Saturn Returns with Caggie - 9.9 How to clean up your mental mess with Dr Caroline Leaf

Episode Date: April 15, 2024

In this week's episode of Saturn Returns, we delve into the fascinating world of mental health and neuroscience. I sit down with our esteemed guest, Dr. Caroline Leaf. Dr leaf is a communication pathologist and clinical neuroscientist specialising in psychoneurobiology who has written several books. Her passion is to help people see the power of the mind to change the brain, control chaotic thinking, and find mental peace. With over 30 years of experience, she specialises in mind-brain research and has dedicated her career to unlocking the secrets of the human mind. Dr. Leaf shares her groundbreaking insights into the nature of mental health, the power of thought, how thoughts are structured and how we can harness our minds to foster personal growth and healing. Drawing from her extensive research and best-selling books, she offers practical strategies to help us navigate the challenges of life, transform our mental habits, and cultivate a healthier, more resilient mindset. We also discuss the intersections between science and spirituality and how her discoveries in science have deepened her spiritual beliefs.  Whether you're seeking to overcome personal obstacles, break cycles, enhance your mental well-being, or simply gain a deeper understanding of the intricate relationship between your mind and body, this episode promises to be a transformative journey. Join us as we explore these compelling topics with Dr. Caroline Leaf, and embark on a path to greater self-awareness and empowerment. Get ready for an Episode packed with wisdom! This Episode was brought to you by London Nootropics who make delicious adaptogenic coffee blends. You can find them here and use the code saturnreturns for 20% off your first order. --- Subscribe to "Saturn Returns" for future episodes, where we explore the transformative impact of Saturn's return with inspiring guests and thought-provoking discussions. Follow Caggie Dunlop on Instagram to stay updated on her personal journey and receive more empowering insights and you can find Saturn Returns on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok.  Order the Saturn Returns Book. Join our community newsletter here.  Find all things Saturn Returns, offerings and more here.

Hello everyone and welcome to Saturn Returns with me, Kagi Dunlop. This is a podcast that aims to bring clarity during transitional times where there can be confusion and doubt. Today I am overjoyed to be sitting down with a remarkable mind. I remember discovering her work listening to Mark Grove's podcast and that is the wonderful Dr. Caroline Leaf. Dr. Caroline Leaf's work pioneers the understanding of mental health and the incredible power of the human mind and in this episode she guides us through the latest findings in neuroscience and shares her insights on how we can harness our thoughts to shape our reality and she provides practical

tools for achieving mental clarity and emotional well-being. So whether you're struggling with stress or seeking to break free from negative thought patterns or simply curious about the science of the mind, you are in the right place because this episode has so much wisdom in it. Dr Caroline Leaf is a communication pathologist, clinical and research neuroscientist with a master's and PhD in communication pathology. She specializes in psychoneurobiology and metacognitive neuropsychology.

That was a mouthful to get out. So basically, she's a genius. That's all you need to know. And when I've listened to her on other people's podcasts, I have been blown away and she did not disappoint on this one. So you're going to enjoy it. She also has a podcast of her own called Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess. And as you will hear from this conversation, an app called NeuroCycle,

which I'm very excited to delve into myself. She's remarkable so strap in because there's a lot in this episode but I think you're going to love it. Caroline, welcome to Saturn Returns. I'm very excited to be talking with you. How are you today? I'm great, thank you. It's lovely to meet you and I'm excited to talk with you as well. Yeah, you know, I first discovered your work, I think we have a mutual friend in Mr Mark Groves. Oh yes, we've done a few interviews together, him and I. Yeah, he's fantastic and I've always really enjoyed them. So I'm super excited to have you on the show. But for the audience that might not be familiar with your work, would you be able to give a sort of brief intro to who you are and what you do?

Absolutely. So let me keep it nice and brief. I'm a clinical and research neuroscientist and a communication pathologist and audiologist by profession. So I study the field of psychoneurobiology, which is the mind-brain-body connection. So it's kind of the science behind all the stuff that you talk about on this podcast, very much showing how the mind is not the brain and how the mind is separate from the brain, but the mind is embodied in the brain and the body and how our mind drives us. And so I look at all of that. I did some of the first neuroplasticity research back in the late 80s. I've been in the field for nearly four decades, so 38 years I've been in the field.

And I've been, I work clinically, I worked with a lot of people with dementias, learning disabilities, emotional traumas. I develop systems to help people to manage their brain i still currently run a research team we do a lot of research we publish in journals i've written 18 books in 24 languages helping people to understand how to understand their mind and manage their mind and move forward with their life and realize that we you know life is hard but how do we do life How is it okay to be okay with yourself? So that's kind of a... Big stuff.

Key stuff. What inspired you to get into that line of work? I was going into medicine and I actually ended up getting into a degree. My first degree was a combination. It was actually an experiment. They were experimenting by combining medicine, speech and language pathology, communication pathology, audiology. So they kind of combined medicine with that. And it was one of the toughest things I've ever done in my life. We worked seven days a week for

literally 12 hours a day, never had any life. And I thought, why am I doing this to myself? But I came out the other end and continued studying and realized that I had got such a great perspective. I didn't get stuck in the pure medical world, nor did I get stuck in the psychological world. I actually got a beautiful blend of all of it, even though it was hell going through it. But I had all the clinical experience, hospital experience, research experience, psychological experience, and all the other stuff that goes along with what I did.

There's only a thousand people that were trained, a thousand that applied, 60 of us that qualified, and then they stopped the degree. And so I'm very grateful for having gone through it because it enabled me to be where I am today. It showed me, gave me a deep understanding of the whole mind, brain, body connection. And I just continued my research and my practice. And I don't practice anymore. I ran that for 25 years. Now I take everything that I've learned and still continue to learn. And then I apply that into, we have an app, a mental health technology platform that's

becoming bigger and bigger to empower people to help themselves because this world has become over-therapeutized. I want to get into that because obviously it's going to run twofold in that I'm sure there's a lot of benefits to it and then there's also, yeah, but before we do, I'm curious for those that aren't familiar, would you be able to sort of define what neuroplasticity is and also the definition between, because I think we use, or I use sort of brain and mind quite interchangeably and the distinction between those two things. Absolutely. It's a great place to start.

So neuroplasticity is basically the fact that the brain can be changed and the body. So it doesn't just, you know, we tend to think that it's just neuro, it's just brain. And yes, it is, but your brain is represented actually throughout your entire body. that it's just neuro, it's just brain. And yes, it is, but your brain is represented actually throughout your entire body. And your mind builds memory networks into the brain and the body. So neuroplasticity is this ability

that we have as humans to change structurally on a constant basis because of our experiences are constantly changing, which leads us to the mind-brain distinction. Your brain is easy to understand. It's a physical organ. Your body's physical. And those, I mean,. It's a physical organ. Your body is physical. And those, I mean, you're dead, they die.

They just disintegrate. But we're alive and we're talking and people are listening and watching. And that ability for us to actually have this conversation, to process life, to do whatever it is that you do, that's mind. So mind is our life force. It's our, in the scientific language, we call it your non-conscious and conscious mind. And the subconscious has three different levels of mind.

And I can dive into that. And it's just very quickly, mind is not, you know, you made a little funny joke at the beginning kind of thing. I don't know if you realized it was a joke, but people talk about the woo-woo. The woo-woo is very real. And that's the- Good, you're in the-woo. The woo-woo is very real.

Good, you're in the right podcast. I mean, it's very real. The mind has been for years kind of pushed aside as something that, well, in the last 40 years, there was this move to understand the brain and this technology that helped us to see inside the brain. So I've watched in the course of my career us go from understanding mind is mind, it's this life force, it drives us, it's how we experience life and the mind takes all these experiences which are gravitational fields and electromagnetic life forces and puts it into the brain and the body and you create a network and you function as a human. And that has shifted in

the last 40 years slowly but surely to the current day and the mind stuff has been pushed aside classified if anyone talks about mind it's kind of classified as well we don't understand that so it's woo-woo and then it's been focused on a neurocentric view which is if it's all about the brain the brain may generate thoughts the brain controls you and that's not accurate because your brain does nothing without your mind so it's the the mind you. And that's not accurate because your brain does nothing without your mind. So the mind is the force that's embodied and makes the brain and the body actually work. So your heart beating, your lungs working, the fact that you're making cells every second, the fact that you are alive and move through and grow and get older, that's all driven by the mind. Does that make sense? Yeah. but where does the mind come from then

well that's one of those questions that's still being debated but for thousands of years for thousands of years spiritual people philosophers scientists have all accepted that there is this this consciousness um this and i don't like to use the word consciousness, but it's what it's used. Let me quote a British mathematician who is a Nobel Prize laureate, who is probably one of the leaders of the century in understanding what I'm about to say, who's radically changing. You'll see his name coming up a lot in the future. He's been 50 years ahead of his time, Sir Roger Penrose. And what he says is that the universe is made of these, embodies the elements of humanity. So love, joy, peace, whatever, these are all embodied and you can actually explain them

in terms of, you know, dark matter and all the big, and all these things is very real stuff. So someone who's maybe of a more spiritual leaning will say, well, that's God. Someone may say it's God-ness. Someone may say it's the universe, the big bang. It's all pointing to the same thing. There's embedded qualities within what we're immersed in, because we all know that's not just me or you it's

there's this in you fall in love you things happen we all know there's something beyond just me in this life now and that awareness is becoming very scientifically explored um it's not it's it's kind of it's not something that you can describe with mathematics although mathematics are used because understanding and love and these things aren't computational, but they do have science behind them. We can identify electromagnetic fields. There is matter in the universe. There is all the great work that's being done with black holes and all that kind of thing, which is where I think all the stuff, we part of that. And then as humans, we connect with that in our own unique way. But we're unique.

So the way you filter your life experiences is very unique to you. And we see that reflected in the brain and body structure. We see that there's no two brains are the same. No two proteins vibrate in the same way in two different humans. The amount of computational, let's take the word computational, the amount of connections that a human brain can be stimulated to make is beyond comprehension.

So we know that there's a beautiful uniqueness and we know that there's a connection because we instinctively know that too. So that's the sort of science that I'm involved in. And is it fair then to say that we should be more inclined to use mind interchangeably with words like consciousness or even universe? That's more of the theme that it applies to. More accurate because the brain is what the mind will use. But the way that we're processing it is very unique, but the themes that we're processing it is very unique but the themes that we're processing are universal

yes so there's universal themes very well said but each of our individual experiences is completely unique so that's why no two persons experiences of a rainbow or love to what to get all philosophical or whatever are so totally different and that's what's so amazing about humans. I mean, we just have to take something like AI, which is based on the prints, the using algorithms to, based on how the neuron, a neuron, one neuron in the brain, one nerve cell in the brain works externally.

So how an impulse fires through a nerve cell in the brain is the foundation for artificial intelligence. And it's brilliant, but it's only looking at a nerve cell in the brain is the foundation for artificial intelligence. And it's brilliant, but it's only looking at one nerve cell. We have somewhere around about a hundred billion. We don't even understand what happens when two nerve cells connect. People have studied the universe, the uniqueness of our thoughts. Many people, and I've said that there's no two thoughts are the same. There's no way that every thought that you generate is unique to you and it's going to

be different to me. So there's this incredible infinite uniqueness that we have as humans, which is phenomenal. And we haven't even gone inside the neuron where there's another whole world inside the neuron. There's a whole world when it comes to memory. It's a big part of the work that I've done is memory and habit formation and that kind of thing. So all of this beautiful structure that we see inside the human brain and body is very unique, very powerful, very organized, but only comes alive because of the mind. So the mind, yes, you could say the equivalent

in the current sort of speaking about it is the words of consciousness, but consciousness is only one level. As I mentioned earlier, there's three. What are the three levels? So there's your non-conscious level, N-O-N, and that's not spoken about much. People don't really understand it.

It's a big part of the work that I do, and there's a few of our scientists that have worked in that concept. So basically the non-conscious is what people would often refer to as the subconscious or the unconscious. But the non-conscious is much bigger than those. The subconscious is a portal. It's like a doorway that filters all of our experiences because we've had trillions of experiences by By the age that we are at each day, we are experiencing so much. Where does that all go? Every experience that you have, every discussion, every moment, every news,

just think of in one day how much you experience as a human and then think of that as over a lifetime. That all gets stored in our mind-brain-body networks in unique ways and constantly adjusts as we get new knowledge and that kind of thing. So the non-conscious is responsible for that. It's also the deepest part of us, our wisdom, that deep spiritual nature that when someone comes to you for advice and they tell you having a problem with your boyfriend or whatever, and you listen and you give advice, that wisdom that comes out of you and you think, wow, that's good advice. I should have given that to myself. That indication of our tremendous inner wisdom that we have inside of us as well.

So the non-conscious encompasses this kind of almost spiritual level. Sorry to interrupt, but is it something that's innate or is it just simply a gathering of the information we've acquired during our lifetime? It's a really good question. So it's going to be a combination of both. So that's where the universal stuff comes in. There's this potential. And then as we grow, that potential becomes unique to us, if that makes sense.

So every human is a potential way of connecting with the uniqueness of, in a unique way with the universal sort of goodness, godness, loveness, spirituality, whatever is all around us, whatever makes gardens grow and sunshine keep coming and moon and the moonlight and, I mean, the moon shining at nighttime and that sort of thing. So all of that stuff is very real, is very scientific, can be measured. And what we do as a human, as we're born and start experiencing in life,

we're taking those experiences and our own unique way of processing that through our non-conscious is driving that process because it happens so fast. So the non-conscious is incredibly fast. Speeds of 10 to the 27, which is faster than 400 billion actions per second. It's very, very fast. So it's taking all our experiences and it's filtering it and it's using wisdom to judge what's good, what's bad, very much on our side. And then it sends messages through the subconscious, sub meaning sub, just below consciousness,

which is like three very extremely complicated filter, doorway, portal that only allows certain kind of a holding station, like a waiting room at a doctor's office, but a big one. And it's holding the most relevant information that we need to function in the moment, which could be something that's triggering us because we need to be alert and aware. It could be a great happy moment. It could be something we need for an exam we're about to write or questions you need to remember to ask me in the podcast or whatever.

So that's in the holding station, and our subconscious basically selects and filters through, and then we become consciously aware. So as you're thinking of a question, you obviously have got a level of information about what I do. You've got your podcast. All of that's combined and put stuff in the waiting room, the subconscious.

And then as we're talking, that's stimulating things to pop through. And that's what you're generating your questions and responses from. Does that make sense? So that's the conscious mind. That makes a lot of sense. That's a really useful way of understanding though. But did you say there were four yes because then there's the

unconscious and people often use the subconscious and the unconscious interchangeably yeah the unconscious is when you're under anesthesia so your brain's still functioning or when you're asleep so you're everything's still functioning but differently so as in that's where we we go when we are sleeping every night? Yes into unconscious which is basically a brain state where there's a reversal of neurochemistry and things to move that we're moving this way in the brain during the day now move that way I'm just trying to make it nice and simple. Is that what you just wrote it's like housekeeping? Yes yes that's where you're doing housekeeping regeneration where things where you where you're doing housekeeping, regeneration,

where you don't experience pain. So that's why anesthesia is also used to study consciousness because it just numbs off. You don't experience pain, but you're still processing what's going on around you. So it still builds into your networks. But there's certain things that your non-conscious mind will never bring into the conscious mind because you don't want the pain.

If you're under surgery, you never want to consciously experience that pain because it will wreck you. So there's certain things that are there, but they are kept in the zone in your non-conscious mind that you don't need them for functioning. They're there driving you, but you don't need to be consciously aware of them. So we're consciously aware of what we need. Okay. And then what is the purpose of that particular place the the non-conscious or the

unconscious the unconscious for sleep because it is a very regenerative state that you go into it's a state where it's protective so if you think anesthesia it's protecting you from pain if you think of sleep it's a point where you are regenerating. Because your mind never gets tired, all three levels of mind never get tired, but your brain gets tired and your body gets tired. So it has to be replenished. And your conscious mind, funnily enough, also gets tired. But the subconscious and unconscious don't.

So we have to have sleep to replenish energy that's been used up, like a cell phone recharging. And that's where a lot of sorting is happening. We need a sort of kind of recall time when we sleep in order to be able to process what we've just experienced and how to put that in, organise that, and that's what's happening. That's why sleep deprivation is just the worst thing because you just cannot function if you

haven't done that sort of filing exactly you know it's creating like i heard a quote last night and i was watching something oh this is amazing it explains what happens when we don't sleep or when we don't manage our minds and it's like an octopus gone crazy you know octopus legs all going crazy it's literally that's how we will feel if we don't you know regenerate and that there's a lot of ways sleep is major but there's things like just having thinker moments during the day just having 30 second to 10 minutes little breaks where you just switch off to the external and daydream you know those kinds of things can also help to reboot and regenerate during the course of a day which i want to get into the kind of habits and

where perhaps people are going a little bit wrong. But to bring it back a second, I'm curious as someone that has done the amount of work and research from a scientific perspective, what your sort of spiritual philosophies are on these things, if you have one that you would be able to share. i grew up as a catholic very sort of strict catholic background and then got caught up into um evangelical evangel i can't even say that word evangelicalism for a period of time um and i'm what my my spiritual thing is i'm spiritual i believe that in godness, goodness, whatever, I believe in these principles. I believe science is spiritual, but I don't adhere to a religion. I think that it is every way that

every culture and person has a different way of experiencing that. And so I'm a great, that works for you. I'm totally supportive of whatever it is. What I have a problem with is when people try and impose their point of view and say, this is the only way. And that is the very reason why I moved out of the very strict sort of religious things of Catholicism and evangelicalism. I think that's how you're supposed to say it. And those very tight philosophies that don't, that are being sort of driven by rules as opposed to love. So if that makes sense. That makes perfect sense. And with your sort of deepening of your scientific understanding, did that also in turn deepen your spiritual practice?

For sure, absolutely. Really? How come? Because often they're seen as sort of one negates the other. I know. And I think this is one of the most common questions I get asked. And how can you reconcile? But science is so spiritual because you are discovering and seeing how things work and how the relationships form and the more you dive into science the more you see like diving into the mind brain body connection psychoneurobiology which is my field specifically the more the more your eyes

open and the more you see wow this this is unreal how we function as humans so the science is just confirming how much we don't know how big the world is how little we are and how brilliant we are too how amazing we are in function in brilliant we are too, how amazing we are in how we function as humans. It's very encouraging. It's very hopeful, very hopeful because it means we can change despite all the terrible things that we see, despite what we've gone through. There's hope. Yeah, it brings a lot of hope. And I'm sure also very humbling. Yeah, it brings a lot of hope. And I'm sure also very humbling.

Very, very humbling. It will make you move away from saying, this is the way. It makes you think, oh, wow, that could be a way. We need to do these things too. It opens your mind to think differently about how you see things. And then in terms of the work that you do and have done with patients and sort of rewiring their brain and their neuroplasticity, what are some of the things that you discovered in some of the most sort of eye opening pieces of research you've encountered in terms of, especially, I guess, around healing from trauma? Because I know that's a big part of your work

so I worked in initially with my initial work was with people with quite severe neurological issues so things like and in the 80s and the correct way of defining these things not that the 80s knew everything but I'm just saying the correct way to define neurological problems would be people that have had a tumor in the brain or had a stroke or had a heart attack or have had a birth tumor or a traumatic brain injury. That's where we see direct damage. So a lot of my work was in that area of working with people with damaged brains and bodies and helping them to restore. And then working with things that are a little more subtle, like people with learning disabilities and language disabilities and those kinds of things and in that work it was very very

evident that people that you can't separate out a human's experience from their emotional experience from the an emotional such a bad it's such an overused word from the human experience so um that what we would term emotional work and trauma work and that kind of thing is, let me say it like this, I'm trying to say this the most simple way. If you're working on helping someone restore brain function, you can't separate the humanity. There's no way you can exclude the emotional trauma that goes with that. So being able to do things and they're not doing things. So for example, someone who's had a car accident and they've been in a coma and they've maybe lost someone to death and maybe someone got killed in that car accident or it's changed their life completely.

There's a massive amount of emotional stuff that goes along with that and behavioral changes. And so there's all that side. And so early on realizing my work that you can't separate the two, you have to work. If a child's battling at school, yes, you help them learn and you help them adapt and you give them all those skills, which I could do. But you have to deal with the emotional side of being teased and bullied and yelled at by teachers, maybe, and compared to other children and being told they're different and there's something wrong with them. In our current model, the diagnosis, and let me briefly reference this in the beginning,

but the over-diagnosis and labeling has made things worse. I mean, it's increased the stigma and it's increased all kinds of problems. So I worked with all of in those sort of arenas and blended the two. I've trained thousands of teachers. I've trained thousands of physicians, trying to help them understand the importance of minds, that we don't pathologize childhood, that we don't pathologize adulthood, that we don't medicalize misery. And so that's been massive in very spiritual things happening in science with that combination. And so my whole work career has turned into one of helping people to empower themselves, to recognize that no one is actually so-called normal.

We should not even be talking about normal. Everyone's brain is unique. Everyone's body is unique. Everyone's experiences are unique. We have extreme states where if someone is traumatized or abused in the true sense of trauma. Trauma has also been overused, the word. It's a tremendous concept creep where it's crept into the point, things like autism and things like that as well. If you think of a scale of 1 to 10, 8, 9, and 10 is trauma.

That's bad things that have happened to you. So that would be like abuse and war and severe bullying and childhood abuse and abuse at any stage where something terrible has happened to you from whatever circumstance, war, et cetera, et cetera. That's true trauma. Then you get your, that's 8, 9, 10. Then you get, think of 4, 5, 6, and 7. That's just where we are every day as humans in life. And those are the habits that we develop in response to an irritating person at work or having too much to do every day or being overstimulated by technology and not managing it and not using it in the correct way. And, you know, habits that we develop in response to life. So, you know, just falling into bad habits, getting irritated with people,

getting irritated in traffic and not controlling those and they build into habits. And then you've got the one, twos and threes, which are the little day-to-day stuff that happens. What we've done is we've taken one through seven and lumped that into trauma and stages of trauma, made a big trauma, little trauma, whatever. We need to keep trauma where it is because it's very severe and it has severe impact and it disrupts the mind and it creates tremendous disconnect in the mind-brain-body connection. So in the brainwaves of the mind, in the structural changes inside the brain, and then in the cellular changes inside every cell of our body, because the memories of our

experiences are not just in the brain. That's really old research and old science and incorrect science. Every experience we have is in three places. It's in the mind networks, which are basically fields that go all around us. So if you think of a podcast that's going like this, that's a good little visual image in your mind. Every experience creates its own little wave network, and they are flowing throughout the brain and the body. Then in the brain, our thoughts, our memories become thoughts that look like trees, so tree-like structures. So we actually grow proteins. this conversation into the mind as this little wave, into the brain as little tree-like structures made of protein, and into every single cell of the body, the immune system, the heart,

everywhere in the little skeleton inside the cell. So the cell has, it's actually got three places. In the cell wall, all cells have a cell wall, and they're like microchips. We think of the computer analogy because we can relate to the little microchips, which hold lots of information. So our memories go into the microchip of all cells, brain and body, and they also go into the skeleton, like our body's got a skeleton, all cells have skeletons, and those skeletons also hold memory, and then the DNA, the nucleus.

But I'm not going to complicate things too much. So just think of a cell having a wall and that's filled with microchips. And inside there's a skeleton and it's also very complicated microchips. And every experience we have is going into the cell wall and the little micro skeleton. And there's an internal micro skeleton, endo would be called a cytoskeleton, in the brain and the body. In the brain, that grows into tree-like structures, and in the body it looks like little rolled-up carpets, but it's the same sort of thing.

And that's why when we recall something, like let's say that we've had whatever experience, every experience is going to be stored in all these places. So we have a body memory, which is very popular. People talk about the body memories and so on, yoga, et cetera, et cetera. That's real. It's real. And when you do things like yoga and so on, you basically are enabling that toxic, when something's a toxic experience, those microchips get slightly damaged and they don't do what they're supposed to do and that creates that octopus type feelings to use the analogy earlier on and very disruptive and

disorderly and that generates an energy that makes us feel like this yoga or doing exercise like depression we know is best handled through just naturally allowing it to flow and things like exercise will help tremendously because you're taking that energy and you dispersing it sort of thing yeah and making it clean energy and so on yeah i'm really i'm really interested about there's so many things there that i want to kind of get into and keeping along that line of thought there's a couple of points or things i want to ask you one being I'm very fascinated by how our thoughts then can manifest physically and how like how you just explained it we can have a thought about something that might stir a memory and then have such a it actually makes us ill you know that it has a physical manifestation and it's not I don't know whether psychosomatic or but I know from my own experience

that the power of it and when you have those thoughts that are I guess you use the term toxic thoughts or that sort of intrusive thoughts that just like hook in as these sort of memory cards and then can then you know spiral into maybe it's a depression or an anxiety or it might actually be a physical illness but I would love to understand how that happens and how we can stop that from happening. Okay so this is really an excellent question and it's totally in my wheelhouse as they would say so it's called psychoneurobiology, mind, brain, body. That's what the three words mean. So essentially, if we go back to what I was saying to sort of link in with this,

every experience we have, like we are having an experience now, this conversation. My words are auditory sound waves and electromagnetic light waves that are going in yours and the listeners' ears and eyes, if they're listening and watching, whatever. And that is creating a vibration of energy, a memory energy throughout the brain and body.

It seems you've got these waves of this conversation. It's very, you've got trillions upon trillions. Every experience you have, you can imagine this like a, you know, you get those great visuals where you see all these little like lines, millions of them. You just go and Google something like that. Just like, do you know what I'm talking about? Like an E-E-E line.

That's what you've got throughout your body. So we're building a new one currently in this. And as we're talking, that is actually searching the non-conscious and pulling up other memories. So if you can imagine that this memory building now, and I'm doing this because it's like a lot of lines inside a little fixed space, is now triggering doing a search. Oh, I've heard this before. I've heard that before.

This has happened or that. And all those are coming under the spotlight and kind of getting connected to this current memory that we're building. So this current memory is actually not memory, it's memories. Every word I'm saying, we speak in full sentences. Our brain stores around 15 to 30, our mind-brain-body connection stores around 15 to 30% of what we say. So what we're saying, it's packaged off and put into these little memories. So memories cluster together to form a thought.

So this, when I do this, which is all the little lines, that's a memory. Now that looks like a little tree in the brain. It looks like this if you can visualize a little memory thing in the mind, mind, brain, body. But that also in the brain looks like a little tree with branches. And as it's building, as you are, as we're conversing, it's growing more and more. My words are growing the root part and our conversation is growing the root part.

But in the listeners' and viewers' heads, their interpretation are the branches. So think of a tree's got roots. The roots is the source of conversation. The interpretation are the branches. How they uniquely process is the tree trunk. So the memories cluster together to grow a thought memory. So this thought memory's got lots of words.

I'm speaking lots of words. It looks like a tree in the brain, which has got lots of words. So a thought is a cluster of memories. And then in the body, it's these little microchips and the things in those skeletons that kind of group together. So we've got lots of space. They're so tiny. You're not going to run out of room your entire life to accommodate all these memories. And they constantly adjust.

But memory is always clustered into a thought, having a thought means that we've consciously activated an existing network there in the tree and in the body. And that's coming to our conscious mind from the non-conscious through the subconscious. And that could have been triggered by just you thinking, just thinking thoughts is coming up and maybe one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, whatever. Or it could be that you are listening to this conversation or you're reading a book or you're having a conversation. So it's external in, stuff coming in activates these thoughts. And we also just activate by just thinking.

So those thoughts, every thought is in three places and thoughts are made of memories. So the fact that they're in this little thing that not only is there in the brain, it's this little wave creates not only is there in the brain, it's this little wave creates a vibration across the entire body. This builds a tree in the brain. And this also builds a representation in all the rest of the cells of the body.

Every cell has some representation of this conversation. And that is why, let's say that you have a very horrible conversation or you're having maybe problems with a friend or in a relationship. And as it starts, the memory starts building. This little way, tree, body, and all the cells, this little like rolled up carpets. Now each conversation or each encounter makes it bigger and bigger and stronger and stronger and stronger.

And over time, it builds into something that's strong enough to impact how you function. So as it builds into the body, the stronger the memory is, whether it's good or bad, set of memories, the more impression it will make and the more of an impact. So it becomes a very strong, impactful memory quickly. Something that's not as impactful is a less, a memory with less, a set of memories inside a thought with less energy. As we think about it or have more experiences or have more discussions and the days go by,

within around about nine weeks, you have built that into a habit that is now big, a big thought in a forest of trees, a big strong, one of these waves, a big strong carpets in the cells of our body. And that combination of the waves, the trees and the carpets are driving how you functioning. And so because it's in the brain and the body, you can have heart palpitations, you have gut issues you can have all manner and we often see gut first because there's a lot of research between there's a very direct path between the neurons in the brain the trees forming the brain and the but then the nerves the nerves in

the gut which are identical to that in the brain we've got a mini we've got a mini brain in our heart we've got so we that's why very often we'll feel heart and gut very fast because they've got a mini brain in our heart. So that's why very often we'll feel heart and gut very fast because they've got very strong representations. But that doesn't mean your immune system that you can't really feel is not also being impacted. It is being impacted, but it's a little less obvious because your heart starts beating. Your heart can get sore.

When you say my heart is sore, it is sore. And that consistent soreness is weakening of the heart muscle because of the cells being damaged by this unmanaged thought so in other words imagine that this energy is like a battering ram and the little energy the tree the you know the cells that combination if it's not managed is like a battering ram against wherever there is potentially your unique biodiversity where your area is that you're going to respond. So what we see in our research is that we look at myself and my team, we'll take, people will basically tell us their story.

They'll talk, they'll give us their narrative. We'll look at various different psychological tests. We'll look inside the brain at the energy response i use q e e g's which look at how the energy all this stuff we'll be putting in our brain what does that look can you can you um with the energy because i know you said it actually doesn't matter whether it's it's not to do with it being good or bad it's the energy and presumably you could have a lot of energy that's good and a lot of energy that's bad and those will define whether this has become something like a big tree to kind of use your your work but can you see from um studying the energy whether it's good or bad or do you just

know from the story so think of energy as the same thing as that is charging our computers now so it's we all understand that things that turn on lights and turn on computers and keep off her cell phones charge it's the same kind of energy it's the same basic physics but what's happening is that if it is toxic the energy is disorganized. It's disorderly. It's the octopus flapping its legs all over the place. And then that will be a very flappy memory, a flappy tree that's ugly and gnarled. And the carpets won't be nice and rolled up. They'll be distraught. And that we feel.

So when we feel this response in our heart, and over time, if we don't manage it, eventually we can develop cardiovascular issues. You can develop immune issues. Because if your immune system, for example, if you've got some toxic issue that's undealt with some undealt with trauma or a bad habit that you're just not managing or something, that your immune system is sending out immune factors in the same way to fight it as it would if it was the COVID virus or any virus. So your immune system is sending out immune factors in the same way to fight it as it would if it was the COVID virus or any virus. So your immune system does not distinguish, it's not thinking, it's simply responding to whatever's throwing the balance off. So energy is this electromagnetic field and gravitational fields and quantum forces that are packaged in these ways. So an experience becomes auditory, electromagnetic, this experience, and it's packaged. This is good information. So it's packaged in an organized way.

So we're building an organized memory, an organized tree, an organized response in our body, in the cells of our body. You may have some heart flushing now. You may feel a level of anxiety because I'm telling you about things that are maybe making you or your audience face stuff. So you may start saying, oh gosh, yeah, I am aware of that. I'm aware of that emotion. And I read that I can feel my heart beating, bodily sensation, signal. I can feel a little bit of anxiety, emotional warning signal. My perspective is, oh, something's not quite right. Perspective warning signal. Behaviors, oh gosh, I'm kind of wiggling around in my chair while I'm listening. And if I actually paid attention to those signals, they don't just float.

They are signals that are not illnesses. They are not symptoms of an illness. They are signals telling us about a thought or a set of thoughts that are made of memories. Across this, if we pay attention, we can then see, oh, this is a thought. Now I can either that are made of memories across this. So we pay attention. We can then see, oh, this is a thought. Now I can either run from that intrusive thought. I can push it back down, but it's going to go back down stronger than before, increasing my cardiovascular potential problems or immune system potential problems or my gut potential problems.

Or I can say, okay, this is hard, but I'm going to embrace process and reconceptualize over time tiny little bit over time before before we get into that because I think that's really important to actually give people a sort of step by step and how how they can actually unpack this stuff and do it in a way that's digestible and not try and you know go for the quick fix but what I'm thinking about as you're explaining all of this is how you know know, it's fascinating. Let's give it the context and put it in the context of relationships that say you have a history of a certain type of relationship or an experience that had happened that created this sort of core memory that creates a sort of toxicity in your new relationships.

creates a sort of toxicity in your new relationships and you know I always love Mark Groves when he says if it's hysterical it's historical and it's a similar kind of thing like if you have a reaction to something that's perhaps disproportionate to the situation but you feel it so strongly because everything's sort of flaring off and the octopus is kind of doing its thing. But it feels in the moment very much like you're onto something or like your intuition is speaking to you. But from everything that you're talking about, it would actually seem that, no, it's more about us having governance and personal autonomy over our thought patterns and unpacking actually the original wound or the original where the original belief kind of stems from and whether that's relevant to the current situation or not absolutely that's exactly what it is and not every single thing is a trauma wound you know we've got very much with social media with all the

online psychological help and tiktok and that kind of thing, which are all great, but there's also a tremendous danger in people, you know, looking for a symptom and giving themselves a label and a diagnosis, which is not going to serve its purpose. And not everything is trauma. So sometimes you can have those warning signals that are just telling you, hey, you just haven't slept enough, or you have kind of just got in a habit of just getting really irritable with people and getting snappy, or you're in a habit of a bit of negative self-talk. So the whole point is to not see that intrusive thought as a threat, but to see that thought, because the word intrusive sounds bad, but to see that thought as information. So it's intrusive, yes,

but it's intrusive in a good sense because if you don't deal with it, you're suppressing it's going to get worse. It's not going any way. And I guess what I'm trying to get at is it's realizing that the intrusive thought, if we're going to use that word, is more about how you feel about yourself

than how someone else is making you feel. That and a combination of those. So there's a reason why we show up in our warning signals, which are the one I mentioned earlier on the emotions, behaviors, perspective, and body sensations. There's always a reason. We aren't just depressed. We're depressed because of, and depression is not an illness. It's a signal. So if we can grab our signals and track it to the thought, which is filled with all these memories, we can then go to the root of the tree and say, okay, well, this is just a habit I've got into, or there's a hint of a level of trauma, not terrible, but there's, you know, all trauma is terrible, but it's like, it's an eight, not a nine or a 10, or this

is just a bad habit? So I can reconstruct and rebuild. You can't take the tree out because whatever you've experienced is part of you forever. It's in that network forever. But what you can do is change it. And that's the empowerment that we have. We have this ability with our non-conscious mind working with our subconscious and our conscious. conscious mind working with our subconscious and our conscious starting with our conscious deliberately and intentionally focusing on our signals to listen to the messages of our

non-conscious because our non-conscious is going to tell us hey if you listen that intrusive thought is a message from your non-conscious it's not something weird it's when you when we say intrusive thoughts are bad we we kind kind of kicking, shooting ourselves in the foot. That's the word I was looking for. Because that intrusive thought is a message. If I pay attention to why am I feeling this envy or jealousy every time I look at social media? Why am I having the same thing in every relationship? If I have the awareness that that's not who I am, that is something that I'm doing because of.

So let me take the time to unpack it. And there is no quick fix. It's going to take you, because habits take 63 days minimum to form. You're going to have to then unpack and reverse engineer and rebuild over that same sort of time period. And that's where people in our current sort of zeitgeist, there's this, let's quickly fix it. I don't feel comfortable.

I don't feel nice. Let me get that antidepressant because it takes away, let's quickly fix it. I don't feel comfortable. I don't feel nice. Let me get that antidepressant because it takes away, it numbs that emotion. So I feel better. I'm so much better because now I don't feel it. And being quick to label ourselves and other people and think that that will solve what we're feeling. And so what it does is an initial, it's like a gift that you get. So initially, oh, wow, that's why. Now I understand there's tremendous surge of relief. But then as time goes on and you open the gift, there's nothing in there.

And I think, oh, there's no gift here. Now what did this actually do? It's empty. It's an empty promise. And that's very frustrating for people. Well, and oh, there's a prescription drug in there. That's the case. And that in itself, those drugs are the one.

It's hard to laugh because I know, I understand. I mean, I'm not in a soft first drugs I can't laugh because I know I understand I mean I'm really curious to get your thoughts on this I've always been tried to avoid and I think when I've had periods of sort of melancholy that I think very human and very normal it took a while to recognize hang on my depression or periods of depression, I never acknowledged the internal chatter that was going on that would usually bring it about. And when I started to recognize that, because I just thought I was like, well, my life looks the same and, you know, my circumstances are the same. Nothing's wrong. I didn't acknowledge how usually it was just I was being so mean to myself that over time time like it's kind

of I I liken it you know going to school and there's bullies in the playground and every day they say horrible things and you you you're resilient for a while and you think I'm not going to listen but eventually they wear you down and it's it's sort of I like that analogy to describe it but for you know people right now where everybody is obsessed with labels and antidepressants and prescription drugs are, I think, massively on the rise. What is your perspective on that and how much is changing just in the current landscape that we occupy? Well, I've watched this for 38 years now, and it's terrifying to have seen because the first few drugs came out in the 80s

and they were first discovered in the 50s, but they started coming out and people were, we had the shift to the biomedical model where instead of seeing our life experiences as life experiences and responses to adverse circumstances that needed support and ability to process through and ways to cope and community and all the stuff that instinctively we know is correct. It was siloed into the biomedical model, which said, okay, well, if you've got heart problems, those are the symptoms. So from those symptoms, we can diagnose

that there's an underlying heart condition. We can target a medication to that problem. That works well for the body and the brain physically, but it doesn't work for life experiences. And it hasn't been disproved. So this whole labeling, diagnosing, medicating for mental health challenges, which is basically medicalizing misery, normal human misery that we actually go through, has created a shortened lifespan, pretty much. So we see from the mid-1990s to now that people die 8 to 25 years younger from preventable lifestyle diseases related to how people are managing their mind.

So how we manage our minds, that whole question you asked earlier on and that whole long explanation I got about the trees and the waves and that, if you constantly bombard yourself with mindsets that I'm broken, once I'm damaged, I'm damaged forever. I have this label, I'm a broken brain. I need this medication. And you start taking that medication. That medication is not medication. It's a drug. Antidepressants and all those things, they're not medications.

They're not fixing anything. They're not like the heart medicine or that medicine for diabetes what they are doing is they are numbing agents so and then they change the structure of the brain and they create these you know different patterns in the brain eventually over time antipsychotics and these things create cognitive problems and like what damage well you get memory problems you lose you your brain starts getting damaged shrinking getting smaller uh becoming more difficult to and you have to regrow again once you start changing um once you start managing your mind but the medication over time it creates um it sets you up for dement, it sets you up for dementias. It sets you up for increased weakness and vulnerability. So that's why people die younger. Because they're more physically weak?

Yes. So the constant barrage of the negative, unmanaged stuff and trying to just medicate it away. So the combination of not dealing and processing and then the plus, there's something wrong with me as an individual. I've got a broken brain. Plus the combination of not dealing and processing, plus there's something wrong with me as an individual, I've got a broken brain, plus the drugs, that's a lethal combination. It weakens the body to the point where you're very vulnerable. And that's why we see the increase in lifestyle diseases coming from a very vulnerable body. So we weaken the cells. And when the cells weaken, which make the body, cross the brain and the body, then with this barrage of these mindsets that are incorrect, then we are more vulnerable to disease.

And over time, it's not straight away, it's cumulative. But we're now seeing, when I first started practicing, we would see people diagnosed with Alzheimer's and dementias in their 80s, 70s and 80s. Most of my patients that had dementias were in their 70s and 80s, mostly in their 80s 70s and 80s most of my patients that had dementias were in their 70s and 80s mostly in their 80s late 70s now and and I've stopped practicing I practiced for 25 years towards the end of my time of practice which was um sort of 15 years in 10 years the last 10 years that I've practiced I now just do research and and the podcast and so on. We were seeing diagnosing dementias as young as 35. And you think that that's 100% connected?

There's a pattern. So when you see 40 years of a change of philosophy where we are labelling, diagnosing and medicating, which works, as I said, for the body, but there's no proof. As soon as you say diagnosis, as soon as you say schizophrenia or bipolar, there's an implication that this is a diagnosis. It's a medical label. It has an underlying cause biologically and the medication is the fix. So like depression, bipolar, it's underlying chemical imbalance. Here's the medication fix. That's not the truth. That's disproved. It never was proved. It's been thoroughly disproved by neuroscientists around the world that depression is not a chemical imbalance and you can't fix it by adding chemicals

the chemicals are simply going to numb it as we've already said but depression is a natural response and a signal from the non-conscious mind to the conscious mind to hey take stock let's see where is this coming from as you said yourself when you look at the internal chatter, when you look at, you know, and you start working through and processing that stuff, which is not easy, and it doesn't happen as a quick fix. And the desire to feel good quickly, which is also the current zeitgeist, playing on humanity's desire not to feel pain. You have to feel pain. The pressure naturally resolves itself over time but things get worse before they get better and that's the natural cycle so what we've done in our research is track the healing journey which is to because i've seen this in my practice in my research but now we've

actually published on this and so we've i've got a couple of books coming out that are um in the next year as well and i've got other books that explain this too, but the healing journey specifically, they are specific ups and downs across a 63-day cycle. And if it's very big trauma, one 63-day cycle won't heal the problem, won't fix it. It's going to be multiple. So I had, for example, patients that had severe trauma alongside maybe some learning issues, that would be maybe four, five, or six cycles, some more. But each cycle that you go through, and by cycle, I mean 63 days, to unwire all this trees and octopus going crazy and your body carpets unrolling and these weird memory traces in our mind, that doesn't happen overnight. And it doesn't happen with drugs. Drugs make them more chaotic.

So maybe use drugs like you use a headache tablet. If you have a headache, take it when you have a headache. If you use them intermittently to help you through a bad moment, that's okay. But if you use them chronically, like heart medication, that's when you just make it so much harder for yourself to heal. And I'm not saying this to judge anyone because people have been told that this is what they have to do. This is what the psychiatric profession is promoting.

Well, it's that term you mentioned about the chemical imbalance. And I think it's very hard to say unless you're someone of your sort of caliber because it's very personal and I guess can be quite triggering for people to hear so what you see what i say to people in terms of this you don't need a meeting let's say someone listening now has got incredibly it's incredibly depressed maybe it's been labeled with bipolar

and general anxiety disorder whatever maybe has multiple labels and multiple drugs what i'm saying to you is that you didn't need a label to acknowledge the pain you're going through because that actually reduces and doesn't honor what you're going through. So let's put the label aside and use it as a description. So yes, you're suffering bipolar reactions, which means extremes where things trigger you and you have an extreme response and then it can be very negative or positive and then you kind of stabilize. That is not a disease that is a behavior that's telling you something's going on and it could be a lot of stuff going on that's created the mind to that all that octopus mind creates can create those those hallucinations hearing voices breakdown psychosis

all kinds of things. And that's not something wrong with you. That is your mind, brain, body trying to cope. And so the way to deal with that is to say, okay, well, I'm having those, but that's not who I am. That's not an underlying biological core. Sure, the brain has been changed because everything that goes in your brain changes. But by me recognizing that those are signals or symptoms of something that's going on, it's not me.

You've got to protect you. Your core needs to be protected, the self needs to be protected, otherwise you lose hope, so you are okay, but you're having the situation that you're in that's manifesting all these very strong signals, and I want to honor that story, there's a reason, just giving you a label, that doesn't honor you as a person. It doesn't honor you. Your stuff's big enough. It doesn't need a label for it to be acknowledged. And that's what makes me very sad because people have got to the point where they've been misled to believe that unless there's a label, it's seen as nothing. It's not valid. It's not valid. It is so valid.

And that's why myself, my colleagues, people like myself in this field, we try to say, hey, listen, your life experiences are so valid. Don't belittle them with a label. Minimize them. Yeah, don't minimize them. Use the label as a description and use that knowledge to help move you forward. You touched on bipolar and schizophrenia. What about those? Big names, big words, big scary words they've had so many years of being entrenched in the current culture the way to see those is they're

very real but they're very real behaviors so if you think of how we can show up as a person we show up in four ways every day throughout the day our emotions. Emotions never live alone. They go along with, we feel emotions in our body. And we've spoken about that already. So it's emotions, behavioral, emotional warning signals, behavioral warning signals. Then you're going to get your perspective, how you look at life, and then you're going to get your behaviors, what you say and do. So let's say that the emotion is depression, extreme states of depression, swinging that bipolar up and down. Let's say that in the body, there's tremendous heart pain, maybe, and gut issues, lots of gut issues. Maybe you find you've got IBS or whatever,

and it's consistent as a pattern. Let's say that your perspective is life sucks. And let's say that your behaviors are withdrawing, just not functioning very well, battling at work, et cetera, et cetera. And that cycle, unless broken, is just kind of spiraling into something that makes you feel like you're going to collapse. So those four signals are how we show up.

So what we need to do is to become aware of those signals and to tell ourselves to shift our mindset, which shifts our whole psychoneurobiology into one of this is not who i am this is who i am now because of let me find the because of it's going to be a hard journey it's and i've broken that journey down in my i've got an app just so people know the neuropsycho app i have books this i walk you through this like a therapeutic intervention, literally, where you can empower yourself, which is so important. I'm not saying don't go for therapy, but you are with your therapist 24-7, you're with

yourself. And it's a process of saying, okay, I'm going to allocate some time, 15 minutes a day, where I'm going to look at those signals. I'm going to then reflect on them. I'm going to write things down. I'm going to reconceptualize and I'm going to get a little action. That's called a neurocycle, five steps. You do that each day, a little bit each day to deal with that issue.

And the active reach keeps you in the moment. So once you move out of that 15 minutes, you've got to live the day. So the active reach is what you hang on to, to anchor. Is that okay? I know I'm feeling like this, but this is my anchor. It could be a statement, a visualization, an affirmation, whatever you want, a little technique, a CBT technique. It's something that you do to keep you anchored.

And in the app, I actually walk you through. You can set reminders and all kinds of things to walk you through. And then the big thing is you get through the day, and tomorrow I'll work a little bit more and a little bit more. And over time, you deconstruct and reconstruct a new reality for yourself, bearing in mind that if you think of a tree, that big issue that was giving you these extreme states of the bipolar and so on and so on,

as you go through these 63 days, you see, okay, this is tracked down to being rejected as maybe in early childhood, going through maybe parents that were drug addicts and not having parents that were very disattached. And I hate to blame parents all the time. I'm a mother of four myself and everyone messes up and every parent that has messed up the child is being messed up. We all affect each other.

The whole thing is that you can acknowledge that it's there and there's a huge sort of flow in, and I say flow, in social media to, you know, let's find our attachment theories wrong and blame our parents for everything. It's an endless cycle. We need to acknowledge that our parents affected us and not all of them did, but maybe it was someone at school who affected you.

Maybe it was a school teacher. Maybe it was some bully or whatever. It's not about blame. It's not about blame. It's about acknowledging you have the right to say, oh, okay, this could be coming from that. And I see that what they did was wrong.

I don't know what was in their head that they did that, but that's not my role. My role is to see that's where it came from. What they do with that is not my problem. I can get bitter, twisted and blame and become a victim. Or I can say that was terrible. It affected me in this way. How do I want my future to play out? And that's what I've tried to help people do is we don't go into some things you just have to accept. Why someone raped someone, God knows. Why someone teases someone

else, they've got issues. You're not going to understand the issues. So there's certain things, but if you know that, okay, your behaviors, your emotions, your signals are related to that experience, I don't have to get tied to that. I can disentangle and I can rebuild my life. And I can decide, okay, despite that, it was bad, wrong. I'm not excusing the behavior. It was terrible. We don't even talk about forgiveness. We just talk about release.

Let's release and let's rebuild. That is hard work. It's going to take cycles of 63 days but it will create an empowerment and shift your psychoneurobiology you literally rewind your brain that's neuroplasticity in your body in a nutshell i mean i that's fantastic i'm going to be downloading your app immediately because i think that that's such wonderful advice and it's it sounds like it's very digestible digestible for people to actually implement into their day-to-day living so thank you very much for sharing that and and for joining me today I feel like I could talk to you I could talk to you for

for days I love this you're a great interviewer and we got into some really cool really good important stuff so thank you so much i enjoyed it i hope you enjoyed this conversation with dr caroline leaf and myself like i said it was a lot of information to digest i probably recommend listening to this episode a couple of times because even when i've been listening back there is so much wisdom she is literally a genius and has so much to share in such an interesting aspect around mental health and all these things about you know how we do tend to perhaps over pathologize or or label things at the moment and actually perhaps it's just reacting to something that's off versus something being wrong with us and yeah there was a lot of food for thought so

I hope you found it useful and if you did find it useful please share it with someone else a friend a colleague family member or share us on social media because I always enjoy seeing who's listening to the show and don't forget to follow the show as well I think I'm supposed to be reminding people of that if you haven't please please please please please hit the follow button now because that means you never miss an episode and thank you so much for listening and as always remember you are not alone goodbye