Know Thyself - E199 - Dr. Caroline Leaf: How to Stop Your Brain From Holding You Back

Episode Date: June 16, 2026

Dr. Caroline Leaf is a cognitive neuroscientist and bestselling author who has spent over 40 years studying the relationship between the mind and the brain. At a time when neuroplasticity was still emerging as a field, she was already building clinical tools to help patients recover from brain injuries, trauma, and conditions that conventional medicine had written off as permanent. In this conversation, we go deep into a distinction that changes everything: the mind is not the brain, and once you understand that, you stop being a victim of your own biology.What We Dive Into:1. The brain does not generate thoughts. It responds to the mind. Everything you think, feel, and choose originates in the mind and then gets coded into the brain and body. 2. Depression, anxiety, and other mental health labels are not diseases you have. They are signals pointing to an underlying thought that needs to be found and restructured. 3. You cannot change what happened, but you can change the impact it has on your present and future. Through a process of deconstructing and reconstructing toxic thought networks, the grip of the past loosens. Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself.https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com✨THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS:https://www.bioptimizers.com/knowthyselfUse code KNOWTHYSELF to save 15% at checkout___________00:00 Intro03:11 The Difference Between Mind and Brain07:17 Why the Brain-Is-Boss Model Gets It Wrong12:25 Consciousness Beyond the Physical Body14:25 Quantum Physics, Microtubules, and the Mind21:24 Science and Spirituality Converging23:41 Early Research: Neuroplasticity and Traumatic Brain Injury28:50 Mind-Driven Change: Telomeres and Cellular Health31:56 Working in South Africa: Healing Through Mental Frameworks34:31 The Origin of the Neurocycle40:13 The Non-Conscious, Subconscious, and Conscious Mind49:35 How Thoughts and Memories Build Into the Brain and Body51:59 The Five Steps of the Neurocycle57:01 Step One: Gather Awareness01:00:24 Step Two: Reflect01:02:10 Steps Three to Five: Mindstorm, Recheck, Active Reach01:09:28 Community Questions: Fear of Losing Your Identity01:14:32 Working Through Shame, Grief, and Emotional Signals01:15:46 Retroactive Causation: Changing the Past Through the Present01:19:28 Intelligent Design, Choice, and the Source Behind Life01:22:45 Mindsets, Patterns, and Teaching Children01:25:58 Stress as Intelligence: The New Book___________✨MORE FROM DR. LEAF↳Website (for books, courses, 1:1 coaching): https://drleaf.com/↳Neurocycle app: https://drleaf.com/neurocycle-app↳Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-dr-leaf-show/id1334767397↳Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DrCarolineLeaf↳Neurocycle Certification: https://drleaf.com/certified-strategist📜MORE FROM KNOW THYSELF↳Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4bZMq9l↳Apple: https://apple.co/4iATICX↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/↳TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@andreduqum↳Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/knowthyselfbyandreduqum/↳https://knowthyselfpodcast.com/👁️MORE FROM ANDRÉ↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/@andreduqum↳Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/know-thyself-podcast↳Book recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list

give you feeling very anxious or stressed out. You feel that in your body. That's your mind talking, not your brain. Your mind is the superpower. A lot of people think the brain is boss, but there's no science to back that up. It feels like most people experience life as almost like a victim of their own brain.

I had clients that were literally written off by a neurologist as vegetable. Within eight months, they were finishing school going onto university. That's when I really saw that, wow, mind really does change the physical. And yet, it was pushed aside of pseudoscience coming to mental health

The biomedical models tied people into disease diagnoses that limits people. You can't have depression. You can't have schizophrenia. They are signals. There's a because of behind that. What kind of world would we live in if somebody knew how to regulate their nervous system? It's fundamental. I had to have something practical, and that's where the neuropsycho was birth.

We saw significant change is 35 to 75%. Once you start doing it, it changes your life. I wish I knew about this when I was at school. I wish I knew then what I know now. It just needs 60 seconds. It creates enough of a pause to be able to stand back and observe. So the first step is gather awareness. The second step is true.

Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Know Thyself podcast. Our guest today is a cognitive neuroscientist and best-selling author. For over four decades, she's been studying the connection and the differences between the mind and the brain. Her work in a psycho-neuro biology, it's a mouthful. Yes. Her work in psycho-neurobiology has been over 40 plus years, exploring the deep ties into behavior change and to healing brain injuries and trauma and at a time when neuroplasticity was

just emerging as a field of study. Dr. Carolyn Leaf, such a pleasure to have you here. Oh, thank you, Andre. I've been so looking forward to this and it's such a pleasure to actually finally meet you. I've watched you a lot and I love your show. So thank you for having me on. It's great. It's a greatest joy. I love getting to meet people outside of the, you know, fruitful conversations that we get to have. And your work is so fascinating. You've been devoted to it for so long. What would you, how would you articulate what the essence of your work is aiming to share with the world at the stage of your life? I love that question. Yeah, it's been 44 years now that I've been doing this. And I think the

essence is to help people to understand what the mind is and the difference to the brain. Because we live in such a physicalist, materialistic world that's just so consumed with the whole neurocentric approach to brain, brain, brain. And we've lost so much of our humanity in that process and got so out of touch with the deeper things, the spiritual things, philosophy, what consciousness is. And it's affected people's mental health. So I really try and that's been, you know, that's my whole field of study, but try and open people's minds to understanding that in a very practical way. So, you know, people, I love the philosophy side, which is so important, but helping people know how to do, not just talk about it, but actually understand

how to manage their mind and how to apply that. Yeah, applied philosophy. For most people, we think the mind of the brain are sort of interchangeable terms and you make a clear distinction. So I think it's really important to set our definitions that way we know what we're talking about throughout this whole conversation. And then we can dive deeper. So what is the difference between the mind and the brain from your conception? My favorite question, the first question I'm always asked, especially in this time frame. Okay, so your mind is pretty much 99% of who you are. It's you. It's all your u-ness, your aliveness, your ability to think, feel, choose. Your brain and body are the physical organs that the mind codes life into and uses for you

to physically show up. So they're very much, not even, so much more than storage, but they are the things that are coded to help you function physically. So your mind drives everything. It drives your physiology, your neurology, and your psych, your whole mind. And so it's got different divisions. So that's what people don't really get is the different divisions of mind because people often hear the word consciousness or, and as you say, they use the word mind-brain interchangeably and then consciousness is this kind of elusive concept somewhere out there. So I try and make that very clear. So the brain doesn't think, the brain can't generate. The brain just simply responds to the stimulation received by the mind.

The mind is doing all the processing, all the thinking, all the, everything we're doing now. And we're using our brain and literally coding it into our brain. And that happens fast. I mean, it's around about 400 billion actions per second just in the neurons that are happening. But our mind is even far, way faster than that. So it's almost hard for people to picture. So we just say, as a simple analogy, would be something like if you think people understand, And if you're hungry, you eat, and when you eat, that changes your body.

It changes your cells and you get energy. And if you eat healthy, you feel the difference. If you don't, you. So if you think of that, like that concept, the way that food you think, you're hungry, you think about food, you choose the food, you put it in your body, it changes your body. It's a little bit of an analogy. It's not quite as deep, but it gives people an idea. The mind is like that, it's like the food that we choose and then put it into the brain and the body,

but it's thought and it changes the brain and the body. So the mind is doing the changing. The brain is doing the responding and that makes sense. And that's quite a hard thing for people to picture because where it comes into, I think where it comes into more clarity is if you think about thoughts, what thoughts are and that thoughts are real things and that they have structural change. And that's where the whole neuroplasticity concept comes in.

So the easiest way out we sell another sort of easy analogy is to think if you're feeling very anxious or stressed out or not managing something. You feel that in your body. You feel your body tense up. You feel over time if you don't manage thoughts or whatever, it may be that you're dealing with. You can feel that physical change. So it's also one way of thinking of it.

What we do with our mind, how we look at life, how we're reacting to things. That's all mind stuff. And that goes into our brain and our body. So if it's not managed properly, because our body's literally wired for brain and body, are literally wired for love. And if we don't manage that,

properly, it becomes, we feel that in our body physically, because the brain and body aren't thinking. They're just responding. It feels like most people experience life as almost like a victim of their own brain, especially because we have more opportunities now than ever, or pitfalls, if you want to call it that, to have our biology, our neurology hacked in so many different ways and this overstimulated culture that we live in. so why is that distinction important?

Because it feels like you're getting at the essence of who somebody is more when you speak about the mind being very distinct from the brain. If somebody were to really understand that and then threw up this whole conversation, get a clear understanding, not just philosophically, but like ontologically, internally, actually experience and understand the difference between the two, what kind of impact and ripple would that carry out in their life?

It's really important for people to understand the difference because, as you quite rightly said, we are at the mind and brain, I've seen this one thing, and all the hacking that happens, let's hack our biology to live longer, let's be billionaires, paying billions of dollars to make the physiology last longer and all the longevity stuff and all the supplementation and all these things that we do. It's so focused on the physical. But according to the research and according to thousands of years of philosophy as well, and spirituality and hundreds of years of neuroscience,

science, our biology only is around about 1% of who we are, and that's our brain and our body. So something's driving that. And so to understand that distinction is important because you can hack and hack and hack it, you get all the biohacks in the world. That if your mind isn't right, what's happening is that there's a complete disproportionate focus. So, for example, if the brain and body are, according to this research and mind and many others, around about 1% of who we are as humans, people are spending 90% of people, percent of their time on the 1%

and they're giving maybe 1% to the 99. And the way that people pay attention to the mind is stress management. They'll talk about stress management. Then it'll be meditation and it'll be breathing exercises and some affirmations and some positive psychology. Very often it's also seen as like these four pillars

or three pillars and it'll be work on your physically, eat, move, sleep and then it will be thrown a little bit of mind. So there's a disproportionate focus because we are so neurocentric, so physicalists, so materialistic. And science, the dominant science focus in the media is one of a physicalist nature. So that being, it's all about the brain. The brain, your meddala made you do it, your reward circuits will make you do this and

one's an alcoholic or is an alcoholic and you've distorts. So there's so much around that the brain is boss and the brain is generating thoughts almost as an epiphenomenon, as a mistake. but there's no science to back that up. If you look at the scientific studies that they base that kind of thinking on, you'll see it's a huge misinterpretation because they will put people, for example, in a scanner,

an FM or I scanner or something, and they'll ask them to do something, or talk about something, or look at photos. So they're first using their mind, and then they're looking at the impact in the brain. But the way that those studies are presented to the general public is that, okay, so this part of the brain did this and your nucleus accumbents did this,

when you were craving when you were in withdrawal, and therefore the nucleus of convictance is responsible for doing that in you. So it takes away all the autonomy from the human, and we seem as these automatoms that are mechanistic, that a part's taken out, a part to put in, and that's not how we are as humans. It's not good science, but it's easy science to explain. And so this is why it's so important.

So if you look at the statistics of that kind of approach, there's many, many ways of looking at it. But there was an interesting study that that began, around 90s, mid-90s, around the time when we had MRI technology developed that could eventually tell us, show us a little bit more about what's going on in the brain. When I started back in the 80s, we had EEG, we didn't have QEEG yet. I used QEEEG in my research, and we had CT scans. So we didn't have, we had EEGs and CT scans.

So neuroplasticity and my work is one of the earliest in that field, we, it wasn't, they didn't really speak, they knew the mind brain difference that was all. in place in the 80s, but looking at how the differences, they didn't have, we didn't have the technology to really see that, so we had to go on behavioral change and so on. So there was thinking in the 80s that there is a separation, but that the brain can't change. Then, fast forward to the mid-90s, with MRI technology, we see, oh, actually, with different thinking, different experiences, the brain's responding differently. And so that, at the same time as all that was going on, which was really exciting and amazing research, we had a study,

at ease being started all over the world, a huge one throughout this country as well, which looked at the impact of looking at humans in this very neurocentric way. And fast forward to our current day, and we see that people are dying 8 to 25 years younger from preventable lifestyle diseases, which they're attributing to kind of beginning. There was almost like a slide from the 90s back to up to where we are now, where there was a move away from the human, the whole experience, the, the consciousness, the spirituality, all that stuff was seen as,

can't measure, touch it, you know, so we just focus on that. You know, and so that's what's happened a lot and become very dominant. And I know there's been a counter movement and it's very dominant now, which is really good, which is this more awareness of spirituality

and, you know, meditation and all these things. But at the same time, there's an imbalance there too, which we can maybe explore. But yeah, so that's, I mean, that's a long answer, but that's why it's important not to think we just project beings.

the brain isn't boss, the mind is boss, the brain just does what the mind tells it to do. And that distinction is very empowering. So I want to unpack that distinction a little bit more because, again, like you mentioned, from the materialist reductionist notion, the pervasive understanding of how the consciousness works, and it's obviously the hard problem, so we don't know for certain. But the belief why it's spread right now is that at some point of our brain matter developing and the evolutionary process, it gives rise to an experience of itself, aka your mind is emergent from your brain. And you're coming at it from the other way, which is not new per se.

No, not at all. It's ancient. Yeah, the wisdom traditions have been speaking from Advaita bin Donta thousands of years old to hermeticism, talking about the universe being mental and the Gnostic traditions. And so it's not new, but it does feel counterintuitive because a lot of us were born and raised in a society that thinks that the brain creates experiences. When I say you can experience, a term for that I would like to explore on this podcast is Qualia, right? So like the taste of garlic, the experience of seeing the color red, you're not going to cut a brain open and find that, right?

Not at all. So just to have, so I can and the audience can understand your orientation towards this all, like epistemically, you believe that the mind creates. the brain, you believe, do you believe that, like, Eldus Huckley's conception of the brain is a reduction valve? So it's kind of like an antenna that like limits consciousness and filters it for you to navigate reality. To me, they're both equally baffling. I don't have a strong conviction one way or the other. I tend to lean in this podcast more exploring the idealistic notions of consciousness. And that feels more intuitive to me. But I've also been very humbled throughout time by

where my intuitions has led me. So all that to say, do you believe that the brain, the physical brain is emergent from the mind? Or how do you... How do I see it? So first of all, I love everything you just said. It's beautifully expressed and I really love it and relate to it. So I believe that the brain is physical matter

that has been structured and designed to be able to handle a certain amount of mind power because the mind is massive. And that leads to the whole concept of consciousness. and we can break that down and define that in a moment. So I see the brain literally as a physical organ. We know that once the heart stops within 15 to 20 seconds of the heart stopping, the brain flatlines and immediately within those few seconds, cells start to disintegrate. So there's a definite change that occurs.

We also know that the research that's actually also thousands of years old, but it's been hundreds of years of neuroscientists showing this, but also there's a whole body of research that's really been developing over the long. sort of 30 years, looking at the concept of the existence of mind beyond the physical body. Now, I use the word mind because it's more, it's an, and I feel personally, and from the research I've done, it's an older word, it's more ancient, it's more, I think it more accurately explains the equivalent of what people would be reading in Apple News and all over the place, because it's very, people are very into this, you know, what is consciousness, would be consciousness.

So a lot of people, when I talk about mind, they may really, relate that to consciousness, which is not wrong at all, but it's only a part of the mind. So mind has got a lot of aspects to it, and there's three main levels of mind. And the brain is used by the mind. So it's this physical, while we're in this physical world, we need something to be able to literally code the power that is, I believe, is eternal, whatever word you want to use. in a physical body for a temporary time. So that comes from the philosophy that this is just a drop in the ocean of life

that there's so much more that eternal life exists beyond this. So there's also a lot of research showing now, really great research. We have more tools now showing that with 99.9% certainty, which is absolutely massive, that consciousness exists beyond the physical brain and body. And that's very interesting because just to get a paper published, example, I have to have at least a one in 1,000 probability, or 1 in 100 minimum.

This kind of research is showing a one in a million, one in a billion, one in a trillion, one in a billion type of certainty and probability, which means it's very accurate, more accurate than, for example, the statin drugs effectiveness. So what's very interesting there is that there's a very interesting large body of research that's challenging the physicalist approach again. and it was pushed aside of pseudoscience and everything, but it's actually, if you compare the different types, the two approaches, the science is much more accurate.

It's also gold standard, double-blind. I mean, it's really good science. What is the research? It's a big body of research. There's a lot going on like at Arizona University. There's Italian, Italy, throughout universities, throughout the United States. Studying consciousness beyond the body. Yes, stating consciousness beyond the body.

studying the concept of they look at reincarnation, they look at after-death communication, they look at near-death experiences, they look at, so they take those kinds of approaches, and then they look at these also lots of work at Arizona University, but Stuart Hammerhoff, you've probably heard of him. Brilliant, absolutely brilliant, his work, and Sir Roger Penrose that he works with the Orch theory. They've also been for years talking about how does, you know, this whole debate, where does it start? and their researches very effectively mathematically,

they've done all the huge mathematical problems and using quantum physics and using very complex stuff that I briefly understand because you have to understand the various, you have to understand the basic principles. But essentially what they've shown is that there is a whole mathematical equation that falls within the realm of quantum physics

that literally collapses into, they call it collapsing, but it uses parts of the brain in the neurons. We have microtubules, which are like little railway tracks, and they're made of proteins called tubulin. And those seem to be able to vibrate and hold the information that's coming in from the universe, and that each person has their own unique way that we receive this information and that there's this whole connectedness happening.

Now, you know from your work, in spirituality, that that is what is spoken about, that we are all one, that there's this connectedness, that there's, so there's, from the Eastern philosophy and this kind of research, they are coalescing. It's all coming together, the two different sides. And that's been quite dominant, it's been dominant, it's not dominant, it's becoming very, people are becoming much more aware of it. I've seen Hammerho, for example, in Apple News, and I say that because that means that they hear

they've been noticed only recently, but they've been doing this work for 50 years, you know, this incredible work. So yeah, that's that, so I believe then that, therefore, that the mind is the dominant force, it's creative, equals MC squared, Einstein's theory, energy creates matter.

Einstein played with this idea constantly, and his whole philosophy was that, well, energy, energy generates something, it makes something. And so that goes against the physicalist thing, because they say that's impossible. Physical is what is fundamental and it generates energy.

But if you look at the calculations, it doesn't work that way. It's energy actually creates matter. So we are, the mind, consciousness and unconscious, there's different levels, generates and creates matter and activates matter. So Henry Stapp is another scientist that, I think he might have passed by now, just recently.

In California, not UCLA, Berkeley, brilliant, absolute brilliant work where he talks about also this whole concept of consciousness

and the mathematical he's an incredible work with our humans theories and things. So these are such a massive body from quantum physics through physics through after death communication

reincarnation and it's all coming together I've been watching this for the last 40 years and that's all coming together so short answer to a lot I mean long onto

short summary I believe that consciousness creates matter and therefore the brain is pretty much created by consciousness and activated and innovated. And that's why when we physically disintegrate, that energy moves out, but it doesn't stop existing. You've probably heard of Feynman as well,

finds geometric concepts. You know, once you've got your gem, once you, it never disappears. You know, so that's, I don't know, that's a long answer with lots of things thrown in. Yeah, I think it's important just to, you know, put a little charcutory board of all these different scientists and researchers and physicists, you know, and give a little sample platter of the work that is being done that is being more and more studied and emergent. And we've had, you know,

conversations on the podcast at length and ad nauseum with Donald Hoffman, Annika Harris. And it's really exciting to see alternative theories that can appeal to the very scientifically oriented mind in a way that the spiritual traditions have been saying. for a while, but we want proof. And, you know, it's tough to be able to prove theories around non-physical stuff with microscopes, you know, and physical instrumentation that was developed to kind of split the world in this Cartesian way of observation. So I think I just love to be able to breathe humility into it all and say, we don't fully

know what's going on, but through some of the science that's been doing, that's been coming out more recently. It is starting to open a lot of doors, and like you said, it is entering the mainstream in a really exciting way. I think where this now comes down into the practical side of things, because we can get,

I'm sure we could go for two hours, just diving deeper into the philosophical. And you and I got to know what to enjoy it because we start talking about all kinds of things. But this is important because it raises the question of who are you fundamentally, right? Are you a bunch of firing synops? or are these neurocurrelates simply that and that you exist in a vast, more vast field,

you call it your mind, this consciousness in which it reinvites a sense of agency and ability to be able to shape your reality instead of it just happening to you. And so now, when you started studying neuroplasticity, and when you started studying our ability to be able to, with through our mind be able to make real tangible impacts and changes on our health, our relationships, all of this. Was there a predominant study in your clinical research that really like awoken your mind up to how possible the change is? What really, so that's a very big leading question because there's so many areas.

You can't have, understand the stuff without looking at everything. You have to look at spirituality. You have to look at philosophy. You have to look at different types of approaches in science. You have to kind of look at all. So I was trained in a very interesting environment where it was part medicine that we had to do and it was a whole lot of neurology and it was kind of a combination degree, which was very interesting because it gave me exposure to a lot of different areas

from psychology to philosophy to hardcore science, to medicine, to neurology. neuroplastity wasn't actually even really a word at that stage. It was more in neurology. What we would see would be changes in a person's functioning. There was assumptions that the brain was fixed and that once damage occurred, that was it. So I was trained that the mind was separate, but once it's damaged, no matter what you do with your mind, your brain was fixed and damaged. And so at that, what really stimulated that interest was that particular lecture.

we were learning about what they now called TBR traumatic brain injury. At that stage it was called closed head injury. And we were having a lecture on that and whole examination. One of the professors just had said exactly that when you work with someone who's had traumatic brain injury, basically what you need to do is teach him to compensate because that damage is there forever. Now, Luria, you may have heard of him from years ago. He was one of the pioneers and the whole understanding of how the brain works. And then also you might have heard of Roger Penn, a wilder penfield.

Brilliant, brilliant. I probably think one of the most famous and done the most incredible biggest body of work when it comes to open brain surgery who was a dominant physicalist but through his work shifted and became very much a dualist

after that, recognizing that, well, jurist in the sense that the mind influences the brain. So while the penfield was a big infant in my life, Luria, those kinds of people. And we were having a lecture and in that lecture, this professor said,

so this is it, once the brain's damaged, that's it, you've got to teach your patients to compensate. And that was what triggered. And I remember putting up my hand and saying, and look, there weren't women, many women in science in those days. It was ridiculous. Patriarchy was very dominant in those days. And I think I was about five women in a class of mainly males.

And I said, but how can that be possible? Because if you think about it, you always are different. every moment of every new experience ingrows you as a human just think of that logically so therefore if your mind is using your brain then how can it not change

and he said and he said well go and do research on it and he was being a bit sarcastic so I said okay well what area and he said well traumatic brain injury because we'll see a CHA cause injury because there's not much research on it because why do research on it

some damage the damage is done And so I said, okay, there was a literal dearth of research in that area and that's what stimulated me. So I started researching that concept and I sort of working with clients that patients and doing, I mean, very experimental using developing mind driven systems and formulas to see if I could train someone who's really battling, could there be change in their behavior, cognitive, emotional, social, that stuff. And we thought, I mean, I had clients that were literally written off by neurologists as vegetables.

That's what they used to say in those days. And we were functioning, they were 18 and functioning at like a sort of 12, sorry, seven, eight, nine year old level. And within eight months going back to university, I went to school, finishing school, going on to university when they had been written off. Now, I didn't just see that once. I sort over and over again. So I knew that there was something.

So that was some of the earliest work in neuroplasticity in my field. And that's when that, you know, that's sort of over that period was when I really saw that, wow, mind really does change the physical, physical, but it's logical, because if you think about it, take all the science, all this complex stuff we've just been saying, and they talk about being the hard question of science, consciousness, I don't agree with that at all. I think it's the easiest question of science, but we've just looked at it the wrong way. We've asked it in the wrong way. You and I have a conversation. After this, we're both going to be different, because you have a point of

view, I have a point of view, we're sharing ideas, we should be different. We're different from the day we've just had. We can just look at ourselves and observe. ourselves and see how we've grown through experiences, the change is evident. We are constantly changing and we're constantly changing and those changes impact us. Just think of when you're very sad, how your body feels. If you've gone through a trauma, feel how your body feels, when you're feeling extremely stressed, how that can build up in your body and if it's unmanaged, we see that. I mean, I've done research where we've shown telomeres shortening and getting a changing significantly in periods of nine weeks, which is pretty much unheard of. I've worked with

Lisa Eppel who work was Elizabeth who Elizabeth Gosh for the B I've forgotten her last time he won the Nobel Prize in the work on telomeres and based on their research

I did research and I sent them my stuff and they said this is unreal that stuff can because normally takes five years for telomeres to change so now telomeres are important because telomeres influence cell division

cell division is important because we have 800,000 2 million new cells forming every second so therefore just think of this whole picture if I am making, if you and I and the listeners and viewers are making 800,000 to a million new cells every second, and that is making up every organ in our body which makes up our systems, which makes up your brain and body, and you are making new cells every second. And on top of that, what the research shows is that the

quality of those cells is influenced by how you are managing your mind in the moment. And we see that direct impact on telomeres, which for many years we've seen as been a proxy around diet and exercise, but there's been a lot of work done, especially by Lisa Eppel, on how we manage our mind, stress management, etc., and how that influences telomere length. And generally, the work around telomeres has been that it'll take up to five years of changing diet, exercise, etc., before we see changes in telomere length.

And telomeres the end of chromosomes. So for those who do they're a bit lost at the moment, chromosomes like an X, and where my fingernails are would be the telomeres. And telomeres, as cells divide, those telomeres get shorter, and then they replenish. But if we don't, as we age, they don't do it as well, but also if we're very stressed out, traumatized, sick, they don't work as well either.

What we didn't know was that can you influence telemers because they're really important in physical health. And what the research showed was diet, exercise, et cetera, but it would take five years. What we showed with our research, what Lisa Epples also shown with hers with different techniques, is that you can change it in short periods of time. So neuroplasticity can happen in the,

the shortest nine weeks. We've had people gain 35 to 35 years of biological age, which is health in their body within a nine-week period. And so that's neuroplasticity in action. And that relates to how we're managing our mind. And then that, you know, that drives the changes in our body. So that's the equals MC square. We've come full circle, you know, back to that point. So that's what stimulated me, that research and traumatic brain injury and just seeing it in different spheres and seeing how people have come through. I also did a ton of work in such a lot of work in South Africa for 25 years working in the poorly performing schools and things. So I grew up in the apartheid era, the transition when Mandela came into power in the post-aparid era. And I was

working in what we call the all the schools that they just shoved out in the townships, terrible stuff. I mean, it was, they weren't getting an education. And I went into those schools. We had contracts to work in those schools. And I would literally teach the teachers and the students how to think, how to learn so they could at least get, you know, educate, get knowledge. And the results were phenomenal. We had schools that were not even getting an education, becoming top schools in the country and that kind of thing. I worked in a wonder after the genocide, a few years after the genocide.

I've seen so much in so many constrained, I can tell you stories for hours and hours about seeing scenarios and situations of people in situations that they shouldn't be functional. But once you give them their understanding, of this physical is not yet. There's so much more. Coming to mental health, the biomedical models,

labeled and tied people into disease names and disease diagnoses that limits people. And so seeing the changes when you show people, hey, this is not who you are. You aren't bipolar depression. You are experiencing that as basically a signal. There's a because of behind that.

And there's amazing research backing this up that when you look at how we're showing up as humans in our conscious mind, and you look at that and you see that that's not who you are. That is data. And if you look at that data, you can track back to the source and you can't change what's happened, but you can reconstruct and you can change how it plays out into the future. And that process is neuroplasticity. It's directed neuroplasticity.

It shows the power of the mind. It shows the power of humans getting through things in life, long answer. Hey everyone. Did you know that there is one phase of sleep that almost everyone fails to get enough of? And this one phase of sleep is responsible for most of your body's daily rejuvenation. I'm talking about deep sleep. And if you don't get enough, you'll probably struggle with cravings, slow metabolism, premature aging, and many other adverse effects. A big reason we don't get enough deep sleep is because over 80% of the population is deficient in magnesium. Magnesium increases GABA, which encourages relaxation on a cellular level, which is critical for sleep.

When I first tried supplementing with magnesium and my sleep score was super high, I didn't wake up a single time throughout the night. It was all the proof that I needed. It was legit. I just felt great when I woke up and I've been taking it ever since. Not all magnesium, though, is created equally. I personally have been using the one from bioptimizers. And like other magnesium supplements that maybe give you one to two forms,

this one gives you all seven forms of magnesium. It's designed to help you calm your mind, help you follow. sleep, stay asleep, and wake up feeling refreshed. For an exclusive offer, go to buyoptimizers.com slash no-leself, link in description as always, and use code no-le-self to save 15% at checkout. I hope you enjoy. Back to the episode. It was a great answer, though. Everybody can relate to some degree, whether they're recovering from a traumatic brain injury, whether they're struggling something, mind-body relationships, or their life is just generally good and they want to be able to live a great life.

Yeah. Because the work that you were doing in South Africa, and I think it's so important. Like, we go through our education systems, especially in the Western world. And it's great for so many reasons. But we learn so much about the external world and we don't really get taught

how this mind, body, breath works. And if we did, I mean, what kind of world would we live in if somebody knew how to regulate their nervous system? Exactly. You know, it's like basics. Yeah, it's fundamental. Yeah.

And so doing this work for so long, you've seen patterns, you've discovered what really works for people. And this is where I would just like to love to zoom in on the neuropsychal and make it really practical for everybody who's listening right now. So what is the goal of what the neuropsychal system and the way that you kind of break the five steps down? And what is it aiming to do? And then what is it?

Okay. So it was birthed out of my work with traumatic brain injury from that first, at first, the professor making that comments and doing the research. And what I needed was to understand how do, what are you like talking? This is an experience. How does this become part of me?

How does it get installed in my network? What is the mind-being body connection? What is a thought? What are memories? So I did a lot of work around that and then started understanding that there's a process that we go through in terms of the experiences of life

becoming part of our neurophysiology. So that's the psychoneurobiology, which is a fairly new word as well. It's a fairly new field. Psychoerea immunology, psychoreobiology. But it's basically this relationship between the mind-brain. So in trying to understand that relationship, now I'm doing all the science and doing all this stuff, but I'm working with patients. And you can't go and have this kind of conversation with someone who's battling with

a traumatic brain injury or some kind of on the neurological side, a tumor or something like that, or a stroke victim. Or on the other side, someone going through extreme. trauma from something abusive or whatever and then in between sort of learning disabilities and that sort of things. I worked with quite a wide range of patients. Now, you can't sit and have this philosophical discussion with everyone. I had to have something practical. What could I sit and do with them to help that client or that patient who had a traumatic brain injury who wanted to get back and finish a school with her peer group who was 18 and she had lost almost a year of school because

of her car accident? What did I do with her? That's what. where it started. So I took that science you know, what is the system? What are we doing? What is it step by step? And a lot of science later, I developed this formula. It's not even, it's not a technique. It's not a process. It's a formula because you can put anything into it. There's so many great techniques and ideas and philosophy, not even so much, well, philosophies can also fit in, but it's not that it's, this is the technique. It's a formula that helps to facilitate directed neuroplasticity. So that whole thing of telomeres,

directing them, if you're making this, that really got me. If we are making that many cells that we estimate and sort of understand, if one neuron has the power 10 to 18, 10 to 16, which is 400 billion operations per second, and that's one, we have 100 billion. What's the relationship between them? That's just the neuron. What about inside the neuron? What about outside the neuron?

What about all the other energy? How can we take all of that and put that into a way that translates into me managing myself for an extremely stressed or backing that student to get back to school or dealing with a stroke effect of stroke or whatever. Forma and then just day-to-day loving, dealing with politics, socioeconomic situations. Just the challenges of being, I mean, I don't know if you're a parent, but we've got four kids running a business, all of that.

And so I wanted to understand that process, and that's where the neuropsycho was birthed. It was birthed out of initially the helping traumatic brain injury patients rebuilds their ability to function on a cognitive, emotional, social, intellectual level. Incredible improvements, we saw significant changes, 35 to 75% changes in those areas of function. Nothing that we expect. In fact, the results were none of us, you know, if nothing happens, it's still research. But if there's a 5% difference, we're going in the right direction.

So when we got those results, we got external statisticians in to look at the work and that kind of thing. And that's when I knew we were onto something. And so the neuropsych was birthed out of that. And then it got translated back down into these five steps. So when I say five steps, it sounds, oh, well, those are so simple. Everything I'm going to say you already know. And that's good because what we know is how you put what you know together and how you filter that and how you use it in a rhythm. That's what I've discovered with this formula.

We are always in a neuroplastic state. We are, our body's bioplastic or brain is neuroplastic. What does plastic mean? Can change. So nothing's fixed. So nothing is fixed. So that's Einstein's equation equals MC squared. So what you do with your energy of your consciousness is going to change that formula.

And that's what Henry Stapp took that even further with his work and really showed that translation mathematically and everything. His work's quite brilliant. If someone's interested, that's a great place to dive a little deeper. They're interested in that translation. So essentially, if you are, it's five steps, and they simply, and they simply, but they're very complex. Being in a plastic state means that we're always changing. So from the moment you open your eyes,

or the moment you go to sleep, you're having experiences, thousands. And those experiences are being processed. But they've been processed by what I call the non-conscious mind. Now, there's only probably two or three of us in the world that talk about the non-conscious. Myself and Erin Nadad Ashgar, who's, I think he's at UCLA was there.

Anyway, he's moved around a bit. And it's a concept that we should be talking about more. So I've spent 40 years studying the non-conscious mind. Now, the non-conscious mind is that deepest part of you that often we can refer to as a sort of spiritual level. It's where your intuition, your insight, your wisdom, your how to handle life, your guidance, all that stuff. It's perfect. It's your new. It's your euness.

It's the uniqueness of you. It's, there's only one Andre. There's no one can ever do what you're doing. You make a lousy someone else. You make an amazing Andre. All of that's within the depth of a world. or non-conscious. It's massive.

It's huge. It's beyond space and time. It's everything about everything about you and about your connection to the world. Now, that's all very spiritual, wiffly, waffly words I've just said, but we can tie that down scientifically with quantum physics, with mathematics and that sort of thing. And so the non-conscious mind is a processor. From the moment you wake up in the morning, to the moment you, well, 24-7, it never stops.

But as you wake up in the morning, you're experiencing life and through consciously experiencing life, The non-conscious takes that and builds that into packets of energy. So there's all the data. So this conversation, every word I'm saying, every word you're saying are little bits of memory, data. And they cluster together into this, into a thought. The thought is this podcast, this interview that you're doing with me, which whatever you call it, say you call it the mind-brain-body connection. So that would be the name of the thought.

Everything we're saying is data. Now, our non-conscious minds, yours and mine, at speeds faster than 400 billion actions per second, are processing this information and into these clouds of energy, E equals MC squared. Then it's coded, like literally photocopied and coded into the brain and the body. And as this energy enters into the brain, now I use QEG for on your scientific research. So all the people have heard of delta, theta, alpha, beta, gamma, those are the brain waves, the frequencies of the brain waves. And they basically represent energy flowing through the brain.

So if someone's dead, we don't see energy in the brain. When someone's alive, we see energy in the brain. And so someone's alive, you're living. And so your living is being processed by an unconscious mind and put into the brain and the body, not just the brain, the body too. All the semantic work people talk about and all heartworms stored in your body. Yes, it is. This conversation we're having now is not just going into your brain. It's going into your entire body.

It's going into your fingertips. It's everywhere. It's across your entire body. We have different versions of this network building. So it's an entire network that the not- unconscious mind builds at the speed of light. Every new word I say, every new concept is added, built in. But you do it differently to the listeners, to we've got some people in the studio with us here. All of us are taking these words and building them differently because we're unique. But our

non-conscious is doing that. And it's happening very, very fast. As soon as it's into the brain and the body, then it filters through the non-conscious filters it through the subconscious. So the subconscious is a filter. doesn't store, it holds things temporarily, but it slows down the non-conscious. Because the non-conscious, and this is work done by Hammerhoff and Sue Roger Penrose, and a lot of people, there's a whole team of, probably a couple hundred scientists in this field that talk about the speed of the non-conscious and the conscious mind and that kind of thing. But what we know is that the non-conscious mind is massive, it's big, it's huge. It's that thing that the spiritual world will talk about being connected to the oneness

and all that sort of thing, to universe, to whatever you use, to source. etc. That is so big and so fast and so vast because it extends into whatever eternity is. So for a time it has to kind of channel down, slow down and work through a conscious mind and a physical brain and body that are limited fast. I mean one neuron has the speed of 10 to the 16 as I said, which is a billion operations per second, which is quite phenomenal. That's one neuron. We have 100 billion. We don't even understand the relationship between too. An AI, just side note, AI, is based on the operations of one neuron, 10 to 16. So, and that will not produce consciousness. That's the kind of philosophy and that's another

whole discussion. So essentially what we have is this incredible speed of our massiveness of who we are. And that has to, for a time, be channeled through something slowed down. So the subconscious slows it down, slows down whatever the non-conscious knows you need in the moment, because we know what we need deep down to deal with a destructive thought, something beautiful that's going to increase our resilience. Whatever is needed is filtered through subconscious and then bubbles up into the conscious mind to get the conscious mind's attention. And the conscious mind is awake when you're awake.

It's asleep when you're asleep. Your brain and body go to sleep physically when you're asleep. So when you're asleep, your brain becomes unconscious and your conscious mind goes to sleep. But the non-conscious never switches off. never switched off. So the subconscious doesn't do anything when we are sleeping because it's reliant on the input from the non-conscious. Now I know this is a lot, but it's three levels. Non-conscious is doing everything. It's got all the solutions, all the problems, all our chaos of our life, all the good, bad and ugly are built and processed. And for every toxic issue, it generates all the solutions. So we in our perfect spiritual level, we have intuition, insight, wisdom, all these things. Dr. Tereswar talk, Taraswa talks about intuition. She's huge on intuition. intuition. This is what I'm talking about. This is the science of literally of intuition. We have all these solutions that we can handle life. And that's what the masters, the Eastern philosophy, the guides, all these sorts of things. We're trying to tap into that level. A practical example.

Let's say someone comes to an else you, Andre, I've got this and this problem. It's for any of yours, let's say. And you listen and you listen and you listen. And you then just pour out this wisdom and they say, oh my gosh, and then you listen to yourself and you think, why don't I listen to myself? You know, we have this wisdom in us. And even now and then we listen to our own wisdom, but we should listen more often. So that's the non-conscious. That's huge, massive, and it has to be channeled down because if we pulled our unconscious into our conscious mind, it would explode. It couldn't, it could chatter and the brain and body would shatter. The power's too much. So it has to be, literally has to be toned down to what the brain can handle. And the brain can handle a lot,

but not as much as the spiritual level. So this is a lot. The neuropsychel takes all the sides, and I haven't even mentioned half of it, is saying, okay, well, if this is the case, if I'm constantly building, do I have any kind of control? If I'm constantly in this neuroplastic state

that I'm consciously wiring all this stuff in, does it go in both directions? Yes, that's the plastic paradox. So whether you like it or not, you are building life into you. What we need to recognize is that I can have some level of influence over how I build that stuff into me.

So I am the architect of my plasticity. Sometimes I'm just going to be so reactive that I'm going to build something into my brain-brain body network that's not going to be good for me. And when I say build it in, as soon as that energy from an unconscious mind, that packet of energy hits the brain, it activates all the neurochemistry, the electromagnetic, the quantum energy, the genetics, proteins are made,

and networks grow. and those proteins fold in certain ways and when it's something that is insured of and deep and healthy the proteins fold correctly the network builds like it should and then it enhances our capacity to function and grow et cetera et cetera and learn and all that stuff but if we don't manage it and it's toxic

the proteins must fold and that creates a pattern and a network that's disruptive chemistry etc etc now that immediately sends a message to the immune system of the brain and the body immune system on the brain was only discovered a few years ago. We thought only the body had an immune system. The brain has its own immune system as well.

So what's interesting is that the brain and body do not read any difference between whether you have, let's say, for example, a COVID virus or a rhinovirus or whatever virus, or a bacteria doesn't see any difference between that entering your body and something toxic that you haven't managed, like some trauma or some fight with someone or whatever. They both become protein chemical structures in the brain. brain and the body with energy inside of them because there's that energetic component. That's Hamahoff and Roger Penrose's work. That's the microtubles and tubulin I spoke about earlier on.

So all this science is telling us that we actually have a level of control. We can redirect that neuroplasticity. So the neuropsychel takes all this and says, okay, that's a lot. How do I do this if I'm battling? If I'm in a stress moment, if I'm in a challenge, if I want to get my mind right because I've had some kind of chronic traumatic and cephalopathy, sports damage from, you know, boxing or something like that. If a car accident, just life, trauma, you need to be able to read the signals.

So it starts, you can each have able to direct the neuroplasticity. That starts with first of all being able to train yourself to stand back and observe yourself, which we very good at doing. When we do that, our whole frontal lobe lights up in a way that it should because it's, it's structured to respond to that action. And when that happens, it then sends signals to the rest of the brain and so on and so on, there's this whole downward effect through the body because it's just responding. It's not thinking.

It's responding like it should. Now, the example of that would be when one falls in love or you have a great connection, like having a great discussion, that activates a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbents, and the VTA, which are very associated with what we call craving and the reward circuit. everyone's heard about the reward circuit. And when drug addicts are in withdrawal, that withdrawal circuit they crave and all that kind of thing. So that circuit is designed for something beautiful. It's designed to help us when we connect.

It responds. It lights up. So all the parts of the brain and the different structures and the way they work together are all designed in the body to light up immune system, hormones, hypothylamic maturity axis. Every part is designed in this harmony to respond. when we manage our mind. When we don't manage our mind, we create this disruption. And the first point of call of the disruption is the network that we build,

which then causes all this other downward effect. So when the proteins must fold, what happens is then that creates an immune response. The immune system says, okay, this is like a virus. Let me send out the immune, the little soldiers and starts creating an autoimmune response. And all this goes wrong. So the neuropsychle looks at, okay, let's see how are you showing up. Stand back. observe yourself.

The minute you do that, you immediately open the door between the conscious, subconscious and non-conscious. A lot of the time we live in this, you mentioned right at the beginning of this interview about how we live in this very hyper-activated world,

technology, etc., etc., when we live so activated, we live in the very much the conscious mind-brain loop and only dip into the wisdom of the non-conscious intimately and that's not a healthy state to be in. We need to keep that flow going all the time.

And yeah, so the neurocycle basically, sorry, I'm telling you. The neuropsycho teaches you how to get yourself back into that flow. We can break down the steps. Let's do it. So is that step one? Yes. So the first step is to observe yourself and then what do you your primary body is very organized. It's very structured.

It's no chaos. It's very organized. So you've got to follow like, it's good logic. So the first thing is to be very observant in a very compassionate, but clinical way. Okay, what am I feeling? Where am I feeling that in my body? what behaviors am I generating from this? What am I saying and doing?

How am I saying and doing it? What is my perspective attitude in this moment? So it's an observation step, but you stand back and you gather awareness. Gather it very specific. I chose that word very specifically. You're in control gathering. You're not just being bombarded. You're choosing.

You're looking. You're reserving. Those four signals that I mentioned, they always work together as a cluster. Emotions will never work on their own. Emotions always show up somewhere in your body. influence a behavior and influence a perspective. So we've always got to look at those four. So that's like those of four categories of signals.

So depression, anxiety would be emotions. Life sucks would be a perspective. Gut ache when you're worried about something would be the bodily sensation. A behavior would be maybe getting snapping, irritable, and going into the fight response, whatever. So infinite number of combinations that happen with us. So just to make this super simple, like if I was to explain this to a toddler,

things happen, you experience anxiety, fear, jealousy, something happens, and you don't want to just be a reactionary victim to what is happening. So you watch it. You watch how the fluctuations in your mind and your body and your emotions, your perspective. More specifically, yes. So even enough, got a book for kids, for parents with kids, young as two to 12 years of age. So you can teach, I taught this to two-year-olds. So very, the most basic level, yes, is when a toddler, for example, is throwing a tantrum or getting very upset or something like that, is to be able to tell them to say, okay, let's just see what you did. Let's stand back and observe, but you don't use those words.

You would literally use something like a toy, like I've created a little brainy toy. We'd say, okay, I see brainies upset or pick up any toy, it doesn't matter. So transfer, because it's easier for them to, they don't know how to observe themselves, so you totally, so you give them something to observe. So if you go to that level, so if it's an old, if it's someone, who's older, anything from five, six, eight and onwards, you can say, let's look at how you're showing up. So it's very much, what are you saying? What are you feeling?

Where do you feel this, nobody? You know, there's all the language you use for, so I've got all that, I've got books on how a parent can speak that simple language right down to the level of a two-year-old. But the point is to create that force to observe in those four categories. And the tradition with Vipasana, they talk about any time, like as some sort of, and sort of subconscious material is triggered, there's always going to be a biochemical sensation somewhere in the body and then also coupled with an abnormality in the breath. So your breath will get a little bit more shallow, you'll hold it completely, something will happen. And the more you can observe the more subtle sensations and altering of your breath and your biology,

the more you can actually be with it and not just be reactionary. Yes, that's the same principle. Yeah. Okay, so that's step why. What's step two? Well, that particular description would fall into the preparation. So I call it mind-brain pre-prep. So any kind of breathwork, visualization, meditation,

gets you into that space where you can get your physiology under control. So, for example, any kind of breath, when you breathe in, you signal to your brain and your body, it's going to be okay. When you breathe out, you're telling your body it is okay. And as you say, to observe that, because sometimes we, as you say, gosh, we should we lift our shoulders, we breathe short. So all of the way we breathing is a way of observing.

So for example, if someone's very worked up and you just say, just breathe, sometimes they'll breathe and they'll do that, they'll get worse. So it's all that observation is kind of a preparation phase. And you speak heavily around the importance of lengthening your exhales, right? Yes, in for three, out for seven is one of my favorite because that's... And for three hold for three? No, just in for three. out for seven.

And then you do that six times, so 60 seconds, and it does it, you can feel it, you'll immediately feel that sensation of oxygen and blood flow to your brain. You almost feel a little bit high, but it creates enough of a pause to be able to stand back and observe. So when someone's in a very high reactive state where they're really being triggered, it's very hard to get cognitive at that stage. So that's where the breathing is vital. And that's where that really works very, very well to create that pause.

and then you can re-engage. And then the re-engaging is when you then would move into the five steps of the neuropsychal. So you have to have almost like a CPR kind of situation. You know, it's a comp or a group I actually teach that to. It's a stress CPR. That gets you into that state of observation. Could you name all of the five steps, just rattle them off and then we'll go through them? Absolutely.

So the first step is gather awareness. The second step is reflect. The third step is mindstorm. And then kind of genetically writing, but just mindstorm is an easier word. and then recheck, which is a reconceptualization, and then active reach, very specifically chosen for what they do. Each step is giving you, each step as you consciously do it, you consciously forcing your conscious mind to deliberate and intentionally engage with an unconscious. And then as you do that, then the non-conscious can send information through the subconscious and bubbles up. Okay, so when you create that little, like a little bit of breathing,

I always recommend start with either a little bit of breathing, a bit of meditation, whatever works for you, however long, there's millions of ways you can do it. But even just if you just breathe for the 60 seconds, that's going to do a lot just to get you in that space. That opens up a lot. And then you start with step one, which is gather awareness. And that's where you would actually clinically, with compassion and kindness, I say clinically, with compassion and kindness. If you don't bring that mindset in

and you bring in judgment and harsh critical towards yourself, that then throws your physiology back into a state and you're going to throw yourself back into a, you're going to get stuck in a mind-brain loop. And then you actually make it worse, you don't make it better. So the compassion and kindness, and there's a million other reasons why it changes the physiology, then you're going to just literally say,

how am I feeling in this moment, what are my emotions in this moment, where do I fill them in my body? what is it what behaviors am I about to do would I normally do would I just snap at that person am I going to withdraw what am I already doing I'm ready whatever because you could be in the midst of this and then what is my perspective in this moment so it could be that depression

just a heavy lethargy through your body for the bodily sensation could be withdrawing and life sucks I mean that's just a simple so it's an observation of those no judgment just compassion and with the compassion is the view that this is not who you are. You aren't depression. You can't have depression.

You can't have bipolar depression or schizophrenia because they're not things like cancer. They are signals that are giving you data. They're data. And if we look at them, as hard as it is, we will get the data. So that first step is to tell yourself, this is not you.

You're showing up like this. Let's see, you know, how you're showing up. And then how we show up is always attached to a thought. The thought is the thing made of memories. that are an unconscious mind built in response to an experience. So we want to backtrack. We want to backtrack. If I'm showing up like this, I never show up just randomly.

It shows up because that's coming from something, that something is a thought. So in the reflex step, which is step two, you're starting to find the thought that those force signals are attached to. And a thought has made a lot of memories. I mean, you can have a few hundred to a few thousand memories in that thought, depending on what it is and how big, et cetera, et cetera. So the reflex step then is taking that is another day. It's also data capture. Reflex is step two.

Step two is reflex. So the first one is essentially as you slow down your breath, you kind of gather yourself, you ground, you chill out, you bring some compassion to whatever the trigger, the stimulus is. That's the preparation. That's the preparation. And then gather awareness. Is kind of taking that a little bit of a step further. Yes.

To like presence it and to like be able to make deeper contact with it essentially. Yes. It's you engaging now. You're engaging and you're connecting. And you're having a conscious, literally a conscious analysis, literally giving yourself therapy, whatever you want to call it. You're literally observing. Yes, it's a conscious engagement.

Speak out loud. Have you, if you're going to have paper and write down as well as you observe. Is there a difference from separating yourself from it and observing it as a phenomenon in itself? Or do you actually embody it and feel into the, how person it is. You merge. You are merging,

but you're also disengaging and merging at the same time. So I call it the multiple perspective advantage. So you're going into an MPA. So you've done that breathing, all that stuff.

Now you're going to go into a multiple perspective advantage. It's a metacognitive state sort of you're aware of. Yes, this whole thing is metacognitive. Where you're thinking about your thinking, yeah. So it's an awareness.

So it's the MPA multiple perspective advantage is where you stand back and you observe yourself from multiple perspectives. So that's where the, compassion and all that stuff comes in. So you're in essence observing, but you're still merging. So you're still feeling that.

You're still feeling, you're not observing yourself as an object. There's still that engagement, which is really important because that that's that essence of that humanity and that connection that we always want to keep with ourselves and not disengage completely, but you want to be able to observe it. So then you're observing the four signals. It's gathering data. That's activated neuroscientifically what that does is it actually activates the network. And as soon as the network's activated, the little protein.

and chemicals, the bond starts loosening. So that means you can start rewiring. That's the plasticity aspect. Which is where reflect comes in? Reflect takes it even deeper. So the gather awareness gets that process going. Then reflect is your classic, who what, when we, why, how. So it's the classic now, you've got this data that you just have gathered awareness.

Now, who were you in that moment? Who else was involved? Maybe someone, maybe there wasn't. But who were you in that moment? that in that moment that it's happening. You're always trying to keep it in the moment that it's happening. Don't try and solve the world's problems and your whole life's problems in one shot.

You take this as a rhythm in the now moment. So you're observing the who, the what, what am I worked up about? What is this? So you're getting more detail as opposed to just the signals. So the signals are being fleshed out. The when, the where, the why and the how. That's reflect.

And you answer those questions and you write them down. And there's a way of writing that I talk about just now. I don't want to give people too many things at once, but there's a way to write down that really captures this and takes you deep. Then the third step is now you've done this first two. So you've got this organized thing of signals. You've got these who-what-win-wey-why answers. I've got data.

So now this is going to have activated. It's brought the network up. And there's a lot of memories in those networks. And there's connected networks, like trees in a forest. You'll see the roots. So what we do is the third step is a stream of consciousness. It's a mind storm. What do the first two steps generate?

What else comes up? So you just let it flow. whatever comes up. It could be, your shopping list pops up. It could be something from 20 years ago. It doesn't matter if it doesn't make sense.

The point is just capture what's come up because there's something. At some point you'll understand that. Then you've got all this data. Now you've got this network up and active and now you can start redesigning. So it's a deconstruction

and a little bit and then you start reconstructing. And so the fourth and the fifth step is going into more of a reconstructive stage. So the fourth step is the recheck. I've got all this data. at all this data in front of me. And now I'm going to start reorganizing this.

The big question is, this has happened. What can I do about it? Multiple perspectives. What are the different ways of looking at this? How can I see this differently? How can I see if there's this trauma associated with this place? Instead of always thinking that I can never go to that place because it's got this hold on me, we don't want the past to, we can't change the past, but we can't, we can't

change the impact of the past on our present and on our future. So a reconceptualization would say, okay, that was pain. for what happened there. But there's also the good, look at the good that came out of it. Or look at how I handled it. Look at how I succeeded through that, whatever it is. So it's reconceptualizing. And you're not solving the whole thing in one day.

What my research has shown, mine and others, is that this rhythm of the neuropy that you do daily, you need to do for at least 63 days. You're not going to rewire a network in one hour, one session. It does take time. So it's cumulative a little bit each day. So then you wrap that up. You do, it's exhausting.

so you don't want to drain yourself. Your physical brain and conscious mind get very tired in your body. Your non-conscious mind never gets tired, but it also will tell you when you're tired, so we need to listen. So I always say keep it within a 5, 15 maximum hour window that you work through the rhythm of the neuropy. So 15 minutes is kind of a good amount of time to do this. So you do that work of the recheck and then you go into, okay, so how can I take an action

out of this data I've gathered, this recheck that I've done, into an action that I can apply today. And that's generally some sort of a statement. Like, I can handle this. I don't know how yet. Something as simple as that, but I will. Or I'm learning how to handle this. Or it's okay to feel not okay.

So it's generally some sort of a statement that's made up of the work you've just done with the previous four steps. And then I always recommend to attach it to something visual. Like a visualization. You all know that works so well. Maybe you visualize a white flower or something like that. Or you could, a quote. Maybe there's a great quote or there's something great.

that whatever, you can, you create something. Now, that is your anchor for the day. To keep you in a space you work on this tomorrow. So you don't allow yourself to do this all day long. That particular activity, you can use the Neuicycle for other things all day long. But when you're working on something that you're trying to change, you do that work. And the active reach then is what you anchor for yourself in during the day. So I've got an app called the Neurocycle, which is available on iTunes.

And we buy apps and there's a web version. So in that there's a little place where you can write your active. reach and you can set the timer to go off at least seven times, you can do it more, you can make it go off every hour. And then it just pops up on your screen and all you do is read it, think about it and move on. So that just keeps you in that space. This is so important to do because the active reach, if you allow yourself to go back to that space, you can undo the work you've just done. Whatever you think about the most grows, that's plasticity in action. So very often we can do the work, activate something. But if we don't manage and capture that, we can put ourselves into

toxic stress. Stress is an intelligence. We want to use it intelligently. So the active reach keeps you in that place that I did my work. Now I'm moving forward. I'll pick that up tomorrow. And that's pretty much the rhythm you get into. So that's doing the work of, like if you've got an issue that you're trying to deal with,

a disruptive thought, a pattern, something like that. And a pattern is a disruptive thought. It's a thought that's doing something. Maybe you want to build something. On the positive side, there might be something that you're trying to grow. There's a new pattern that you're trying to grow. that you're trying to grow. So it's not necessarily always breaking down to the problem.

It could also be building a new network. And during the course of the day, once you get into that rhythm of the neuropsychal, because it's directing the whole mind-brain-body connection, you can use it in 10 seconds. I mean, I'll be in an interview, and someone will ask me a question, and I will think, what, you know,

what, I mean, that's stimulated something and I'll quickly run through a neurocycle to get to the answer. So I use it to get me into that insight level, that intuitive level, so I can answer questions. So it's got multiple. uses. There's many other uses too, but for the sake of this session, for the sake of not confusing everyone, that's the basic principle. So the fifth one, the last one was putting into action, have some sort of behavioral change

that actually moves it from the level of conceptual to embodiment. Yes, so you're starting to rewire the network and stabilize it. Because it's like as you start the work, it's basically the five steps embrace process and reconceptualize. So essentially that last step is how you anchor yourself in the work you've done today so you don't go backwards and you don't try and do too much because if you do too much you'll stop it, you'll get overwhelmed. So it's a statement, it's a quote, it's a it's a visualization, it's a combination, it could be an affirmation, it could be a little technique, like a little CBT technique. Those out of context, out of the five steps, don't create sustainable change. When you put them into the right place, like Actra reaches all the little action type of things that you can do to help.

help you. If it's in that, it's followed the correct format, then it's going, the protein changes and the chemical changes and all that biology will happen in the correct way. Otherwise, it's a situation of you do it, and then it's fun for a while, and then you've got to do it all over again. And people get so disturbed and upset and think, what's wrong with me? Why can't I change? Because they're not following the correct rhythm for the correct amount of time. So you have a bit of growth forward, and you go 10 steps back. And that's kind of how you, why you have to go through a rhythm, for at least 63 days. Our online community sent in some questions that I want to add in here.

Shannon from California said, what advice do you have for those who are apprehensive about losing a part of their personality during the process of rewiring their mind? Oh, you won't lose. That's such a great question, by the way. You won't lose your find. It's in the unconscious mind, your perfect use, all of the brilliance and the hugeness of your humanity, and all the insights and intelligence, all of that's there.

So what it does is you peel off the layers that the conscious mind has got us stuck in from social media thinking you should be like this. And all the, we make a lousy someone else, we make a great us. And so this work really helps you find you. So I do a lot of identity work with people and this is key because that's one of the biggest things that get shot. If I think of most of my patients and most of the clients that I do one-on-one work with and the therapists and things that I train,

that is one of the biggest issues that most, common issue, people feel like they're losing identity or losing part of themselves. Fiatta, like more specifically, do you recommend we plan for a space to grieve the part of ourselves? We have lost or do you have any strategies one can use to make this aspect of rewiring the mind easier to accept or tolerate? So the grieving aspect is obviously, I don't have enough context here, but what I think I'm hearing her say is that there's going to be a change in her. But see, what we get used to, we can have that. We can have that. that we've developed that are counter to our natural way that we function, that are cool,

perfect you that are inside an unconscious mind. And so life can really tarnish and taint that and we can create counterparts to our personality that get us through, but they're not totally authentic. So I think what she's saying is that from life's experiences, she's developed certain ways of functioning. Now with rewiring, some of those may go away. So yes, there is a grieving, but the grieving comes in and the big grieving period comes around 36 to 42 days

from the research that we've done. We've tracked us daily, what the changes that go on in people's lives. Around that time period, when you've done this consistent work daily, your insight expands like a 360-degree view. You know, when you start you like this, like a horse with blinkers,

and they come off and come off. And that brings almost more anxiety and more depression, but it's different. It's a grieving and a knowing and a seeing the change and the growth and the things that we need to go through as humans. It's good. It's healthy.

It's hard. But it's a grieving we need to allow ourselves to do. And generally, that's about a sort of 10-day period in that rhythm and then it picks up again. So, yeah, that's to the technique, the knowledge. So the technique is if you know that rhythm, which is why I have like the whole healing journey literally plotted. And we've got a paper coming out quite very soon on that as well. But I've got little graphs and things in my books and materials. if you know what's coming up, when it does come, you know what you're grieving.

So knowledge is always, knowledge of what's coming up doesn't show you, because we get very strong when something that seems to be, what is this. I don't know what this is, but when we're prepared, that's really important. And in those moments, if it becomes too much, always say if you're doing a neurop cycle, and you're hitting very great, because it brings up a lot of stuff, just stop. And then just do something in that breathing range, visualization, meditation, I have different techniques, CPR techniques that one can do and so on. There's so many great stuff, things out there.

So you can just pull out for a moment, just get yourself back together. Maybe talk to someone as well. That's also another option. Be careful of who you talk to, though. Because sometimes your pearls of wisdom will go the wrong way or whatever, or you open up to someone who doesn't energetically receive that in the right way. Also, you can talk yourself into a whole. So if someone's just agreeing with you, you could increase your very,

and mentality can make you worse, whatever you think about the most grows. So if it's not progressive forward, if someone's not challenging you to be more curious, that's not going to really help you. You could get stuck and go backwards. Yeah, it feels like the more that you go through this whole process,

like the more you've gone through different deaths of old versions of yourself, you see how the story ends. You know, you see that there is this transfiguration into a different, more evolved, more compassionate version of yourself. And so it's easier, I think, you go through it to have more trust and faith in the process and know that it's not the end of a story.

It's just a transition moment. And a growth into a new story. You're writing your new story. We're always writing a new story. Yeah. But yeah, it definitely can feel like the end of your world in those moments because in some ways it is. But it's also the birth of a new one. Exactly.

And so. Transition is always hard. Yeah. And we had this tendency to compound the shame, guilt and fear on top of the. it for feeling that way, you know, but it's like bringing some softness into the experience to realize that like this is kind of this transformation process and the shedding and the birthing of new is like what we're here to do as humans. Like we're on this journey of discovery. It is. And I love that you brought up the shame and the grief just and the guilt or whatever

that goes should. If one can look at those as data, so immediately when you feel it consuming, step back into the multiple perspective advantage and see that this is not me. I don't have to feel bad about this. This is something, wow, this is interesting. Be curious. Why don't I feel the shame? What is the data that it's telling me? And when you explore down that road, suddenly what was maybe going to block you, grows you. And you get insight, there's going to be tears, there's going to be, but you will grow immediately. So it's data, and then you don't merge with it in that way. You actually learn from it. So it's a shift and it works. It's hard. Because when that shame hits and that guilt hits, we want to go into a sort of toxic stress response.

You want to get into the intelligent version. use data. No, we can so easily trap ourselves into the reason and logical way of needing to know how things are going to play out, right? Instead of knowing that once we get further, we'll see further. Absolutely. But the fearful part of us wants to have the logical A to B, you know, what's going to happen. And that need and control for certainty can undermine the process unraveling in a way

that could be greater than we could expect. Exactly. And raise you just what you said is that we think. I mentioned already, we can't change the past, but we can change the impact of the past and our future, which brings the concept of, I don't know if you've ever heard of the concept of retroactive causation, which is fascinating because if you think it's logical that our past influences are present, we'll get that. But we can actually change, our present can change the past. And that's retroactive causation. And essentially what that's saying in simple language,

and the neuropsychel teaches you how to basically get into that mind state is that the past can hold us in a certain way of thinking about who we are, how we function, how we have relationships, etc. And if we don't, we can't meditate that away, we can't breathe that away. Those help us get through the painful moments. We have, what the only thing we can do to heal that is to deconstruct and reconstruct and accept that you can't change the source, but you can change, you can reconstruct to change how it plays out into the future. So when you go through the neuropsychopor process, that's what you're doing, you're finding the source, you're accepting that what it is and you rebuilding. And then when you do that, suddenly the past grip now loosens. So now the future work

that you've done now goes back and changes the impact of the past. That's retroactive causation. Because there is no present past and future in your spiritual level. In the non-conscious level, it's not bound by time. So the future has already happened in the past, it's a one. So we want that in our growth. We want to bring that up into our growth. It's a hard concept. But when you start working, you start seeing, wow, that had such a grip on me. And now it's still painful. I still may be cry and have tears and a sadness, but it's not the same. So now I've used my future work to change my past, and I've changed the impact of the past.

Those, I think you can certainly get into different heightened state experiences where you drop the illusion of this linearity in line of causality of time, where there's this past, present and future, like you said, you can go and reconstruct your perception of these past moments, dropping the emotional charge, a tie to them, therefore birthing wisdom and perspective. And that to me feels like one of the beautiful fruits of processes like Neuropsychol and the way that you described it, you know, because then you can meet life more fruitfully present, not living life solely through the colored pain of your past.

Yeah, absolutely, which keeps people stuck in a victim mentality. And that's, yes, there are victims. And we're never going to decry when someone has been a victim. But you in charge of your life going forward, we all know this. But we know it. Do we know it? Do we know what I'm saying? That's the hard part because we can't grow from that.

So whatever, we've all had things happen to us, but we have to be able to say, that has happened. I need to move forward into the next steps. And it is very hard. We all know that. No one's denying that. But once you start doing it, it changes your life. you know this I wish I knew about this when I was at school

I wish I knew about this when I was at university university I was developing this but over the years as I've refined it I wish I knew now I mean I wish I knew then what I know now and you know that's why I'm so hot about teaching as young as possible because you can lead we can become decent humans which is what we're supposed to be and humans need that at the moment humanity is really you know I know we in the spiritual rebirth

and all that kind of thing we really are but we really do need to get our look at ourselves and stand back and grow and we grow And when we grow, it's not a selfish thing. When we work on our own growth, we become less selfish. We become because we understand others better because we're understanding ourselves. It sounds counterintuitive, but it actually is what happens. So, yeah.

Looking back, have you felt like there's actually an intelligent design to the way these things are orchestrated? The painful, tough events where at times we really do feel we're the victim of circumstance and we learn painful lessons often then are the birthplace for different gifts that become very important later in life. In terms of the way that these things happen, yeah, do you think there is an intelligent design to the way they unfold? I think so definitely.

I think there is some sort of source. I like to talk about godness. Source, whatever everyone wants to call it, there's definitely, and from all the near-death experience research that's been done and after-death communication, that sort of field is really opening up across cultures.

There's been so many thousands and thousands of documented scientific, of those things and it definitely shows that there is a very strong intelligence that's behind everything and that this is just a tiny drop in the ocean which is very encouraging because I believe there's also, I mean this is really going down another path potentially but I do believe that we kind of have some kind of knowledge of what we choose to go through because there's a certain learning that we need to do and go through and you kind of think well why on earth would I choose that? I mean often I think if this was again Why did I choose these things that happened to me?

But there's something in that that we can, if we process those, there's something really amazing that comes out of that, that will touch, you don't know how that's going to touch the rest of humanity and, you know, that sort of thing. So yes, I do believe there's intelligence, absolutely. I don't think it's a man in the sky.

I don't think that. I think that's very, very physicalist thinking. Yeah, very anthropocentric as well. Exactly. I do think it's a force of some loving, as we always say, always comes back to love, you know, what is love, what is the science of love. And what's interesting around that sort of thinking is, you know, what is fundamental.

The physics always tries to talk about, you know, atoms and quarks and brought down. But actually fundamental to that is consciousness. So consciousness is below everything. And when I talk about that word consciousness, I'm talking more about mind and the different levels of mind. So that's kind of a parallel. So that's underlying everything. So consciousness is intelligence. And the biggest thing I think that shows intelligence is that we do have intelligence.

design is our ability to choose because it's a choice that actually creates the equals mc squared effect that's what makes complete the equation so that's choice is a very intelligent thing even though we make bad choices it's to be able to choose and influence ourselves uniquely and therefore impact the world wow i mean that's for me's very strong indication thank you for doing the work that you're doing i think it's very empowering and needed now more than ever thank you If you had 60 seconds to share one message for humanity, what would it be? I would say to them, you can't control the events and circumstances of your life, but you can control how you react to them.

And I would tell you on to that, that you can't change the past, but you can change how it plays out into your future. You can change what it looks like inside of you and how it plays out into your future. Such power. Your mind is the superpower. Your mind is boss, not the brain. I got three things in. That's great.

Is there anything else on your heart that we haven't shared that's either core to your work helpful with the context of this conversation that you'd like to share before we start to wrap up? What was interesting is that we did do a survey for a book that I wrote to find out what are the top sort of areas that people are really battling with currently

and they're kind of almost ancient too and it's interesting that the classic things that always come up are I'm under so much pressure and I'm under things like black and white thinking and people pleasing. And so that was quite interesting to find, and I did a whole book on that with these 18 areas that people really get stuck in. And those seem to be mindsets, not seem to be, they're mindsets.

And mindsets are something that are generated by a thought. So as I was saying, a thought is made of memories. And that's the experience. Experience has become memories inside of a thought. But they generate a mindset. So if it's a negative experience, it generates a negative. mindset. So there's a whole, if someone's under tremendous pressure work wise and whatever, that's building that network and it generates that mindset of I'm under pressure. And if we can,

what's very helpful, I saw this with my patients and my clients, which is why I end up writing that book, is that if we can name, see that, oh, okay, that's what I'm doing, I'm under pressure, then I can use the neuropsycho more specifically, almost like a prescriptions. I do neuropsycho prescriptions where you can try and hone in on the area. So it's not just this bland, oh, I've got trauma in my childhood. Not everything is about trauma in your child. It's sometimes it's just patterns that we've developed and yes, there's very, a lot of it does come from childhood, but we've also

developed, react, this life happens and sometimes we just need to know how to manage that kind of moment. So that I think is quite an important concept and idea. And then working with kids from young, I mean if you are children read children read us, so if

they're better at body language and non-verbal communication than adults, we lose a lot of that. We know that between in the ages of, up to age of five, they, and we, children are incredibly insightful. Then it still, it carries on. And then we lose that as we reach sort of our mid-teens

and that sort of thing, it gets less. But what's interesting is that's why it's so important for us to teach children from very young that it's okay to have a bad emotion. You know, we live in a biomedical world that has taken mental health into the world of, has taken an approach to mental health that's very biomedical. So it's treating it like an illness and it's not.

mental health is part of our humanity and our response to adverse circumstances. So our children, Gen. Alpha, are growing up the most challenged generation when it comes to emotions because every time they have an emotion, they told it's bad, and then the ticotification of mental health. And that's a big concern, looking for the label to try and find, well, this is the solution, but that locks you in. And so they've got to be able to express themselves. You've got to be able to cry and have guilt and compassion and happiness and joy and fear. It's all part of it.

And that concerns me that that's not happening like it should. It's been labeled and medicated or suppressed. Guilt an identity around it instead of what you mentioned earlier, which is like their signals. They're signals. Exactly. They signals. So we can teach kids from young.

I think that's something that's very big on my heart to do that. Yeah. Well done. You've written so many books. Yes. The 20th just went in. I've just written a book on, went in last week on stress. They're truth about stress.

For 90 years, we've been talking about stress is bad. stress, stress, stress and stress kills. And it does, but that's only one side of the coin. Stress is actually intelligence. It's a filter. And it actually helps us to process life. So if we understand how to read the flight, flight, whatever, all the ones that we used to fly, flight, free for, you know, the ones that we're used to hearing. That's just, if you, that's a signal. So if you can catch that signal, you can flip it into its intelligence. So that's, and you can, you can, you can, how to, there's techniques to do that. And that is life changing. That's, my patients have been asking me for years to write that book.

and it's taking me, I should have done it years ago because I think it's so practical because we react in the moment. So something happens and we'll go into one of those responses. And if we know, oh, okay, that's a stress response. I can flip it. I can use it to flip it and find the good one. So for example, we maybe go into a fight response. The healthy, intelligent version of that is assert, which is great because now I can turn

something that was becoming confrontational into something that's actually problem solving. So that kind of thing. So for me that work is, and we still doing a lot of research. I still do a lot of, we've got another big clinical trial coming up and trying to always understand

and refine the non-conscious mind. What is it? How can we take that? How can we access it? If we can get in there and live in that part of our mind more actively, we can change so much.

So that's a big desire of mind to understand that more. You're doing so, so good. I love it. And it comes in an amazing package. You know, I think that like a lot of these ideas become way more impactful when they come through a person who's obviously so passionate about them, but also makes it fun and irresistible that like this,

it can feel quite heavy this journey of these, you know, a lot of these conversations of like the things that another, another to do list on our biohacking thing that we got to like add, you know, and it becomes a burden in it of itself. And as much as I love eating clean and the tools to support my mind and body, I feel like this conversation is pointing to something that surpasses all of them, which is the ability to actually use our mind to direct our life and architect our life in a way. And that is an under-explored area of life, which I hope this conversation gained people some context around.

You said that so beautifully. You said that so beautifully. Once you're in that state, then you can decide what you want. But otherwise, your to-do list becomes so stressful that you are, under pressure and you're cracking under the pressure of trying to do all these things to make you healthy and they're not going to actually make you healthy. So start with your mind, get to know yourself, build yourself, and then you'll know what to do with all the other stuff. They'll just naturally fall into place. Yeah. Amazing. Well, we're going to leave links down in the description where people can stay connected with you and your work. And that's all. Thank you.

Yeah, this is fun. How are you feeling? Thank you. No, I love it. I really enjoyed it. There's one thing I didn't share. I don't if it's possible. We've started a certification program. Can I talk about that? Yeah, yeah. So one thing I'm very excited about is because people, I can't teach us to the whole. I can. I have read books and things, but what we've started is a certification. I did it in South Africa.

I trained a lot of therapists. But what we've done now is we introduced a coaching version of the neuropsycho so people can become a coaching strategist. So a neuropsychel strategist or if people are already in the clinical sphere, so they're mental health practitioners or some physician or whatever, then they can do the neuropsychal clinical version. So that's where we're trying to help more people. get into this.

If they want more, they can, I've got all the materials they can do on their own, but if they want to start a business, but also if they want to help one-on-one, we can refer to those people for more one-on-one. All right, thank you.

Everybody, yeah, appreciate you for tuning to this episode of the Know-Thyself podcast. Until next time, be well. Thank you. Thank you. You did it.