Speaker 1: We can actually accept on massiness, and we can also
Speaker 1: learn to manage on massiness, which is recognition. Okay, that
Speaker 1: was missy. It's okay to be missy, but that can't
Speaker 1: stain it because it's having a consequence.
Speaker 2: Hello, Welcome to the Psychology Podcast. Today we welcome Caroline
Speaker 2: Leaf to the show. Doctor Leif is a communication pathologist
Speaker 2: and cognitive neuroscientist. Sincerely nineteen eighties. She has researched the
Speaker 2: mind brain connection, the nature of mental health, and the
Speaker 2: formation of memory. Doctor Leif is also the best selling
Speaker 2: author of Switch on Your Brain, Think, Learn, Succeed, and
Speaker 2: Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess. Our latest book is called
Speaker 2: How to Help Your Child Clean Up Their Mental Mess.
Speaker 2: In this episode, I talked to doctor Caroline Leaf about
Speaker 2: managing the mind. The world is a crazy place and
Speaker 2: our minds can get disorderly trying to keep up with it.
Speaker 2: But according to doctor Leif, to have a messy mind
Speaker 2: is to be human. We don't have to pathologize our
Speaker 2: emotions and thoughts. Instead, we can embrace them and implement
Speaker 2: strategies that allow us to better direct ourselves. Doctor Leaf
Speaker 2: shows us how to make sense of the messy mind
Speaker 2: and the scientific research behind those steps. We also touch
Speaker 2: on the topics of self compassion, consciousness, trauma, and neuroplasticity.
Speaker 2: It's always fun chatting with Caroline. I was on her
Speaker 2: show a little while back, and I've been looking forward
Speaker 2: to having her on my show for a while. So
Speaker 2: I'm glad to get this out there, and I think
Speaker 2: she's going to really help you clean up your mental
Speaker 2: mess and get order in your life and make some
Speaker 2: sense of your life. So, without further ado, I bring
Speaker 2: you doctor Caroline Leif. Doctor Leif. It is so exciting
Speaker 2: to have you on the Psychology podcast.
Speaker 1: Oh, it's so good to be with you a game.
Speaker 1: I so enjoyed interviewing you before. We laughed a lot.
Speaker 1: I just remember saving a lot of peop laughed and
Speaker 1: a lot of great discussions. That's an honor.
Speaker 2: I remember laughing a lot with you too. Didn't you
Speaker 2: have like a classroom? You were in a classroom sort
Speaker 2: of background.
Speaker 1: Probably different set on my studio because I'm in the
Speaker 1: same studio, But I think I had a different because
Speaker 1: we have different sets in here, so I think it
Speaker 1: was my main screen. Yeah, I had a great screen. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's what.
Speaker 2: Worked was well, can you introduce yourself a little bit
Speaker 2: to our audience first before we get into your work.
Speaker 1: Absolutely well, I've been in the field of mind branbody
Speaker 1: research for thirty eight years now, so pluckdates me. I
Speaker 1: started in the eighties. That's when I did my degree
Speaker 1: in communication, pathology and cognitive neuroscience. And it was an
Speaker 1: interesting degree because they don't actually have it anymore. They
Speaker 1: mixed up neuroscience was very new then. So what they
Speaker 1: had was they put us into a combination of medicine.
Speaker 1: And I say this, which will make sense with my background.
Speaker 1: They did a mixed up medicine, psychology, communication pathology, neurology.
Speaker 1: So we had all this incredible and neuroscience and its infancy.
Speaker 1: We had this incredible degree with all this clinical application,
Speaker 1: with work seven days a week. They nearly wiped us
Speaker 1: all out, and only sixty of us actually qualified before
Speaker 1: they decided they needed to split up the degree into
Speaker 1: two years, because they into two separate degrees because they
Speaker 1: put seven years in four. But I tell you say
Speaker 1: that to say to you, I'm so glad I did it.
Speaker 1: I hated it that I loved and hated it at
Speaker 1: the time, but barry, what it taught me to do
Speaker 1: was to think very critically. It taught me to see
Speaker 1: things from a different angle, from a medical perspective, from
Speaker 1: a psychological perspective, from a neuroscientific perspective, from a communication
Speaker 1: pathology perspective. And essentially what I was trained to do
Speaker 1: was to look at how people shut up and to
Speaker 1: try and help understand what experiences in life have resulted
Speaker 1: in that, and how is that impacting the physical functioning
Speaker 1: of the brain and the body. So it was a
Speaker 1: unique angle that didn't get me stuck in a field,
Speaker 1: and it launched me into doing a lot of research,
Speaker 1: which one of my nearest neurology professors one day really
Speaker 1: triggered that by making a comment that, hey, listen, the
Speaker 1: brain is fixed. This was in the eighties, Thank goodness,
Speaker 1: we don't think that anymore, and if someone has brain damaged,
Speaker 1: you just have to teach your patients to compensate. And
Speaker 1: proceeded to give us a whole lecture about that, and
Speaker 1: I remember raising my hand saying that that doesn't sound realistic,
Speaker 1: because as humans be constantly changing, we're having multiple experiences
Speaker 1: be different all the time, so there must be something
Speaker 1: more to this, And he actually said, well, that's a
Speaker 1: ridiculous question. I'll never forget that. I actually did a
Speaker 1: TEDx talk called the Ridiculous Question of neuroplasticity, and at
Speaker 1: that time there wasn't even a word really around that.
Speaker 1: It was such a new concept. He said. I said, okay, well,
Speaker 1: he said, go do research. I said, well, give me
Speaker 1: the area that you think is the most challenging. And
Speaker 1: so he threw out you know, you could see was dismissal.
Speaker 1: It was go and research traumatic brain injury because it's
Speaker 1: a waste of time. There was so little research on
Speaker 1: talk TBI in the eighties. So I thought, okay, well
Speaker 1: I'm young and don't know much yet, and then you
Speaker 1: go do it. So I just dived in and solid
Speaker 1: researching TBI and looking for systems of how could I
Speaker 1: help someone with traumatic brain injury improve cognitive, social, emotional functioning.
Speaker 1: And that launched me into where I am now, where
Speaker 1: I did intensive research in that area. I worked with
Speaker 1: people with all different kinds of emotional constraint. It's traum,
Speaker 1: severe trauma, traumatic brain injury, neurological impairment, stroke would be
Speaker 1: called ADHD, but more learning disabilities because that terminology of
Speaker 1: ADHD is always questionable to all the neurological plus the
Speaker 1: trauma side and worked. I was in South Africa at
Speaker 1: the time, so I did a lot of my work
Speaker 1: in the pre apartheid transition and post departed era. Worked
Speaker 1: in schools with people, went to under I went almost
Speaker 1: what I call underground for almost twenty five years, where
Speaker 1: I wanted to understand the human experience from a multicultural
Speaker 1: perspective and from all different angles. So I was working
Speaker 1: in very poverty stricten areas as well as working with
Speaker 1: people that receives of companies. My objective was really to
Speaker 1: understand mind mind brain connection and how people function. And
Speaker 1: then I'm basically practiced for twenty five years and now
Speaker 1: for the last five years, we are doing a lot
Speaker 1: of formal research myself and my team and busy with
Speaker 1: publications and research studies and whatever in this field sort
Speaker 1: of all coming together and I write box and I
Speaker 1: teach the stuff in my podcast and conferences. So there's
Speaker 1: a quick overview.
Speaker 2: You are busy. You are a busy human. How do
Speaker 2: you have any time for research with with your Instagram posts?
Speaker 1: That's true. The research comes out of the and four kids.
Speaker 1: I have four kids too, so in the process. They
Speaker 1: my guinea pigs. I always say that they my laborates,
Speaker 1: which they think is hilarious. But three of them work
Speaker 1: for me and my fourth, my fourth most is my
Speaker 1: son is actually co authoring children's books with me at
Speaker 1: the moment. So all four kids are involved in some way,
Speaker 1: all adults, which is lovely.
Speaker 2: That's incredible. They're very interested in psychology and neuroscience.
Speaker 1: They love they love the other whole mind brain psychology.
Speaker 1: I mean Dominique, who you met earlier on Who's My Producer?
Speaker 1: She was actually in Hollywood and working for you, working
Speaker 1: with actors and things, and so she moved over to
Speaker 1: this field and she she loves, she loves it. They
Speaker 1: all love it. They all found they bossed me around
Speaker 1: and tell me what to do.
Speaker 2: You know, you're you're so popular. I mean, your work
Speaker 2: resonates so much with people, and you have this very
Speaker 2: unique combination of nerdy neuroscience information and knowledge with personality.
Speaker 2: We are funny, you know, you're charming. You know, so like,
Speaker 2: what do you think in your own eyes? Resonates the
Speaker 2: most with people that are watching your lectures on Instagram,
Speaker 2: for instance, I.
Speaker 1: Think Scott, what really resonates is the fact that I
Speaker 1: say to me people that it's okay to be a mess,
Speaker 1: and you know you're not diseased if you have any emotion,
Speaker 1: emotions or not illnesses, and it's okay. And this hope.
Speaker 1: So I try and infuse everything with a message of
Speaker 1: hope because I've worked with such extreme cases. You just
Speaker 1: have to go back to the pre a parted era
Speaker 1: in South Africa and I work these three days a
Speaker 1: week and saw the most absolutely shocking things. And you
Speaker 1: will wonder over the genocide and just post genocide and
Speaker 1: that kind of thing. When you've seen that level of
Speaker 1: pain in humanity and you see people coming through, I
Speaker 1: know that the hope for humanity and the whole thing
Speaker 1: of mental health is such a human experience. And I
Speaker 1: think that's maybe what appeals to people is understand that
Speaker 1: mental health is part of our human experience. It's ok
Speaker 1: to be a mess, and is a way of managing
Speaker 1: the mess that can help us find a level of
Speaker 1: peace and embrace all of the humanity, including the bad stuff.
Speaker 1: Not to be scared of the bad stuff, but you
Speaker 1: see it for the message that can bring.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, you're known for this idea of the
Speaker 2: mental mass I think it really relates to I call
Speaker 2: creative people as having I say they have messy minds,
Speaker 2: and I say it in a positive way. So in
Speaker 2: the spirit of discussion, can we say that sometimes it's
Speaker 2: not necessary to clean up the mental mass. Sometimes it's
Speaker 2: actually good to just embrace it and accept the messiness
Speaker 2: of it for creativity.
Speaker 1: Oh absolutely, you know. That's I think one of the
Speaker 1: three words that I say a lot, and that's to
Speaker 1: embrace and process and reconceptualize. But who knows how long
Speaker 1: each phase lasts. It's so unique as we buy individual
Speaker 1: we are so unique in the way that we go
Speaker 1: through things. And I think that's been such a big
Speaker 1: problem with mental health is that there is this very
Speaker 1: limited sort of diagnostic category. Is that even accurate scientifically
Speaker 1: and kind of You've got to fit in this mold
Speaker 1: and this cookie cut of mold. And if you're not,
Speaker 1: you know, if you're still experiencing grief after losing a
Speaker 1: loved one off to x amount of time, sudden you've
Speaker 1: got a disease. You know, Meanwhile, that is such a
Speaker 1: unique experience for that person. No one's an expert on
Speaker 1: your experience, only you are. And even we try to
Speaker 1: get to grips with what that is. So, yeah, I
Speaker 1: think massiness is part of a huge part of when
Speaker 1: we start embracing our business, we start embracing our humanity,
Speaker 1: and that's where we can start finding acceptance for things
Speaker 1: that we can't understand and find a level of peace. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think so many people just just feel
Speaker 2: as though their mind is a mess, especially right now,
Speaker 2: exactly during this era we're living in right now. Can
Speaker 2: you unpack a little more what that means to have
Speaker 2: a mental mess and what does it mean when you
Speaker 2: say sometimes we don't use our minds correctly, Well, what's
Speaker 2: like the incorrect way of using the mind? You know, Like,
Speaker 2: can you explain this.
Speaker 1: A little bit absolutely? So, I know there's a a
Speaker 1: lot of almost controversy, if that's the right word, around
Speaker 1: what the mind is. And in fact, you and I
Speaker 1: both know from our or both our training, is that
Speaker 1: the mind is considered the hard question of science, or
Speaker 1: consciousness is considered the hard question of science. I come
Speaker 1: at this from another angle to to why talk about
Speaker 1: the messiness of the mind being okay and what it
Speaker 1: actually means and all that stuff, is that I don't
Speaker 1: think that the mind is the hardest question of science
Speaker 1: at all. I think it's the most obvious question. The
Speaker 1: mere fact that you and I can have this conversation,
Speaker 1: that we both have a level of expertise in our fields,
Speaker 1: that we can converse around these topics, that's evidence of mind.
Speaker 1: Like I am not floating and you're not floating, that's
Speaker 1: evidence of gravity. You can't see gravity, but we can
Speaker 1: see the product of gravity, which is us not floating.
Speaker 1: So we may not be able to see mind, but
Speaker 1: we see physically, and we can actually see it physically
Speaker 1: because then I'll come to that, But we see the
Speaker 1: evidence you and I having a conversation, being able to process,
Speaker 1: being able to answer each other's questions, being able to
Speaker 1: experience the what we experience before and what we're going
Speaker 1: to experiencing afterwards. That for mes evidence of mind. I'm
Speaker 1: thinking and feeling and choosing in response to your questions,
Speaker 1: and I'm formulating answers. That's all mind and action. So
Speaker 1: the mind is almost is literally like a gravitational feel,
Speaker 1: quantum energy, et cetera, by electromagnetic fields. In so many
Speaker 1: ways we can understand the physics side of mind, but
Speaker 1: there's this very impactful side of mind which is the
Speaker 1: sort of psychological side, which is our ability to think
Speaker 1: and feel and choose, which is what we do now
Speaker 1: in response to each other. But that choose, which is
Speaker 1: what we do now in response to each other. But
Speaker 1: that thinking, feeling, choosing, which is all this energetic force,
Speaker 1: et cetera, is moving through the brain and the body.
Speaker 1: So the mind has to have the involvement of the
Speaker 1: brain and the body in order for you and arch
Speaker 1: Sharp in this conversation. If we were dead, there wouldn't
Speaker 1: be us, if we wouldn't be having the conversation, there
Speaker 1: would be nothing happening in our brain and body. But
Speaker 1: the fact that we have a mind and we are alive.
Speaker 1: Our mind is this energetic force that is driving the
Speaker 1: functioning of the brain and the body. So for example,
Speaker 1: you and I are both making and all the viewers
Speaker 1: and listeners are making somewhere between eight hundred thousand and
Speaker 1: a million cells every second. If you were dead, you
Speaker 1: couldn't do that. So there's some kind of energetic force
Speaker 1: that enables our bodies to run, our brains to run,
Speaker 1: to process these experiences of life, intrastructural changes in our brain,
Speaker 1: intrastructural changes inside the pyticistus and of our cells, which
Speaker 1: we feel in our experiences that traum and we feel
Speaker 1: it in our body memories in our body as well.
Speaker 1: And some kind of relationship between this force of our mind,
Speaker 1: which I choose to call the mind and spiritually or
Speaker 1: whatever you want to call it, and this functioning of
Speaker 1: us as a human. There's something that they're in our liveness,
Speaker 1: and so mind is this driving force, this energtic force.
Speaker 1: And then I see mind also as having two parts
Speaker 1: to the messy part, which is so acceptable. Like we've
Speaker 1: been saying, it's so much part of being human. We
Speaker 1: don't know what's coming up in the next moment. We
Speaker 1: can predict a certain extent. I know, you interviewed me
Speaker 1: about my work, so I can predict with the seventy
Speaker 1: percent accuracy kind of the conversation where it's going. But
Speaker 1: I don't know what you're going to do after this.
Speaker 1: I'm going to have a very low understanding of what
Speaker 1: you're going to do after this. In other words, we
Speaker 1: live in a world that you can't actually plan. So
Speaker 1: there's a lot of experimentation that we do as humans
Speaker 1: on a daily basis, and that's a messy process and
Speaker 1: it's very normal. You don't know what someone's going to
Speaker 1: say to you or email to you, or you know,
Speaker 1: throw at you. And so we messy in the processing
Speaker 1: of life's experiences, and we messy in our responses, and
Speaker 1: that is okay because that's how we learn. We make
Speaker 1: a mess, then we see, oh, gosh, I shouldn't have
Speaker 1: got irritated, or I needed to plan better, or I
Speaker 1: needed to respond differently, is that it had an impact
Speaker 1: or that wasn't the right decision. So we see and
Speaker 1: the mess and then we can repair and then we
Speaker 1: can grow. So messiness has to happen in order for
Speaker 1: us to function. It's very scientific. The mind brain body
Speaker 1: connection is very systematic, very organized, very scientific. And in
Speaker 1: the scientific process, we're making all these little hypotheses and
Speaker 1: then we've got to prove them or reject them or
Speaker 1: accept them. And that's what's happening very fast all the time,
Speaker 1: and that's what our mind is doing. So when I
Speaker 1: talk about managing the mind, which is a big part
Speaker 1: of kind of the philosophy and the way I approach
Speaker 1: the work, is that we can actually accept our messiness
Speaker 1: and we can also learn to then manage our messiness,
Speaker 1: which is recognition. Okay, that was messy. It's okay to
Speaker 1: be messy, but I can't stain that because it's having
Speaker 1: a consequence. It's maybe impacting my work relationship or my marriage,
Speaker 1: or my relationship with a friend, or my quality of
Speaker 1: my research or whatever. So I can say, okay, that's
Speaker 1: what's happened. Now I can stand back and I can
Speaker 1: manage that, and I can change and reconceptualize, and that
Speaker 1: we can. That's a build big sort of cliff note
Speaker 1: to you. We can extrapolate that then too. Everything So
Speaker 1: in terms of how we've dealt with COVID, how we
Speaker 1: dealing with everything, our anxiety, depression, all of that can
Speaker 1: be viewed in a d of. I can be missing.
Speaker 1: Life is hard, it's got good and bad, the toxic stuff,
Speaker 1: the experiences of life or process by our mind into
Speaker 1: our brain and body. We are having an impact in
Speaker 1: our brain and our body, and that mind brain body
Speaker 1: impact needs to be is going to express itself and
Speaker 1: how we show up and how we show up may
Speaker 1: not be the healthiest, it may be a copy mechanism.
Speaker 1: But we can then go in and say, okay, well
Speaker 1: that's what's happened. How can I change that. How can
Speaker 1: I rectify? I can manage that all the time, not
Speaker 1: pushing what's happened aside. Because your story is your story.
Speaker 1: What's happened to you and is happening to you you
Speaker 1: can never change, but you can change what it looks
Speaker 1: like inside of you and how it plays out into
Speaker 1: the future. So that's kind of what I mean by
Speaker 1: cleaning up the mental mess.
Speaker 2: It's not mind control, it's mind management. And I think
Speaker 2: that's an important distinction because I think a lot of
Speaker 2: people that have like a mental mess, they may go
Speaker 2: in the abstraction. I feel like they have to like, Gosh,
Speaker 2: for a bit, did we feel anything we don't want
Speaker 2: to feel?
Speaker 1: Or God?
Speaker 2: And so what is management? You know, just unpack what
Speaker 2: it means to kind of be a manager of your mind.
Speaker 1: Okay, very good question. So we in a biomedical dominant
Speaker 1: type of approach to mental health where we've adopted the
Speaker 1: disease model of medicine and we've brought that over into
Speaker 1: when I say, we're not me, but it's the general
Speaker 1: it's very strong, dominant, sort of gold standard of not
Speaker 1: gold standard, but dominating. Philosophy of mental health is one
Speaker 1: of a biomedical approach, which is seeing anything that goes
Speaker 1: wrong with us as a disease in terms of mind.
Speaker 1: So like you have diabetes or cancer, and they can
Speaker 1: diagnose and they can track it to a biological cause,
Speaker 1: and they can give you a treatment that there is
Speaker 1: as specific as they can get in medicine to that
Speaker 1: cause that works with that kind of physical thing. But
Speaker 1: that model has been adopted into mental health, as you know,
Speaker 1: and that has then reduced its reductionistic and it's taken
Speaker 1: us down to a level of trying where researchers have
Speaker 1: tried to say, if you feel depression, it's an it,
Speaker 1: it's a disease. It's got they are biological markers. So
Speaker 1: there's other genetic calls, or there's it shows up in
Speaker 1: your brain as a difference in your brain or something
Speaker 1: with your chemicals. And as we know that that chemical
Speaker 1: myssge just has once again been in a recent paper
Speaker 1: by your animal grief being shown not to be true.
Speaker 1: So based on that, we have mind management shifts away
Speaker 1: from a biomedical model looks at you as a human,
Speaker 1: as a unique human having unique experiences. So this is
Speaker 1: not anything new, we all get that, but it's it's
Speaker 1: the narrative of your life and the narratives of your
Speaker 1: life that we have to actually honor. So if you
Speaker 1: are have a traumatic childhood in the ACE studies, or
Speaker 1: if you have a traumatic marriage, or if you're going
Speaker 1: through something during COVID, which everyone's had different experiences, these
Speaker 1: are toxic experiences, so they are going to be processed
Speaker 1: by your mind. Your mind literally kind of grabs the process,
Speaker 1: puts it in your brain, build it in those neural
Speaker 1: network changes. Change. That's in the influence a message to
Speaker 1: your body, and it's built into your body. So we
Speaker 1: have this mind being body connection translating experiences into our brain, mind,
Speaker 1: brain and body. So mind doing it, but it's also
Speaker 1: in the mind. It's in three places. So if we
Speaker 1: having a toxic experience, that translates into because it's going
Speaker 1: through the brain, it has an impact on the brain,
Speaker 1: so the brain and the body will then respond. It's
Speaker 1: a response versus it's not generating. So if we feeling
Speaker 1: if some let's say, for example, there is a very
Speaker 1: traumatic event that you went through childhood, you suppressed it
Speaker 1: for years and something recently has triggered that. Because thoughts,
Speaker 1: these experiences are volcanic in nature, you could suppress for
Speaker 1: only so long and then they will explode. And we
Speaker 1: get good at suppressing for various different Sometimes it's just coping,
Speaker 1: it's a trauma response, whatever, but eventually it will something
Speaker 1: maybe triggers it, and it manifests itself and there's now
Speaker 1: it's so overwhelming that you go into a deep depression.
Speaker 1: So if you had to go and see a psychiatrists
Speaker 1: or potentially some psychologists, they would say, yes, questionnaire and
Speaker 1: use a DESM and something like that, and they give
Speaker 1: you a diagnosis and say you have clinical depression. And
Speaker 1: that's initially very nice to note because now you have
Speaker 1: a reason for why you feel like you do, because
Speaker 1: it's so overwhelming, that feeling of depression. But it's kind
Speaker 1: of an empty gift, and it's like a gift that
Speaker 1: seems to be something that you open it up and
Speaker 1: now what It doesn't actually tell you anything because it's
Speaker 1: not a true diagnosis. It doesn't link you back to
Speaker 1: a biomedical cause, a biobiological correlate, because they haven't ever
Speaker 1: discovered after billions of dollars in euros and years and
Speaker 1: years and fifty sixty years of research, they have not
Speaker 1: been biological, genetic or chemical correlates. There have all been
Speaker 1: theories that have been construct so them or that's the word.
Speaker 1: Clinical depression is a construct It's a description of an
Speaker 1: emotional what I call an emotional warning signal. So let's
Speaker 1: say you have this thing from childhood, something triggers it.
Speaker 1: Now in the current state of your mind and in
Speaker 1: your life, something's happened and you've got overwhelmed by this depression.
Speaker 1: I would say this in terms of my management, you
Speaker 1: don't have clinical depression because you can't have clinical depression.
Speaker 1: You're experiencing a very dominant emotion. Now, I want to
Speaker 1: put a proviso in there. I don't believe that you
Speaker 1: need to have a medical description of something like depression
Speaker 1: to make it valid. It is valid. In fact, I
Speaker 1: believe that that actually stigmatizes and moves away from the
Speaker 1: true story and doesn't honor what you've gone through sufficiently.
Speaker 1: So mind management says, hey, I see you, I hear you.
Speaker 1: What you've gone through is significant, and what you're experiencing
Speaker 1: is huge, and it's knocking your life upside down, and
Speaker 1: that needs to be rarely dived into. And you need
Speaker 1: all kinds you know, you need whatever level of support
Speaker 1: but in addition to the support that we all need,
Speaker 1: there's also a level of eternal mind management that is important,
Speaker 1: and that mind management will help you understand, to help you,
Speaker 1: to a certain extent, get to a level of understanding
Speaker 1: of the origin story of where this has come from,
Speaker 1: which is environmental. There's things that have gone on. There's
Speaker 1: the thing that happened as a child, so that's a
Speaker 1: nurturing maybe aspect, or a severe trauma. So there's things
Speaker 1: that went on. It could be racism, it could be
Speaker 1: some political situation, it could be in other words, all
Speaker 1: the environment impacts us. It's not about us, it's about
Speaker 1: us in the world, and we have to consider the environment.
Speaker 1: So mind management is looking at you feeling extremely depressed
Speaker 1: and recognizing that that is a warning signal filled with
Speaker 1: messages that isn't alone, because if we feel depressed, it
Speaker 1: changes our behaviors. So there's a second warning signal, and
Speaker 1: that may be withdrawing, maybe can't get out of bed,
Speaker 1: maybe just can't talk the moment, just can't sleep, whatever
Speaker 1: the behaviors are, that will also then trigger a physical
Speaker 1: response because that experience wasn't just built into the mind.
Speaker 1: The gravitational fields and electromagnetic fields of the mind. But
Speaker 1: it was also physically the structural change in the brain
Speaker 1: and a change in the body. So we're then going
Speaker 1: to have this physical response, and that could be anything.
Speaker 1: I mean, we're all different. It could be that you
Speaker 1: as you this is triggered, you suddenly discover that you
Speaker 1: get sirisis, or you have tremendous gut ache, or there's
Speaker 1: suddenly whatever. There's so many physical impacts that have happened
Speaker 1: because of what you went through, and as this is triggered,
Speaker 1: it brings those back ups. So that's the physical warning signal.
Speaker 1: So my management is the honoring of I feel depressed.
Speaker 1: I'm not depression. I feel depressed, extremely depressed because of
Speaker 1: and there's a because of and I'm going to embrace
Speaker 1: that depression to find that message behind it. And depression
Speaker 1: is not an illness, it's not a disease of the brain.
Speaker 1: It is a warning signal coming from what I call
Speaker 1: an unconscious and we can dive into that maybe in
Speaker 1: the next question or something. It's coming from your mind,
Speaker 1: bring body into action. That's your best friends on your side.
Speaker 1: It's coming through from the non conscious levels of the mind.
Speaker 1: As an intrusive thought, with all these signals, and if
Speaker 1: we embrace them, we then get a level of control
Speaker 1: over them or a level of autonomy. That doesn't mean
Speaker 1: you're going to be walking around like an avatar or happy.
Speaker 1: It means that you could for months be in a
Speaker 1: state of tears and crying and not being able to
Speaker 1: out of bed and not functioning. But that's still progress
Speaker 1: because you are allowing yourself to embrace the grief. So
Speaker 1: I'll give you an example. I've got a case study
Speaker 1: in my latest book, this one over here, so that
Speaker 1: there's a case study in here of a client and
Speaker 1: my recent clinical trial, which is a great example of this,
Speaker 1: who had experienced incredible childhood trauma but so bad that
Speaker 1: the only way they could cope was suppression. So it
Speaker 1: was sort of the flight trauma response, and that was
Speaker 1: what they loved in and you know, we can cope
Speaker 1: with those things. That's what you needed in the moment whatever.
Speaker 1: But as a young adult millennial hitting their thirties, next
Speaker 1: the volcano exploded in their life and everything was going wrong.
Speaker 1: They meant for all the therapies, got all the diagnoses,
Speaker 1: and they were just getting progressively worse and wanted to
Speaker 1: just sort of leave the planet, so my management how
Speaker 1: does a supply? So basically what this person wanted, what
Speaker 1: we needed was to understand the story. And initially, when
Speaker 1: starting out, this person saw themselves as depression. Once we
Speaker 1: introduced a level of mind management, I didn't get them therapy.
Speaker 1: It's in an I put my systems into an app
Speaker 1: on the phone. So they literally went way once they
Speaker 1: had all the assessments and brain QG, blood, narrative, psychological,
Speaker 1: very big matrix of of assessment. They were then had
Speaker 1: the apploaded by my team into because I was double blind,
Speaker 1: so they didn't meet me into that. Now, the point
Speaker 1: that I'm making is that I do believe in support absolutely.
Speaker 1: As humans, we need deep, meaningful connections and whatever that
Speaker 1: looks like, we have to have it. But at the
Speaker 1: same time, you're not with your therapist, coach or other
Speaker 1: people twenty four to seven, you wake up with yourself.
Speaker 1: You're living with your own anxiety in the shower, with
Speaker 1: that trauma or that intrusive thought tho. So another way,
Speaker 1: we need two things. We need mind management all the
Speaker 1: time because our mind never stops, and we need that
Speaker 1: support to help facilitate and collaborate. It's a collaborative process.
Speaker 1: So in this particular case, giving that that particular person
Speaker 1: this ability to go and say, hey, this is what
Speaker 1: you do when these emotions, when these emotions come up.
Speaker 1: Let's look for the associated behaviors. Let's look for the
Speaker 1: weeds coming out in your body. Let's look at the perspective,
Speaker 1: which is the fourth one. Because your emotions, your behaviors,
Speaker 1: and your physical sensations or channel, by the nature of
Speaker 1: the mind and body connection will channel into our perspective.
Speaker 1: So it could be and this is kind of what
Speaker 1: this person said life that extreme depression, not sleeping, not
Speaker 1: functioning while at work, just literally giving up incredible, incredible
Speaker 1: issues with GUIDs, etc. And life sucks. So there's a
Speaker 1: very simple example of that. It would be deeper. So
Speaker 1: in mind management, you would look at those signals, you
Speaker 1: would embrace them and give yourself permission to feel those
Speaker 1: and experience those there. And then basically, once you've gathered
Speaker 1: awareness of those, you don't want to just be aware.
Speaker 1: If you just become awaren in to do nothing else, you'll
Speaker 1: get worse. So mind management involves preparing the brain because
Speaker 1: it's very scary to look back at your passer, to
Speaker 1: look at a trauma or something like that. So we
Speaker 1: need to know how to decompress, and that's breathing. All
Speaker 1: that stuff that we know about that's so spoken about,
Speaker 1: very good for the neurophysiology. Then you're going too this
Speaker 1: gather awareness looking at those signals. Then you would move
Speaker 1: into a process of what does this actually mean? You
Speaker 1: would reflect, so it would be a why question, why
Speaker 1: more details? Why am I feeling this? What's going on here? Why?
Speaker 1: A little bit of the like why do I feel
Speaker 1: this emotion? Why is it linked to this? Then you
Speaker 1: would write that down, because your brain goes through stages.
Speaker 1: Then you would check what you've written down, and then
Speaker 1: you would actually end that little process with an action. Now,
Speaker 1: what I've just described as the concept that I developed
Speaker 1: called the neurocycle, which is the tool of mind management,
Speaker 1: which is based on thirty ideas of research of how
Speaker 1: can I, as a person, directs the europe Ester city
Speaker 1: of my brain? How can I get my mind missing
Speaker 1: mind under control, which implies I have a wise mind.
Speaker 1: I have a part of me that's not messy that
Speaker 1: can kind of stand back, give myself permission to experience
Speaker 1: the messiness, and then try and make some sense of
Speaker 1: it and go through and that's a process. What I
Speaker 1: showed with the research is that you can't just become aware.
Speaker 1: If you just become aware, you're going to increase levels
Speaker 1: of anxiety if you've got to land the plane, and
Speaker 1: landing that plane is slowly over time, for just a
Speaker 1: limited amount of time. In today, starting to unpack the
Speaker 1: intrusive thought that the signals were attached to, because that
Speaker 1: signals attached to something. In the case of the case study,
Speaker 1: I was explaining they initially, obviously on day one, they
Speaker 1: weren't sure what was going on. By days four to seven,
Speaker 1: they were starting to see, okay, there's something from childhood.
Speaker 1: By day twenty one when they came back into the
Speaker 1: clinic for into the clinic for the next part of
Speaker 1: the next lot of testing and so on for the research,
Speaker 1: that person wasn't saying I am depression. That person was
Speaker 1: saying that I am because of And they said I'm
Speaker 1: even more depressed and I'm now anxious and extremely anxious.
Speaker 1: Now that immediately sounds, oh, they've gone backwards because we've
Speaker 1: been trained to think, oh, I'm gonna suppress those thoughts.
Speaker 1: Those are bad things. Depression and anxiety are bad things.
Speaker 1: Those are illnesses, No they're not. They are wonderful messengers,
Speaker 1: awful to experience. But if you embrace them, there's something
Speaker 1: behind them that's going to take you to the details
Speaker 1: of the thought that they're attached to. And that thought
Speaker 1: is the experience made of loads and loads of memories,
Speaker 1: could be thousand different memories encapsulated into that thought, which
Speaker 1: is that intrusive thought that is making us feel that depression.
Speaker 1: So in my management, what I do is I actually
Speaker 1: pay attention to the signals, track back to the intrusive thought,
Speaker 1: and then I go through a process over time, and
Speaker 1: the time is actually sixty three day cycles and in
Speaker 1: verse twenty one is very deconstructing work and reconstructing. And
Speaker 1: then the second four two is a stabilization in order
Speaker 1: to bring behavior in order to be able to apply
Speaker 1: in your life. And so a day twenty one, this
Speaker 1: particular subject you said, I'm even more depressed than before
Speaker 1: and more anxious. But there's growth because they're saying, I'm
Speaker 1: not depression, I am depressed because of and I'm starting
Speaker 1: to see what. And that person started seeing the early
Speaker 1: childhood trauma and they were grieving, so they were having
Speaker 1: an incredibly normal response to an adverse circumstance, which is
Speaker 1: terrible childhood trauma, abuse, terrible for years. So that's your
Speaker 1: ace adverse child experiences. But they had managed to suppress
Speaker 1: it for so many years with certain burst in between
Speaker 1: which they had none with medications and so on like that.
Speaker 1: But this is they managed to, in a very day
Speaker 1: to day basis slowly manage it through this very systematic
Speaker 1: process of driving the neural rewiring in a way that
Speaker 1: you can't fix us in a day. You'll overwhelm yourself
Speaker 1: and you'll fall apart. It's a teeny bit each day,
Speaker 1: and so by day twenty one they were able to
Speaker 1: say things like, I'm the depression and increased depression and
Speaker 1: anxiety is coming from the fact that I am now
Speaker 1: facing the issues and grieving. So they were in a
Speaker 1: period of grief.
Speaker 2: Look, this idea of the neuro cycle is fascinating, and
Speaker 2: your five steps that can help people. I would love
Speaker 2: to know more on a more personal level. I'd love
Speaker 2: to know how you have personally taken all these ideas
Speaker 2: to help yourself, you know, like, has there been a
Speaker 2: particular habit that you're willing to share hurt with our
Speaker 2: audience that you've been able to apply these five steps
Speaker 2: to and you've really, you know, in sixty three days,
Speaker 2: have seen a lot of changes.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, absolutely, So seeing it with patients is one thing,
Speaker 1: as you say, and thank you for giving me the
Speaker 1: leeway to give that overview because now we can really
Speaker 1: unpack it. So in my own life, I could not
Speaker 1: live without this. So it started off with me helping
Speaker 1: my a traumatic brain injury patients and then going with
Speaker 1: that whole history I've told you. Then I start of saying, hey,
Speaker 1: I'm using this while I'm working. I'm actually working with
Speaker 1: my patients, and I'm experiencing change as I'm wing with
Speaker 1: my patients. So from very early on, I started seeing
Speaker 1: things in my own life that I was backing with.
Speaker 1: I use this every single day. This is a lifestyle.
Speaker 1: I'm always working on a sixty three day cycle where
Speaker 1: I'm working on a particular concept over a very structured time.
Speaker 1: But I also use it very quickly because the neurocycle
Speaker 1: is not something that I've externalized and made very conscious,
Speaker 1: a very natural process that we us humans go through
Speaker 1: actually at four hundred billion actions and foster per second.
Speaker 1: So the non conscious mind that's driving off functioning. This
Speaker 1: is quite a complicated thing of science, and I want
Speaker 1: to give you a whole lecture, but the simplified cliff
Speaker 1: version notes is that the driving force of our non
Speaker 1: conscious mind and not subconscious, not unconscious, the non conscious,
Speaker 1: which is the most intelligent part of us, that is
Speaker 1: experiencing life, that has all these thoughts of their memories
Speaker 1: collated and organized, and it's on your side, scanning and searching.
Speaker 1: What's disruptive, what's enhancing? All of that is working and
Speaker 1: moving through the subconscious into the conscious mind and alerting
Speaker 1: us through those signals. Okay, so what I found when
Speaker 1: I was working with my patients is that, hey, these
Speaker 1: are things, all intrusive thoughts and signals are coming into
Speaker 1: my own mind and one of the things that I
Speaker 1: battled with for years that stole so much joy. I
Speaker 1: can tell a lot of different things, but this is
Speaker 1: very relatable to a lot of people. When I've shared
Speaker 1: this before, is I used to say, if only all
Speaker 1: the time, I couldn't enjoy a moment like I'd finished
Speaker 1: an interview, and I think the whole time of what
Speaker 1: I should have said or could have said. Or I
Speaker 1: go on a holiday and I'm enjoying the holiday, but
Speaker 1: as the day ends, I'm thinking I could have done that,
Speaker 1: which would have made it better. I don't do it anymore.
Speaker 1: It's taken me multiple cycles of sixty three days to
Speaker 1: not do that. Every now and then I get back
Speaker 1: into something will trigger and I'll fall back in the pattern.
Speaker 1: But through my management, I can catch it, because it
Speaker 1: steals my peace and it stole my ability to enjoy
Speaker 1: my moment. Now you met Dominique before we started. We
Speaker 1: were on a holiday back in South Africa. When we
Speaker 1: left when we still lived there, and we had this
Speaker 1: beautiful holiday house by the sea, and Dominique was about
Speaker 1: I think seven or eight years old, and we were
Speaker 1: leaving our holiday house to go back to our home.
Speaker 1: And I hated leaving holidays, like everyone that I'm really
Speaker 1: bad at leaving. I don't like holidays ending. And I
Speaker 1: was a whole way in the car for about two hours.
Speaker 1: I was going on about I wish with this, so
Speaker 1: I wish that, and if only this, I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: this adult, was four kids, and I'm saying these stupid things,
Speaker 1: and it was I was getting so anxious and so
Speaker 1: tense and so depressed about the situation that my little
Speaker 1: hure old dominique pipes up in the background. Mom, you
Speaker 1: are spoiling the holiday with your if onless. It was
Speaker 1: the first time someone had actually took an old children
Speaker 1: are very insightful to actually say, you know, that was
Speaker 1: my intrusive thought. I was living in a world of
Speaker 1: if only and losing the joy of the moment, and
Speaker 1: I decided right then and there what I was doing
Speaker 1: with my patients was what I needed to apply for myself.
Speaker 1: And it did take me a couple of months for
Speaker 1: me to really understand how to navigate this, but it
Speaker 1: refined the process quickly as I applied it on myself.
Speaker 1: And so that has been I mean, that's just one
Speaker 1: that set me free from everything, because along with if only,
Speaker 1: could have, should have, would have the ugly cousins as
Speaker 1: my husband call them, you know, because it leads down,
Speaker 1: You just go down a rabbit toile of regrets and
Speaker 1: you lose the moment. So that was a big one
Speaker 1: in my life that set me free.
Speaker 2: That's huge, No, that thank you for that example. You
Speaker 2: talk in your book about lots of different domeans in
Speaker 2: which this this neurocycling can apply to. I think a
Speaker 2: big one right now is people trying to detox from
Speaker 2: their traumas. Any advice at all you can offer people
Speaker 2: that maybe are keep ruminating about an unpleasant experience they
Speaker 2: had or something like that.
Speaker 1: Absolutely well, if you think of what an unpleasant experience is,
Speaker 1: that's going to come out into our consciousness of awareness
Speaker 1: as an intrusive thought. So we've been told that intrusive
Speaker 1: thoughts are bad things. It's nothing, there's no bad emotion,
Speaker 1: there's no bad thing. Everything's basically just telling you something
Speaker 1: about what you're going through. So that's a key issue
Speaker 1: with trauma, is that whatever you are experiencing as an
Speaker 1: intrusive salt, and all the signals that are attached are yes,
Speaker 1: the experience may be very bad and traumatic, but the
Speaker 1: fact that you're experiencing it is I know it sounds
Speaker 1: so hard to perceive it, but it is actually working
Speaker 1: for you and not against you, and you know how
Speaker 1: to manage it. So if you are getting if you're
Speaker 1: finding yourself ruminating, which is very much what an intrusive
Speaker 1: thought that's unmanaged will make you do, you just go
Speaker 1: round and round in circles like that. If only just
Speaker 1: go round and round in circles like a hamster wheel,
Speaker 1: and you just get worse and worse. Rumination, intrusive and rumination.
Speaker 1: And what we see with neuroscience is that whatever you
Speaker 1: think about the most will grow. Essentially, whatever you think
Speaker 1: about the most growth. So neurologically, as you are thinking
Speaker 1: that if only or that interest of what comes up,
Speaker 1: and you're getting caught up in the pain of that moment,
Speaker 1: and you're ruminating over and over what that person see
Speaker 1: to you, or what the experiences done to your life,
Speaker 1: or how it's messed up, or how you feel why
Speaker 1: did that person do that to you? And why did
Speaker 1: this happen to me? As you're giving it, you're giving
Speaker 1: it energy. Think of watering a plant and how a
Speaker 1: plant grows when you give it energy. Neural networks work
Speaker 1: the same way, and a neural network is pretty much
Speaker 1: is the thing that inside the little protein structures called
Speaker 1: that of that makeup branch is called dendrites. That's where
Speaker 1: you're stalled just being it's growing. It's stored there, It's
Speaker 1: stored in your body and stored in your mind, so
Speaker 1: three places. So I give it energy. It's getting bigger,
Speaker 1: and the bigger it gets unmanaged. The more we ruminate.
Speaker 1: So that's the one principle. The other principle is that
Speaker 1: I'd like to use it to continual I developed with
Speaker 1: my patience years ago. It just helped me to explain
Speaker 1: this concept. Think of a continuum from one to ten.
Speaker 1: So one to one and two is the just the
Speaker 1: ups and downs of life. That just there's the joys
Speaker 1: and this, there's a little things that we can irritating
Speaker 1: email and nothing that's too radical, that's just the kind
Speaker 1: of day to day stuff. Then we can move up
Speaker 1: to the sort of three to five where it's more
Speaker 1: of a struggle. It's a day to day so it's
Speaker 1: not the end of all that maybe an irritating boss
Speaker 1: or a child that's going through a difficult phase, or
Speaker 1: a project that you're working on that's really challenging new
Speaker 1: time wise or you put it, but something that is
Speaker 1: not unmanageable but could become unmanageable. Then shift over to
Speaker 1: the sort of six sevens where we're starting to tip
Speaker 1: now from healthy stress, which is what will happen in
Speaker 1: first two levels, which is where your blood pressure increases,
Speaker 1: so you've got more oxygen and blood furrture brain and
Speaker 1: a good sense and Therefore your decision making is more
Speaker 1: effective because your brain is going to work better and
Speaker 1: your brain, your mind needs to work to your brains.
Speaker 1: You want all the pathways clear, the fault clear, and
Speaker 1: all that stuff that I think that's good. Stress Westing
Speaker 1: stress is bad. But where we start tipping is when
Speaker 1: we start feeling that those day to day struggles are
Speaker 1: accumulating and forming an aggregate, and it's starting to shift
Speaker 1: us from icncope. This is too much. This rumination that
Speaker 1: was maybe intermittent is now happening almost five times an
Speaker 1: hour or five times a minute. I'm starting to feel
Speaker 1: like it's consuming all my time. Now I've shifted where
Speaker 1: instead of the blood vessels around my heart dilating and
Speaker 1: pushing more blood to my brain and activating my HPA axis,
Speaker 1: which is the stress access to work before me, now
Speaker 1: shifted into a toxic mode to my physiology. My neurophysiology
Speaker 1: is now shifted where one of a lot of things
Speaker 1: is that your blood vessels will now contract instead of dilate,
Speaker 1: So now there's not enough blood for and ouxygen to
Speaker 1: your brain. So now've tipped into toxic stress. Another HPA
Speaker 1: axis is working against me quarters all risers and blah
Speaker 1: blah blah, oh when just downstream effects not happening. So
Speaker 1: I'm feeling really bad. So my tip for someone who
Speaker 1: is experiencing trauma, when trauma is triggered, sorry may mean
Speaker 1: the last scale part of the scale, you get the
Speaker 1: eight nineteen. Now, those are those things that happened to
Speaker 1: us where we were the victim. So the big stuff,
Speaker 1: the huge things from childhood at any stage of your
Speaker 1: life that are a war, an abuse, a sexual accounted
Speaker 1: loss of a loved one, car accidents, physical traumatial body
Speaker 1: that's changed your life. Those big, gigantic things that are
Speaker 1: very very hard to process and take a lot of
Speaker 1: time to process, and very often meet suppressed for a
Speaker 1: time while we're learning to cope. So what I'm saying
Speaker 1: with the continuum is the first piece of advice is
Speaker 1: just try and rank, you know, stand back, observe yourself.
Speaker 1: We're very able to do this. You can put two
Speaker 1: cheese next to each other. Used to do this when
Speaker 1: I was practicing. Put two cheeses next to each other.
Speaker 1: You sit in one and you all say in the other,
Speaker 1: the messy minds in this one where you are, and
Speaker 1: then the wise mind's in the other one. And what
Speaker 1: you can do is almost shift chairs and say, I'm
Speaker 1: going to step into my wise mind, and my wise
Speaker 1: mind enables me to stand back and give advice if
Speaker 1: you want to know what that is and feels like.
Speaker 1: Think of when someone comes to you, Scott and they say, Hey,
Speaker 1: I've got this problem, can you help me. It's so
Speaker 1: easy to guide other people, so it's so difficult to
Speaker 1: guide ourselves. So you want to do that. You want
Speaker 1: to get into that mode. You know, it's a distancing
Speaker 1: concept of psychology where you stand back and you observe
Speaker 1: yourself and you give your self advice. So it's almost like, okay, Caroline,
Speaker 1: you're feeling, how are you feeling? You're feeling like this,
Speaker 1: Tell me how you feel, you know what's coming out
Speaker 1: of you. How can I help you? And you shift
Speaker 1: between those two modes, and when you do that, you
Speaker 1: create a safe space where you can allow yourself to
Speaker 1: experience with no judgment, no guilt, no condemnation. This is
Speaker 1: what I am feeling in my emotions in my body,
Speaker 1: this is what I'm doing in my behaviors, and this
Speaker 1: is my perspective, and you kind of itemize as you
Speaker 1: gather wellness of flows in this way and in this
Speaker 1: very objective way, and then you start going to the
Speaker 1: rest of the neurocycle. So it's the continuum. First, I
Speaker 1: just said, okay, this is this is definitely a seven,
Speaker 1: This is in that eight nineteen range. This is big stuff.
Speaker 1: Then you make a decision, Okay, we're not going to
Speaker 1: fix it today, We're going to move into a period
Speaker 1: of time. What support do you need? Do you need therapy,
Speaker 1: do you need coaching, do you need a friend, what
Speaker 1: sort of that kind of thing. That's what I would
Speaker 1: recommend that people really try and give themselves grace and
Speaker 1: peace and be kind to yourself. You know that brings
Speaker 1: in all those things. It's quite like negative self talk
Speaker 1: and creating self boundaries and all that kind of thing.
Speaker 2: Self compassion, yeah, self compassion.
Speaker 1: Kind We're not kind to ourselves.
Speaker 2: Some narcissists are very are too kind of themselves.
Speaker 1: That's also true. And that's another whole whole issue, because
Speaker 1: if you dig down deep, there's a lot of stuff
Speaker 1: going down there too.
Speaker 2: Aren't people too? Aren't people too kind of themselves? Some
Speaker 2: people are being cheeky.
Speaker 1: No, no, but you can be cheeky because I think
Speaker 1: It's very relevant because I think it's a coping mechanism.
Speaker 1: We can be so kind to ourselves, but it kind
Speaker 1: of hides on self head. So it's kind of like
Speaker 1: a surface thing. I'm just going to be happy. I'm
Speaker 1: going to got this under control. I'm great. And it's
Speaker 1: almost like a diversion because the research you've you would
Speaker 1: have seen the research showing that you can't be positive
Speaker 1: all the time. That's happiness psychology movement has been pretty
Speaker 1: dangerous in a lot of aspects. Is that it actually
Speaker 1: are functioning drops. If you try to be like an avatar,
Speaker 1: you try moderate, moderatecitement, and happiness is very much more
Speaker 1: balanced and helps us to develop our characters and embrace
Speaker 1: suffering and all that kind of stuff and grows human.
Speaker 2: It's a really good point. It's a really good point.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So your neurocycling program. What I found perhaps most captivating
Speaker 2: to me as I was reading your book was the
Speaker 2: idea that you can use it for daily mind management.
Speaker 2: So you can it's sort of like a set of
Speaker 2: techniques and tools that you can use kind of whatever
Speaker 2: arises in your life. You don't need to have a
Speaker 2: specific habit that you want to change in sixty three days.
Speaker 2: But you can. Actually it's sort of a way of.
Speaker 1: Being absolutely yeah, you explained that really well, it's a system.
Speaker 1: It's a system of how you can get your missing
Speaker 1: mind talking to your wise mind, listening to the message
Speaker 1: from the unconscious, and driving neuroplasticity in the right direction.
Speaker 1: Neuropesticity mean the fact that the brain can change. It's
Speaker 1: changing all the time regardless. So the plastic paradox is
Speaker 1: that your brain's going to change regardless if you don't
Speaker 1: direct thee it's going to change in a direction that's
Speaker 1: not going to help you, affecting your body and feeding
Speaker 1: back into your mind. So the neuro cycle is a
Speaker 1: system burst all those years ago and developed and are now.
Speaker 1: As I said, you have like five different trials running
Speaker 1: at the moment. You've got all kinds of papers that
Speaker 1: are we've prepared with like five papers and currently under
Speaker 1: public preparation for publication, peer review journals, et cetera, showing
Speaker 1: the development of this concept. So it's a system within
Speaker 1: which you can put whatever you want. It's a framework,
Speaker 1: it's a vehicle. It is you can bring in if
Speaker 1: there's certain techniques that work for you, meditation techniques CBT
Speaker 1: techniques act. I mean, there's a million different things, but
Speaker 1: you just want to put this in this framework that
Speaker 1: you can drive your direction in the way that you
Speaker 1: wanted to drive. So yes, it's greatful. The big stuff,
Speaker 1: the big traumas, the eight nineteens, even the seven six
Speaker 1: sevens eights. That takes time to rewire, and the rewiring
Speaker 1: process works in cycles of sixty three days and not
Speaker 1: necessarily one. I've had patients who've had to work over
Speaker 1: two years, which is twelve cycles over two years before
Speaker 1: they've felt each neurocycle, you'll feel all level of control,
Speaker 1: but before they feel like they've actually got to a
Speaker 1: point where they started to feel like they can, you know,
Speaker 1: make positive strides in their life. So each is a
Speaker 1: positive stride, but it's accumulative day to day. It is amazing.
Speaker 1: I'll give you a simple example. My whole research team
Speaker 1: was meeting at my house for my studio home office situation,
Speaker 1: for a big research meeting, and I had to go
Speaker 1: to the dentist in the morning, and the dentist, like
Speaker 1: normal always runs let and this was a really critical
Speaker 1: meeting and nothing could start because I'm driving this process.
Speaker 1: So now, but all these people all over the waiting
Speaker 1: for me. They've arrived and the dent and I'm sitting
Speaker 1: in the dentist chair. I can't get out of there,
Speaker 1: so I'm getting really anxious and edging because I'm getting
Speaker 1: all these texts that I can have pink, pink pin
Speaker 1: and some So this is a silly example, but a
Speaker 1: neurocycled I realized, okay, I gathered awareness. I calmed myself
Speaker 1: down of my emotions, what my body was doing, and
Speaker 1: just doing that calmed my neurophysiology down, gave me permission
Speaker 1: to feel this way. Then I reflected I, which is,
Speaker 1: you know, why why am I feeling like this? Gave
Speaker 1: myself the answers. It was very calming. I couldn't writecause
Speaker 1: the dentist hand with in my mouth, but I visualized, Okay,
Speaker 1: they're sitting there. I know that they'll be getting my
Speaker 1: husband will be entertaining them, my staff will be giving
Speaker 1: them drinks, so they'll be having They'll be fun, you know.
Speaker 1: And then I rechecked that, saying okay, we can. They'll
Speaker 1: make up the time. And my active reach, which is
Speaker 1: the footstep, was an action. I'm going to calm down,
Speaker 1: let the dentists finish and tell the dentists hurry up
Speaker 1: and get back and when I'm there, I can we
Speaker 1: can make up time. So it sounds so silly, but
Speaker 1: I was in a completely calm state before I did that.
Speaker 1: Prior to that, I would have made such a mess
Speaker 1: of the poor dentists. Was I was wiggling because I
Speaker 1: was trying to get away and I'm trying to tell
Speaker 1: them hurry up. They wouldn't have finished what they had
Speaker 1: to do. I would have been in pain and I
Speaker 1: would have had a terrible meeting because I would so anxious.
Speaker 1: And it's happened to me before. I mean, I don't
Speaker 1: knew they've experienced that. You know, your brain just fogs
Speaker 1: up with you in a state of anxiety and so on.
Speaker 1: I had clarity of mine. I walked in, I laughed,
Speaker 1: I told them, I told them about the neuro cycle,
Speaker 1: and it was no. They were having a great time anyway.
Speaker 1: They didn't bind a few minutes, but I had made
Speaker 1: a huge deal. So there's an example of a day
Speaker 1: to day in my own life.
Speaker 2: I love that. Do you bring in like cognitive be
Speaker 2: able therapy at all? Like what are your thoughts about
Speaker 2: Like the idea of cognitive distortions, it seems relevant definitely.
Speaker 1: There. I say it with caution because I think that
Speaker 1: everything that's been developed is of value. So every system
Speaker 1: that people have developed is good, and there's good and
Speaker 1: bad in each one. I have an issue with CBT
Speaker 1: in that if you've got a toxic issue or an
Speaker 1: intrusive thought and it involves all those cognitive distortions. I
Speaker 1: love all those descriptions. That's great. But if you have
Speaker 1: all of that which is reality, and you just try
Speaker 1: and say, okay, well that's all bad and I need
Speaker 1: to think of something new, it creates the white bear effect.
Speaker 1: You know, that's whole research that what you don't want
Speaker 1: to think about, you're going to think about more. So,
Speaker 1: what CBT does really well is that it will bring
Speaker 1: in some techniques that will help you temporarily band aid
Speaker 1: the situation. So there, it's because the remission. The research
Speaker 1: shows that TBT is not as Yes, it's evidence based, Yes,
Speaker 1: it's part of the gold standard treatment, but it's not
Speaker 1: actually as successful as people think it is. If you
Speaker 1: look at the evidence and the research, it's very questionable
Speaker 1: in terms of sustainability. So where it does work when
Speaker 1: and I've tested this out is. It's a great way.
Speaker 1: The neurocycle is five steps. The fifth step is called
Speaker 1: an active reach, and that's where you do something based
Speaker 1: on a deconstruction reconstruction process. So the five steps of
Speaker 1: the neurocycle are embracing processing and reconceptualizing through a very
Speaker 1: systematic process over time. It's a deconstruction reconstruction process where
Speaker 1: you accept I can't change what's happened to me, but
Speaker 1: I can change what it looks like inside my brain,
Speaker 1: body and mind, and a change how it plays out
Speaker 1: into the future. So that's the kind of philosophical component.
Speaker 1: So if I've done those four steps of doing the deconstruction,
Speaker 1: I'm not saying don't be messy. That's a bad emotion,
Speaker 1: that's a bad you want to get rid of that.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying any of that. I'm saying, that's okay,
Speaker 1: you can be messy. Remember this way we started the conversation.
Speaker 1: But now in order for me to cope where I
Speaker 1: am right at this moment in today's day one of
Speaker 1: sixty three or day five of sixty three or whatever
Speaker 1: you or what do I need now? And that's where
Speaker 1: I found CBT techniques to be very useful as a
Speaker 1: little exercise that I can do during the course of
Speaker 1: my day because you take your active reach, and your
Speaker 1: active reach is how you discipline almost discipline your mind
Speaker 1: to not allow yourself to go back to the if
Speaker 1: only rumination or something's okay, I was doing that, but
Speaker 1: I'm going to do this to manage that. So there.
Speaker 1: It works really well, along with things like positive affirmations,
Speaker 1: but they go at stitch five. You use them earlier,
Speaker 1: you're not going to You're not going to get the
Speaker 1: same sustainability and behavior change or life change that people
Speaker 1: are looking for.
Speaker 2: Thank you. I appreciate that, you know, contextualizing it within
Speaker 2: your overall framework. You know, I'm a huge nerd. I
Speaker 2: really enjoyed reading about your godsic learning theory, like the theory.
Speaker 2: Unfortunately we can't cover everything today, but you know, people
Speaker 2: listening to this conversation, I'm sure are very curious how
Speaker 2: they can dive deeper into your five steps and help
Speaker 2: them in their own lives. Could you just tell people
Speaker 2: a little bit where they can go to find out
Speaker 2: more about you and your work.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, and Scott, that's really with you and I have
Speaker 1: a lot in common. We love on nerdy science. I
Speaker 1: mean that's why I love your book so much. In
Speaker 1: your work, I love it so Yeah, your disic is
Speaker 1: just basically the foundational theory that this is built on
Speaker 1: these simple explanations in my book, I think the.
Speaker 2: Easiest reading about it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you. Me doing more research on it and
Speaker 1: updating it all the time. Basically, my Instagram handles doctor
Speaker 1: Caroline Leaf. That's aways a good place because from Instagram
Speaker 1: you can get everywhere. I'm on TikTok, I'm on Facebook,
Speaker 1: I'm on all the social media platforms, my web page
Speaker 1: doctorlief dot com, and I have an app called the
Speaker 1: Neurocycle App, which is basically walks you through the whole process.
Speaker 1: There's the books and so on, so that's that they
Speaker 1: can find me.
Speaker 2: You're doing a lot. Thank you, doctor Leaf so much
Speaker 2: for being on the show. And yeah, you're doing a lot,
Speaker 2: not just research, but doing a lot of changing people's lives.
Speaker 2: I'm sure you get lots of messages from people who
Speaker 2: thank you for changing their lives. So that should make
Speaker 2: you feel very good.
Speaker 1: It certainly motivates me to carry on. It's when you
Speaker 1: see that happening, it's very very encouraging. So I'm so
Speaker 1: happy to help people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, thanks so much for being on my podcast.
Speaker 2: I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to this episode of The Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 2: If you'd like to react in some way to something
Speaker 2: you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion
Speaker 2: at thus psychology podcast dot com or on our YouTube
Speaker 2: page The Psychology Podcast. We also put up some videos
Speaker 2: of some episodes on our YouTube page as well, so
Speaker 2: you'll want to check that out. Thanks for being such
Speaker 2: a great supporter of the show, and tune in next
Speaker 2: time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.