Change Your Brain Every Day - How to Find the Roots of Your Psychological Troubles, with Dr. Caroline Leaf

Episode Date: March 23, 2021

This week’s series of The Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast features our guest and good friend Dr. Caroline Leaf, who outlines some of the major takeaways from her new book ‘Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess’. In this episode, Dr. Leaf explains the second step in her 5-step process to cleaning up your mind, which is reflection. Dr. Leaf and the Amens give you practical tips to go deeper into your mind to explore and define the roots of your psychological issues, which is a vital step for learning to control 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 back. We are still here with our friend, Dr. Carolyn Leap. She's written an amazing book, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess. It's five simple, scientifically proven steps to reduce anxiety, stress, and toxic thinking. And in the last segment, we talked about gaining distance and also being able to sort of step back and look at the problem and having agency, being able to choose, correct? So we want to jump into step two. What is step two of cleaning up your mental mess? So once you've gathered awareness, as we mentioned, you've gathered them, you've taken control. So that's what's gather, not just let it fall on your head. And you're very specific.

Like let's say it's day one and you are in, because you always work in cycles of 63 days. You may only have the energy or the mental space to take you just to focus on one or two of the signals. So you don't have to rush the process. And that's really important with gathering. You keep control all the time. And we see from neuroscience that the minute that you're aware which is why this gather awareness is so important as we move into step two is that when you're aware of something the toxic thought

literally and i always use these little trees the toxic thought literally moves into the conscious mind and it becomes more malleable and that means it's more changeable so if it's about gathering awareness we now are swapping from being controlled, where it's suppressed, to controlling. And that in itself is quite painful. And that's why I always say with these five steps, when you're working with them with the big stuff, the toxic thoughts and the traumas and those kind of things, you're not going to do it for long. You just do 15 to 45 minutes a day. So you gather awareness. If you're doing 15 minutes, you'd spend just three or four minutes on that and then you would go to your reflect so step two is the reflect and

reflect and by the way this is always use the trees as as thoughts because the thoughts look like trees in the brain and like trees have got branches and roots and so do so do thoughts so the thought the branches the roots would be the source so the origin that would be the trauma experience all the roots of it and then that would manifest in your interpretation of the trauma so this is how you think and feel about yourself so maybe sexual trauma like in your case and maybe there's a whole perspective of i'm not good enough and shame and all that kind of thing and that's how you show up in the world in terms of behavior so when we do the five steps being a thought detective you literally are looking at the signals in the plane landing the plane and gathering awareness and tracking back to find out why am I doing it? Because the

overarching thing is we don't just show up for no reason. However we show up has a reason. And those reasons are what we need to underscore and find out and embrace, process and reconceptualize. So we're not just going to chop the head off the weed in the garden because it'll just grow back. We have to do the work. And that's hard. And we all talk about that. The three of us talk about that all the time. There is no quick fix. We live in a world that wants to give us quick fixes.

So we've been kind of trained in the last 40 years for quick fixes, but it's not. I like that. I want to make sure we say that again, because it sounds simple, but it's really important. However you show up has a reason. We've got to get to that root cause. Yes.

So it's really important to look at the root cause and sometimes people really avoid that's the thing we try to avoid the most is what does that root cause because it's painful but however you show up has a reason and that's important i just wanted to sort of like highlight patients a lot Right. From the pain. No, that's so good. Awareness. Gather awareness, yeah. It's reflect. Gathering awareness to reflect on it.

And how do people do that practically? So on a reflect, basically that's where you ask, answer, and discuss. If you think of a light shining through a prism, it goes in one color. It comes out the colors of the rainbow. So there's a depth to reflection. That's why I chose the word reflect. It's got an enormous depth to it. It's where you ask, answer, discuss, and you're exploring,

and you really are finding out why do I have those feelings, those warning signals of depression. And I say specifically you're reflecting on what you've gathered, what's in your basket. You're reflecting on the emotional warning signals, the physical warning signals, the behavioral warning signals, the perspective warning signals. Because all of those are telling you, they're warning signals, they're messages, they're telling you something to go to your point that you made a moment ago. They're telling you something about this. objective in terms of the analogy with the five steps is to actually get to the point where you actually dig up the sand around the roots uproot this tree and reconceptualize it into a new healthy thought and that new healthy thought as you're going through the gather reflect in the five steps

is if you look deeply inside the tree you'll see there's dark leaves and there's light leaves and i did this on purpose because reconceptualization doesn't mean that once you find the root cause that you eliminate your you know your story goes that you it's there like you tell your story in your book and and we all have our stories um basically your story is just reconceptualized so now the green part is how you've chosen to live your future not change to the past and that the light leaves are the story but it's changed and that's what you're getting to that's where healing will come healing will never come if you just chop the head off and it'll grow back like the roots in the garden so reflect is then the process of why am i feeling that emotional warning signal of anxiety and depression

and then you answer yourself and i'm feeling it i think because of and then you have whatever you answer why and then answer again so you're going through this process of very deliberate and intentionally digging deeper. With each of these stages, what I showed with my research is that you're creating more coherence in the brain. I mean, I'm speaking to the brain, the brain doctor, so you know exactly what that means. But the vital importance of, I look at more at the alpha, beta, delta, gamma, theta, those waves. And what we saw was that as people start going deeper with the reflect, where you start asking, answering, and discussing, we created a beautiful, starting to create a beautiful flow between the two sides

of the brain because and you're starting to create introspection so alpha will increase across the front part of the brain which helps you to dig deeper and then as so as you're reflecting that information that you're gathering it's it's very systematic this process is very systematic you don't blend it all together you don't grab grab one signal and then unpack it. You grab the signal and then you step to the next step very systematically. So reflect is very much ask, answer, discuss. Ask, answer, discuss. That discuss portion is extremely important because you want to start taking yourself and introspecting and going as deep as you can to find out why. Now, this is really hard work. And what I showed in my research is the treatment effect, that when things will get worse before they get better, which is what we said. And what was interesting is that I put two case studies in the book with the little brain images and things in color.

I don't know if you guys have got the hard copy, but we put the QEG in color. But this particular subject was interesting because this subject was like offline depression basically the subject said i am depression they tried everything clinical they had the label they had done the medication the treatments but and they were about to give up on life they had this work family sleep if everything was just gone and by the time they reached 21 days of doing this these five steps they had their brain had gone to a gray level which is what you want obviously gray is different for everyone but it's basically showing that there's a balance in

the brain and what that said in terms of their narrative is they've gone from being i am depression i am hopeless to i now know why i have depression and that's the point i want to make so by day 21 they were seeing part of the roots their comment was i've seen part but i know there's more work to do. But by day 63 of continuing the five steps daily, which included the gather and the reflect, and we're going to do the other steps as well, is that they were saying, okay, it's now showing up in my behavior. So not only do I'm not scared of depression, I know what depression, it's telling me something, it's a helpful messenger, and I now know how to manage it.

So, and I also just want to say upfront, this is not replacing therapy. I'm totally for people going for therapy. Therapy is vital. Coaching, therapy, counseling. But no one can fix you and you can't, no therapist can fix a person. We can only facilitate the process. I know that having practiced for so long and you know that yourself, Daniel. So this doesn't replace.

All I'm doing, you can do any technique, any therapy. I'm an EMDR, anything. It's simply how do you live with yourself between therapy? If you use therapy two days a week or whatever, you've got to live with yourself 24-7. What do you do with your mind? It's work. Yeah, you need tools and a tool chest.

Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Preview for us, and then we have to go off to the next one. Steps three, four, and five. So then once you've get you've reflected and gathered you've done a lot of thought work now you need to capture that and write that down and you're only right at this point because you don't want to because you want the systematic process of the brain going deep and deep and you're going deep and deeper so you would that's

the writing at this point is a very um brain on paper process. We'll talk about that more in the next one. Okay. Four and five is? So four and five are right steps. So the third step is to write, but you write in the form of a metacog. And then the fourth step is recheck, which is also writing. And then the fifth step is an action step. It's called an active reach.

So that just kind of seals like a full stop at the end of the sentence. So those are basically the three steps that you use systematically in a time frame. And you can use them in five seconds to catch yourself in the moment. But when you're doing the hard work of detoxing established traumas, that you do daily 15 to 45 minutes over the 63 days. So when we come back, we're going to talk about writing and rechecking and acting. Stay with us. If you're enjoying the Brain Warriors Way podcast,

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