Change Your Brain Every Day - Try this Technique to Stop Toxic Thinking, with Dr. Caroline Leaf

Episode Date: March 24, 2021

Toxic patterns of thinking can damage more than just your emotional health. It can also affect the physical functioning of brain and even cause inflammation in the body! In this third episode of a series with ‘Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess’ author Dr. Caroline Leaf, she and the Amens take an in-depth look at her 5 steps to a cleaner mind, including an effective technique for making sense of your personal observations to give you a map for rewriting your own thought patterns.  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 here with our friend Karen Leaf, the author of Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess by Simple Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking. And I assume you can buy this anywhere great books are sold? Yes, anywhere books are sold. Amazon sold out three times, but they've restocked. That's another story. On the success of the book.

Thank you. It is just needed now more than ever before. And the whole idea I just love is that you can change your brain. Now, that's sort of a theme of my life. Exactly. Now, you can do it with your diet, no question. You can do it with exercise. But allowing an undisciplined mind makes your brain worse.

It makes it amazing. Chronic stress damages your brain. You know, I was just thinking about a study they did at UCLA on people who had OCD. And OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder, has its own signature in the brain, where the basal ganglia are really active and the anterior cingulate is really active and one group they gave prozac to and it calmed things down the other group they just taught them how to control their thoughts and it also calmed the brain down so So doing the mental work to clean up your mental mess can help to optimize, as you show in the book, the physical functioning of your brain. So we've talked about gathering awareness.

You are not your mind getting some psychological distance. I have a fun technique. We actually learned it from our friend, Stephen Hayes, on one of these podcasts, Give Your Mind a Name, which is the same. It's that psychological distancing. Reflect. So think about it. That's what separates you from all the animals, uh, ask, answer and discuss. Um, and then in this podcast, I want to talk about the next three steps. So we have to be fairly brief. We want people to get the book, get the book. It will help you. Doesn't mean you don't need therapy, but it'll make therapy go so much faster. I did two years of therapy, intensive therapy, several times a week. And

it's still having those tools in between that just help you really dig deep. You've got to be able, I mean, I think one of the benefits of really successful therapy and successful therapists is when they give you the tools to do it yourself in between, like you said. Absolutely. You've got to learn how to be introspective. Otherwise, you're in therapy for the rest of your life. Well, that's exactly, yeah.

That's exactly, I agree with you. And what I showed, and totally what you said, what I showed with my most recent trials is that we had a control and experimental group, and the control group did not get the treatment. They did not get the five steps. The neurocycle and the experimental group did get the five steps and they were doing it daily via an app because we have an app as well. And the difference was unbelievable. Both became very aware of the issues because we did all the blood biomarkers and the psychological testing and the narrative, which was the most important, the DNA testing in the brain, the QEG. But the treatment group got the five steps versus the others.

And so the control group, what we saw is they got worse. And what was one of the strongest indicators of how they got worse was looking at their telomeres. So all of them at the beginning of the trial, they all came in really in a bad place. And we looked at their telomeres and telomeres are are as you you guys know but for the audience that don't it's the chromosomes that look like x's and it's all fingernails it's the at the end of the chromosomes and just very very briefly just to show you how powerful managing your mind is through the through a system like the five step the neuro cycle is that a lot of our subjects their telomeres were so weakened and so short.

Now that's not really good because you make a million cells plus every second and your telomeres are involved in that process. And telomeres, the recent research shows that they're a proxy for mind management. So the more your mind is a mess, the shorter the telomeres, the more your cells are affected and the more your body becomes vulnerable and biologically not in the best place. You increase your vulnerability to disease by 35 to up to 35 to 98 so we found some of our subjects in the trial and i put a case study in who was their biological age was almost 30 years older than their chronological age and in a sickly body so here they're in their 30s and they had a body

of a sickly 65 year old within nine weeks Within nine weeks, that had reversed and their chronological and biological age matched. Their telomeres significantly lengthened. There was no drugs involved, no diet involved. It was pure mind management because your mind's driving. I mean, you speak about diet, exercise, we have to deal with all of those. But essentially, what we saw was that those subjects that managed their mind, their biological and chronological age matched up, and then also all the immune, the biomarkers, the immune system, the inflammation, the brain markers, everything changed dramatically. But the ones that didn't, they got worse.

It was so bad that they had so much high anxiety by the end of the study. Obviously, we gave them the mind management, and it changed things immediately. But the key thing here is that our mind's working anyway. You can go three weeks without food, three days without water, three minutes without to change things immediately but the key thing here is that we are minds working anyway you can go three weeks without food three days without water three minutes without oxygen but you don't even go three seconds without using your mind so we've got to get the help of therapy and and all the professionals like like yourselves and you get with that the help that you offer i mean clinic and that and and therapy but we have to also live with ourselves between those sessions and that's

really what the five steps do so the third step step is then, as I mentioned, is the right, third and fourth step are both right steps. And the first right step is a get your mind and brain on paper. Don't worry about like a literary piece, just pour it out. The biggest thing is to drag as much out as you can. So I developed a system called the Metacog, which is 38 years in research. And it really is a very strong way of writing. It's pattern writing that basically matches what these trees look like. So like a tree has a trunk and branches grow and all branches grow out of the previous branches. You basically create these patterns on the page and you just put down your thoughts. You just put down these words and whatever comes up, it's basically your memories in your thoughts. And it's a total mess but almost like you're vomiting it on paper but that really

pulls the two sides of the brain together and really activates the hippocampus and all the different prefrontal cortex it creates such a dynamic flow in the brain because the mind is driving the brain and the mind as you bring this order in the mind you're bringing this order in the brain and then the fourth step is the recheck, where you can now go back and see, wow, what did I just write? This is unbelievable. I experienced this and this and this, and I didn't even know I knew that. It's a very revealing process. I use it all the time in therapy with my patients.

So I've made a simple version in the book. And then the fourth step, just to finish that step, you're going back into the messy, messy metacog, pouring your brain on paper, the mess on the page, literally, and you start finding your patterns, your activators, the cycles that are happening. And you start creating, looking for the antidotes, the reconceptualization, the other perspective. How can I see this differently? What does this mean? And honestly, this doesn't happen in one sitting i have to stress this to find you sort out as you all know toxic thinking you have to do it regularly for exactly exactly i mean on day one you may just identify that you depressed and that okay depression and my and i'm withdrawing I'm withdrawing and there's something going

on, something in the past. And my recheck is I'm going to have to do some more work. I mean, it's tiny little bits every day. And that's in these certain key days where we saw major neuroplastic changes, like a day seven, day 14, day 21 was extremely interesting because that's where we saw gamma peaks where people actually were starting to say, instead of I am depression, I know why I'm depressed. And they were starting to say, I know what to do. And then, as I said, the changes happen over time to 63 days where the behaviors start changing.

So the fifth step then is to kind of round off the day's work. And that is, okay, so this is what I've learned. I've learned that I'm feeling depressed i'm withdrawing my behaviors i am my perspective is life sucks and i'm my body has got tremendous heart palpitations and there's just a lot of physical stuff going on i'm not sure why but i can start seeing that there's a reason behind this and there's definitely something from my past because this is a pattern it's happening differently in these certain situations. So therefore, my active reach could be something like, it's okay to feel depressed.

There's a message in the depression. And you literally write that statement down and you put it somewhere or put it in your phone or I have an app called the NeuroCycle app and it's got a little section, active reach reminders where you can type it in. And then that pops up during the day. And during the day, you know how we have the tendency to ruminate, especially when we've activated something from the past and you've got this scary thing that these flashbacks are frightening and overwhelming. We have to limit the time we focus on those. So the active reach keeps you in a safe space so that

you can go about your day. And every time you tend to fall back and go and rethink through, you say, no, I'll do that tomorrow. I'm just going to focus on my active reach. And so, I mean, that's just a very simple summary. There's a lot more detail in the book and there's many ways you can do each of these lots of detail with each of the steps, but that's the basic overarching principle. And then you repeat it the next day and you repeat it the next day and so on until you get to day 21.

From day 22 to 63, you do just step number five. Because by day, it takes more or less 21 days to be as a thought detective, to embrace process and reconceptualize this into this using the five steps daily. And then this is now the new pattern we want to grow. But like any new little plant that you've grown, it's just a new little thought.

It doesn't have enough energy to impact your consciousness. So you're not going to have a behavior change yet. So you've got to deliberately practice this new way of thinking at least for a minute to two minutes every day for 42 days. I love that you did not make this three minutes to everlasting change. Oh, gosh, no. No, it's a lifestyle. If you want to manage, if you want control of your life,

if you want to manage it, you have to change your habits and it's a daily practice. Absolutely. Eating right, exercise, whatever it is. All of it, yeah. And that's all mind driven. It's more important than learning to manage your mind

and you have to do it every day. It's got to become more new. Yeah, your mind's always with you. So if you don't manage it, then it's got to become more yeah your mind's always with you so if you don't manage it then it's a mess and so we all amaze me come back we're gonna talk about some stories uh from carolyn's blog and how you can go further to clean up your mental mess. Stay with us. to Amen Clinics. Use the code PODCAST10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com. For more information, give us a call at 855-978-1363.