain it. In fact, quantum physics is defined— is often defined as the law of thought, which is interesting. And the most important— yeah, and the most important factor in quantum physics is actually the human's ability to think, feel, and choose, or autonomy or agency, often referred to as the observer effect. Because as we make decisions, that we change things, because it's decisions that lead to change. And so even in all the little decisions build up to the big one. So if you think of it just in simple language, the brain and body are physical, 1 to 10% of who you are, and the energy fields around in these gravitational fields are the mind. And psychologically, this field is how you think, feel, and choose, such aliveness. So you're always thinking, always feeling, always choosing 24/7 during the day, when you're conscious, when you're awake, which can be during the night as well. When you're conscious, you're thinking, feeling, and choosing. Mind, mind in action, is basically building all the experiences that you're having while you awake into physical structures inside of the brain that look like trees. So I have another little analogy here. I have a little green tree in a pot with lots of branches, which obviously has roots inside the pot. And this is pretty much what the result of mind is. So mind is think, feel, choose, which we do all the time. And as soon as you think, feel, and choose, you actually start building thoughts, which are protein-like structures, and you build them inside the brain. So right now, as everyone's listening and watching, I'm producing auditory sound waves through my voice and electromagnetic waves. And that's what you receive in your gravitational fields. You then uniquely process it through your unique thinking, feeling, choosing, which is all these gravitational field things, which then move through the brain and the body. And the brain responds on this energetic, electromagnetic, quantum, neurochemical, and also genetic level, which means that it takes the experience, what you're hearing and seeing, through the mind, gravitational field, sync field, choose, and becomes these physical protein structures in the brain called thoughts. So a thought is a tree, and like a tree is made of branches and roots, a thought is made of branches and roots. So these are memories. So all the little branches and leaves and whatever are the memories, behaviors, emotions, and these would be also the root memories. So right now, the roots would be the equivalent of what I'm saying. So it's the origin, the source. This discussion is about mind-brain, mental health, or however people have sort of labeled it in their mind. So let's say mind, brain, or mental health. And so as I'm speaking and as you're asking me questions, that's all going into the roots. So you're converting the sound waves and all that stuff through your brain the way I've described and growing lots and lots of roots. At this point, there's probably close to 100 roots that have been— that you've made in your brain, made of proteins. And my words and visuals are vibrations in those proteins. And then as you build that, you immediately grow a little trunk and these branches and leaves, and that's your perspective or your unique interpretation. So if there's 1,000 people or however many listening to this podcast and watching, they're hearing the same thing. So same roots, but your interpretation, everyone will build their own interpretation based on your existing experience. Because as I'm talking and giving you all this and you're doing all of this, you're building this, you are using your existing knowledge to make sense of what I'm saying and to kind of link it to existing networks. So we have this non-conscious mind, non-conscious, non, that's this massive forest of all our life experiences that have gone through this mind-brain conversion into these trees. And they're all in this forest and they They're constantly being used and changed. And so as you're listening to me now, they're popping up and down and maybe there's some toxic ones. This is a toxic tree, a healthy tree. Maybe some of these are popping up because maybe you've had a bad experience with mental health or something like that. And that's reminding you of something as I'm talking. And we use that to inform our current thought-making process, which begs the question, which is super interesting, is how many thoughts do we build in a day? And it seems like it's in the region of somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000. And to build those, we have to be informed by other thoughts because you don't build thoughts in a vacuum. And if you think of it, as you listening to me now, you've got a whole life experience behind you that's different to mine. So you're using that to interpret what I'm saying. So your culture, your upbringing, your experience in terms of religion or no religion, whatever, all of that's informing what you're hearing. And that informing is these things popping up and down. So any one thought that's been constructed is being influenced by at least 5 5 to 10 other thoughts. So in any one session of time that we're awake, which is on average about 12 hours, 12 to sort of 18 hours, we, or 16 hours, we are basically building about 8,000 thoughts and having an additional anything from 10 to 20 to 30,000 thoughts coming through our head. I mean, that's a big number. That's close to 50,000 events that are going on at any one moment. And mind, that's mind. And all that can become a complete mess, which is why I talk about the I called the book Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess. Because—

So am I too. I got my copy.

There you go. Yay. That's so good. I'm so pleased. Because we, as humans, we're all making a mess all the time. No one's exempt from this. Because we really don't know what's coming up. I mean, we don't know what events and circumstances are coming around the corner. And so we kind of— we respond based on our experiences, I've been saying. But it's almost experimental. This think, feel, choose thing is an experimental process. So a lot of the time we do make a mess. But we are— if we suppress the mess and keep the mess, then it becomes very toxic to our brain and our body, causing problems with inflammation and our hearts and our brain. And I talk about that in the first half of the book, the impact of not managing our mind and how it even affects us down to the level of the DNA and the telomeres and that kind of thing. And so, but if we manage our mental mess, if we actually acknowledge, okay, this, I'm angry or I'm depressed or I'm frustrated, there's a reason. Let me process this. Let me embrace it, process, and reconceptualize. Then you shift into mind management. And that's what your brain and body and mind can handle. They can't handle suppression. Suppressing these things is like saying having a virus in your body and not doing anything about it. Eventually, it's going to— if you don't deal with it, you're going to get really sick. And so a thought is as real as a virus. So that means that the way that our bodies respond to something like the COVID virus with all the inflammatory factors sending out the B lymphocytes and T lymphocytes and macrophages and so on, the way that our brain and body's immune system responds to something like COVID virus, it responds in exactly the same way to toxic thought that we don't deal with. So those traumas from childhood and those which come out in patterns in our relationships and how we run our life, those, if we keep them suppressed, they will explode in our brain and mind and body. So brain and body physically, that could be illnesses of any sort, problems with your heart, your GI tract, vulnerability to illness, etc., and also in your mind in terms of mental health. So mental health is not an illness. Mental health is a response to how we're managing our mind. So if you have mental ill health, it's still a response, still not an illness. It's a mismanagement of mind will lead to mental ill health. And we all experience that to different degrees. And therefore, when we're cleaning up our mental mess, we're basically cleaning up, we're managing that mental, we're managing those issues. We're facing our mental ill health issues and we're actually finding out why we have them and we're fixing them. And when we do that, our brain and our body function at a very high level. But when you suppress, our brain and our body get very, very vulnerable. We create environments throughout the brain and the body that increase vulnerability. Vulnerability to disease by 75% to 98%, which is quite scary. But so this is not positive thinking or law of attraction. It's none of that. This is a whole different ball game. This is actually a very realistic, very hopeful concept of what we do with our mind, which is always working anyway. So if you ignore that, it's going to be messy. And there's going to be a vulnerability in our environment of our brain and our body. But if we recognize it and manage it and self-regulate it, then that's mind management. Then we're going to clean up the mental mess in our mind. And our brain and our body. That's the overarching process and we can do that and it's a skill that we can learn. Mind is—

Okay. So, I would love— So, a couple things real quick. One is, I love what you said there in the beginning based on past experiences because that's what I tell people about books that I find so interesting is like, if you read a book now and then 10 years from now or even with how fast things are now, even 1 year from now, the experience of reading that book will be dramatically different. Different due to it reflecting or intertwining with your past experiences. So—

Absolutely.

So it's a completely different— it's almost like reading a different book at that point because it's, it's multiplying with different, um, parts of your life that you didn't have at the initial read.

Totally correct. That's actually a really great way of explaining it. That's exactly what's happening. So every experience is experienced like that because our mind's always changing, life's always changing, mind is always changing, brain is always changing, body is always changing. Therefore, everything is always new. And we can direct that process. That's what's really cool about this. We can direct that process, direct our mind and direct the neuroplasticity in our brain.

Okay. So that's what I want to lead into. So like, obviously now more than ever, I think people are struggling with this just due to many things. But I think, well, forever people have been, but I feel like what happens, two things. One, people have been suppressing for decades because they weren't really aware that they were suppressing. I'm guessing. So I guess that would be my first question is like, how difficult, not just that, how difficult and then how do you do it? Like decades of suppression, because it seems like that would be a lot of work.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Excellent questions and very good insight. And one of the things you mentioned, you're the first person who's interviewed me, who's commented, who's made this particular observation that I'm going to say now. And I have to say that's quite good because I've been interviewed by hundreds of people. So you mentioned that for decades people have been battling and that's true. So already that just, that statement, it already levels the playing field. We talk about mental health in this current environment, and it's this big, scary fear factor that's increasing, and there's a pandemic coming of mental health issues. That's the wrong story. If you are human, which you are, and since the beginning of mankind, whenever that was, people have been battling with mental health. So mental health is not something new. It's simply being human, alive in the world, and all these crazy things that can happen, good and bad. So that's the first thing. We need to change this narrative that mental health is an illness and only happens to X amount of people. So we hear statistics like 1 in 4 people have got depression and 1 in 6 are suffering from anxiety. And then, you know, you get all these statistics and that is actually incorrect, completely incorrect. We hear that mental ill health is on the rise. Incorrect. Now people are saying, hey, but what about COVID So listen to the rest of my statement here. Let me qualify it. 100% of people are depressed, not 1 in 4, 100%. Not 1 in 5 are battling with anxiety, 100%. Just at different levels on the continuum. So if you're in the midst of COVID which you are, all of us are, but some people have lost loved ones. Lost finances, they've lost homes, they are sick themselves. So, that's been very, very, very extensive. Other people have carried on kind of living because they were financially in a position where they could work from home, they were able to isolate so they didn't get COVID, so they didn't have— they don't have any sickness or grief. So, there's two different versions of the same thing. Sure, the people in the nicer situation, they maybe are lonely and frustrated because they can't go to as many restaurants as they used to and they can't be as free. So, that's a very different experience, but it's still— and that doesn't validated, that's still a very frustrating experience because as humans, we are social. We want to— it's not about you, it's about you in the world. So there is a level of frustration, depression, and anxiety in that state, which is totally acceptable. Don't have to feel any guilt. It's a completely normal reaction. And then you get the other extreme where it's really bad. And that's also completely normal. If you're going through those kind of losses, my goodness, of course you would feel depressed and anxious. So the way that we are speaking, the way that the media and a lot of the scientists are speaking about, and medical professionals, about the upcoming mental mental health pandemic really frustrates me because it's created a fear in people that's going to make it worse. They're saying it's the worst pandemic. And I mean, it's the mental health is just going to be on the rise and it's going to be a pandemic and it's the next pandemic. And the offer to treat that is more labeling, more diagnosing, and more drugging. And that's already created such an issue because prior to the pandemic, this whole philosophy of treating mind issues as an illness, reducing it down, what we call neuro reductionism, which I'm sure you've heard of, where you reduce everything down just to the biology that you are your brain and everything's happening in your brain and there's all these neurobiological correlates causing you to be mentally ill. That's the message we've been receiving for 40 years and very strong in the last 10 years, very, very strong. So most people think, oh, if I'm depressed, I have a chemical imbalance. Meanwhile, that's not even scientific. It's been thrown out of science a long time ago. It's just a great marketing thing. And it's not even valid. Yeah.

I've heard that so many times.

That's why. Yeah. I know. No, more than $20 billion plus has been spent in just in the States alone, has been spent by the National Institute of Mental Health on trying to find the neurobiology of mental health, and that they've never found it yet. There isn't a gene that's causing it. What happens is that we experience life like COVID, like abuse, like trauma, like being in a war-torn country, all the different ranges of experiences, and that we process. We, in life, we experience, we process it through our mind into our brain. And if it's toxic, we build these that increases vulnerability of the brain and the body. I've mentioned, and therefore you're vulnerable to diseases and that feeds back in the brain. And now we've got this negative feedback loop where your body's sick in response and you still got the problem. So you're not able to deal with it. And so the cycle continues. And that isn't going to be helped to get a label and a drug because the drug is causing iatrogenic problems, which is medically induced problems because those drugs over long periods, and I'm talking about psychotropic drugs as in antidepressants, anti-anxiety meds, antipsychotics, and stimulants, which aren't anti-anything. Just a play on words that they've used there. They simply are anesthetics and stimulants that change the— that have psychoactive effects in the brain and change the structure of the brain. So they kind of anesthetize the pain. And that's why a lot of people feel when they take an antidepressant that they feel better and they get a label and they feel better. And initially you may feel better because now you've got a name to how you feel, which is a nice thing to have. And you've now got— you don't feel it so bad anymore because the drug's numbed it. So you may think, oh, this is great. But then the drug wears off and you feel worse because now you've still got the this. This didn't go away. And you've got the side effect of the drug. And there's more than 1,300 side effects, 1,300 and more side effects per drug. And most people are on lots of drugs. And then it interacts with other drugs that you do need, like heart meds. And I mean, I can go on and on, this polypharmacy situation that happens. And then you still— so now you've still got the problem, the drug's worn off, and now you feel worse because you've got the side effects. And so we get this terrible cycle. And this is what's been perpetuated. It started 40 years go, more or less. And in about mid-'90s, they started seeing that the— they started seeing that there was something was going wrong. By the mid-2000s, they saw that the trend of people living longer had reversed completely. And that instead of people living longer, which they have been for decades because of advances in medicine and technology, suddenly by 2014, it's insane, it reversed. So now people are dying what they call deaths of despair, lack of hope, from preventable lifestyle diseases and disorders. Preventable. So here we are in this age and people, because preventable lifestyle diseases means that our mind is not being, our mind's being ignored. You focus on the biology and you ignore this, you're going to have this kind of thing happening. So we've hit this peak where we've got this kind of thing happening and now people are dying younger. Add, bring that in technology, great thing, but mismanagement, we're gathering all this data but we don't process it, which builds up toxic waste in the brain. We've got into hurry sickness, quick-fix mentality. We have positive psychology, wellness trends, and pop culture, which is— there's a lot of good in it, but there's also a lot of problems because it creates this thing of, okay, well, if I just do these 5 things or these 7 things or read these many books, I'm going to be fine, and 10 positive affirmations and 5 gratitude statements, and you're still not fine. So then, oh, what's wrong with me? And so it's created tremendous shame and a tremendous focus on the individual as being broken. That's not the message that we should be getting at all. So the message that I bring completely kind of goes against that and says that, hey, life is hard. Since the beginning of time, it has been. You're going to have ups and downs, maybe more downs than ups for some people. And that is an experience you're having through your mind. Your brain is just going to do what your mind— your brain and body do what your mind experiences. They just reflect your experience. Basically, they're reflectors of your experience. And if it's a damaging experience, damaged mind, damaged brain and body. But that's not the end of the story. You can, because your brain is neuroplastic. Plastic, which means it can change. And it changes because of your mind. Your mind changes your brain. So if you can get your mind managed and if you can learn to be more in control of your mind by self-regulating it, you can then learn to be more proactive in managing the uncertainties of life because we can't control the events and circumstances, but we can control our responses. So if we can start learning about how— what is my— and response means I think, feel, choose, and I respond. So I think, feel, choose, I build these and I respond toxically. I think, feel, choose, and I build this and I respond in a more positive anyway. If I— can you control this? Yes. Can you take these and fix them? Yes. Can you change them? It's a life journey, but that's happening anyway. And if we don't manage it, then we live in this, and this leads to burnout, overwhelm, feelings of like living under that giant apple tree that's got millions of apples and you're sitting there and the apples are just hitting you and you just feel like you have no control. Meanwhile, we have control. So in my book, in the first half, I actually put my most recent clinical trials, made them very easy to understand with lots of graphs and things, just showing what will happen with an an experimental and control group. An experimental group had all the brain testing and blood testing and biomarkers for inflammation and psychological testing and self-regulation testing, which is the system I've developed, and also looking at their narrative, the most important. Who are you? What's your story? What's going on in your life? And both experimental and control got that. The experimental group, however, got the neurocycle, which is the second part of this book, which is the system I've developed over these nearly 4 decades on how to systematically use your mind to manage mind to direct the changes in your brain and your body, so to direct the neuroplasticity. And so the experimental group got the system in app form and the control didn't, but they had all the same testing. So the control group became very aware of all this stuff, so did the experimental, but the control group had no mind management. So they got worse and worse and worse through the study. So at each point when we tested them over the 9 weeks, they— it was a 6-month study, but the main group part was 9 weeks and then we did a follow-up at 6 months. They just got worse and worse and worse and eventually became so inflamed, DNA affected, everything. Obviously, we gave them the Neurocycle at the end of the study. The experimental group got it at day 1. So we had people coming in that were so depressed that called themselves, literally, actually all the people at the subjects, experimental and control, at the beginning of the study were saying things like, "I am depression." That had become their identity. "I am anxiety. I can't function because I am anxiety. I've got this neurological brain disease. And saying things like that, which are very traumatizing and going, I can't sleep, I can't do this. All the I can'ts, all the how their life is just this one big burden. And that was their narrative. But nothing about the past, interestingly enough, not much. More just, okay, this is going on in my life. Everything bad going on in their life. Then we put them, gave them the Neurocycle. Within 21 days, those subjects were, and I've got a beautiful colored graph of one, of two case studies I've put into the book. I don't know if you saw that in the book that I've got colored images. Here we go. So this is inside the brain and that's inside the brain and that's just the different energy force, energy fields that we look at in the brain. So delta, theta, alpha, beta, gamma. And that blue brain, this is someone who came in totally depressed. They would like literally suicidal. It was so bad. This was their last attempt. By day 21, you see the gray. That means that the brain has stabilized. And this subject was no longer saying, "I am depressed." They were saying, "I am depression." I'm depression, and going on about everything bad. They were saying, I now know why I was depressed. Depression is not my identity. It was a warning signal of an underlying cause. I know why I was depressed. I'm starting to get insight into that. And even that process, even though I feel more, I feel actually quite anxious about the process, I know why. I know that I'm not that. So there's been such growth. They were sleeping, 25% improvement in sleeping, all kinds of changes that were positive. But key, not I am depression, I feel depressed because, and they started telling us the narrative that existed. So now we started getting insight into why the trauma that they had experienced as a child or as a young adult or in their early marriages that had contributed to where they were at that day. They couldn't tell us that at the beginning of the study. By day 63, which is the time it takes for behavior changes to happen— 21 days does not form a habit, it takes 63 at least, so 9 weeks— they were saying, okay, I now know why I have depression. I know I still suffer from experiences of depression. Depression is not an illness, it's a warning I now have very good insight into where it comes from. I can see what work I still have to do and I know how to manage it. And that was sustained and even more growth at 6 months. The control group had the opposite. The experimental group had, for example, this person with the blue brain here. At the beginning of the study, their DNA was so weak. So we look at telomeres. We look specifically at the telomeres, which DNA is a ladder. You pull out the chromosomes, they look like Xs. If you cross your fingers, your fingernails would be your telomeres. And telomeres are growing. Get longer and shorter and get strong and weak depending on how you manage your mind and also what your diet is, but your mind controls your diet anyway. So if you're eating a good diet, but you haven't got your mind under control, you'll lose 80% of the nutritional value anyway because your mind controls you getting the nutrition from the diet. So we saw that these subjects were actually stuck in, but their ages were, let's say for example, just out of the, I'm not gonna, to protect people's privacy, but let's say someone was 30. They had bodies of a sickly 75-year-old. So 30, sometimes 30, 45 years older than— so here you are 30 and you're sitting with a body of a sickly 65-year-old. That's increased your environment of your brain and body to be vulnerable to disease by 75% to 98%. And you feel terrible when your body feels like that. That feeds back into your mind. So you can imagine the feedback loop. By the end of the study, that gap had closed. Their telomeres had increased in health and had grown longer. Which is what you want in order for your cell health, which means your biological health, the health of your organs, to be improved. So I mean, that's just like— this thing is real and there's so much hope because in 9 weeks you can change your life. And that goes to your question, how long does it take to heal suppressed trauma? Well, cycles of 63 days, which is not long if you've had 20 years of trauma. It may be that you go through multiple cycles because in the process of uncovering the origin story, which is the roots of the tree is you may, in one cycle, only discover that much, and then you need to do another cycle to discover that much and so on. So you could go through 3 or 4 or 5 or 6. It depends on you, on the timing, on what happened, on how you can handle it, on the support system. So there's a multiplicity of factors. But the good news is that in cycles of 9 weeks, in this very systematic, organized way, for just 15 to 45 minutes a day, you You can actually identify these and deconstruct them and reconstruct them. So the neurocycle teaches you how to do that, how to identify, how to embrace process and reconceptualize in a very safe, controlled, and systematized way, which is non-threatening. And so, you know, all the stopgaps are built in to help if there's emotional trauma in the process, 'cause it's very, it's going to get worse before it gets better. I mean, you've suppressed something for 20 years or whatever, and suddenly your life's this mess and you're so anxious you can't function. And you realize that you're at a point where you're suicidal and you start digging in and trying to find out what's going on, because you realize, okay, it's now make or break point. And you start looking at your signals of extreme anxiety and depression and non-functioning or whatever it may be, or suicidal ideation. And you see those as signals as opposed to an illness, you've already shifted your physiology. So here you are in this very bad state, anxious, not functioning, et cetera. And instead of saying, okay, getting a label and being told you're clinically clinically anxious doesn't even help you. What's that going to help you? But if you actually start saying, all right, I recognize that these are helpful signals, that the anxiety is not an illness, there's nothing wrong with my brain. It's not my brain that's a problem. It's that I'm going through something. And sure, my brain is going to be affected. So it is, in a sense, problematic. But it's the result, not the cause. The result— the cause is the experience you had or the experiences you had. So the first thing is to actually embrace. If you suppress, it controls you, and then your brain is in that toxic state because your brain's wired for survival and this is not survival. This is like the COVID virus. It'll send out immune factors because this is threatening survival. Eventually, if you don't deal with it, you get your body working against you. That's why illness comes. So that's what we have to deal. So once you start dealing, we see a lot of the illnesses start becoming better and you start getting much healthier. But if you start saying, okay, this is really hard, but I see that anxiety is a helpful signal as a messenger of an underlying cause, immediately you shifted 40, 1,500 neurophysiological responses to work for you instead of against you. So the whole mind action and body is now primed for resilience. And even though you're still crying, you don't know what the issue is, and it might take you multiple 9-week cycles, just the mere fact that you've embraced it started the process. And then you would work through from the top of the tree because the experience would be the roots. As I explained a little earlier, as people are listening to me, as listening to you and I, what they're hearing is basically the roots, but I'm giving good stuff. So let's hold up a healthy tree. So what I'm saying and what you and I are discussing are the roots and the branches are the interpretation. Same thing here. This is the toxic experience. It's the roots. It's the original. It's the origin story. This is the perspective it's created. These are the emotions and the behavioral signals. And this whole thing manifests in what you're saying and what you're doing, how you're running your life, not being able to form relationships, battling with work, battling with just a child, maybe battling with behavioral issues, learning problems at school, relationship problems, being a aggressive, whatever it is, sleeping problems. Those are all— and normally it's a whole bunch of them together. It's always what we call comorbid. So with the mind management, you would then go from the top of the tree to the source over this very organized period of time, limited in a day. You don't spend all day on this. You spend, you know, you spend in the detoxing, you just do it in limited times. At the same time, and I'll tell you exactly how to do it here. I have a chapter on how to do toxic traumas and acute traumas and all that. Different. There's also the other benefit of the Neurocycle, which is this 5-step mind management process, is you can use it in the moment as well. So, the mind's always working. You can go 3 weeks without food, 3 days without water, 3 minutes without oxygen, but you can't even go 3 seconds without thinking. So, your mind, you're always thinking, always feeling, always choosing. Mind is always in action. During the day, you think, feel, choose to build thoughts, and at night, you're sorting out the thoughts that you've built. So, your mind's always inaction. So consequently, if it's during the day and in the morning you've done your trauma work, but during the day life happens, you read that, scroll through Instagram, and there's that one Instagram that makes you feel like you've got imposter syndrome or another Instagram that makes you feel envy and jealousy. And now it's consuming you because those are toxic. But if you let them consume you, they are toxic. But if you say, okay, I own it, I own the envy, I own the jealousy, I'm feeling this because of, and you actually do the work work, you know, because as it happens, you grow this and there's the envy, there's the read the Instagram, that's what they've got, blah, blah, blah, envy, jealousy, and this whole toxic thing builds. But I can in a few seconds say, okay, this is what I'm feeling. And as quickly as I've built it, I can unwire it. And so I feel the envy and jealousy because of this, this, and this. You gather all the signals, which is the first step, gather awareness. And then you reflect, which is the second step, which is an ask, answer, discuss process about why I'm going through this. Then you write it down, which is the third step, and then you recheck it, which is checking what you've written, and then you do an active reach. You can do that in 5 seconds, in 5, in 1 minute, which then can help you get that under control so it doesn't impact the rest of your day. You get in a conversation with someone and they say something that totally throws you, and now you feel yourself, oh my gosh, and you just feel like torn up inside, but you've got to still go through the rest of the day being a parent or working. You can do a neurocycle then. You can say, okay, well, this is how I'm feeling. This is why, and you go through the 5 steps and you can bring it back under control. So, call the in-the-moment stuff neurocycle life hacks. Life hacks, sorry. And there's a lot of examples in the book. And there's also an app called the Neurocycle app, which is great because it works with this. It's on Google and iTunes, normal app store. And that then is the audio-driven version of it. So, it's both aspects. And the more you do it, the better you become that you just find yourself automatically neurocycling. It's a lifestyle for me now. I'm not saying that I'm never a mess. I make a lot of messes, but the difference is that I recognize it very fast. I can get myself out of it and through an issue very quickly so I can keep going and doing whatever. It doesn't control my next moment. So this moment doesn't— this toxic moment will not control that next moment. And if it does, I know how to catch it quicker. So sometimes I'm good at catching it immediately. Sometimes it may take me a few moments to catch it or even an hour or so, but it doesn't go on for days at a time or weeks at a time or the whole day. And I'm also always recognizing the patterns in my life to be able to deal tox them in the fixed 15 to 45 minutes that I spend each day. So I've got a chapter at the end of the book with how you kind of put this all together. And it's not something— to learn it, yes, it takes a bit of time just to understand the principles and learn it and that kind of thing. But once you've got the hang of it, I do it when I'm getting ready and I automatically do the neurocycle. It's not that I have to go and I take out a book and do something and do some technique. You're doing it anyway. You just do it. Your mind is doing the 5 steps anyway. All I've done— your mind is doing the 5 steps on an unconscious level at 400 billion actions per second anyway. You're either just doing it in a messy way or an ordered way. All I've done with my science and clinical trials and research and now this book, which is my number 19, by the way, it's my 19th book, is put this into an accessible format that no matter what age, no matter where you live or who you are, you can use this to help you manage manage your mind. And it's a skill we can learn. Mind is a skill we can develop and learn. Now, that's a long answer to your question, but you're welcome to unpack it in any way you want.

No, no, I absolutely love it. It seems to me like as you were talking with Neurocycle, that's one of the things I love about is it's something that you can implement into your day-to-day and it becomes kind of second nature as you continue to practice it. And it seems to me it's just a big shift to like, obviously now I think one of the biggest issues is related to tech in a sense of, we'll just use TikTok as an example because it's the easiest example.

Yeah.

So say if somebody were to be on Instagram, feel envy, jealousy, or something, they would, I guess naturally, I'm just thinking like a lot of people might like numb themselves by just like going to another app and like TikToking for 20 minutes and being like forgetting about it. But what they actually did is bury it.

Exactly.

Yes, exactly. So instead of doing that, and it seems almost like the neurocycle, I mean, it's almost just as easy in a sense of doing. So it's just a better transition, no more difficulty, I guess. Maybe it takes a little bit more thought, obviously.

With self-regulation. Exactly. That's a good thing. It's self-regulation. You, and you said that beautifully. It's a better transition. And maybe in the moment, maybe the in that acute trauma so much that you need a tiny distraction. So then maybe use the TikTok for 20 minutes, but then you're going to have to make a decision at some point to come back and sort this out because otherwise it controls you. That's the key thing. It takes away your sense of agency. And when our sense of agency as humans is taken away, or we feel it's been taken away, that increases a feeling of hopelessness, which then is going to increase feelings of depression and despair and being overwhelmed and hovering anxiety and all those scary words. And it can get so bad. I mean, people get so abused at some points, go through so much trauma been through so much trauma like war and war-torn countries and multiple abuses that their minds can split. So they can't even use distraction, but then their mind split is a form of coping. So distraction is a form of coping and temporary distraction is okay as long as you deal with the stuff. But when a person's mind really splits, it's so hard to deal with it that the only way they can cope is by going into an alternative reality, which may be another personality just to cope. And sort of that's how they deal with the terrible things that are happening to them. Or they hear voices and that kind kind of thing, which doesn't mean they're ill. Sure, the brain and the body are going to be damaged in the process and they'll have a white blood cell count that will be insane and that kind of thing and glucose levels that will be crazy. But once you lovingly and kindly and supportively help that person to get to a point where they can actually start learning to self-regulate and you do that through— there's a therapeutic version of the neurocycling that a therapist would then use more externally to help the patient. And then once the patient is at this point where they can learn to do it themselves, then they can move into the stuff that I'm talking about in in this book. But I mean, I've had extreme, extreme success over the years in my practice with people with extreme states of where they've been labeled bipolar and schizophrenia and schizophrenic and that kind of thing and be given these hopeless diagnoses of helping them to get to the point where they're independently managing their mind. Doesn't mean you're not going to have depression. Let's face it, as a human, it's part of life experience. And that's really what I want to try and get through to people is it's really okay to feel depression and anxiety. It's what you do with it and it's how you view it. And in the West, we have this this really crazy philosophy which developed over the last 40 years of seeing it, as I've said, as an illness. But if you see it in a way that it is helpful, as a helpful messenger, which is funny enough how the Eastern philosophy is, it's any kind of emotion is a helpful messenger, whether it's positive or negative. And it's telling you something. And if it's negative, it's something you need to fix. If it's positive, it's something you need to grow. So my research also, I thought, okay, I'm going to research that too. So part of the research in here is also showing that if you see it in this way, does it shift your neurophysiology? Absolutely. I mean, absolutely. And a recent study came out of Tokyo in Japan at a University of Japan in Texas also confirming this, which was really nice because my research had just been done and written up, and then I saw this study. And there's many like that. And that's the— it's so hopeful. It's so, oh, it's okay. We can all be relaxed together. I mean, do you think of it this way? Tyler, you go to a dinner party with friends when we can connect. Let's say you go out for dinner and you socially— you do all the right things, mask, whatever, and someone says to the table, "Hey, I've got a neuropsychiatric brain disease." Like, everyone at the table will go silent because we don't know what to— because of what we've told people, because now that person is seen as a crazy person. Be careful, they may be violent, they're weird. That's what's going through the person's head because of the messaging. But if that same person said, "Oh guys, I had this like really awful experience, and then I realized that it's actually from this childhood experience, and I realize this is why I'm doing this, everyone's going to lean in and say, oh, wow, I'm so sorry. Yeah, you know, I had something. And then suddenly the community starts, the connection starts, and you start sharing, and people share their stories. And that's how you process. So you're embracing it and in processing it. And then you both may be all crying at the table and hugging. And if you're in the same family, socially distanced, eh, hugging and so on. I mean, I have to stress that because really wearing masks and social distancing is very important. But basically what I'm saying is it's two different scenarios. And the scenario that I painted is the correct scientific one. And that's how we can heal as a society, not go and relabel and medicate. So that's hopefully what this book is going to bring through, is that more hopeful message of what's gone wrong and what can be improved. And just one more thing I mentioned in the beginning, and I didn't finish completely explaining that because I wanted to say all of this. Is that for years the trend of living longer reversed. Now people are dying 8 to 25 years younger than they should. And with COVID it's increased by a year. And so that, and people in between the ages of 25 and 64, so at the prime of their life, people are being knocked. So kids are losing parents and the workforce is losing workers in their prime of their career. And that was pre-COVID. So this 40-year philosophy of ignore mind and just label everything and too busy and wrong foods and not get your mind mind right to eat the right foods and to make the right choices and exercise choices and use— manage technology correctly. It's all a mind-driven process. So if we haven't done that for 40 years, we're now paying the price. People are dying younger. But we can reverse that. That trend can once again be reversed if we bring mind back hugely into the equation.

Yeah, no, one of the biggest things I'm loving about this is just the mindset shift of like, if you are depressed, if you do have anxiety, not to think that it's just like an illness and you're hopeless and like just going right for a prescription drug or whatever it is. But actually, just literally what you've stated is just like, it's teaching me something. Like, you know, and that you can use that, whereas the other, the other option is kind of like, you know, you just wait for a doctor, I suppose, to prescribe you something. Yeah, we saw that doesn't really work. No, for the long term. So I do, I know, I know you're tight on time. So I want to, I want to leave the floor to you. If there's anything else you want to share, please do. And then let people know where they can get the book, your website, and anything else for people to stay in contact with you.

People can get the book wherever books are sold. So they can go to my, my Instagram handle is Dr. Caroline Leaf. And if, and all my social media platforms are that. So they go straight to the, it'll take you to the book website, which is cleaningupyourmentalmess.com. And if they, if they, they can, they can order the book and from that'll take you to wherever books are sold. So you can get it wherever books are sold and even on our site as well. And yeah, that's basically— my Instagram handle is DrCarolineLeaf. My webpage is drleaf.com. And I have a podcast which is ranked one of the best in mental health, helping people with these things. And it's also called Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess. So if people want to subscribe to my YouTube channel and to my podcast channel, they can also get access to all of this information there.

Perfect. And thank you again for coming on. It was, it was incredible to to have you on the show.

Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it. I thank you for your insight and good questions.