Change Your Brain Every Day - 5 Steps to Managing a Messy Mind, with Dr. Caroline Leaf

Episode Date: March 22, 2021

When it comes to the subject of mental health, too much of the discussion is based on the fear factors associated with brain disease and destructive conditions. This negative bias led Dr. Caroline Leaf to write her new book ‘Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess’, which helps people to understand and train their minds without all the intimidation. In this first episode in a four-part series with Dr. Leaf, she and the Amens give an overview of her 5-step method to gaining control over your thoughts.  For more info on Dr. Caroline Leaf's new book 'Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess', visit https://www.cleaningupyourmentalmess.com/  

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. In our podcast, we provide you with the tools you need to become a warrior for the health of your brain and body. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we have been transforming lives for 30 years using tools like brain spec imaging to personalize treatment to your brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com.

The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceuticals to support the health of your brain and body. To learn more, go to brainmd.com. Welcome everyone. We are here with our friend and co-crusader for mental health and brain health, Dr. Carolyn Leaf, who's a communication pathologist, cognitive neuroscientist with a master's and PhD in communication pathology. She's from South Africa. She's a bestselling author. She is like me and a huge believer in neuroplasticity. And she has a brand new book called Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess. Five Simple Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking. So my goodness, we are living in a society of toxic thinking. Boy, are we ever.

Emotion. Welcome, my friend. Yeah, welcome. Thank you so much. So lovely seeing you both again. Absolutely. So why this book at this point in time? It seems like it's coming out at a perfect time. Right. When the incidence of mental health

problems is skyrocketing. And I asked her this because I know how long it takes to write a book. I asked her this on my Instagram interview. She did not plan this. She did not know, just like we didn't know, that there was going to be a quarantine. So if you believe in coincidence, but I would love to hear why you chose to write it when you did. Well, it was a long time coming, but as you say, I didn't know about the pandemic. And that was when I had actually allocated a batch of time just before the pandemic started was when I was going to finish writing this because I just finished the clinical trials and I just finished sort of doing the analysis and thought, well, now I'll sit down to write the book. I'm thinking, how am I going to do this? Because I travel 70% of the month.

And then the pandemic hit. So I actually had time to sit and write the book. And it was just incredible because I really had the results and that kind of thing from the trials. And I've been doing this for so long. And I wanted to bring in this whole, as we say, the narrative that we both, that all three of us share against what currently is happening in mental health. And it's made it such a negative thing. and it's made it so out of people's like people are so frightened of

of their minds and not understanding it and I really wanted to bring to the to everyone into their hands what it means to have a mind and what it means to be human again and as a human we in life experimenting and we don't always make the right make the right decisions and we make a mess and that's okay. And if you feel depression and anxiety, it's part of being human. And so, I want you to get away from the narrative of constantly the scary brain disease story and that you don't have control back to, hey, listen, we are humans. We can train our mind. Our mind is this trainable thing and it's not your brain and it can work through the brain and the brain

responds. And, and it was just so appropriate that, you know, it came out at this time, but I think it's, it's, it's, it's both of all of, in fact, all of our work is it's always timely because mental health has always been an issue. And that's something I've been saying in all my interviews is that from the beginning of time till now, there's no, we've all been battling with our mind, just each generation. There's just something else that we're dealing with.

We happen to be dealing with technology and pandemic and that kind of thing. But mental health is not something new. I just wanted to make people feel less frightened and have more accessible understanding of mind and brain and their autonomy. That's why I put the clinical trials in and did it the way that I wrote the book. You talk about five steps. let's talk about step number one in this podcast. What is the first step to reducing anxiety, stress, and toxic thinking? So the first step, well, if I can just quickly backtrack a few seconds, the five-step system

is what I developed over 38 years ago initially in a very therapeutic sense for people with traumatic brain injuries and severe trauma war trauma Alzheimer's autism that kind of learning disabilities then I adapted it in adapted it into the education system and corporate and government and then eventually I started saying to myself but this is something all of us need to understand and know how to do and what what is that? It's our mind. We need to understand mind. And there just was not enough research around mind. And there was so much research, as we know, the neuroscientific explosion has been amazing, but it's made us very focused on the biological that we've forgotten about the interaction with mind. So I really wanted to hone in on mind and understand mind,

what it is, what are thoughts, what are emotions, what is mind, what is the brain, and how can we use our mind to change our mind to clean up the mental mess to direct the neuroplasticity in our brain. And I started that back in the 80s when they still told us, remember Daniel, they were telling us the brain couldn't change in the 80s. And I remember about one of my professors saying this to me, my neuroscience professors, and I said, I don't see this because we're always changing as humans. We're always experiencing different things. So they said, well, that's a ridiculous question if you think the mind

can change the brain. I said, okay, well, give me the worst population and I'll do research. And they said, okay, work with traumatic brain injury. And I started and I did some of the first work in my field showing that if you deliberately and intentionally manage your mind, you can change your brain. And out of that was birthed the five steps because I was working, I was trying to take complex neuroscientific principles and therapeutic principles and all this stuff and trying to make it into an accessible way of how can I help someone deliberately and intentionally change their mind. So the very first phase of it was working with people with learning disabilities, traumatic brain injuries, and so on.

And it was very much helping them to restore function and to go back to like if they were at school and they'd lost that ability to get back to school, get back to work. And the five steps then just grew. And it was a systematic way of deliberately and intentionally driving your mind to be able to then improve how you're functioning in your mind which then obviously then changes brain and body so in this particular over the ensuing years i've developed a small developed a theory did clinical trials and i still do research and you know as you saw in the book i've put a summary of the recent research showing the importance of the mind brain interaction even down to the level of

telomeres so that's kind of the background so the five steps has got a nice long history and it's been simplified and over the years and it's it's basically our mind has got two phase zones for want of a better word and i always explain it in a very simple and very simple analogy would be if you imagine yourself in a helicopter but it's a time machine and you are the pilot and you're the co-pilot and the pilot's the messy one like all over experimenting, flying, learning to fly kind of thing and the co-pilot's the wise mind and we see neurobiologically that we are wired for love and we know that there's an optimism bias in the inner so our whole being is drawn towards a balancing imbalance that That's why we have the immune system.

It's getting rid of the virus. Same thing with toxic thoughts. It creates an imbalance. So our wise minds, this deep inner wisdom that we have, and that's the co-pilot. And what we don't listen to in our busy world is we don't really listen to our co-pilot. We don't tune in sufficiently to that. So the first step to gather awareness is for us to train our messy mind, which is actually not a bad thing. Our messy mind, the pilot, is what's very active when we're conscious, when we're awake. And we don't know what's coming up. Life happens and we're responding from the time we wake up till the time we go to bed. This happens, the emails happen, the conversations, the work, and we're constantly responding. And if we don't self-regulate that

and manage that, the mind's working anyway. The the mind never stops and it's the mind that's processing that into the brain and the mind is how we think feel and choose and if we don't manage that it's very messy and it's okay to be messy but we're supposed to manage messy so we do experiment it's very always said that our conscious mind the pilot in the hill in the helicopter is a very messy kind of experiment of okay i got irritated there now i'm fine here this it's regulating yourself it's experimenting but you've got to train ourselves to listen more to the co-pilot so gather awareness is the whole five-step process of the neuropsych is all about self-regulation it's all about mind management managing our mind which is% of who we are.

And it's always working regardless of you wake up with your mind, you eat with your mind, you drink with your mind, you talk with your mind, you go to sleep with your mind. It never stops for three seconds. So therefore, we need to manage it. And the five steps is how we manage our mind for the big stuff like the traumas like you talk about in your book. And then for the day-to-day stuff that you're dealing with in terms of the just basic dealing with imposter syndrome, if you're looking at something, watching social media, which is such a huge thing with imposter syndrome, especially with our Gen Z, and

the little things that can happen on a day-to-day basis. So what I bring to the table with the five steps is how can I actually be consciously, deliberately self-regulating my mind all the time? And that begs the question of how often can you do it? So neuroscience shows us we can do this every 10 seconds. It doesn't mean we watch your clock every 10 seconds. It means that we can be very deliberate and conscious of how am I thinking? How am I feeling?

How am I choosing? How am I expressing myself? What's my body language? What was my reaction? What was the impact of my reaction? We can do that in the moment. And in doing that that we can also see our patterns what are the patterns in our life what are the addictions what are the cycles what are the things that are holding me back and that's so then that you then would take the neuro cycle into a deeper level where you

would do it daily for 15 to 45 minutes over the 63 day cycle so that's kind of the two applications the moment by moment and then the big stuff, the traumas and so on, and the toxic habits, the established stuff that you would do in cycles of 63 days, which is also part of the research that I just recently did. Because we all think that it takes 21 days to build a habit. It doesn't. It takes 21 days for reconceptualization to happen, which means you can convert a toxic thought to a healthy thought, but it takes another 42 days to stabilize that. So behavior change won't happen unless you work

in these cycles. So the five steps is basically used on those two different levels. So the first step very quickly, because I know that you're running out of time with the first segment, is to gather awareness. So it's to start the process of getting very self-regulated. So, and I chose the word specifically gather because gather implies you have agency and control so if you think of a huge big apple tree that's full of poison apples and it's this big ugly apple tree and here you are the pilot and the co-pilot and you're flying over this massive forest which are all your thoughts because thoughts look like trees so that's the scenario this huge big forest and you're flying

over it most of it's green through the middle there's this dark strip of dark green trees that are perfect and that's your wisdom mind which is really what the co-pilot has access to and then you the messy mind and you're flying over this forest and you've got this tree the smoke signal from this big lot of dark trees and those trees look like thoughts look like trees that's why i use that analogy and you make the decision to gather awareness trees that's why i use that analogy and you make the decision to gather awareness of that signal what is that signal the depression the anxiety those addiction patterns whatever it is those maybe just getting upset all the time or getting irritated whatever it is that's the most dominant thing blocking you at that moment your mind we

have to go off to the next segment but if i understand right it's actually getting a bit of psychological distance from the noise that is in your head and just become aware and separate yourself absolutely it's and it's gathering in exactly that but it's getting this that's kind of the preparation phase for the whole five-step process where you create that distance and these different techniques that talk about doing that. But then you gather awareness is where you actually land the plane. You pay attention to the signal, the depression, anxiety, you land your little helicopter and you get out and you stand back. And that's, you don't stand under the apple tree so that we often get into life and we just get overwhelmed. We just throw ourselves in and we just get overwhelmed and don't know what to do.

So the first step is stand back, create the distance, create the space. It's called the multiple perspective advantage. And you pick, like you pick apples off a tree, you control it. You have agency. You can reach out and pick the apples off the tree. So there's, and there's different, you would look at different signals. So you'd look at your emotional signals like depression, anxiety, frustration. You'd look at your physical signals, like your body, what's your body doing, GI symptoms or whatever they may

be, your behaviors, what are you doing, how are you showing up in the world, and then your perspective. So you've gathered those, but you have agency, you've taken control. And that's very important with the gather awareness portion of the first step, which is a very quick overview. When we come back, we'll summarize that a little bit, and we'll talk about step two. So the issue of psychological dissonance is critical. Yeah. So you don't believe every stupid thing. Exactly. As you say, the dragons. Stay with us. If you're enjoying the Brain Warriors Way podcast, please don't forget to subscribe so you'll always know when there's a new episode.

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