Discover Science-Based Mental Techniques to Rise Above Anxiety and Depression

Sam Foreign.

Good evening, Good afternoon everyone. Depending on where in the world you are. And welcome to our webinar today with Dr. Caroline Leaf on helping you overcome anxiety and depression. So firstly, if you guys are here, then I'm guessing, and I see close to 600 people tuning in live right now, you'll probably go up to about a thousand. And if you guys are here, I'm guessing that you came here because right now or at some period in your life you have suffered from anxiety or depression. And we get that these things are both anxiety and depression have been, have been growing in, in, in, in the world right now, especially if we've come through this crazy pandemic. And I know these feelings can feel like they have taken control over you and sometimes life can feel helpless. But the fact is they are science based methods to help alleviate these dark clouds and bring you to a level of beingness where you can be feeling blissful, feeling safe, feeling excited about life again and having some of those fears of anxiety dissipate. So with me is one of the most renowned and experts in helping heal anxiety and depression, Dr. Caroline Leaf. Thank you for joining us today.

Thank you Vishen. It's an honor and a pleasure.

And I want to give you guys a quick intro to Dr. Caroline Leaf. So we knew that anxiety and depression are things which are so, so, so important to everyone here. And so we wanted to find the best teacher. So Dr. Caroline Leaf is a clinical and cognitive neuroscientist with a Master's and a PhD in communication pathology. She's developed tools and processes that have transformed the lives of hundreds, literally hundreds of thousands of individuals with traumatic brain injury, tbi, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, cte, learning disabilities, add, adhd, autism, dementia and mental ill health issues like anxiety and depression. As you guys know, right now is Mental Health Awareness month and this is one of the reasons why we are focusing on this topic. So Dr. Caroline Leaf's mission is to change the world by bringing mental health back into the hands of people so they can learn how to self regulate. And through this program that we have developed with Dr. Caroline Leaf, you're going to get the power to gain back your life, to understand the emotions that, that you might be running away from and how to, and how to help transform yourself, your partner, even your children. So she is the bestselling author of Switch on youn Brain, Think, Learn, Succeed, Cleaning up youp Mental Mess and many more. She's developed a geodesic learning theory which has been shown to increase thinking, behavioral and academic performance by 35 to 75%. And she's been researching the mind brain connection since the early 1980s. So, Dr. Caroline, I'm so excited to have you here. There's a plane flying overhead, so let's wait for that plane to pass. So I, I, I happen to be at the chosen retreat in Florida, so I'm spending Memorial Day weekend over here in the US at this beautiful Zen retreat by my friend Tony Cho, who's a member of Mindvalley, and he's built this gorgeous temple and shrine in 40 acres of land here in Florida. So I'm going through a spiritual experience over here. And this is why you can hear insects buzzing in the background and you can hear planes flying overhead. Caroline, where are you right now?

I love the background there. I actually normally live in Miami, but we also live in Dallas. I'm in Dallas, currently, our studios here. So I'm doing this out of Dallas in my studio. So South Lake specifically. So we don't have. Yeah. So it's wonderful to be with you. And it is, it's such an important topic that we're going to be talking about today anyway.

And Caroline, you know, every time I have a guest with an unusual accent, you, you got to tell us where that accent is from. I know, but reveal it for the audience.

Absolutely. Well, I was born in Zimbabwe in Africa and grew up in South Africa and basically been in the States for the last 14 years. My mom's British, my dad's Italian, and I'm married to a Swiss, and I basically have a very, a mix of South African and, and all kinds of accents.

So amazing. I love the South African accent. You are the, the, the fourth South African teacher that we have signed on mindvalley.

That's amazing. I didn't realize.

Lorenzo Delano, who developed Our Fitness Protocol 10X, May Musk, who is Elon's mother. Her new program on the Musk Family is coming out soon. There is you, and then there's Rowleen Strauss, who's the former Miss South Africa who also won Miss Universe. She has a program on confidence.

Oh, that's beautiful. Four of us. I love that. The South Africans everywhere.

I, I'm going to have you begin with your, with your presentation, with your lecture. And guys, I want you to know that we intend to deliver incredible value to you. Many of you are going to see your lives change just from the next one hour with us. Okay. We'll be ending pretty much sharp at the end of the hour. So, Caroline, it's all you thank you, Vishen.

I'm excited to get going. Well, hi everyone and this is a tremendous honor to share my 38 years of work in the field with you. I have a slideshow to help you just follow all the things that I'm going to say. I'm going to be giving you a new narrative and a new way of looking at mental health and anxiety and depression as part of this to help you understand and build hope again. Because when you look at all the statistics out there, it can be really scary. And if you look at, you know, the messaging for the last 30, 40 years, it, it almost feels like mental health is a helpless, hopeless thing. But it's not. And hopefully by the end of this session together you'll have a very much, much more hopeful understanding. And I know when you do the quest you go into, it's going to change your life forever. So the first slide, I'm going to start showing you the slides, you'll see them popping up on the screen. But the way that we have been doing mental health for the last 40 years, and I should probably not say we, because it's not how I've been practicing mental health, but the general philosophy of how mental health has been approach and brought forward to the general public globally is a pretty hopeless, kind of a hopeless message. One of, well, if you've got a problem, you know that's who you are and you've got to live with it. On the good side, the last 40 years has brought the discussion of mental health into the general conversation and that's so extremely important that we feel much freer to discuss mental health. The issue, however, is how it's been discussed. So what I'd like to present to you today and that I'm doing in six, seven sessions over the quest that you can take part in, which I highly recommend you do, is a non pharmacological approach to dealing with anxiety, depression and other mental health issues. And by that I'm going to show you an alternative to help you understand that mental health is something that's part of the human experience. We've got to stop looking at mental health as a disease and we need to start seeing it as part of our human experience. And, and as we have human experiences, let's take a scale of 1 through 10 with 1 being 1, 2 and 3 being our day to day struggles and 9, 8, 9, 10 being the big stuff, the traumas, the abuses, the extreme stuff. If we are, we move within on that scale, up and down on that scale, most of us are in the region of the one to five little things to the sort of medium things. And then now. And then we'll have one of the big things. Unfortunately, most of us aren't operating in the 8, 9, 10. But a very high percentage of people have had extreme trauma. You can't be a human in the world today without being impacted by the world and without going through some level of trauma. And that's a fact. Same thing whether you're a child or an adult. We are impacted by environment. As one of my favorite quantum physicists, theorist says, or philosopher. He talks about the fact that it's not about you, it's about.

Excuse me, Dr. Caroline. I just wanted to point out. I think. I think there's an issue with your presentation that you're sharing because the screen is blank.

Oh, the screen is blank. Okay.

Sorry.

Thank you for sharing that vision. Let's see what's.

No worries.

It was working when we tested it. So let's quickly check again.

Yes, now we see. Now we see the slides. Go ahead and click play. Let's see if that works.

Are you seeing it now?

Yeah, it's not playing. But you know what? Just. Just. You can just click through the slides. Try to get out of presenter mode. I think the issue is presenter mode. Yeah, yeah, we can see it now. Just close the. Yes, now we got it. Now we got it. Right.

Okay, okay, okay. Can you. Is there any way you can put that on the front screen? Okay, so I might have to just glance to the side now and then, because it's the slides on my side now. So I don't know what happened there with the technology. Apologies for that, everyone. I'm not sure what's going on with the. But essentially, the slide that you see up is that we can take back control of our mental health. That is our objective is to take back control of our mental health. And we can do that because mental health is something that all humans have experienced. And as I've explained, on the scale of 1 to 10, it's part of the human experience. You cannot not be impacted by life. Now, the first thing that's really important to understand about mental health is that we're not our brain. And you'll see, I've got some props over here. Our brain is not our mind. And in understanding mental health, it's very important that we make that distinction between the mind and the brain. So I'm actually a psychoneurobiologist, which means that I study the mind and how the mind works with the brain. And how the mind and the brain work with the body and how all of that influences how you show up in life. And when we start understanding that the mind is our deep spiritual part of us, it's the part that keeps us alive. It's the part that makes your heart beat, it's the part that makes your brain, brain work. It's the part that makes your, your lungs help you breathe, your genetics work. Your mind is this force, this huge force that we've actually been talking about for thousands of years. And it's your deep spiritual force that enables you to function as a human and show up in life. Your mind needs a physical substrate, and that physical substrate is the brain and the body. So the mind becomes embodied in the brain and the body. The mind actually drives the brain and the brain responds to the mind, as does the body respond to the brain and the mind. Now, with that basic principle in, basic principle in mind, what we can see is that as we go through life, from the moment we wake up in the morning till when we go to sleep at night, we are experiencing life. And the impact of life is being processed by our mind into our brain and it changes the structure of our brain and that builds that experience into the brain. I'm going to show you some slides as we move along. But the basic principle operating here is that we have a messy mind, which is really normal. It's part of our day to day experience. It's how we, how we do life because we don't know what's coming up in the next moment. So messy mind is our experiential part of our experiential part of us. We consciously going through life and experiencing life. We also have, at our core, we have a wise mind. And this wise mind is reflected in our structure as well. So we see that our biology of our brain and the biology of our body is.

Dr. Caroline, sorry to interrupt. Whoever's controlling your slides, could they just zoom in? The slides are super tiny. They just have to zoom in and they're good.

Give us, give us one moment.

Yes.

We're just going to try and fix this zoom in.

Unclick format. Unclick format. So you don't have that, that side.

It's a zoom and unticked format.

Yeah, you have a sidebar showing and it's too small. Yeah.

Just bring it back. Okay, Give us a moment. Sorry, we're just going to have to. We've got this fancy setup here and it's just something's going on here. Okay. So while we sort that out. I'm just going to show you some props and things so we'll get that sorted out. So basically as we experiencing life, the information of life is wired into the brain in the form of trees. So these trees are protein like structures and these trees, I call them trees because they look like trees, but these are actually thoughts. So our experiences become our thoughts and thoughts look like trees. And like a tree is made up of roots and branches, so our thoughts are made up of roots and branches. So in our brain every experience is building into these roots and branch. Tree like structures that are made of proteins and chemicals and vibrations and they constantly in a dynamic state. So they constantly are getting, as you have more of the same experience, more information's added and so on. Take this conversation that we're having now about mental health as we're talking. This source of what I'm saying would be in the roots. So the origin story, the source, where things start from is in the root portion. As each of us is completely and utterly unique, we will process what we're hearing differently. So although these 600 plus things of you people listening to it, of you listening in, you all hearing the same word. So that's the same root or the source, the interpretation, how each of you are processing what I'm saying is going to be unique to each of you. Now there's a very relevant point to this. The point is that the branches that you see on this tree which are above ground, that is our unique interpretation of an event now or an experience. Every experience we have is made up of multiple bits of data. So like I'm saying, lots of different things now. So there's lots of different routes in the root system. And that means that there's going to be a lot of interpretation happening. All this, the roots and the branches, these are our memories. So memories cluster together and they form thought trees. So thoughts are real things that actually occupy mental and brain real estate. They physical things. And we as humans respond to our experiences that become these physical representations in our brain and our body and gravitational fields. Quite literally in the, in the gravitational fields of our mind, we are responding to those and that influences how we show up as humans. So here is a toxic looking tree and this, the roots of this tree are basically, you'll see the roots and the, and the branches. This looks wiry and ugly compared to this one. So this would be a healthy experience and this would be a toxic experience. The difference being is that this would be, this is great conversation that we're having. This is Helping us, this would be something like, you know, maybe an abuse or something going on at work, or bullying at school, or problem in a relationship or the experience of isolation over Covid, whatever it may be. That would be an experience that's converted in the brain into this physical change. Now what we've seen from the research and this is building to the point of how you are so able to be, you are so empowered to be able to change things. If we live in this zone, this toxic issue that we don't deal, if we don't deal with it, this is going to influence how we show up. So if we don't deal with this, it gets bigger and bigger and influences how we show up. This is healthy, also influences how we show up. But it's okay because this is healthy and this is going to have a positive influence on how we show up. Most of the time this is the zone that we live in. But we have these parts of our lives that are bad and are toxic. And from little things to big things, as I've explained. So if you imagine your mind looking like a massive forest, and this forest of trees is down the middle, is this perfect, like beautiful forest. But on the outside they all these lots of different trees, but they don't look as perfect as the ones on the inside. The ones on the outside are some small ones which are new experiences, these big ones which are established experiences. And in between the green stuff, you've got the toxic ones, some of them big, very clustered, maybe a few trees together, some little ones. So the size relates to how long they've been there. Just to give you an analogy. And the strength of the experience will determine how big these things are. As humans for good mental health, what we want to do is be aware of the, of this process, be aware of the fact that every experience, everything is building into our brain and our body as one of these two types of trees. And these trees. Then as soon as, as the mind builds these into the brain, and these are protein structures with vibrations inside and all that kind of scientific stuff, our body is impacted. This is going to bring health to our body. This is going to bring toxicity our body. So this is the psychoneurobiological concept that I introduced you to when I first started talking psychology or mind, how we thinking, how we experiencing life, all of that stuff. And then the taking of that experience and building it into the brain, then the brain instructing and the every single cell of the body and putting this memory in a slightly different form. These thoughts with their memories in A slightly different form inside every cell of the body. This is why when we do body work, when you do things like meditation and relaxation and breathing, you are changing, not you're changing your mind, your brain and your body. But what we see from the research is that we can't just breathe or meditate away out of things. These are preparing the mind, brain and body to do the work. So we need to meditate and you know from mindvalley how important this is. And Vishen has incredible tools on meditation in, in, in Mind Valley in the different quests. These prepare the brain and the body, calm down the neurophysiology, get the psychoneurobiology aligned so that you can literally stand back and observe yourself and start doing the work of change. So we can classify all the breathing and meditation and those things as extremely important brain preparation for mind work. Then the next thing that's involved in is, the next thing is we have to go beyond that and we have to start processing and reconceptualizing the information in order to manage our mental health. So let me give an example. Let's say now that we discover in this process of working on our mental health, we are showing up with, let's say, a lot of anxiety. So that's an emotion. So imagine there's a balloon coming out of here and this balloon says anxiety. I'm going to take this toxic tree and I'm actually going to put it under the table. So at this stage I don't know what's causing my anxiety, but I can identify that I have anxiety. So there's the first balloon. I'm starting to pull this thought from the non conscious, which is the deepest spiritual part of us. Non conscious, not unconscious. Unconscious is when you're asleep. Non conscious is your active, dynamic driving force and the biggest part of your intelligence, your spiritual nature. Okay, so first of all we've got the first balloon which is anxiety, let's say. Then I say, okay, well how's the anxiety feeling in my body? Maybe there's tension in your shoulders, maybe there's your heart beating cardiovascular reaction. Second thing is that. So that's the second balloon. Now this, as I become aware of that, I'm now pulling this up into this even higher up into my conscious mind. Then the third thing is I say, okay, how is this manifesting in my behaviors? Or maybe I'm having panic attacks, or maybe I'm just not able to concentrate. So behaviors, what are you saying? What are you doing? How are you saying and doing it? In the fourth Thing is, how is this affecting my perspective in life? Fourth balloon, coming out of here. And that could be, well, life sucks. So I've identified very simplistically four categories of signals that when we deliberately and consciously and intentionally focus on those four signals as four basic state statements, we pull the toxic issue from the non conscious into the conscious mind. When I do that, I have changed all my psychoneurobiology. I have shifted myself from being powerless or feeling helpless into being empowered to do something. Because I'm now embracing this concept. Because when I pull this, those, the four balloons, the four signals, the four balloons pull this thought up. I'm now recognizing that this way I'm showing up through these four signals is attached to a concept, a thought that is filled with memories. The first level, as I start taking the time to look at how am I, what is this anxiety and, and cardiovascular heart palpitations and, and with panic attacks and life sucks, what is that? Those categories, what do they look like in my life? What is my self talk, how is it, how am I handling this in my day to day living, my work, my relationships, what does it look like? So these, this part is the sentences that we build around the concept of how is this actually showing up in my life as I'm doing those two steps of becoming aware of the four signals and starting to spell out literally in sentences what that looks like in my life. The critical self talk, problems, you know, sticking to relationships, trust issues, people pleasing, you know, and getting to specifics. Not just people pleasing, but are people please my boss in these situations and I sacrifice myself in the process and I get totally frustrated. That's the sort of thing you are starting to do at this level. And that's giving you insight into how you showing up now as you're doing this, you'll know from doing meditation and breathing and, and that kind of work that self love and compassion and kindness is vital. No, judgment is vital. This is not who you are. You're showing up like this because of something. There's a reason behind this. In our current biology, in our current. Did you want to say something, Vishen?

Nope.

No. Okay. Sorry. I thought I heard you said something. In our current biomedical model of mental health, the minute that you say you have anxiety, what will happen is that we have shifted in the last 40 years. Instead of taking the time to look at your signals, to see how it's showing up in your life and to track down the tree trunk to you, how you process this information down to the roots, which is the origin of the story, of the, of the experience. And this obviously takes time and we'll talk about that in a moment instead of taking the time to explore that narrative and go through the pain of healing. Because as you explore that narrative, it's going to create a lot of, a lot of trouble, a lot of pain, perhaps increase the depression. When you see perhaps that the years that you've lost to child abuse and you've been suppressing it all these years and doing this work, you now start seeing, okay, well this is why I'm battling with relationships and this is what happened. And you grieve and your depression and anxiety will increase for a time that is healthy, a healthy response in depression. And it's not an unhealthy depression or anxiety because you're grieving. Basically what you've gone through in doing that kind of work, we are empowering ourselves to actually rewire the networks of our brain. As well as changing what it looks like in the mind as well, it changes how, what it looks like in the, in the cells of the body. In the current biomedical model that was kind of eliminated around 40 years ago with our focus on the brain, we became very neuro reductionistic and this led to, honestly, it's probably about 60 years, but it really exploded in the last 40 years. A focus on, instead of talking about how you are showing up and this is not who you are and your story, as I've described, it's more of okay, what are your symptoms? And these are symptoms of a disease. And that implies that there is going to be a diagnosis. Now that concept works beautifully for the physical brain and body and that works. For example, if you have diabetes, there are tests for diabetes type 1, for example. We can track the source, we know it's in the pancreas. There's ways of testing that. And we have a target drug like medication like insulin to try and target that. It works. It's great science, but in the last 40 years the lines blurred and crossed and we started adopting that type of thinking into the mind realm. And instead of taking the time to look at the stories of a person, which does take time and the context and life and impact of, of environment, social environment, political environment or economic environment, all these factors and the person unique response that takes a lot of time, takes a lot of effort, we've shifted away from that and focus more on what does it look like in the brain. I studied back in the 80s that it's my 4 degrees over the 80s and early 90s and at that time they didn't believe the brain could change. I did some of the work, first work in the world on neuroplasticity, showing that when you change your mind, you can change your brain. By the mid-90s, it was accepted that the brain could change. So what I'm describing is that the mind changing the brain and we see from technology that the mind changes the brain. I personally, I have a whole team of researchers and we've been researching now for years. We found a whole lot of different clinical trials. We still do and I've just. We've got five papers being published this year. There's. You'll put one in the link of my most recent published paper. But what in essence we have shown with this work is that we can't reduce someone down to symptoms in a brain when it comes to life stories. That is not doing a person, it's not validating a person's experience. It's actually increasing stigma. It's telling people they have a brain disease when they don't. You also cannot see, for example, depression and ADHD and that kind of thing inside the brain. What we will see is the impact on the brain. So when we use technology to look inside the brain, and I do with my research, we work with QEG and when we, when we talk about the physiological impact effects in the brain or what the brain looks like in response, it's in response. So in other words, it's not what your brain looks like is not the cause of the anxiety or the depression. What the brain looks like is the impact of your life experience processed through your mind into your brain. This is changing how your brain functions. This will change the blood flow in the brain. This will change the chemical, the electric, magnetic and electrochemical status of the brain. It changes the energy of the brain. But the fortunate thing is if we go through the process of what I've just described very briefly, which is standing back and observing ourself once we've prepared our brain and doing the work of embracing, processing and reconceptualizing, which leads to a reconstruction, a deconstruction of this and a reconstruction of this. What we are doing is that we are actually changing the impact on the brain. So we will see, for example, if someone is in a very highly anxious state, we will see the response in the brain. And you can talk, you know, someone could come in and they can be very anxious and as they telling their story, or if we use psychological measures, scales and things to just assess their levels of anxiety. There's all different scales. I Have developed a scale as well, a validated scale that looks at self regulation. There's all different ways you can do it. The most important way though of talking to someone is to let them tell their story. What is going on in your life? What is your story? Because we need to remember our stories. We can't change. Whatever has happened to you is your story. And whatever your story is, it's going to never change. But you can change what it looks like inside of you from this to this. And I'm going to show you talk a little bit more about that as well. You could change what it looks like in your, inside your brain and therefore you can change how it plays out into your future. It's a little bit like a volcano. If you think of a volcano exploding, a volcano will bubble, bubble and explode and bubble and eventually it goes dormant. And you still see the remnants of the dormant volcano. But that's now because that's your story. But it's no longer. It makes you sad. You can still see it, you can remember it, but it's no longer this dominant force. It has shrunk, sunk down and become very small. You can hardly see it. It's just one little aspect and one little wiry branch sticking out of the beautiful green tree. But that takes work. That's not going to happen automatically because automatically we are going to. Or what we naturally will do is we'll stay in our messy mind. This is very dominant, this generates very dominant signals. The emotions can be overwhelming, the behaviors can be overwhelming and so on. And if we don't catch those, those become well worn pathways in the brain. And the brain just does what the mind tells it to do. And so. And it always goes for conservation of energy. So if we, if it looks for the sort of simple route out, so that's the well worn pathway, the brain will follow that pathway. But that pathway is a, in this aspect, in this instance is an, is a damaging pathway. The immune system of your brain, for example, will look at this in the same way as it would look at something like the COVID virus, which is a protein structure that enters through the, into the nostrils and affects how the brain functions and your immune system fights that. We all know about that. Having gone through this whole pandemic. Did you know, however, that. That your immune system of your brain will respond to a psychological threat that has become this physical protein structure in your brain in the same way as it would respond to something like a pathological viral invasion or bacterial invasion in your brain or body. So when we hear that then we need to work on developing our psychological immunity as well as our normal immunity. And that's what I try to teach in the work and the research that I do. And what this quest is about is helping you prepare your brain and then go through the process of being able to stand back and observe yourself, which by the way, I call the multiple perspective advantage. Standing back and observing yourself, finding those signals that are the most dominant in your life, that are creating these patterns in your life, that are creating these, these overwhelming dominant thought, overwhelming dominant signals of depression and anxiety and changes in your behaviors and your body and in your perspective. Standing back in a non judgmental way and saying, okay, this is how I'm showing up. I validate myself, I allow myself to be a mess. It's okay to be a mess. This is not who I am. There's a reason for this, that languaging to yourself is extremely important. We see that in the brain when we do that, that we see shifts in how the different waves of the brain function. And I know if you are a quest follower, you've been exposed to some of the concepts of delta, theta, alpha, beta and gamma waves in the brain, which are basically the energy responses in the brain to how we are thinking. And you can have a burst of. If you think of the waves of the sea, the easiest way to understand this is to think of the waves of the sea. And these are huge waves that are far out to sea that we would call the delta, the delta waves. And then as we come in, theta waves. And then as we get up to the beach, the waves bold, we call that beta. The crest at the top would be high beta. Crashing on the beach and making little waves we'd call gamma. So it's just a little analogy. And what we want is as humans, life is a struggle. We want to be able to face our struggles, empower ourselves to be a mess, to allow ourselves to be a mess and then to manage the mess. So living the lives of not trying to be like an avatar, not trying to suppress the symptoms like the biomedical model does with diagnosis, not trying to just push that to the side and think, okay, well, you have a bipolar, it's a brain disease. We can see it in the brain. These are your symptoms. Here's the diagnosis, here's the medication. That is not scientific. That approach has been disproved by top scientists in the world. And I talk about this in the question, I give you links for this research too. We know as well that the WHO released a paper in 2022, talking about how there's been an increase, a 13% increase between 2014 and 2019 in mental health problems. I mean, I can quote statistics till the cows come home. Children's mental health has never been at such a bad state as it currently is. We know the statistics, so we know that a logical thing here is just to step back for a moment and hear what I'm saying. And that is that it's got worse. Mental health people are battling more with anxiety and depression. We started off this conversation like that, but why? If we've had this, if we've had a system going for 40 years and if it was working, things should be better, not worse, but they're worse. We see people dying 8 to 25 years younger from preventable lifestyle diseases. We see all kinds of things manifesting and we see that shift happened around 40 years ago. So the way we've been shifting, the way we've been doing mental health, where we label and diagnose, which is not even scientific, has made things worse. So we need to go back to what the ancients told us, what we instinctively know, and that's to tell our stories. But what we need to add to that is good science. And that good science is looking at, okay, so I'm going to tell my story, but I don't want to go round and round the mountain. You don't want to get stuck in rumination. You want to see that when you ruminate and you have an intrusive thought and you have these, this intrusive thought with all of its signals, you want to see that as your best friend. You want to see those signals as your best friend. You want to see depression and anxiety not as these scary things, but as emotions that are very much part of our human nature that enable us to, to, to go through suffering, to appreciate what it means to be a human and, and to the ups and downs of life. It's all part of our character development. We want to see depression and anxiety as when they in the right zone, as being messengers telling us something and enabling us to connect with empathy to other humans in this world and experience things in a very deep and beautiful way. But what we don't want to do is we want to, don't want them to get into the extreme state. We don't want them to get unbalanced. So there's kind of like a sweet spot or what we talk about in the brain is a Goldilocks principle. And that Goldilocks principle with these signals and with how we're showing up in life is that there's this sort of sweet spot. It's not to the. If you remember from Goldilocks, the porridge, the one was too hot, the one was too cold, one was just right, one was too sweet, one was too salty, was just right. Each of us has our own just right level of anxiety, just right level of depression, just right level of stress. We, we are functioning at our, you know, wired for love, wise mind zone. And it doesn't mean we're not going to cry or be sad or have depression or have bad days that is totally normal and have bad things happen to us and have responses to those adverse circumstances. That's all going to happen. That's inevitable. What I'm talking about is not seeing your responses as diseases of the brain or your genes or a chemical imbalance, which is a myth and all has been disproved, but rather seeing that as your response to the adverse circumstances that you are going through and saying, okay, this has happened. It's affected me like this. I'm showing up in this way now. Let me go through the process of how can I actually change what this looks like? Because I can know and see how I'm functioning, I know how I want to function, but I kind of get stuck unless I do the work of reconstructing. And this is where psychoneurobiological science comes in. So what we showed in one of our, and I'll just talk about a couple of my studies just very simplistically is in my most recently published paper, we talk about showing how when a person understands how to manage their mind and see that, and manage that toxic stress, the anxiety levels will drop, the toxic stress will drop. In other words, this will move from being toxic into the sweet sweet spot and the beta in the brain, the beta level, which is the wave that builds and the crest, instead of being big and just getting bigger and bigger and bigger and crashing and big and crashing in a very kind of disruptive way, we get that wave to build and, and form the crest and crash in a very gentle way in a way that works for you, which is different for each person. And when that happens, so when as a person is feeling more empowered to see the signals pull up, the thoughts start analyzing, deconstructing, weakening this, changing this, we see that the amplitude, which is the bigness of the wave, so that would be a small amplitude and that would be a big amplitude. We see that the amplitude of the wave starts getting a bit more manageable and we see that the Foam at the top of the wave or the crest, instead of being violent, is now calmer. And that is healthy. That's a healthy brain response. When we see that brain response, then we see things like for example, homocysteine, which has been very established in the scientific literature in the medical world as being linked with mental health. So in homocysteine, which shows inflammation, it's an amino acid that shows that responds to our mental health, it responds to how we managing our minds, that particular homocysteine will then also reduce, will be less, so that there's less inflammation. We know from medical science that the more inflammation that there is in the brain and the body, you can get a hyper immune response. And that increases your chance and vulnerability to disease by 35 to 98%. So what my objective is with my work and with this quest is to help you to recognize, hey, I can do the meditation to prepare my brain and this is absolutely essential. And then I need to go into the next phase. And that next phase to manage my mental health is to tell myself kindly and gently, it's okay to be a mess, but now let's manage that mess and let's manage that mess through a process that you do daily over cycles of 63 days. So part of the work that I've done is to look at how long does it actually take for us to do this process of finding these toxic thoughts with all these branch memories, which are all how we functioning down to the source and changing that. Because one of the things that you, you don't, you cannot do, which is what the biomedical model tells us is trying to do, is you can't eliminate this, you can't suppress this. You suppress this, it's going to explode like a volcano eventually in your life and the hot lava pools all over your life. We can't eliminate or suppress our story. As I mentioned already, your story is always going to be with you. But you can change what it looks like, you can change the impact into your future. So what we essentially want to do is we want to take this story and we want to change its energy and make it small, like I mentioned, only a tiny part, and then reconstruct. So what we do is we've got to go to the roots. We have to go from the signals to the thought and from the thought. We have to start at how's this showing up? How did I get here? What is this? What is the source? Key thing when you get to the source is don't get stuck thinking how could that have Happened to me. Why did that happen to me? Unfortunately, to understand why someone rapes someone or someone abuses someone, or why someone decides to go to war, all the terrible things that happen in life, you're not going to find that answer because that's coming from some broken person and broken systems and that kind of thing. And you could spend so long losing your energy to which is limited to trying to solve why things happen. It's more productive for you to recognize, okay, I don't understand why, but that is why they did that or why the situation, why I landed up in this situation and people did this to me or whatever. But I understand that what did happen is the cause of how I'm showing up in life. And I don't have to stay connected. When we talk about quantum physics, we talk about the principle of entanglement. One of the foundational principles of quantum physics and entanglement is that particles that are in relationship, if one moves here, one moves there, one turns, the other one turns there's this connection translated into simple mental health terms is if someone has abused you or hurt your people, could have been more than one person or a system, it's hurt you like racism and so on. By asking the questions why, in terms of getting stuck, you're going to stay plugged into the source. If you're asking questions in terms of I want to make change, that's a whole different story that becomes very positive. This is wrong with the system. What are we going to do to change the system? So that's another part that you can move into. But first you have to make sure that you are mentally healthy. Oxygen mask principle. Let's get your oxygen mask on, get you to a point where you healthy, and then you can help to change the system. Because the natural outpouring of when we start to manage our mental health, we want to help change the system, we want to help others, and that's very healthy. In turn helping to increase your own healing by a factor of 68%. So essentially what we are wanting to do then is we want to shift our, our focus onto getting this root system healed. And what I often tell children is that think of putting plant food. There's the rotten part of the roots. Let's put plant food on. So the work that you do is putting this plant food on to change what this looks like. Now, that's not going to happen in one day. It's not going to happen in four or seven or 14 or even 21. In fact, at each of those points that I've mentioned day 1, 4, 7, 14, 21, you're going to have major growth changes but generally they in a direction that will make you feel kind of worse. Because what you're doing is you are looking at the impact on your life, you're looking at the source. And this is very sad, this is grieving. This, you know, requires you to feel levels of, of all those emotions of what you went through. And that's very healthy, it's helping you process. But then a shift occurs at around three weeks, at around the three week mark, which also happens biologically in your body. So your body goes through a processes of healing in the, in around about three these sort of three week blocks. And so we see it around about three weeks we start seeing like stem cells forming to create healing. We see the immune system starting to sort itself out and not become a happy immune response. If we managing our mind, so if we managing our mind, the immune response which created inflammation for the initial healing will then start reducing and you can and this thing starts getting, this starts getting weaker and weaker and building into the healthier thought tree. But if I don't manage, I stay plugged in, I stay entangled in the source. This doesn't get better. I get a hyper immune response, hyper inflammation and all kinds of things can go wrong in my system. So this is why I'm saying we have to unplug, we have to disconnect and this is how we do this. So day one, it starts day two, it's going on and so on and so on. Each stage there's these sort of these, these, what I call these breakthrough days. That day 4, 7, 14, 21 is. You can often feel a little bit worse before you feel better. But it's a different, it's a breakthrough, it's okay. Now I know why I feel this, that this is the source and say, etc. It's kind of like surgery. You have to get cut up to be healed. You have to go through the pain. Feeling is healing. All those things that you hear, this is a valid thing. Now there's a key thing Here at day 21, if you stop this tree, these two parts of the tree, if you imagine that this is one tree with two parts, they are equal in size. So I now know what issue was in the source and I now know where I want to go because I'm building this replacement healthy way of thinking. But the issue is they equal. So if I'm triggered I could go either way and if I don't catch it, I could Rebuild this and shrink this. So what we have to do to create a habit, to change our behavior, to. To change our emotions. In other words, to take that well worn pathway and grow grass over it and create the new pathway. We have to repeat this for cycles to. For two more cycles to stabilize it. So we take this and we practice the healthy until this gets very small and that gets big. And that takes around about another 42 days. I've done a lot of research showing habit formation takes around about 63 days. And I'm doing more research currently to confirm these numbers and that and the cycle what happens at each stage. And sometimes it's a huge thing. I mean if someone's been. I've had patients who've been gone through extreme severe abuse. It's taken multiple cycles. So six to 12 cycles, which is about two years to work through and get to the point where you feel like you can start moving forward. It's different for everyone. There is no cookie cutter. But this says this. The basic cycle of 63 does this work of deconstructing and reconstructing in where you are driving the neuroplasticity of your brain and bringing your mental health, getting your mental health under control for that particular aspect. And then you do as many cycles as you need depending on the complexity of the trauma. Now what do you do each day? You do what I described you basically do. And I'm going to almost done here. You're going to basically do your brain preparation which is the meditation of which Chris provides, as I keep saying, the most beautiful meditations out there. You start with a meditation and then you basically going to become aware of the four signals to pull this into the conscious mind. As soon as the thoughts in the conscious mind it's going to become weaker so you can change it. Then you start the process of reflection and so on. So you're going to do five steps. It's called the Neuro cycle. The first step is to gather awareness of those four balloons. To stand back in your multiple perspective advantage and gather awareness of those four balloons to bring it into the conscious mind. Because the conscious mind has to do the work of changing it. Although the non conscious mind is the foster and the more intelligent part of us, the change happens in our, in our conscious. We have to consciously make the decision to connect with the non conscious or wisdom and to gather awareness brings that into the conscious mind. So we can start the process of connecting the non conscious and the conscious or deep spiritual part with our conscious mind. To do the work of Deconstruction and reconstruction. Step two is deep reflection. Reflection is like shining a white light through a prism. Comes out as a rainbow on the other side. So this is where I look at the branches and I start asking myself, how's this showing up in my life? What is my self talk? What does it look like in my relationships? How am I, is this impacting my daily life? The deep down? I'm giving broad categories but detailed, detailed sentences. The third step is we've got to get, get. We've got to genetically right? We've got to stimulate genetic action and we do that by taking a big piece of paper and just dumping all of this onto the page. So the third step is a right step. It's not journaling, it's basically a mind dump. And I call it a metacog where you write all over the page in circles, on lines, in bubbles, etc, and we do some of this in the quest and I have materials as well, an app and books and things. We go into this in detail. My app is called the Neurocycle app and you write that down. Now that that connects the nonconscious and the conscious, gets you into a deep spiritual part and helps you take you down to the roots. Then you look at the fourth step is called the recheck. You're going to look at what you've written and get the patterns and the triggers and the. It's the wow moment this has happened. Now what can I do? What's the antidote? How can I start moving forward? Then you end the work for the day and you move into an action which is the active reach. And the active reach is a little action that anchors you and helps you not to fall back into toxic patterns of rumination, but helps you move forward. Now you do it for about 15 to 45 minutes a day. So if it's 15 minutes, you spend three minutes on each step and that's what you do for the day and then you move on the next day. You do this for 21 days, 15 to 45 minutes. And then you do the five steps of the neuro cycle for five minutes for the balance of the time. So in a nutshell, it's an organized sequential process and each of that is changing the neurophysiology of the brain and the body in the direction so that you can rewire and make this small and that big in order to be able to manage your mental health. So incongruent. I never finish totally because there's always so much to say. But you can Go dive into the quest and find out so much more. But I want to leave you with this two things. You cannot control the events and circumstances of your life, but you can control your reactions. And that's powerful. And that's where mental health comes in. And that's called mind management. And I'm telling you, this is what this quest is about. And then the second thing is what I've said so many times. You cannot change your story. It's happened to you. You need to validate and honor your story. But you can change what it looks like inside of you and therefore how it plays out into your future. Thank you.

Thank you Dr. Caroline. And thank you everyone for joining us. We have a thousand six hundred people live with us, so I hope you guys appreciate it. The, the, the wisdom and the way how what Caroline shared is rooted in science and not just theory. So many of you here, the vast majority of you here are already mindvalley members. And I want you to know Caroline's new seven day program is already available to you. You don't have to pay anything. It'll be part of your membership. So I'm going to encourage you guys to dive in and, and participate in that program. Now for those of you who are not members, you can get access to the program as well. And I'm just going to give you a quick tour of what to expect. Caroline, this is the program that we have launched with you. It's called Calm Mind, the Scientific Guide to Managing Anxiety and Depression. If you go to the page, you'll be able to see a beautiful trailer on the program that gives you an idea of what, what to expect. The link is mindvalley.com forward/calm mind. One word. Okay. So the program is designed in seven days to help you rise abrupt anxiety, anxiety and depression with a proven five step process called the Neuro Cycle process. Caroline, could you tell us really quickly what this Neuro cycle process is about?

Absolutely. So when I was using the tree as the example earlier on, it's basically five steps. So you're going to gather awareness of your four signals. You're going to reflect on those four signals which takes you to this part of the, of the thought. Then you're going to write that all down, which starts taking you down to your processing, how you got there. Your recheck is step four. That's where you're going to start reconceptualizing. And step five is an action step that keeps you anchored and you do that daily.

Perfect. Perfect. Now if you go to this page, mindvalley.com forward/, calm mind. You will see the curriculum for the program so you'll get an idea of what to expect. This is what the seven day curriculum looks like. Caroline, could you quickly take us through what you cover on each of the seven days? Now, by the way, keep in mind, guys, each day is only 20 minutes. It's really, really, really, really manageable.

Absolutely. Okay, so basically I can't, I'm not able to read all of that, but I know what was in there. I can't see it from here.

Right.

So basically I introduce you to this idea of the mind and the brain. First of all, to understand that was the beginning of the.

The.

I dive in a little deeper and I show you slides and everything about how to understand the difference between the mind and the brain and how thoughts form. I explained to you how the brain. What I give you information on the multiple perspective advantage, which is that ability to stand back and basically stand back and observe your thoughts so that you can do this deconstruction reconstruction process. By the way, each of these lessons I give you a bit of information. Then I'll give you a little exercise to practice it. I explained to you about how the current system, why it doesn't work, the biomedical model and how this is an alternative that is actually more. Well, it's scientific. Where the current biomedical model is not. The same system is. I give you the research to show that. I explain that to you a little bit more. I talk a little bit about medications versus drugs. I then go into the five steps. There's a couple of sessions on the five steps on how to actually do those, as I said, each day with lots of examples and little exercises. And then I end off telling you in the last session, for those of you that have children, that I have a book coming out this year in August on how to help your child clean up their mental mess. So it's a simple version of how you can help your children.

That's beautiful. That's beautiful. So, so the, the entire program is available for you guys. And again, please, I want, I want to stress this again for those of you who are mindvalley members, you don't have to pay anything extra. Okay. Everything is available for you. There are a couple of really unique bonuses that come with this program as well. When you, when you simply join. For those of you who are not members, I hope you can see the value of membership because you don't just get this program, you get close to 100 additional programs. Access to meetups around the world. We have a thousand meetups every 90 days. And of course you become part of this incredible community. Could I ask a small favor? Those of you who are already members, please share in the chat what you think of your mindvalley membership for people who are on the fence. Okay, now if you scroll down below this page, you will see, you will see how to become a member. You can become a member, you can join monthly or you can join annually. Okay, so what we're doing right now is we're giving a hundred dollar discount on annual membership. So I'm logging in right now from the United States where membership is typically 499, but you can get a lifelong discount. So it's only 399 a year. If you, if you, if you become a member right now, you'll get Caroline's program and you'll get every other program available for you. Now maybe some of you are thinking, look, 399 is too high for me. I just want to do Caroline's program. Well, in that case, just become a, just get a mentally a monthly membership and then you can cancel at the end of the month after you finish Caroline's program. You can finish the program in seven days. In fact, you can even go deep and finish the program in one day. And so there's immense value here because since this program is seven days and you're getting a monthly membership, you could basically do a different program every week. You could do four programs for just 99 bucks. Think about the sure value that you get. But think about the value of having a calm mind, of being able to master these emotions that have been taking so much out of you. So here's a couple of things on what you will gain from the program. So firstly, rise above depression. Embrace a brighter, more fulfilling future. Conquer your deepest fears and anxiety. Heal from trauma and reclaim your inner strength. Manage stress with ease and develop better resilience. The curriculum for the program is easily available on the website. So you can check out the curriculum. And then one of the things that we're doing is that rather than have everyone take this program on separate instances, we're actually going to have a formal class. So for those of you who are committed to mastering your mind, the formal class starts on June 5th. Now what we mean by a formal class is that we're going to have thousands of people start together and go through this for seven days together while engaging in a discussion group and while also having Dr. Caroline leap come at the end of the week to answer questions she will be live. So if you are looking to heal this, this, or rather tame the thoughts in your head, the depression, the anxiety, set a goal and commit to kicking it off on June 5th with thousands of other Mindvalley students. Okay, so everything will be happening, will be kicking off on June 5th. All you got to do is if you're already a member, click on Start program, choose join a class, and then choose the June 5th class, and everything else will happen automatically. You can see some amazing, amazing, amazing reviews that we've gotten from our early batch of users who beta tested this program. Monica Ducciu said she's battled with depression, anxiety and insomnia since she was a teenager, and she's been prescribed medication. But going through this quest, she realized how her mental health is totally in her own power. Faraz Ali, who's a leadership coach, spoke about how he has a clearer picture of how to spend his time and emotions. From Stockholm says in just two days, which is 40 minutes, she was able to get to the root cause of many beliefs that were holding her back. Okay, now when you join again, as I said, it's seven days, but there'll be a live call happening with Dr. Caroline Leaf at the end of the week. And you're also going to be able to join a telegram group that we are setting up where you will have, you will have weekly motivates, daily motivation to help you go to the program. So this is all the information you need. And of course, signing up right now on this call, we're giving you a hundred dollars off permanently on your mindvalley membership. Here's a summary of everything that you're getting. It's really an incredible, incredible value. And that's the link where you can sign up. Just go to mindvalue.com forward/challenge and enroll. So while we, while I keep that up, I'm gonna see if we have any questions for Dr. Caroline Lee. Okay, so let's go on to the questions that are coming in. And you can choose to ask a question in Q and A or you can upvote questions. So one of the questions is.

How.

Much improvement will I see in just seven days? It sounds like too short a time.

I'm thrilled you asked that question. If you recall. Thank you for asking it. If you recall. You can't change anything in seven days. So what you'll learn in the seven days are the techniques, the system. You're going to understand how it works. But the actual work is going to take cycles of 63 days. So you won't get yourself completely under control because you've got to rewire these things in the brain. Each thought which is so complex because it has so many memories will take multiple, sometimes multiple cycles of 63 days. But in seven days you can master the concepts of what does this mean? How do you do it? What is the angle? What are the five steps that you can learn in the seven sessions? So yeah, so seven sessions maybe is more accurate.

Yeah. So the seven sessions really give you mastery over what's going on in your mind. And many people who are hopeless suddenly understand that there is hope.

Yeah.

And then over time they end up conquering the anxiety and depression. Right. So you may not conquer it in the 70 days, but it's. But you learn the technique, you gain the hope and then you start seeing it slowly, you start recovering bit by bit by bit with this new enlightened way of looking at what's going on in your mess. And I think that's really the biggest thing. Right. It's the hope and the understanding that it is within your control.

Absolutely. People being empowered that I showed with my research, the huge percentage change, significant percentage change in people's up to 81% of people feeling more in understanding and in control of things like anxiety and depression.

Right.

And that's something. Yes, it's built the hope. The seven days gives you the technique and the hope. But then the work is 60 multiple cycles of 63 days.

Amazing. Amazing. And, and again, for those of you asking, you can enroll and get the hundred dollar offer@mindvalley.com forward slash challenge. Okay, my team has posted the link in the chat so you'll see that mindvalley.com forward/challenge June 5th is when the challenge kicks off. Why we call it the challenges because this is an actual class with Caroline coming on live June 5th and then it lasts seven days. Your time commitment will be 20 minutes a day. That's it. But at the same time, with the 20 minutes of learning throughout that day, there might be certain practices, certain awareness that you need to bring into your day to understand yourself. Caroline, would this be correct? 20 minutes a day, but then there might be some additional stuff.

Yes, absolutely. So each, each quest day of the quest ends with a little exercise that they do and they should do that before they do the next day. So you, you just, and they're not, they don't take long and they're just going to boost your day. It's going to make you really feel very different and, and start really getting understanding of your mind.

Perfect. Thank you. And for those of you on the fence, scroll up in the chat and you will see what members are saying. For example, Carmen says, I highly recommend the membership. Definitely worth the cost for people committed to personal growth. Whatever your interest is here, physical, spiritual leadership, etc, you'll see dozens of members talking about how how membership is changing their life. Ashlyn said, it has encouraged me to start exercising, eating healthier, my memory has improved, my mental health has improved due to meditation. I never thought I'd be the meditating or manifesting type but now I try to morning and night. I recommend it to everyone trying to get their lives back on track, trying to become a better version of themselves. Thank you for sharing. Aslan. So guys, that's it for our call today. Mindvalue.com forward/challenge. Thank you all. And thank you Caroline Lee for joining us today.

Thank you so much. Thank you Vishen.

Take care guys. You'll all get an email with a link to to enroll. Okay, thanks.

Bye bye. Sam.