Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #281 Five Simple Steps To Reduce Anxiety, Stress and Toxic Thinking with Dr Caroline Leaf

Episode Date: June 7, 2022

What does the content of your mind look like? Do you sometimes have thoughts you don't want to have? Do you sometimes feel emotions you don't want to feel? My guest today has recently published a book called Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: Five Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress and Toxic Thinking which contains techniques and practices that can help any of us whether we have a diagnosed mental health problem or not.   My guest is Dr. Caroline Leaf, a cognitive neuroscientist, researcher and best-selling author. Since the 1980s, Dr Leaf has researched the mind-brain connection, the nature of mental health and the formation of memory. She was one of the first in her field to study neuroplasticity and how the brain can change with directed input from our minds. Over the years, Dr Leaf has helped transform the lives of many people around the world - she's helped people with traumatic brain injury, stress, anxiety and depression, but the tools that she shares are relevant for anyone who wants to improve the functioning of their minds.   We begin our conversation talking about the difference between our minds and our brains - these two terms are often used interchangeably but Dr Leaf explains why this is a mistake. She explains how it's our mind, both our conscious mind and our non-conscious mind, that actually control our brain. It is because of this, she says, that we are much more in control of our symptoms than we might think.   Dr Leaf believes that many of the conventional clinical approaches to mental health and well-being are misguided and limiting. Her approach reframes things like depression and anxiety as a response, rather than an illness. Signs and symptoms, she says, always point to a thought or belief that has caused them. So instead of medicating them away, Dr Leaf believes that we need to spend more time looking for the cause.   It is Dr Leaf’s firm belief that we can all benefit from what she calls ‘mind management’. Whether we want to build a healthier, more resilient brain, whether we want more focus or whether we want to reduce negative thoughts that are affecting us, Dr Leaf has pioneered a five-step protocol to help us do so. In this conversation, she reveals just what those steps are and how we can all put them into practice in our everyday lives. Thanks to our sponsors: https://www.leafyard.com/livemore https://www.athleticgreens.com/livemore https://www.vivobarefoot.com/livemore Order Dr Chatterjee's new book Happy Mind, Happy Life: UK version: https://amzn.to/304opgJ, US & Canada version: https://amzn.to/3DRxjgp Show notes available at https://drchatterjee.com/281 DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified health care provider with any questions you have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

thoughts are as physical as something like a pathogen or a virus inside the brain, but they can be changed. So you can't change what's happened to you, but you can change what it looks like inside of you, and that's what's vital. Hi, my name is Rangan Chastji. Welcome to Feel Better, Live More. more. What do the contents of your mind look like? Do you sometimes have thoughts you don't want to have? Do you sometimes feel emotions you don't want to feel? Well, my guest today has recently published a book called Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess, Five Simple Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, stress and toxic thinking. And the truth is the techniques and practices within this book can help any of us whether we have a

diagnosed mental health problem or not. My guest is Dr. Caroline Leaf, a cognitive neuroscientist, researcher and best-selling author. Since the 1980s, Dr. Leaf has researched the mind-brain connection, the nature of mental health and the formation of memory. In fact, she was one of the first in her field to study neuroplasticity and how the brain can change with directed input from our minds. Now over the years, Dr. Leaf has helped transform the lives of many people around the world. Yes, she's helped people with conditions like stress, anxiety, and depression. She's helped people with traumatic brain injury and a variety of other different conditions. But for me, the tools that she shares are relevant for anyone who wants to improve the functioning of their minds, which I'm pretty sure means all of us.

We begin our conversation talking about the difference between our minds, which I'm pretty sure means all of us. We begin our conversation talking about the difference between our minds and our brains. Now these two terms are often used interchangeably, but Dr. Leaf explains why this is a mistake. She explains how it's our mind, both our conscious mind and our non-conscious mind, that actually control our brain. And because of this, she says, we are much more in control of our symptoms than we might think. Dr. Lee believes that many of the conventional clinical approaches to mental health and well-being are misguided and limiting. Her approach reframes things like depression and anxiety as a response rather than an illness. Signs and symptoms, she says, always point to a

thought or belief that has caused them. So instead of medicating them away, Caroline believes that we need to spend more time looking for the cause. Dr. Leith believes that all of us will benefit from what she calls mind management. Whether we want to build a healthier, more resilient brain, whether we want more focus, or whether we want to reduce negative thoughts that are affecting us. And she's actually pioneered a five-step protocol to help us do so,

which she goes through in detail in our conversation. I really enjoyed speaking to Dr. Leaf and appreciate how much time and energy she has spent researching this important area over the past few decades. I hope you enjoy listening. And now, my conversation with Dr. Caroline Leith. I really wanted to start with this understanding of what the mind is. I think many of us, when we think of our minds, we think of it as one distinct entity, but it's very clear that you use the mind and brain.

You talk about them differently because they are different, yet a lot of writers, a lot of scientists, I feel, use those terms interchangeably. This is such a vitally important topic to discuss. And mind is my passion. I have been researching it for 38 years now, which is a long time. And I practiced clinically as a clinical neuroscientist for 25 of those years. And mind has been the dominant focus of what I've been trying to understand. And interestingly enough, back in the 80s, the mind and the brain were seen as separate.

And in fact, if you go back to the sort of 150 years of science, you'll see that discussion. And also, if you go into the ancient texts, whether it's philosophical, spiritual science, you'll see the mind-brain split in all different ways. There's always been this thing that mind is this kind of like a force that is driving things. So probably the easiest way to understand mind is to think of the difference between you and I alive talking and our listeners and viewers and a dead person. So if you and I had a dead person here, which we obviously don't, they wouldn't be doing what we're doing.

They wouldn't be responding. This is so basic, but the brain and the body would be disintegrating. But right now, you and I, in response to being alive, our brain, every second we're making 810,000 to a million new cells, our brain is responding, our heart is responding. There's stuff going on. But if you die, that stops. So I see mind as this force that is driving this aliveness and enabling us to experience life, everything, the ups and downs, and process it, and then put that into the brain. So I see the brain for my research and sort of the field that I'm moving, psychoneurobiology, the brain and the body are the responders, the mind is the driver. So the mind is kind of,

if you think of our mind as being around us and in us, and on a physics level, we're talking about gravitational fields. I mean, there's amazing research being done in gravitational field work where Nobel Prize physicists have shown that you can actually measure gravitational fields and we know that it stops us floating, we know the basics but we can actually see that we have our own unique gravitational fields. We know from electromagnetics that we have this electromagnetic field around us, we can see that in EKGs, we can see that in the blood, we can see that in QEEGs. So we have a lot of evidence in the physics world of this force that is moving through the human body, creating this aliveness response. On a psychological level, the mind would be our ability to think and feel and choose in response to, for example,

this conversation. In response to when you woke up this morning and the conversation you had with a loved one or the decision to eat what you ate and the decision when you read the politics and the latest thing on COVID and decisions about our lifestyle. All of that is mind-driven. The mind is driving everything.

So I see the mind as this force, physics level, psychological level, interacting with the brain, receiving the world, putting it into the brain and the brain and the body responding. So you're quite right. I've watched this over the last 40 years of my career, that as from a young scientist and practitioner and clinician to where I am at the moment, still doing clinical trials, I have watched this trajectory where we've gone from discussing mind and brain as being separate, but absolutely intimately connected and necessary to the one needs the other,

you can't be without, and to the point where mind and brain are being used as the same term. And so this is always one of the first questions I get asked in any interview, any lecture, any Q&A is the mind-brain difference. I'm not talking about dualism in the sense of Descartes or something. I'm talking more about, you know, I mean, that's these elements of that. I'm talking about this force in the sense of Descartes or something. I'm talking more about, you know, I mean, that's these elements of that there. I'm talking about this force, this life force. And I see mind under that. So we could say spirit, we could say soul, we could say, you know, there's all the beautiful spiritual philosophical ways we can explain it, but it's our life force.

And the brain is this beautiful physical organ that is extremely complex that we've learned dramatically more about over the last 40 years, more than we've learned in all of history. And yet, as we've learned more about the brain, we've become neuro-reductionistic. Everything's been about the brain to the point where even a human experience like an emotion is now considered an illness. If someone has depression and the emotional depression is seen as an illness, I don't see it as an illness if someone has depression. And the emotional depression is seen as an illness. I don't see it as an illness. I see it as a response, as a warning signal, as a clue, as a messenger,

because it's our mind, brain, and body working together to tell us that something's going on. So yes, I see a definite separation, and I see the signs backing this up. Yeah, so it's kind of like the brain is receiving inputs from the mind, and the mind is like the driver and tells the brain what to do? Exactly. It's driving the brain. It's like a computer. Computer is, although I hate to compare the brain to computer because it's way more intelligent, but the philosophy is similar. We have these computers.

If we don't plug them in and charge them and make them work, they don't do anything. So I kind of see the brain as something way more sophisticated than a computer because of just the way that the neurons work and the firing and so on. I mean, I love that, Carolina. I really, really like the way you've described that. And you've mentioned that the brain is much more powerful than a computer which of course it is and I absolutely concur with that but I've heard you say before that the mind is even more powerful than the brain. Yes I believe it. Well I think that's a really beautiful way to look at it because we know that these smartphones in our pockets are just incredible in terms of what they

can do but we're going up a level saying no the brain's better than the smartphone and better than the computer but the mind's even more powerful than the brains you know how did you how did you discover that i know you've said there's some research behind that but i think that's really really inspiring for us i i agree with you and yes you verbalize it beautifully i think it began 38 years ago when I was sitting in, I had actually applied to get into neurosurgery and I was sitting in a neuroscience lecture and it was actually given by a neurologist.

And they were saying that, okay, well, when you work with your TBI patients, traumatic brain injury or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, CTE, that kind of thing, just remember that their brain can't change. And that immediately caught my attention. And I questioned the professor. I said, listen, how can that be? We are experiencing different things every moment of every day. I'm not the same now as I was when I walked into this lecture. If that's the case, if my mind is using my brain, and my brain is the organ that is making this stuff happen, then the brain has to change because there's new experiences every day.

And they actually said, well, you know, it's a ridiculous question, but you know what? Go and do research on it. And I did a TED Talk on this, and then I did research. And 38 years later, I'm still doing research because at that point, I said, okay, I'm going to take TBI, traumatic brain injury, because there was literally no research on traumatic brain injury in the 80s for the

reason just described they said well why study the tbi when the brain can't change and carol i don't mean to interrupt you i just want to make it clear for people listening that tbi traumatic brain injury you know this could be someone in an accident they have fallen down and hurt their heads or had some sort of problems relating to some sort of trauma to their heads. Yes, sorry. Thank you for describing that. I appreciate it. And then TTE would be trauma from sports injuries or repeated impact, that kind of thing, which creates a slightly different pattern. So I looked at those two fields, specifically traumatic brain injury, because it was considered, well, just teach the patient to compensate. They're never going to restore function. Very often the neurologist at that

time would say, well, they're a vegetable if they've been in a coma for longer than eight hours. And so there was a lot of sort of negativity around it. So I thought, well, if I can look at that worst case scenario and show even a minuscule change, then there's hope. But the change was way beyond what I expected. I worked with a patient that had, the first patient I worked with and I did research on was someone who had been in a car accident, 16 at the time of the accident, in a coma for two weeks, written off by the neurologist as a vegetable,

was really non-functioning. The parents just did not give up. She came around after two weeks and the parents still did not give up, even though no one was there. They were just not getting any kind of support because it just wasn't believed in those days. So fast forward the story. I was doing research.

They heard about me. They said, please, they begged me, please work with her. I said, I can guarantee nothing because I've never even done this before. It's new theories I'm developing. It's new science. And anyway, long story short, I worked with this child for eight months. Her goal was to get back to finish high school. And she was 16 at the time of the accident. By the time I saw her, she was 17, eight months into her accident, which is significant

because we know the first year after traumatic brain injury, they used to say, you don't catch it in that first year. Well, you can do nothing for the patient. Her peer group had gone, were finishing, were going into their high school year, were halfway through. And her goal was to get back and finish school with them, which was an impossible goal because she couldn't even function on a second grade level. You know, on a sort of like a sort of eight, nine year old. And so I really didn't, you know, it was the young scientist in me that took on something that was impossible. It was phenomenal. I tell you, she worked three hours a week with me and then every day at home, they worked as a support at home.

Within eight months, she caught up. She finished high school. Not only did she finish high school, her grades, her results were phenomenal. She was a really weak math student prior to the accident. Post-accident, she'd become a math genius. Long story short is that her social, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral changes were uncanny. And we had statisticians check the numbers. I repeated the studies with different situations, and I took it to a larger scale, and then I've continued all these years. That motivated me. That made me see something's going on here with the mind parallel

to that i was in south africa at the time working in the then apart terrible apartheid system and working i would go out into the um areas where they had written off you know put all the at the colored and black people terrible terrible situation as we all know and i would go out there and work because they weren't getting educated so i would go and work in the schools i would drive through these places i mean mean, I would go to community centers and have 2,000, 3,000 people turn up just to hear about how I can use my mind to change my brain. I teach them how to learn. And then through the transition period, the post-apartheid era, I did that three days a week. And there I learned, Dr. Chatterjee, about the resilience of the human

mind. There I learned about in the most constrained of situations, where people are starving, abused, the impact of trauma, unbelievable. How when you tell someone, okay, this is the physical, but this is your mind. Let's start changing it. Let me teach you how to learn. Dramatic impact. We had schools that had been written off that were coming back on the grid

and getting grades, getting kids that were passing 12th grade which is um matric in south africa but that's where i saw the power of the mind i mean it's it's so inspiring hearing you talk there's a real passion there's a real authenticity a desire to just help people i can i can hear that i know that's what people love about you what i hear when when you talk about South Africa and the apartheid era and all the work you've done in a whole variety of different settings, I can't help but think that this work is applicable to each and every one of us. Whether we've had a brain injury or not, using your methods, we can harness the power of our mind to change our brain, change our body, change the quality of our lives. And what I also like is that a lot of this stuff is really

accessible to everyone. Your program, a lot of it can be done, I feel, at very little cost. So even if someone lives in a very harsh, deprived environment, and of course, a lot of the trauma and socioeconomic stress that exists is in those communities, actually, they can still apply the method that you've come up with. Yeah, you're so right. And that's what motivated me, inspired me. It was those days that I realized that yes, we need therapy, and I'm all for therapy and counseling and coaching, but it's expensive. And every human has the right to have access to understanding mind management. And that's really been my goal is to understand what is mind

and what is mind management and make it accessible to humanity. Because if we can manage our minds, we can improve how we are functioning as humans and we can improve these issues in the world. And I know that's such a huge, big philosophical statement, but it starts with the mind because we are where we are because of our minds. We experience racism and we experience all this political divide and we experience all these things that we're experiencing globally

at the moment and have been since the beginning of time because of minds, because of humans making choices. And if we can try and help people to shape and manage that and access and recognize this is who I am and I'm showing up like this because of, it's not who I am. If I can try and manage these patterns that are disrupting my functioning, get back to the core of who I am and live this mind management lifestyle, I can contribute to the world in the way that only I can.

Because as I always tell every single patient that I ever work with and every person now that I talk to, which is millions, is that there's something you can do that no one else can do. I mean, you bring something to the table, Dr. Chatterjee, that no one else can bring to the table. You have an angle of philosophy, a way of thinking that is enriching lives that no one else can do. So if you don't do what you do, we all lose out. And that's what I believe for every human. And I believe that's part of our mental health walk is that we have to recognize that we've got to stop saying that there's mental

illness. We've got to start talking about that there's extreme states because of extreme adversity. But every human's back in. Every single one of us needs mind management. And if you think of life on a scale of one to 10, most of the time we're kind of hovering around one to four, which is the average ups and downs of life. But then sometimes things catch up like like COVID happens, and this happens, and multiple whatever happens, and we land up going into extreme states. But that doesn't mean that we have neuropsychiatric brain diseases, all these scary labels that totally limit people.

And then you've got to get all this inaccessible, expensive therapy and get that if you can. But the average person can't afford that. There's millions of people that need help. One thing I deeply resonate with in your work is this idea of how problematic labels can be. And if I reflect on my 20-year career now as a medical doctor, and I was reflecting earlier on today in preparation for this conversation. I was thinking about, I've always had a problem with how we were taught to manage things like depression and anxiety. I just felt a discomfort that

I sort of have to code them and put them in the computer that this person now has depression. And then almost always, it would be a form of pharmaceutical medication that we'd be asked to prescribe. Yeah, we might refer for some therapy as well, but almost always, there would be some sort of pharmaceutical therapy. And I remember this deep sense of frustration thinking, well, this person coming with depression and this person coming in with these so-called labels of anxiety, it doesn't really tell me anything about their life. Why do they have this response? Why are they showing up with these symptoms? So I felt very dissatisfied. It's taken me a few years to really figure out

how to manage them better. But I think that's one of the things I love about your approach is that you also do not believe that these labels are that helpful for the majority of people. I'm smiling and saying thank you so much for saying what you said. I work with so many physicians and I train physicians and I have for years. And this is the same cry from every heart of every physician I've ever met and worked with. And to just sort of lump someone's pain into a label, I often tell people it's like getting a gift that's empty. Because initially when you feel so overwhelmed and distraught from the challenges of life and you're feeling that extreme depression and anxiety, and it's so incredibly real, just for someone to say, oh, it's this, is this immediate sense of, oh, wow, at least there's a reason.

But then you open that gift, there's nothing in there. Now what? And it's also a bit of a tautology, as you would have experienced as well, because there's the list of symptoms, there's the label. And then you can say, well, the patient can say, well, why do I have that? Because of those symptoms. What are the symptoms? Because you have that.

So you're just going symptom, label, symptom. You're not ever getting to what you said already, which is what is the person's story? That is what we need to look at because each and every one of us is in life with our stories. And our stories are the because ofs. We're showing up in X way because of. And until we find the because of,

and until we reconceptualize that, we can't change what's happened to us, but we can change what's in us. And that's reconceptualization. And until we've done that, we're going to just have these labels that, and you and I both know, just look at the research.

I mean, I was just looking at, I'm writing a paper at the moment on my most recent clinical trial and be busy with another huge one at the moment with over 30,000 people over this COVID period dealing with mental health and mind management. And just looking at the, we all know the impact of mental health. We all know it's hit the younger, worse than the older age group of women more than men. But across the board, there's been a tripling of anxiety. But the way it's verbalized, oh gosh, it's like there's another

virus. And it's made people even more fearful. Meanwhile, it is an adverse circumstance, an extreme adverse circumstance. So the story is extreme adverse reactions. So it's not that we've got a bunch more ill people. It's that we have people that are back into cope. So we have to, as a society, re-look at how we are actually telling people stories. So it's not going to help someone who's lost someone in the pandemic, who's been lonely, whatever, and they are given, oh, you have clinical depression.

That's not an answer. And then the medication, which we also know, if you look at the history of what the medications have done, we are sitting now in 2021 with a worse situation than ever before. There was that federal data, a huge study, I've put it in my book, which you may have already seen. But from 1996 to 2014, they started identifying a trend, a very worrisome trend.

And that trend was that despite the advances of technology and medicine and neuroscience, people are actually living shorter. So for decades, we've been living longer. But now people are dying up to 8 to 25 years younger, and it's got worse, obviously, over the pandemic. And it hasn't – the way we've managed mental health, this mental illness philosophy, this biomedical model for mental health, has not actually made it better.

It's actually made it worse. It's increased people's lifespan. And just to round off sorry to come back to the label thing that 8 to 25 year study they show that if you have a mental health label you fall into the 20 to 25 year earlier death bracket in other words that label literally can chop up to 25 years of your life which is insane i mean that shouldn't be. Yeah. I mean, I didn't know that last statistic. That's absolutely incredible. So it's not just neutral when we as doctors do this to our patients.

It's actually actively harmful, at least for some of them. And, you know, I don't think any doctor is meaning to do that. I think a couple of problems I can see are short appointment times. You know, here in the UK, it's typically a 10-minute appointment that a primary care physician will have with their patients. Really not enough time to hear their story and see where their symptoms fit into the wider context of their entire life. So that's one thing.

I think the other thing is I really do think there's a lot of problems with medical education. I think I don't, it's very hard for me as I get older and more and more experienced to not look back and reflect and go, you know what, actually, some of this is highly, highly problematic. Because we're not very good, some of us, at managing uncertainty. So we like, we're taught to, oh, those symptoms, they fit this box. I could put them in the depression box. I could put them in the anxiety box. And therefore you feel a bit better because it's like, oh, now I know. Now I can get them on the treatment regime. But I think we have to get good at uncertainty. We have to get good at saying, hey, look, I don't

know. Let's explore this together. Let's figure out what's been going on in your life. And I love the way you put it. Dr. Lee, you talk about burnout or inability to concentrate or depression or anxiety. You talk about these things as signals, as warning signals for us rather than labels. I wonder if you could expand upon that a little bit. Absolutely. And you're so right there with just to pick up on the 10-minute thing. I really respect and honor that challenge that a physician is going through in those time appointments and the training.

As you say, I've trained medical students. It's just, as you say, it's just let's look at the symptom and let's look at the effects in the body, where that's coming from, which is great for the body and the brain, but it doesn't work for the mind and it doesn't tell us about the interrelationship. So we have to have another level to deal with that. So this is where I believe we can make something very complex a little bit more simple if we understand the process. understand the process. Just taking a quick break to give a shout out to AG1, one of the sponsors of today's show. Now, if you're looking for something at this time of year to kickstart your health, I'd highly recommend that you consider AG1. AG1 has been in my own life for over five years now. It's a science-driven daily health drink

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offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. That's drinkag1.com forward slash live more. That's drinkag1.com forward slash live more. So part of my work has been to try and understand what is the mind, as we know, what is a thought, what are memories? Because if the thoughts and memories are the things that are driving us, just think of the fact that 96% of people, which I actually think should be 100%, battle with intrusive thoughts. Those thoughts are then often including limiting beliefs,

which then impact how a person is moving forward in their life. And then that also contributes to lots of patterns and things that emerge. If you track back those, what are those things? If you track back what they are and you understand what they are and you understand the source where they come from, you can actually have an impact. You can change things.

So that's what my work is. So that's a foundational phrase. Now, what does that actually mean? Simple language. The way that a person shows up. So let's say that you have a patient that comes to you and that they are saying that I am so depressed. I can't get out of bed. I can't do this anymore. My life is just such a mess. I can't function. I can't work. I can't breathe. I can't eat. That's the symptom

checklist, the nickel depression, et cetera. What about if we say, okay, I get that, but you're a thoughts detective. That's a signal. All those things you described about your emotions, about your behaviors, about how your body feels, and about your attitude or your perspective to life, those four things that you've just told me now, that tell me that you, according to the book, have clinical depression.

Let's throw that aside for a moment and let's say that you're a thought detective and that those are actually very helpful messengers. They are warning signals. And if you become your own thought detective and step into wisdom and think, okay, why do I have those signals? I've got my overarching pattern of depression, can't function, want to give up on life. Then as they describe to you, they talk about, I feel this in my body. I feel these emotions.

My perspective. They may not know that they're telling those four categories, but if you analyze, that's four categories of warning signals, clues that we have, messengers. And if we take those, then you can say, okay, those are because of. They're because of a thought. And a thought is basically how an experience that you've had is housed in your brain and your body and your mind. So then let's say, okay, you as a person have had X experiences. So what is your most recent experience that you potentially had that's making you feel like this?

And so in other words, it's about you in life. Life's impacted you. The adverse experiences of life have impacted you. What we've already done just just in that small conversation, is we've removed it away from you are broken. You have a neuropsychiatric brain disease. You are clinically depressed. On top of your heart disease and your cancer or whatever else,

you've removed it away and you've said, hey, I see you as a human. I hear you. I hear you. And you can do this quite quickly. It's not going to solve the initial assessment, which is ongoing. It can be quite quick. And a person can learn to do this for this quite quickly. It's not going to solve the initial assessment, which is ongoing, can be quite quick. And a person can learn to do this for themselves quite quickly. I'm belaboring it because I'm kind of teaching it.

But once you have, you say, okay, so you are a person in life. It's not about you. It's about you in the world. The world has impacted you. So, therefore, let's talk about your most recent experiences that are impacting you. COVID will probably come back or loneliness or abuse or like women, the increase in domestic violence has been terrible over the pandemic

or children, 16 billion children or not, have missed out on normal psychosocial development from not going to school. And this has increased all kinds of emotional issues with our kids. And so that's the story. So let's say this is real. You need to talk about that. This is not something that can be just labeled and put in a box. This is an experience. So let's talk about your specific experience. What does that look like for you? And so then that, as they

talk about it, then you can say, okay, what you're describing is a thought. Now I'm going to hold up a tree. A thought looks like a tree. And this, I don't know if you've ever seen me use these before. As neuroscientists, we talk about thoughts having an arbor-like structure. Arbor means tree-like structure. Neurons look like trees. So what we know from neuroscience is that an experience converts in the brain to a product. So as that experience hits the brain, all these reactions happen and you make amino acids which group to form proteins. And those proteins hold vibrations. They hold the data of your experience the emotions what happened the

details in proteins that group together to grow branches and you grow a tree in your brain you grow a thought tree in your brain so what we know from neuroscience is that an experience converts in the brain to a product the product is a. The tree is made of proteins and chemicals and vibrations, et cetera. And the more you hear, the more details of the experience, the more branches you grow. But it grows in the root system first. So in this conversation, everything I'm saying and everything you're seeing, for those of you that are also watching, is going in the root system. Like any plant, you first plant a seed and then you grow roots and then you grow that little trunk and then the branches. It's exactly like that with the thoughts. The experience is the seed. Then we start putting it into our brain. So the root system are my words, our conversation.

The branches that grow from the roots are how you uniquely think, feel, and choose about what you are hearing. So your mind interpretation of what you're hearing based on existing experiences. So memories are clusters. Memories cluster together to form a thought. And thoughts then enable us to speak and do. So I'm now speaking about the brain because I spent all these years building trees in my brain about all the stuff about the mind, brain, body connection. You have thousands of trees in your brain,

if not hundreds of thousands on your field in medicine. And whenever you help a patient, you are drawing on that existing thought inside your brain with that memory data. And then that's how you're able to work with your

patients i'm doing on those as i'm speaking now so essentially the thought is the product of the mind it's the mind converting the experience into a physical product in the brain and as soon as it's in the brain then then the brain sends a message to the rest of the body to form a copy of this memory, but inside every cell of your body. And that shows up in the little cytoskeleton of your cells, of your body. So your body's made of all these cells, and the cells have got a little cytoskeleton that holds them in place,

and we get a change inside there. And what's super interesting about the body memory, and this relates to what we, you know, there's so much yoga and meditation and breathing and body there's so much talk which is wonderful in this day and age now of the importance of recognizing how memory gets stuck in our body and it does and so you your heart memory will actually have a different perspective to your liver to your kidneys to your skin and then that all coalesces inside the brain. And then your mind makes sense of all of it. So that's why we have to work so holistically. Now, how does this thought show up?

This thought shows up in what you say, which I'm speaking now. So my thoughts on the brain are showing up in what I'm saying. It's also showing up in my emotions at the moment, which are excitement, I'm positive, I have empathy to share this information. It's showing up in my body. My body's feeling very energized. My shoulders are lifting. I'm using my hands. So I'm using my bodily expressions to transfer this information. And my perspective is one of anticipation and excitement to share this information. So in other words, I have generated this knowledge via four signals. And those four signals are my emotions,

how I feel now is an example of excitement, my words and my behaviors, which are my words and my actions, the things I'm saying and doing, holding up a plant, saying these words, my bodily sensations where my shoulders are lifting, my body is moving, my hands are moving in order to help generate this message, and my perspective, which is one of I'm excited to share this information. Now that's on a positive side. So in other words, we have an ability to become aware of our thoughts

through the signals that these thoughts generate. So if we can learn to tune into our signals, and then from our signals we can learn to then, our signals and then from our signals, we can learn to then, those signals are attached. They're never just floating. They're attached. These like little, imagine little chains, four signals with little chains attached to, or little wires,

whatever you can visualize, attached to a thought. And so you look at your signals and you focus on those. Those will take you to the thought. Neuroscientifically, we know that the minute we focus on signals, we will take you to the thought. Neuroscientifically, we know that the minute we focus on signals, we bring awareness into our mind of concepts, I mean, of these thoughts with all the embedded memories. Dr. Leif, can I say, when you say signals, do you mean something like, okay, I feel depressed, I feel low, i don't feel like getting out of bed in the morning instead of jumping to

the label of depression are you saying when you say signals you mean these are signals let's try and figure out the thought behind those signals am i getting it yeah okay so we talk about a lot in the common parlance if we want to put it that way about we use the word emotions emotional intelligence we throw the word emotions all over the place anything that is like um not logical so there's this kind of split in the way we use our languaging but actually emotions are one of four signals so emotions never turn up alone and depression anxiety frustration irritation anger jealousy grief condemnation shame you name it. The thousands of different emotions that are out there are all clustered under the emotional warning signal.

And every warning signal, emotional warning signal, has three partners. It's never alone. It has three partners. So whatever your emotions are, you're going to always find a behavior attached or a series of behaviors attached to that emotion. So the second warning signal is our behaviors. What are you saying? What are you doing? Those are very strong indications of what's behind it.

So you take the behaviors. What am I saying? What am I doing? So feeling depressed, behavior, I'm withdrawing. Bodily sensation, gut issues. sensation gut issues perspective life sucks there's a simple version so there's four signals so here i am showing up daily i feel totally depressed and flat i'm battling to get out of bed my body is gut is aching it's bloated it's whatever um i am withdrawing from people i don't want to go anywhere and i just

think life sucks yeah so now that we want to grab that and not now currently what would happen is you'd go to the doctor or you'd think based on the language of today oh i've got i've got a clinical disease in my brain i have a brain disease i'm holding up a model of the brain i've got something wrong with my brain no you don't have something wrong with your brain your brain is affected because your mind has to use your brain in order for you to express it and everything goes to your brain. So your brain does have biomarkers. There are going to be responses in your brain and your body, but that's not the cause. That's the response. So what we want to do is we want to look at how our brain is responding and listen to the messages

that the mind, brain, and body collectively will put together through the signals. So your mind, brain, and body are working as a network. And this is scientific dualism. This is not some weird thing. Mind is as we can use quantum physics, classical physics. We can measure mind. We can see. You can't see a gravitational field, but we know that we're not floating.

And that's why we know it exists so basically we can use these signals and train ourselves to to to look at the signals because those signals are attached to the thought and as soon as you find the thought you can find what's attached to the thought it's so powerful because what's really interesting for me right is you showed this gorgeous, green, vibrant leaves and a plant in this pot, right? So that looks healthy. And you are talking about the brain. So I'm guessing that because you've spoken about the brain for years, you have wired in this particular tree structure. So Dr. Leaf and her brain has a particular structure. So when you start talking about the brain, that emotion, behavior, body sensation perspective

just gets repeated. You're energized, you're excited, you're talking with fluency. That's really powerful because I'm guessing that actually you can also have not so healthy trees in your brain, disease trees that can repeat the kind of negative patterns, the negative thoughts that so many people are struggling with. You've got it. And here I'm holding up, for those that are listening, I'm holding up another version of a tree. And this is now a wiry looking metal, ugly looking tree that's very much alive, but it's completely distorted. So why I'm using trees, Dr. Chatterjee, I mean, you'll know the neuronal structure is the neurons in the brain look like little trees. And these little branches and stems, that's kind of where the memories are stored in the dendrites, not inside the synapses, but in dendrites.

And dendrites are the branches on the top of the tree. So if you think, if you look at a tree, that's literally what thoughts look like in your brain with the root system. That's why it's such a great analogy. So the healthy green tree, what we see from all kinds of brain scanning and I use QEG research

and also looking at all kinds of other ways, we see that the proteins are folded correctly and we have the correct kind of immune response in the brain. And we can have the correct levels of homocysteine and cortisol and we have when we activate these kind of responses our telomeres are functioning right down to the level of our dna we are functioning at a higher level so the proteins p here the proteins are folded correctly now you know as a medical practitioner that that's so vitally important in so many neurological diseases and so many

functional things that go on inside of our body is that proteins need to fall correctly when proteins fall correctly the whole energy all the electromagnetic fields and all the and all the all the electromagnetic and the neurochemical etc everything is going well this is a healthy situation in the toxic tree this is now a toxic experience, a toxic thought. So when we have like a toxic, like maybe an abuse in a marriage or terrible work situation or some kind of trauma as a child or as in COVID loss of a loved one or very sick or losing, you know, maybe you've got long COVID or whatever, you know, the loss of finances, all the things that happen to us, car accidents, relationship issues, divorces,

these things that happen, those are negative experiences. So now they still are processed because just by the nature, the virtue of you being alive, you will code life in whether you like it or not. 95% of life is coded in non-consciously, 5% consciously. And I'll come back to that. So this toxic tree that I'm holding now is now misfolded proteins because the experience was toxic. So your mind still took that experience, still put it in the brain, still generated a response in the brain, all the electromagnetics and quantum and blah, blah, blah, switched on genetic switches, proteins were made. But because of the distortion of the experience, it creates a distorted energy wave, which creates a distorted protein. And the protein must fold, which then creates a disruption. So it's still there in your brain, but it looks different.

So now the immune system of your brain is responding. So like we all know so much about COVID now, it's a pathogen, it's a virus, your immune system is going to fight it. You've got to look at thoughts in the same way. They are as physical as something like a pathogen or a virus inside the brain because they're there they're real but they're not they can be changed that's what's vital yeah this is this is the key i mean one of the things i think is so powerful about your work and your books is this idea that we can rewire our brain. So I genuinely think for the majority of people either watching this or listening to this right now,

I honestly believe that they probably have never heard before that their thoughts change their brain. When they think a certain way, that forms a particular structure in the brain. And for me, if we just follow on that sort of train of thought a little bit further, a lot of people feel stuck, right? They feel depressed. They feel anxious. They think life's hopeless. This is who I am, right? But it's not who they are, is it? It's actually the current structure of their brain based upon previous thoughts. And what you're saying is if you can now become the driver, if you can understand that your mind is in charge, you can actually start to generate that your mind is in charge, you can actually start to generate new thoughts. And if you are intentional about it, if you repeat it consistently, then you're going to start to, I guess, the disease tree, let's say, in your brain that you may not want, you're going to start to

deconstruct that or sort of almost have that wither away. And then you can start to grow a brand new tree with new roots that if you do it consistently enough, deliberately enough, repeatedly enough, then it's going to actually fundamentally change who you are and how you feel. Absolutely. You've tapped on that. That's exactly what's happening. So it's not easy, as we know, but it is so hopeful because it means that whatever's happened to us doesn't necessarily have to be how it's going to play out into our future. So you can't change what's happened to you. It's happened. It's the past. It's your story, but you can change what it looks like inside of you. And that's the neuroplasticity of the brain. That's the wiring and the coding because the mind has to code the brain. The mind

is coding the brain. So every experience is coded into the brain and the brain is way more complex than a computer, but it doesn't function if you're not alive. So it's the mind that does the coding. But there's a huge thing here at Dr. Chatterjee that's really vital and that is that we can change our brain, but we've got to know the impact. We've got to train ourselves to tune into the impact of life. And sometimes you get so sucked into just the feeling of depression and the feeling of sickness in my body and the feeling that life sucks and stuck in the withdrawal and isolation. We feel so stuck and so hopeless in extreme situations

that we don't feel that we can change. And it's a matter of really educating and helping people to develop the skill because the evidence is there that your brain is never the same. So even if you feel like you're stuck, your brain is still changing, but it's getting more stuck. So the change is more negative. So if we can make people aware that your brain is always changing based on what your mind is doing, this means that you can actually start learning to drive the drive your mind the wise the wise mind can drive the messy mind because we always have a messy mind because the messy mind is because life is messy and it's kind of environmental and that's essentially what we're doing but a massive

part of this and i know i mentioned it earlier and maybe if you unless you want to ask me a question but most people aren't aware that 95 and and I think it's more, I personally think it's probably higher, but on average, 95% of how we show up every day is based upon what we have non-consciously built into our brain and our body and our mind. And that's what's driving us. Yeah. I find this incredibly fascinating, right? Because, you know, the idea 95% of what we do each day is driven by our non-conscious minds. Now, to me, that implies it's non-conscious now, but at some point, we would have engaged with life in a certain way. We would have repeated certain behaviors. Even, I don't know, bringing it to really kind of day-to-day things. I mean, what would you say to this? What if each morning

you wake up, you've had a good night's sleep, and the first thing you do is look at negativity and you watch the news for an hour each morning, for example, you are presumably feeding in. It's this idea, isn't it, Dr. Leaf, that your brain is changing constantly. So either you're going to drive that change or the change is going to be done to it. And many of us don't realize, actually, that by not being intentional, by not being conscious about how we're choosing to live our life each day or choosing to think, actually we're training our brain in a very unhelpful way. Exactly. Because your brain can only do what your mind tells it to do. Your brain is set up to be activated and the mind is the activator. So we have this hugely intelligent part of us,

which is our non-conscious, not unconscious. Unconscious as you know, I know it's like you knocked out an anesthesia your brain's still active but it's different that's a state that's a state that your brain goes into but the non-conscious mind is related to a think the thinking part of you the non-conscious we think is we people often misunderstand and it's the biggest part of you it is 99 of who you are it's the most intelligent part of you. It's where your wisdom resides, your ability to intuit, to dig deep, that inner core of knowing who you are, your value, all that stuff. It's the ability to – it's driving your interaction with the world. And it's on your side. This is the best part.

And it works 24-7, and it works at speeds of 10 to the 27, which is faster than 400 billion actions per second. So by virtue of being alive, your non-conscious mind enables you as a human to take every experience and there's a certain amount of selectivity and put that into the brain and the body and that impacts us.

But now not everything's good. So your example, you wake up in the morning and you immediately put the news on or you immediately grab your cell phone and you start scrolling through the news feed. And so now you've merged, your brain is merged with the environment that you consciously chosen. So your 5% conscious deliberation of what you're choosing to focus on is now focusing on that.

But then you go through the day and because you consciously focus on that, it's whatever you think about the most grows. So now you're drawn to all of that. So you focus more on that. But also there's stuff going on in your nature, your nurture, your socioeconomic or political, the things that people around you are doing, just by the nature of being alive in your work environment, et cetera. All of that is also forming part of the 95% and has been since a child. So what we have to do is our non-conscious mind, our brain and our body,

are wired for love, literally. And that's a scientific statement that was made by a Nobel Prize winning scientist. We're literally wired for love. Our mind, brain and body is on our side. And it's looking and scanning what of life's experiences are toxic and what level of toxicity are there and what level of impact is it having on you now the most toxic ones are then may brought into another level of non-consciousness which is just below consciousness which is your subconscious subconscious is the bridge between the non-conscious the massive wise brilliant non-conscious then you've got the subconscious

bridge then you've got your conscious mind conscious mind is only awake when you're awake the subconscious also only when you're awake the non-conscious is awake all the time 24 7 so here what happens is that the scanning is going on and this is this is not such a shift in perspective that we'll probably have to talk about this a little bit in depth a little bit more depth but your non-conscious sees oh gosh this is really something in caroline's life that is impacting her day-to-day functioning. This is a major issue. This is a pattern. This is of all the maybe 20 or 30 or 40 things or 100, whatever, this one needs attention.

So the non-conscious pushes that through the subconscious into our conscious mind and tries to get our attention. How? Through those signals. So when you feel depression or anxiety or hovering anxiety or frustration or guilt or condemnation, don't ignore it, embrace it. In other words, the non-conscious will show the impact of your life through the signals coming into the conscious mind and we've got to pay attention to them. So we've got to pay attention. So the natural response for many of us these days is when those signals are there, something, sugar, alcohol, online shopping,

online scrolling, right? So in that moment where the non-conscious mind is trying to tell us something and show us something, we're saying, no, I don't want to hear your signal. You know what? I've got other options." That then speaks to this wider point. As you were describing that, Dr. Leif, I was thinking, okay, if the non-conscious mind is there to help us, why do 94% of us also have intrusive thoughts each day, struggle with negativity? If it's there to help us, what's going wrong? Is it these thought trees in our brain that are diseased and are not healthy, or is it something else? I'm so glad you asked that question. It's one of my favorite questions because intrusive thoughts have had such bad rep. They are one of the most powerful ways that we can start training ourselves

to tune into our signals. So you're quite correct. 94% to 96% of people worldwide battle with intrusive thoughts. And that's how it's been pitched, battle. Let's look at this from another angle. An intrusive thought is your non-conscious on your side looking and scanning for things that have the most energy because whatever you think about the most is going to grow big and bushy. Think of a forest, the biggest tree in the forest or the biggest trees in the forest those are the biggest toxic okay and and the biggest because we get good intrusive

thoughts too we get ones that are healthy too but most of the time the ones that disrupt us are the ones that are these these kind of just make us feel good these will make us feel uh so what we need to do and this is what i would do with my patients. This is one of the systems that I've developed within the system of the neuropsychal is your intrusive thoughts are your best friend, because if you learn to read them, you can start nailing what the actual thought is. And the minute you become aware of a thought, this is where neuroscience has been very, very really great, is that you destabilize the thought. So once a thought is destabilized, what that means is that when I'm not aware, look, it's not, you can't see it, it's in my unconscious, it's driving me and I'm doing all

these things and feeling, harboring anxiety. But now I decide, okay, let me look at this anxiety, let me embrace it. Let me stop for a moment and not be scared and not drown and not suppress and not drug it away or whatever, sugar it away or alcohol it away or whatever. Let me stop for a moment and not be scared and not run and not suppress and not drag it away or whatever, sugar it away or alcohol it away or whatever. Let me actually sit down and face this. The minute I do that, I now start, this thing starts moving through the subconscious onto the conscious level. I destabilize this, which means the protein bonds that hold this together weaken. They start to denature. By the mere fact that we share a different type of energy.

Conscious mind is a different type of energy to non-conscious mind. And it's a very powerful veto energy that enables us to start weakening the body. So this is the malleability we have. Now we can start changing this. Now I can't change what's happened to me, but I can start going through a process. So this is not just mindfulness. Mindfulness will create this, all the mindfulness techniques that are out there. But once you're aware,

if you stop at this point, you will get worse. Okay. This is just amazing. So does this analogy work for you? Is it accurate? So we've all got certain thought structures in our brain from our past experiences, right? Whatever our past experiences have been, whether it was how we were brought up, you know, a bit of bullying here, but a trauma there, a breakup here, you know, a bad job interview, whatever. Our interpretation of the world, the thoughts we generated on the back of those experiences have formed a kind of residue in our brain, this kind of structure. Now, some of these structures are not helping us, right? So you're showing this diseased tree there. Now, we've all probably got,

let's say the dream scenario for all of us, which I don't know if anyone has got or ever got to, is that we've got a brain full of bushy green trees that are all healthy, like this beautiful forest. Okay, that's the goal. But many of us presumably have got little patches in various places of diseased trees. And I think what you're saying is, if we don't distract, if we don't run off to social media or the news or to alcohol or to drugs or whatever it might be, if we bring't distract, if we don't run off to social media or the news or to alcohol or to drugs or whatever it might be, if we bring awareness to, oh, you're thinking like this in this situation, you're saying that we're almost like starting to pour a bit of weed killer

onto this disease tree and we're starting to weaken and disintegrate it at the branches at the roots so that if we then go forward with the next process that you're going to talk about we can start to grow new roots in a new tree is that accurate based upon what you've said yeah you're brilliant totally you've hit the nail on the head that's exactly what's happening but every intrusive thought if you if you pay attention to an intrusive thought, you can actually, and very determined, logical, okay, I'm not scared of it. I'm going to listen to it. And you'd actually write that down. And there's a little technique you can do. I can explain right off the bat. Please do, yeah.

You take a, if you can find a 16-minute block in your day, 16, there's a whole lot of science behind the 16 minutes, but around 15 to 16 minutes. And you sit down, distraction-free, close your eyes and let your mind wander and daydream. But have a pen and paper, really, or your phone or your computer, whatever you want to write into. And then open your eyes after about two minutes and then write down the thoughts. And then close your eyes and do it. And repeat that about eight times. So it'll be eight times, eight two-minute little blocks. By the end of that, if you look at what you've written, you'll see a pattern.

You'll start seeing the same. You'll see, oh, that's actually three or four things that I'm consistently thinking about. And the 20 things I've written, they can be all grouped together. So those are like memories coming out of the thoughts of this, maybe three main thoughts with details attached to those thoughts and then you can maybe order them and see that that's one two and three and that's the most disruptive and then you can start okay i've got a point of departure so instead of my intrusive thought now having been something that is

going to because it can it can draw you into a vortex of negativity that you can go swirling around because your default network of your brain gets very disrupted it's like a symphony concert that goes wrong and so if you but if you stop and capture the thought you can tune that violin quickly and you can put it aside and you can have the tune violin you can continue with your day and then you can you know you can or something's broken in the in the orchestra or something like that you can pull it aside and deal with it later but if you just let it run amok amongst that symphony orchestra, it's going to be a cacophony of sound or whatever, as an example. Does that make sense? I really like that. So let's say someone struggles with intrusive thoughts. And

at some point, it'd be good if you define an intrusive thought for people as well at some point. But let's say you've got them, and you do this process over 15 or 16 minutes and you're writing things down so is that the end of the process i mean does that in it does that in and of itself help or actually is that a starting point which you then need to continue with something else yes you need to continue with something else because what you're doing is all the, I've developed a basic system in that there's various techniques and those systems are based on 38 years of clinical research

and so on of how the mind drives the neuroplasticity of the brain in the right direction. And what I mean by that is how do we find these, deconstruct and reconstruct them into something that works for us

and not against us. And this is not toxic positivity because we're not meant to be positive all the time. That's really bad for our brain and our creativity. We're only supposed to be positive moderate amounts of a day and of our life. So essentially what you would do once you found intrusive thought, you would go through a process and we can discuss that, but your ultimate goal is not to completely eliminate this because that once again is is not to completely eliminate this because that once

again is never going to go. No matter how many CBT techniques you do or how many medications you take, this will reappear. It's like a volcano. Until it's extinct, it will keep erupting. So until you have rewired your brain, it will keep coming up at various times, which is why we can have a few good days things and then out of the blue we just get triggered by something that someone says we don't kind of know why exactly so then it just it just comes up so what a lot of current techniques do they give you temporary relief um and so you'll have this thought so that's bad and then you train yourself with the technique to every time that comes up to replace with this but this this has never been, you've never taken the power out of this.

So maybe it works for a time. But as you just said, you have a bad day, you get triggered. And maybe you haven't been practicing this for a while. So now this is dominant again. So what you have to do is you have to actually take the power out of this. So this can't stay on this level. Sorry, for people listening, Caroline's holding up the negative, the sort of disease tree at the moment. Thank you.

Thank you for reminding me to tell the audio listeners what I'm doing. Okay, so I get so excited and carried away. Okay, so what we want to do is we don't want the disease tree to be dominant. We want to weaken. So as soon as I'm aware, I've destabilized it. There's a law of energy. Energy is never lost. Energy is always transferred.

So now this is energy that went into making this. I now want to have my energy. This sucks your life out of you, the toxic tree, the toxic thoughts. We all know that they weigh down on you. They weigh more. They literally do. So we want to take that energy and put that into something healthy. But what happens, and you'll see I'm holding up the listeners,

I'm holding up a tiny little branch of the healthy tree. Over initially as I start changing the situation to a process, and we will discuss the process after once I've explained this basic thing, this basic concept, what we want to do is this has got to have the energy removed from it. As it gets removed from it, it gets removed from it it gets smaller and smaller and smaller and eventually it just becomes something tiny you'll just see something tiny sticking out over the bottom of the computer so what people are i mean in the in the window

of the computer so for those of you that are listening imagine a tiny little wiry tree next to a tiny little green tree so what i've done is i still have my story i can how it's like this is the thing of people can tell you what happened to them. If someone's gone through an abuse or gone through the war and gone through whatever, they can tell you their story. And they still may have tears and so on. They remember what happened, but it no longer controls their relationships, their life, et cetera, if they've done this work.

If you haven't, you're permanently in that state where this is controlling you. So by going from the signal to the thought, deconstructing to the root, and we'll go through this process slowly in a moment, you weaken this. It gets down to the point where it's just a little sprout, and you now grow this new way of thinking that is accepting the uncomfortable situation that recognizes you can't find out why someone did something to you. You can't spend your life because you're not an expert on anyone else's experience. So there's a level of acceptance of what happened. And then there's a reconstruction of, okay, well, that's what happened, but I don't want it looking like this in my life anymore.

I want it to look like the healthy green tree. So I'm starting to move into how I wanted to play out into my future. Now, a lot of people get this far. Then they get in therapies or on their own or whatever. Then they get to this point where a chasm starts developing in their life. And by that, I mean that you know what you should be doing. You can verbalize all the reasons why you can have a good relationship. And you know why you were battling with a relationship because maybe you went through an abuse or something like that as a child, or you were sexually abused or something, and that's impacted your ability to actually form a trust and bond relationship. You know all of that. You've

got the cause, you've deconstructed, you've got, I want a relationship, but you're still not doing that. You're still getting into situations like before. How do we change that? We have to grow this stronger. This has to get to the point where it's got to grow into this size and even bigger. I've got a third one over here and that takes time. So we have to, whatever you think about the most gross. And now what I'm holding up for the listeners is I've got three trees together and that's like covering almost my whole face, green trees versus the tiny little branch. So i just stay at this point i'm going to fall back and this can easily grow back again and i can easily fall back into those places of

tremendous frustration i've tried it didn't work try something else but if you go through the hard work which is really painful gets worse before it gets better you will eventually get to the point where you grow this tree into a big tree then as you trigger it or as something happens in your life that makes you that similar you know triggering activation event you now have this power of the green tree you remember there may be a little spurt of the past because you remember your story but you know how you now want to act out and this is what will produce the behaviors and emotions that you want to function yeah you, you know, I think for me, an analogy that certainly works for me is, you know, I've certainly had this experience,

many people may have done if they move into an apartment or a house, and they get there. And this happened when we bought this family house in which we currently live, the garden was a mess, complete mess. There was hardly any grass there. There were weeds everywhere. And I kind of see this as that's a garden, almost like a toxic mind that's wired for negativity and anxiety and disempowering stories and the world's against me and everything feels hopeless. But bit by bit, by tending to that garden, the weeds started to go down. The plants we wanted to grow in the grass, if we feed them and nourish them the right way, they start to grow. Now, there's a time when actually what you're saying, I think, is sometimes we go to therapy or we

meditate or we journal or we do mindfulness, and we get an awareness. And you've already said that that awareness already starts to disintegrate that toxic structure that's there. That's great. But sometimes we stop too early or we think that's enough. And actually, it's weakened, but it's still there. So that garden, yeah, there's some healthy stuff there, but there's still also those weeds. And if we don't keep tending, those weeds will take over again. But through, and I think this is where your neuro cycle, your five-step process comes in,

that if you consistently do this in a very focused way, over time, there's going to be much more green. There's going to be much more resilience in the garden, I guess, in the brain. And you may still have a few weeds here and there, but generally there's still going to be a robust, thriving garden or a robust, thriving brain. And the more you do it, the less likely that weed is, that negative brain structure is to throw your day off and to get you triggered by your partner or your children. Again again i'm just trying

to bring it to life in the in the way that i see it is that that's accurate totally accurate because also i love that analogy and i often use the you know going through a forest or garden analogy is i'm going to add to that analogy think of when you when you were weeding your garden if you just chopped the head of the weed it it would just grow straight back. So you had to actually dig the roots of the weed out. You had to upend that weed and hopefully some of the seeds or whatever didn't spread across, but they would. And then a few more weeds pop up. But each time you remove the weeds, when you tend the garden, you have to take it out by the roots. You can't just chop the head off. So if we just do a technique or a medication or turn to alcohol or whatever, or constantly

distract ourselves, we're just chopping the head off the weed. We never resolve the issue. And that's what I'm trying to help people understand is that you need to understand, we're so logical as humans. We're so systematically driven. Our whole mind-brain-body connection is systematized. It's algorithmic. Every memory is a complex set of operations and that nature that we have is a driving force behind us to understand how did the weed get there in the first place? Let me eliminate the source so that I can at least find the source. I can't always control what

flies from my neighbor's garden into my garden or something like that. But I can do as much as possible, keep tending the weeds and pull them out by the roots when they come up. And that requires a constant, deliberate and intentional mind management. We have to constantly manage our minds like we have to manage our gardens. no i love that and look this kind of really speaks to the title of your latest book which is just fantastic like cleaning up your mental mess i love that because that's what it is many for all of us probably have got some degree of mental mess and you've got this five-step scientifically validated process which is

actually very straightforward it doesn't always mean easy, but it's very straightforward, I think, to understand on how we can, each of us, whatever our mental mess is, whether for us, for one person, that's anxiety, for another person, it's depression, for someone else, it's an intrusive thought, for someone else, it's an addiction, whatever it might be. Your process, the realization I had this morning when revisiting the book was that this is kind of how the system works right and you can use that for whatever you want in your life including how to build a better brain and build more resilience so could you could you explain what is this five step process so that people understand you know roughly what is the arc they have to go through.

Before we get back to this week's episode, I just wanted to let you know that I am doing my very first national UK theatre tour. I am planning a really special evening where I share how you can break free from the habits that are holding you back and make meaningful changes in your life that truly last. It is called the Thrive Tour. Be the architect of your health and happiness. So many people tell me that health feels really complicated, but it really doesn't need to be. In my live event, I'm going to simplify health and together we're going to learn the skill of happiness, the secrets to optimal health, how to break free from the habits that are holding you

back in your life, and I'm going to teach you how to make changes that actually last. Sound good? All you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash tour and I can't wait to see you there. ThePathLatitudeMattery.com forward slash tour. I can't wait to see you there. This episode is also brought to you by the Three Question Journal, the journal that I designed and created in partnership with Intelligent Change. Now, journaling is something that I've been recommending to my patients for years. It can help improve sleep, lead to better decision making, and reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression. It's also been shown to decrease emotional stress, make it easier to turn new behaviours into long-term habits, and improve our relationships. There are, of course, many different ways to journal, and as with most things, it's important that you find the method that works best for you.

As with most things, it's important that you find the method that works best for you. One method that you may want to consider is the one that I outline in the three question journal. In it, you will find a really simple and structured way of answering the three most impactful questions I believe that we can all ask ourselves every morning and every evening. Answering these questions will take you less than five minutes, but the practice of answering them regularly will be transformative. Since the journal was published in January, I have received hundreds of messages from people telling me how much it has helped them and how much more in control of their lives they now feel. Now, if you already have a journal or you don't actually want to buy a

journal, that is completely fine. I go through in detail all of the questions within the three question journal completely free on episode 413 of this podcast. But if you are keen to check it out, all you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash journal or click on the link in your podcast app. Absolutely. And that's really important because we've already intimated that and said awareness is not enough. So we're very fully aware, using the word aware, as in our society today, there's so much wonderful training around meditation and awareness and mindfulness and whatever. But the problem is that we have to go beyond. So I began my career and developed the

system of the neurocycle way back 38 years ago when I was trained as a clinical neuroscientist to work with things like traumatic brain injury and chronic traumatic encephalopathy and dementias and learning disabilities. And so it was very clinical. And what I was seeing was the need to actually have a systematic way that aligned with the mind-brain relationship and that could drive changes that were needed neuroplastic-wise inside the brain. And then I saw the tremendous impact on body changes, so health, physical health. And then I started seeing automatically a huge change in how people functioned across the board, cognitively, socially, emotionally. So there's a very long history behind it. There's a theoretical base

and there's a lot of science. And I'm just in a seven-hour meeting yesterday, we've got a huge clinical trial running at the moment with nearly 45,000 people that ran over COVID looking at what mind management does in terms of health, mental health, physical health. I do all kinds of, in this book, there's clinical trials. I say that to say that, yes, the system that I developed is simple. It's based on what you actually know to do, which should be, because if it's something crazily difficult, no one's going to do it. And anything that really works has always got to be simple. But the science underlying it, don't be fooled by the fact that it's so simple that you don't do it properly. Because there is a good way of doing it.

So the basic arc of the system is that you need to do this gather awareness. I'm going to give you the big picture and then we can dive a little deeper. The big picture is that we have to become aware in the ways you've been saying up to this point, through the signals, et cetera. But once you're aware, you've pulled this up. Now, if you leave it there, you will get worse because this will go back into the non-conscious even stronger than before because your brain is always changing. So it'll just go back into a worse form. So we want to then go beyond that. And we see this from the mindfulness meditation research. Generally, the studies don't go longer than either 24 hours or three weeks.

There's only very few studies that go as long as six or eight weeks. And what is seen is immediate changes. As soon as you have done any kind of mindfulness practice, any kind of mindfulness cognitive behavior therapy, in that moment, there's going to be massive change, positive change. But the sustainability goes after a few weeks. So I wanted to find out why. I also was looking at the research in the 60s about the timeframe. So this five steps only works in a certain timeframe. And if you do it in too short of a time, you're going to have that small tree and it's not going to work.

So let's start with the five steps and then we can talk about the time so it doesn't confuse everyone. So the first step then is gathering awareness. Once I've gathered awareness, what have I gathered awareness of? I've gathered awareness of the four signals. So it is the emotions, the behaviors, what you say and do, your bodily sensations. What are you feeling in your body? Because you will always have some level of body. Maybe you're tensioning your jaw. Maybe there's tension in your shoulders. Maybe you've got back issues. Maybe there's whatever, gut, heart, all different. We're all going to have different combinations, et cetera.

But what is your, that's the third one, what are the bodily sensations and what is your perspective? So when you clinically and objectively stand back and observe yourself and gather awareness of your signals, Those will then take you to, because there's these invisible strings that those four signals work together. They're attached to the thought, which is the explanation of the thought that I gave. So then the second step is to say, okay,

those signals seem to be pointing to some kind of a relationship thought issue. And this is that intrusive thing that I keep thinking of. And then you start seeing some details the interpretation how you are thinking feeling and choosing so the gather awareness is of those four signals it's kind of just statements about you know you just label them like name them put them into a sentence but then they take you to the thought the second step is to start reflecting on what are those signals attached to? What are these branches here? What's my interpretation of my life in relation to this concept,

which could be relational issues or it could be a problem with a family member. It could be, like the example I gave earlier, can't seem to get into a decent long-term relationship. As soon as things get too intense, you pull back, don't have trust issues, whatever. So you start reflecting. Reflecting is a beautiful thing. Reflect, gather is a beautiful thing.

Let me quickly go back. Gather awareness. I didn't just say where, I said gather. Gather is very significant because you want to be empowered. You want to feel in control. People that feel depressed, anxious, and any kind of mental challenges feel out of control. So I want to give you a route back to control. So you can gather, you can choose what you can handle today. You do not have to do this in one day. In fact, you cannot do it in one day.

You have to do just a little bit over a period of time. And I'll tell you the timing in a moment. So you gather. So it's like going into, now we've got a garden analogy going, let's say you grew an apple, had an apple orchard in your garden, if your garden was big enough. And let's say you had one apple tree, okay? So you go into that garden and you're going to pick apples because the apple tree is so full. You don't go under the apple tree and shake it and let them all fall on your head. It would totally overwhelm you and hurt you. You stand back and you choose, I want that apple, that apple.

So is that, Dr. Leif, is that just, just so I'm super clear on this, is it basically, if you go in and shake the apple tree, so all the apples fall on you, that's all the different emotions, all the things that you struggle with in life, and you're like, oh man, there's no way I can do this. I can't do this neuro cycle five-step process on all of them. Let me today on a Sunday morning, I have 20 minutes. So you can talk about timeframes in a second, but let's say you, or you have an hour or half an hour and you go, right, I'm just going to deal with this specific one particular thought or emotion that sometimes bothers me. And you're just going to pick that one thing. Step one, you're saying is gather.

So you're taking that apple. Step two is reflect. So you're reflecting on gather so you're you're taking that apple step two is reflect so you're reflecting on when does that emotion come up well you know what what's the story behind that emotion so far have i got it yes absolutely so you've picked your four apples the four signals imagine having a basket and you've picked apple number one is the emotion apple number two is the behaviors apple number three are the behavioral signals in your body signals apple number four is perspective four in your basket now you hear those have pointed that x that activity has pulled us from the non-conscious to the conscious so now it's pointing to a thought but you don't quite know what isn't thought yet it's still too early days you're looking at this you know with like blink you know you don't you can't see the detail yet it's still is it do you think it would be useful

to do this let's say with depression or anxiety would that do you think taking a particular symptom do you think that would that help here with the analogy we can do so in your apple you've got the first okay gather we're in a step number one the first apple emotion depression second apple and i'll stick with the same example i said earlier on so So there's repetition, which makes it easier. Second example, behaviors, second signal, behaviors, withdrawing. Okay. So my apple two is doing apple one is depression. Apple two is withdrawing or isolation. Not speaking much to people, whatever, just even if it's one. Third one is, I said gut issues earlier on. So there's the third apple. Fourth apple is life sucks. So there's my four signals. Now I see, okay, this, then I see, oh, that's pointing to relationships.

So there's a toxicity in my relationship. So those are attached to a toxic thought that is called toxic relationships. But you don't know the details yet. So now you're going to reflect. So take out emotion number one, apple number one emotions. Why? Ask yourself why. Why am I feeling this depression in terms of relationships? And you answer yourself and you can go ask yourself three or four whys. Ask, answer, discuss. Ask, answer, discuss. Be very systematic. I would literally, Dr. Chatterjee, put two chairs out for my patients. And I would say, okay, you sit in one and you talk to yourself in the other. I'm just in the background facilitating

this process. So you are talking, your wise mind's talking to your messy mind. So your wise mind, as soon as you objectify things like that and you create that distancing, it's easier to do this. So you say, okay, Caroline, why are you feeling this depression in terms of your relationships? And that'll show you the detail here, which is how you are interpreting. Oh, okay, I feel depression because I really want to form a long-lasting relationship. But every time I get into a relationship and the trust issues, whatever, you start getting a little, and why are you doing that? I think I've got trust issues. Why?

I don't know. There's maybe something in my childhood. Whatever. Then you go to the next one. Say, okay, that's enough for for now don't try and solve it all in one day you'll be overwhelmed really be very strict 15 to 45 minutes that's the time frame okay and you can do less then you go to okay um then you're going to write that down so you've gathered these four and you've and you've done a bit of reflection and that's why i say keep it short, two, three minutes for each step. Write that down.

And when you write that down, amazing things happen in the basal ganglia of your brain, different parts of your brain, which basically start moving the energy around the different frequencies of your brain in a different way that you can tap into existing connected thoughts. So it brings up associated thoughts, but it also helps develop your intuition so that you start looking down the tree trunk, which is how did you process to get to what on earth went on in your life that you're processing yourself in this way, that you're

not worthy of a relationship or whatever. And so then you start, the writing will start bringing that up. But the writing step step step three is chaotic and it should be chaotic you just mind dump whatever comes to your mind you just write all over the page i've developed a system called the metacog i have a app called the neuropsycho which has got all of this and i guide you through audio video everything is clear on how to do the metacog etc there's also in this book i give you examples of the metacog with et cetera. There's also in this book, I give you examples of the metacog, the new clinical mental message you mentioned. And we're constantly adding stuff to the NeuroCycle app in terms of guidance, et cetera.

So the metacog is, if you don't know how to metacog at this stage, just do a circle in the middle of your page and just write all around that circle. Get yourself out of linear, get yourself into multidimensional and use colors if you want. And don't worry about order.

It's one of the most revealing processes. It'll look like chaos and that's good. More chaos, the better because you're dragging up things that you're getting into the non-conscious. You're digging deep. So where we're up to is we've done the gather and we're going through the example of depression. So we've got the four apples, depression, withdrawing, feeling it in our guts, life sucks, those four things. We're reflecting on where they may have come from. And we're just starting to think, oh, yeah, maybe I can see why that happened. Or, oh, my mom was like this. So

that's why I feel, you know, what you're just starting to open the door a little bit into that conscious awareness, then the third step is right. So you're writing down on the back of the awareness, on the back of the reflection, then you're saying things are going to come in. If you start writing them down, that does something very powerful, right? So you have this method called the Metacog, which people can get in your app. They can get through the latest book and figure that out. But at the moment, even if they don't have that, just start writing anything in relation to how you're feeling. That's step three. Is that right? That's correct. You got it perfectly.

It's very systematic. If you jump to step three before you've done step one, you won't get the same benefits. And this is what I've tested very methodically in my research. What's the best? I've looked at all the combinations and I've looked at what is happening in my brain and body. So it's really important that you do it in your brain systematic. You're driving the neuroplasticity. You're rewiring your brain. You don't want chaotic rewiring. You want to drive the direction. You don't want to be all over the road. You want to say, I want to go there down that path. That's what I'm wanting. So how am I going to get there? As opposed to, oh, it's going to go all over the road. You want to say, I want to go there down that path. That's what I'm wanting. So how am I going to get there? As opposed to, oh, it's going to go all over the place. Okay. So the fourth step now is also a writing step, but it's where you do what I call,

it's a recheck. It's called the recheck step four. And this is where you go into reconceptualization, which is a phenomenal word. It's a powerful, deep word. All the words I chose have got hugely deep meanings. Reconceptualization is the acceptance of your word. It's a powerful, deep word. All the words I chose have got hugely deep meanings. Reconceptualization is the acceptance of your story. It's the, this has happened. Now what can I do about it? Very powerful step. So you take what you've written, which is the culmination of your aware and reflect,

gather awareness and reflection. You've got this chaotic mass of words on your page. You may have very few the first day and whatever builds up over time and you now say okay what does this mean and you start looking for patterns for triggers for activators for getting some sense out of this so that's starting to show you a route you'll start getting a glimpse into the core so you're getting the you're now because we're looking at that diseased uh tree structure in the brain of course but that's what we and we we're we're looking at

that diseased tree structure based around depression and all the thoughts and feelings and everything around that and you're saying as we go through this process we're getting now from the branches all the way down to the roots as to where did this start? And so this might be, for example, you know, I don't know, it depends on what you've written, but could this be something like, oh man, yeah, this pattern is whenever I see that person and they talk to me like this, I then respond automatically, which is how I used to respond in that other relationship. Actually, that's just automatic. Is that what you mean? You're just sort of making sense of it? You start making sense of those. You start seeing that this is a consistent pattern.

And then you start as you go, you're not going to get this on day one. It's going to take you at least three weeks, if not longer, but we'll talk about the time a bit more detail you're going to start seeing okay if i do this consistently and every time that person sees that kind of thing in each relation exactly like you described it there's there's a cause there's a reason that you're showing up and you're starting to see that root popping out of the ground it's like you've taken a spade and you started digging away there's a really tough root in that garden of yours that you were talking about and you had to take a spare.

You couldn't just pull it out. You actually had to move, loosen the soil in order to find the seed. Gosh, this root's just going on further and further and some roots are much deeper than others. So the more established the trauma, the bigger the root, the stronger the root, the more difficult it is to get that tree out

the longer it takes to see it. And that's okay, but there's still these cycles of time. But yes, exactly that. You're starting to see at this point, you're starting to recognize the way I'm showing up is not a mental health disease. I don't have a diseased brain. I have had an experience and that experience wired into my brain and over time became an established pattern that has created a disruption in how I run relationships.

So I'm showing up in this way because of, and now through this process, you are finding the because of. So by the time you get to step four, you're in that recheck process where you are trying to reconceptualize. This is what's happened. I don't understand exactly where it's coming from, but it seems like it could be, I remember my parents maybe had a bad relationship, or maybe your very

first few relationships were just really bad. You just, you know how it can happen like that. You're just going to one bad relationship after another and it just becomes a thing. There's something wrong with me. And that is a root. That's the origin story. Like I started today with the first at the beginning of the interview, I said, my words are the roots of the origin of the story, the words of this conversation. The roots of the toxic tree are the initial experience. This experience is all conversation. It's going in the root system. So the root system is always what was the original experience.

So eventually that's revealed. You know, the first time that you do a neurocycle, you may only find just one tiny part of the root, one little part. And as you go through over time, you see more and more. So day one, you may just get to the point where, okay, well, all I can see is that I am not crazy. I'm not insane. There's this depression that is actually telling me something. And this is amazing.

I can actually do something about this. There's a reason why I am having problems in my relationship, which is really making me depressed because as humans, we want a relationship. We want to be loved. That's our most core basic need. It's that kind of maybe languaging that you may get to start saying to yourself, which then leads you to step five, which is the act of reach. And that is, okay, I've done a lot of work. I've done my 15 minutes, maximum 45, and really try and stick to those time frames or you will you will peter out your energy your brain is like a cell phone and your mind your conscious mind is like a cell phone it gets tired your non-conscious mind never gets tired so we

have to bear that in mind you still have a day's day to get to you still have whatever you do as a person parenting medicate medicine etc um podcast You can't just spend all your life, all your day on that. So very, very strict. About 15 minutes is up or 45 minutes max. So I end the session with what did I learn today? What can I take away from the session? And how can I encapsulate that into a statement that I can train myself that each time the intrusive thought of I'm useless,

I can't form a relationship, I'm depressed, I'm, you know, I'm diseased. Anytime those things come up, I can go back to my active reach, which is a statement of no, hang on. The way I'm showing up is because of something is a because of behind this. And just saying that yourself, each time the intrusive thought comes up, you capture it with that act of reach yeah so so basically what i love about this it's a it's a self-contained complete exercise that just slowly just enhances with regular repetition someone's awareness of what's going on and and i think really the really powerful thing that i think for people is that they realize that,

oh, the way I feel and the way I think is not who I am. It's who I became in response to something. Right. And so now it's not the real me, but now I know why. And so could, and just, just to finish off that depression example, could the active reach potentially be next time I feel like this, instead of staying in bed, I'm going to go for a 10-minute walk? Yes. Or I'm going to put on a temporary distraction. I'm going to watch a happy movie. I'm going to watch Friends or something like that so that I get into a better mindset. Or anything. It might be as simple as sometimes people are so depressed,

they can't get out of bed. It might just be, you can try and get from the bed to the couch or something like that. Yes. So it's very unique to an individual. Yes. There's no set preset. I mean, there's examples I can give of what we've just done now, but the real active reach benefit will come from what do you need in that moment? What's the full stop of the sentence that you need to keep you going today and to keep you moving forward in the day and not allowing yourself to go back to that problem? Because what happens when we get it stuck into a severe depression or an anxiety attack or something or overwhelmed burnout, burnout isn't a a result of is we stay too long in that because we don't know what to do.

We stay in the chaos. So here I'm saying allow the chaos. It's okay to be a mess. You're allowing that expression, but then you're moving on. So by the same token, once you've got this going on day one, we should quickly talk about the timing and then also how you can use this in day-to-day struggles. Today, I'm going to have my active reach, something like that, what you just said, I'm going to get out of bed or I'm going to tell myself. And each time during

the course of the day, if my mind goes back, I'm going to say that active reach because you tell yourself tomorrow, you will come back and you'll do it again. So your active reach could also be a statement plus a visual. So maybe you love sunsets or you love puppies or whatever and you say okay i'm going to watch a puppy video on tiktok each time i feel anything like that just to keep it's discipline your mind to not go back to that place and pour more water onto the and the key thing there it's intentional that's that's the big thing right isn't it instead of the the your thoughts driving you you are taking charge again. Hey, listen, this is not me. I know what's going on. I know this is going to come back. And next time

it comes back, I'm going to make a different choice, a choice that I have made intentionally. That is incredibly empowering, isn't it? Totally empowering. So you're using your veto power. You have veto power. You are able to override that thought. So that thought doesn't go in a day. It goes in time. But yes, you are driving. When it comes up and it's controlling you, you now have a system to control it. And then over time, because it took time to wire in. Habits don't form in 21 days. We've all heard that. That was a myth in the 60s promulgated by a surgeon and it became very popular, but it's not scientific. Very few people have done research on the numbers.

That's one of the fields that I have worked in. And so how long does it take to form a habit? At least 63 to 66 days. And so that I've shown with neuroscientific research and so on, and I'm doing more studies on that now. So essentially what we see, and I saw this as a clinical neuroscientist too, that to do this process, that we've just to find all these roots, you're going to have to spend at least 15 minutes for at least three weeks, 21 days. And it's only at that point,

have you spent enough time taking the energy away from this, making it small. And at this point, I now know all that stuff that I've learned. And I may have realized that a lot of the root causes could have been trust issues in your parents' relationship or something. You'd have had a level of insight into the cause. What you won't have, and I'm going to say this upfront, is don't get stuck trying to say, but why did they do that to me?

Remember, you're only an expert on your own experiences in understanding that because of you're looking for the source, but you can't understand why people do what they do. You can't control people, events, or circumstances. You can only control what's inside of you and how you want that to play out into the future. So a lot of people get stuck there in their own self-management and also in therapy. Don't try and find out why. We can go down rabbit holes. So by day 21, it's small. So then what you have to do is you have to spend at least another 42 days, but you only spend five minutes a day going through the five steps of the neurocycle, but only in five minutes. So this is where the app's great because the app will walk you through video and audio for the 15 to 45 minutes. And then there's script for the days 22 through 63.

And then also it's described in the book. And that's just the five steps very quickly where you're taking this and you're growing it into this. Does that mean, Dr. Lee, that let's say there's one particular thought pattern and therefore tree-like structure in our brain that is negatively affecting our life. If we identify that and through what you've said,

and there's a lot more detail in your book and your app, of course, for people who are really interested in diving deep, but they can take that 15 minutes minimum a day for 21 days, going through that five-step cycle, just 15 minutes, it's actually not that long. So that's 21. And for the next two cycles of 21 days, so 42 days, you only need to do five minutes a day. And then at day 63, effectively, are you saying that that diseased tree will no longer be there? And instead, you'll have a fresh, new, vibrant, green, healthy one. Is that what you're saying? It'll always be there because your story, you'll always remember what happened to you. You'll remember, oh, that was an abuse or that was whatever.

But it's shrunk and it's small and it's weak. The sting is gone. It has no power. It's transitioned from dominating to being dominated. So it's still there. It's part of your experience of life, but it's not dominating your day-to-day life. Yeah, that's exactly it. We've mentioned a lot about negative things so far. And of course, that's affecting people.

Towards the end of the book, there's a very powerful chapter on building your brain, building a healthy brain, building resilience. And I really want to just briefly touch on this, building a healthy brain, building resilience. And I really want to just briefly touch on this, because I think this shows the incredible power of that five-step process. Yes, you can use it to manage anxiety, depression, stress, addiction, whatever that might be. But you can also use it to actually develop your brain and grow a more resilient brain. And I think one of the examples she gave was listening to a podcast. And I thought that was really beautiful that actually people can listen to a bit of a podcast, let's say this one, or I don't know, your podcast, or I know on Fridays, I have a 10 minute bite-sized podcast with some of the best bits from previous guests.

And I thought this is a really useful exercise. So maybe could you talk it through that lens? Because I think that's also quite an empowering way to finish this conversation for people. I'm glad you brought that up because when I was working with my patients, the first thing I would do would be brain building because you've got to activate the resilience, which is all of us, we all have natural resilience. It's not certain traits in certain people. Every human is resilient. We just have to develop the skill. So brain building is one of those unspoken mental health tools that is absolutely vital and it's so powerful. I've shown in my research that you can get an 81% handle on depression, anxiety, all these things, and 75% improvement in your intellectual capacity and things like that when you do brain building alongside the detoxing it's the same five steps but if you think the detoxing you're deconstructing

and reconstructing brain building you're constructing and so there's two types of brain building it's the same five steps but you're learning new information you're growing networks into your brain so if you take like a podcast or you take something you're interested in and i think podcasts are really great because it's it's a medium that you have to listen and then stop and then make notes. And it's, oh my gosh, that is doing the most phenomenal things in your brain. My traumatic brain injury patients, we got from literally being written off as vegetables to getting debris by doing brain building using the neurocycle.

It is so powerful. And it puts you in a state of resilience because you're growing networks in your brain that are healthy and strong. So think of a beautiful green garden. We go all the way back to your garden. Think of how beautiful and healthy it is now. Now you can go in that garden and if you are feeling, if something happens or there's one weed, you are not over, the weed doesn't overwhelm the garden because the garden is strong. So brain building is building the beautiful flowers, the grass, the constant beauty.

It's you growing that. So in between when you're detoxing the weeds, you are focusing on the resilience. So it's the resilience growth. And you can do that with, as you said, you listen to the podcast, stop it after about a minute, and then basically go through the five steps. Gather awareness.

Think about what you've just heard. Write it down. Check, does it make sense? You may want to rewind and re-listen to compare, and then maybe do a little bit of discussion. And this may sound like a laborious process, but take your 10-minute one. I love it. It'll take 10 minutes of one of mine. And 10 minutes of that exercise, stopping and starting and doing that, it is is so powerful and then there's other ways of doing i call them insurance policies yeah

it's really powerful because they could so listening to let's say a 10 minute podcast let's say right let's say they listen is that the gathering is that that or is that is that the preparation but that's it's a bit of both isn't it it's kind of you're quite right you listen for about a minute same kind of exercise as that earlier one with the intrusive thoughts. So listen for about a minute. Pause it. Have your paper or you're working your computer. And then pause it and ask yourself, okay, what have I just heard?

Repeat it to yourself. So do a bit of ask, answer, discuss. So gathering is to listen. The reflect is ask, answer, discuss. Writing step three, write, discuss. Step three, write that down. Then look at what you've written. You may want to quickly re-listen and compare what you heard to what you've written. And then say, okay, this is what I heard. Press play and continue. And you repeat that cycle for 10, 20, 30 minutes. And could the active reach be,

depending on the topic, next time I'm in this scenario in my life where I'm overwhelmed with choice, oh, I've just realized actually this is a great framework to apply there. So I'm going to go through this process next time when I have to make a decision, for example. Or could, I also think the active reach is something, I've thought about putting this at the end of my podcast. I haven't yet. Just saying, if there's one one thing you've learned why don't you teach that or share it with someone else that's active reach right that's a positive action that will help rewire exactly so when I did I love do a lot of working schools did a lot and train teachers and in a school environment when a child's learning um their work they go through this process which I've just described, the reach in education terms is reteach.

And so basically what you do is you explain back what you've learned. So it's a reteaching of what you've learned in that process. And so that's exactly what it is. So your active features you can explain back, tell someone what you've just heard on the podcast, tell yourself, phone a friend, text a friend, or draw on that content because if it's a Google podcast that you're interested in, stuff that you want to learn stuff about,

you can draw on that content in a further situation. And we also use it as if I'm very, very overwhelmed or I've had a shock or there's been some traumatic news and I've dealt with the emergency, I've triaged, I will then, to get myself in a place of creativity where I can handle the situation more effectively, I will go and do a brain build. I've taken some of my research because I'm always in research trials

and I'm writing journal papers. I'm always having to learn new stuff. I will go and do a cycle and it calms me down. It is one of the most calming exercises, but that's like another whole amazing stuff. It is, yeah. And I do want to, I really would encourage people to take a look at the book, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mass, because it's, I think whatever you are dealing with in life, there is a structure there and a framework to help you process and move through it and move beyond it. And what I love about the NeuroCycle, you can use it for chronic trauma, things that have been bothering you for years, but you can also use it in the moment to deal with something. And I think that's really powerful. But you can also use it in the moment to deal with something. And I think that's really powerful.

Can I give you an example? Sorry, just of that in the moment, because people are thinking, well, 63 days, how do you use it in the moment? It's basically the help me crisis in the moment. I'll give you an example. I had to go to a research meeting with my team yesterday. It was a seven-hour meeting, and I had to go to the dentist before, and I was on a flight. So I had all these things back to back, and everything was delayed. So I was delayed for my team, and I was getting very anxious about this because I'm on a flight. So I had all these things back to back and everything was delayed. So I was delayed for my team

and I was getting very anxious about this because I'm running the team. So I did a neurocycle to calm myself down so I could work out what to do, get my team started so that they didn't have to wait for me so I could get there. So I did, I gathered awareness of my emotions.

I allowed myself to feel them. I reflected on this is why logically I just walked myself through the process, wrote down a few ideas of how I'm feeling,checked to work out okay what's my plan active reach phoned my team one of my team lead team members and said okay start this this set it up and i was calm and i could get into the meeting so that's an in the moment crisis yeah i love that and i guess the more people practice it maybe as part of a morning routine i guess um the more people practice it, maybe as part of a morning routine, I guess, the more able you're going to be to quickly zoom through that five-step process. In the moment, like you had to do yesterday, that's really powerful. And when we do a part two, we'll

definitely go into that in some more detail. Before you go, Dr. Leif, I want to acknowledge you for the incredible work you've been doing for decades now to bring awareness to this field. You are literally helping hundreds of thousands, millions of people around the world understand themselves better, give them autonomy, awareness, real agency over the course of their lives, which I think is one of the greatest gifts anyone can give somebody else is that sense of autonomy and agency. Many people around the world are struggling at the moment. This podcast is called Feel Better, Live More. When we feel better in ourselves, we get more out of life. Just to finish off, for people who are struggling, who think that the way they are currently is the way things are always going to be, and they can't see a way out. Obviously, I hope there's been some inspiration during our conversation. What would you say to them at the end? I'd say that you can't change your story,

but you can change how it looks inside of you and how it plays out into your future. And you have that autonomy and you can learn how to do that. It's hard at first, I totally acknowledge. And the other thing is to be in mind that you can learn how to do that. It's hard at first. I totally acknowledge. And the other thing is to bear in mind that you can't control events or circumstances or people, but you can learn to control your response. And it's a learning. Notice I'm saying learning, which is very encouraging because I'm not expecting you to just automatically do it.

I'm saying that it's a skill that you can learn. And once you learn, it's one of those skills that just grows exponentially. It's kind of hard to get going, but once you're into it, it just grows exponentially. And it doesn't mean you're going to live an avatar life. That's not normal.

As I said, being constantly positive is toxic. And toxic positivity is totally toxic. I'm talking about embracing all of your humanity. Celebrate that depression and that anxiety because you can at least feel as a human.

And when you see, and allow yourself to be a mess because behind that mess is the message. I know that's so cheesy, but seriously, when you embrace those signals, that depression, et cetera, you are going to find what it's attached to

and you're going to be able to reconstruct your life. Very empowering. Thank you so much. Thank you for the message. Thank you for the words. And I'll see you on part two. Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. As always, do have a think about one thing that you can take away and start applying into your own life. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful week. Always remember,

you are the architects of your own health. Making lifestyle changes always worth it, because when you feel better, you live more.