The Squeeze - Dr. Caroline Leaf: Manage Your Mind

Episode Date: August 30, 2023

TW: brief mention of physical, sexual abuse   Today we are joined by a highly requested guest, Dr. Caroline Leaf! She is a renowned neuroscientist who specializes in psychoneurobiology and ...meta-cognitive neuropsychology (say that three times)! In this episode, we’ll dive into what made her want to get into this field, epiphany moments from her studies, and 5 steps to help reduce anxiety, stress, and toxic thinking and drive the mind-body connection in the right direction. Dr. Leaf has captivated audiences worldwide with her empowering message about the potential we all possess to transform our lives through our thoughts. She also offers insight into how our “mental messes” from childhood follow us into adulthood, and what she thinks is wrong with how we’re currently treating mental health. She continues to be a leading voice in the conversation surrounding mental health, offering a unique blend of scientific expertise and practical wisdom that she shares with us all in this episode. So, hold on to your brains and get ready to clean up your mental mess with us! Follow Dr. Leaf on Instagram and check out her website drleaf.com for more!  How to Help Your Child Clean Up Their Mental Mess  The neurocycle app   Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess  Thanks to our sponsor for supporting this episode!   Earth Breeze — Subscribe to Earth Breeze and save 40%! Go to earthbreeze.com/thesqueeze to get started  To email us your questions or share your story, you can reach out to lautner.thesqueezepodcast@gmail.com. Be sure to rate, review, and follow the podcast so you don't miss an episode! Plus, follow us on Instagram, @thesqueeze and personally @taylautner and @taylorlautner + on TikTok @thesqueezepodcast  To learn more from The Lemons Foundation, follow @lemonsbytay on Instagram and visit lemonsbytay.com  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Starting point is 00:00:26 going back to the inner child because someone who's, for example, been abused or in any way, whether it's sexual or physical, or if it's a short period or long period at any stage in our formative years and as adults, that is organically growing. You may not be consciously aware, but you're in a situation where there's a similar smell or a similar sound or a similar looking person or a statement or a movie, and it gets triggered. When life gives you lemons, what do you do with them? Over here at the squeeze, we talk about it.
Starting point is 00:01:11 Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of The Squeeze. The Squeeze, the squeeze, the squeeze. Remy is looking so confused right now. Why is Daddy talking like that? Why is he speaking like that? Because he's way yard. Welcome, everyone.
Starting point is 00:01:26 We're happy to have you. Happy Wednesday. Hope your week is off to a wonderful start. Midweek. If not, we got time to fix that. We got a whole other half of the week to go. We're going to start doing that right now. Right this moment.
Starting point is 00:01:40 So why don't we smile? All right, there you go. It's the time. Even if you don't want to, let's see those pearly whites. Let's flex those cheek muscles. Hey, you're not smiling. Everyone's going to smile. Sorry.
Starting point is 00:01:54 Okay, that's not a real smile. That looks like I'm in pain. I don't like doing big smiles. Why? I just, I don't like how I look when I have a big smile. Interesting. Yeah. Okay, then like a, like a.
Starting point is 00:02:09 I gave it to you. This is going to turn into a fight here. I smiled. I'm smiling. I'm smirking. That counts. Okay, fair enough. I do want to talk about something that my husband did yesterday, two days ago, a couple days ago.
Starting point is 00:02:27 That was really sweet. A few episodes ago, we ended with, I said something in you or making fun of me, but doing something for someone else, doing something nice for someone going out of your way to make someone say, holding the door open for them, saying an extra thank you, whatever. it may be. The other day, we were meeting at the store we both drove separately. I had parked in the parking lot and Taylor was like a few rows on the other side of me. And I
Starting point is 00:02:52 watched him and he started like walking the opposite direction of the entrance. I was like where is he going? And then he walked over to this old lady who was trying to get stuff in her car. I mean, it was a pack of like 42 water bottles. It was one of those huge ones. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:03:08 I think probably weighed like 40, 50 pounds. Yeah, and you helped her put it in her car. You know, sometimes you got to do what you got to do. That was really sweet. And we didn't want her breaking her poor little back. No, that was really sweet. I was like, aw, how cute is that?
Starting point is 00:03:24 I will well. You did something for someone. That was very kind of you. Oh, wow. Thank you. Yeah. How's your day gone? Oh, boy.
Starting point is 00:03:32 My day is going good. I had a psyche valve today. Oh, yes, you did. For the first time, a full little. little eval. How did you feel about that? Good. I have like a follow up to talk about some things, but it was good. It was, I didn't know like what a psych eval was, but basically he just like, I don't know either. I asked me a bunch of questions about how I'm feeling different like things I could maybe struggle with or, yeah, just basically asked a bunch of questions about, you know,
Starting point is 00:04:04 different emotional, different physical things that I've been through and have dealt with. dealing with. So yeah, it was, it was really simple. Okay. I'm glad you felt good about it. Yeah, it was great. Nice. Yeah. Well, who do we have on the show today? We have someone who actually has been highly requested by Argus. You guys have been asking for her to come on for, honestly, quite some time. Wow. I had to laugh to myself because last week, someone asked for her. And I was like, Little do they know. Oh, really? Little do they know.
Starting point is 00:04:41 She's coming on. Dr. Carolyn Leaf we have on the podcast today. Yes. And what is she specialize in. Oh, my gosh. This is what I'm right. This is, I had to ask her this. Okay.
Starting point is 00:04:52 So she's a neuroscientist. I have to read it because I can never say it. She specializes in psycho neurobiology. Psycho neurobiology. And metacognitive neuro psychology. Oh, no. But there's also metacognitive neuropsychology. She's a very, very, very.
Starting point is 00:05:11 very, very smart lady. Yes. Oh my gosh. Very smart, very kind, but we just had a very educational time with her, which was so fun. Yeah, we definitely learned a lot. I love learning and she's a great person to follow. We have her, I believe like her Instagram down below. You go check her out. She's great. She has awesome tools for your mental health. She recently just came out with a book called How to Help Your Child Clean Up Their Mental Mess. We just kind of dove into Which is great for like parents. Yes. This is yes.
Starting point is 00:05:45 With kind of how to support, you know, your children mentally. Yeah. Very important. As they grow up as they go through trials and tribulations. But it was just really awesome to get to talk with her. She has some of the most insane stories of people that she's seen, people that she's helped. And just very, very knowledgeable. And just has a really cool outlook on on mental health and on, you know, how to treat things and how she
Starting point is 00:06:10 approaches it. I learned about the neuro cycle, which is really cool. I don't want to give too much away because that was a fascinating part for me. Yeah. But yeah, we really, we enjoyed our time. Yeah, very thankful to have her and just honored to have her on for sure. People like her on this show. It's very. We're very thankful for everything that, you know, that Dr. Leaf does and, you know, that all of our specialists that we have on just do for the world. Yeah, because we would not be sitting here today. Without them. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:06:42 Because we would not be well. We would be very unwell. There you go. Yeah. So I hope you visited this episode. All right. Well, without further ado, everybody, enjoy Dr. Carolyn, Lee. Carolyn, thank you so much for squeezing in with us.
Starting point is 00:07:04 We are so excited to have you here on the squeeze. Well, I'm really pleased to squeeze with you. I love it. Okay. Before we get started, I do, I have a question. So you have like, a lot of titles. And two of these words, I don't even know what they are.
Starting point is 00:07:22 You're a neuroscientist that specializes in psychoneurobiology and metacognitive neuropsychology. Wow. What does that mean? Basically, I study the science of how the mind, brain, body connection works and the difference, so the difference between them and how they interact and how that affects how we show up in life. And once we understand how we show up in life and how to
Starting point is 00:07:47 read that, we can then track back and find out how do, we can basically deconstruct and reconstruct. We can reverse engineer back to the source of how we show up because how we show up is always because of behind it. We don't just show up. And when I say show up,
Starting point is 00:08:03 our emotions and behaviors, how we're functioning in life. And so we can track that back and then we can deconstruct and reconstruct and rewire and show up differently. So we can can't change our stories, but we can change what it looks like inside of our psycho-neurobiological network, mind, brain, body network, and therefore heart plays out into our future.
Starting point is 00:08:23 Wow, those words, that sounds so beautiful. Yeah, it does. I mean, I'm just curious, did you, like, always have a passion for this, or what, what originally prompted you to want to get in this field? I think from very young, I was interested in the mind and the brain and was going to become a neurosurgeon and I got into medicine and I thought, this is not really what I want to do because it's just I don't want to be dealing in an operating theater all day long and got very interested in a degree that they were offering at the university at the time. I mean, I'm 60. I'm just almost 60 in a couple of months. And so when I was training back in the 80s, neuroscience was pretty much not even spoken about.
Starting point is 00:09:10 So they had, I was very fortunate to have been exposed to a degree that was a combination of medicine and mind and whatever. So I moved into that. And that just got my juices going. And I started doing research very early on in trying to understand if someone's got a brain injury or if someone's badly with learning or severe trauma, how can we help them in a way that empowers them to change? And that took me down a journey of, you know, understanding what is memory, what are thoughts and what is, what emotions and all these things that we throw out there and that are kind of. overwhelming and what that means and how we can actually change your mind, change your life, which is really great. So it's always been a fascination and I haven't stopped.
Starting point is 00:09:49 It's 38 years. I've been in the field now. I still do research. I still run clinical trials. I don't practice anymore. I practice for about 25 years. And now I just pretty much do this and I put all, everything that I find and research and everything that I have discovered into a mental health app to try and make, basically to help
Starting point is 00:10:07 people have accessible and affordable mental health support. port. Yeah. Is this app out already? Yes, it's been out for a while. Now it's called the neuro cycle, as in neuro for brain and cycles. So cycling through your brain. And it's basically how you would use your mind to change your brain and body and change
Starting point is 00:10:28 your messy mind. So you can literally drive the direction of how your brain changes, which is incredible. Because if you can learn how to do that, you can pretty much rewire your networks and change how you function. And it's not easy. I mean, it's easy, but it obviously doesn't happen overnight. But it's something that people don't realize how much power we have and how to utilize that. Because of current biomedical models very much about labeling and sticking people in a box, very biomedical, very what we would call reductionistic. But that doesn't work, but you consider people's stories. Life is complex. Challenges are huge. So you can't just stick a whole
Starting point is 00:11:06 experience into a label. You've got to do so much more. And that's what I do with the work I do. And that's what the app does. It's very simple, practical how to rewire your brain, literally. Yeah. Yeah. That's really cool. I mean, yeah, it definitely takes work, but what a powerful thing to be able to do
Starting point is 00:11:25 and just know that you can have the control to do that and, you know, how it can change your life. That's unbelievable. Yeah. No, it is. It's very helpful. It's very empowering because essentially it's mind management. So we talk about managing pretty much that's what I teach.
Starting point is 00:11:42 How can you manage your mind? Because your mind is doing all the work. Your mind is your aliveness. Your mind is what's helping us have this conversation out. If you were dead, we couldn't have this conversation. So your mind is this energy force that actually makes the brain work. It makes the body work. It makes your heart work and all that kind of stuff.
Starting point is 00:11:58 So mind needs to be managed. Otherwise, messy mind, messy brain, messy body, messy life. So that's the sort of very simple fifth notes of you. So if you can teach a person to, whether it's a simple, day-to-day struggle like getting irritated in traffic or something that's maybe a pattern that's starting in a relationship or maybe a big trauma like an abuse of some sort. Wherever it is on that scale and in between, we need to know how to be empowered to manage our minds.
Starting point is 00:12:25 And so that's really what the focus is. Yeah, that's awesome. So something as you guys know that has been a huge part of my mental health journey, Taylor's mental health journey journeys as individuals. And as a couple has been therapy. Amen. And that is why I am so excited to share our next sponsor with you guys, which is cerebral. Cerebral is here to help you achieve your mental wellness goals with professional therapy and medication management support 100% online.
Starting point is 00:13:01 You'll experience the all new cerebral way, an innovative approach to mental wellness designed around you. You'll get a personalized treatment plan from a therapist, prescriber, or both in a safe and judgment-free space. I love that cerebral is 100% online because that means you have no excuse. You have to go. Like there's no, oh, I had on time to go drive. It's too long of a drive. No, you can do it on your lunch break. You can do it before work, after work.
Starting point is 00:13:30 And it's honestly just, it's convenient. Yeah. It's convenient and they have great therapists. Yeah. And it'll just keep you accountable too. So we highly, highly encourage that you guys. check out Cerebral because therapy is just done wonders for us and we know it'll do the same for you. To get started on your path towards better mental health, Cerebral is giving our listeners
Starting point is 00:13:56 15% off their first month of online therapy, medication, or both. Get started at Cerebral.com slash podcasts and use code the squeeze to make 2024 your best year yet. That's C-E-R-E-B-R-A-L.com slash podcast and use code the squeeze. Offer is only valid on monthly plans. Other exclusions may apply. C-Sight for details. Get going on that therapy. I want to know, just as you were talking and sharing, you know, everything you've been
Starting point is 00:14:32 through through the field, for all your research, through all your experiences. is there something that you've, like, found in your research that was like an aha moment or maybe shifted the way you approached your career path, but approached how you handled, you know, all of this mental health stuff? Oh, for sure. Thank you for asking such a great question. I think that epiphany moment really happened when I was pretty young and I was a new student and I was one of our neuroscience professors was saying the brain can't change. And immediately I thought that's impossible because we never the same from moment to moment. You know, life is constantly changing and whatever. And our mind is how we experience life.
Starting point is 00:15:12 And therefore, the mind changes. The mind uses the brain. So therefore the brain must change. And I said this to this professor and he said, oh, well, go to research and go study something like traumatic brain injury because, you know, there's no point. Basically, he was being sarcastic and saying there's no point in studying it because in the 80s, they didn't believe the brain could change. So I took up the challenge and that really was an epiphany moment for me because I thought, if I can work out how to get my mind to change my brain, then there must be some impact that it could have with people with
Starting point is 00:15:40 dementia or learning disabilities or traumas or mental health issues, you know, autism, traumatic brain injuries. And so I did some of the first neuroplasticity research back in the late 80s, early 90s with traumatic brain injury. And that showed me that this is the right way to go. And so I developed it further. I was in South Africa at the time. So I lived there.
Starting point is 00:16:03 I've been here about 15 years, but I was there at the time when I started my research. And that was around just post-apartheid. And pre-end post it was during that time period. So I worked in a lot of the schools in South Africa and a lot of the hospitals and things like that and seeing the trauma of just people's, I mean, that terrible part-aid system and just what can happen when there's that kind of socioeconomic and political. And all that's bad. how it affects people as a community.
Starting point is 00:16:32 And so I was dealing with a lot of trauma with people in that situation. And I started applying this at that level too. And it was just phenomenal to see the responses of people that didn't feel that they could ever learn or achieve anything or deal with that extreme trauma. And I mean, there was a situation once of us, I would go into what they called the townships and I'd work. And it was terrible how the systems they had. and I would go into a school and then the whole community would come and we'd have thousands of people
Starting point is 00:17:01 and I could go away if you were white they would kill you I could go anywhere I could get in my car I could be nine months pregnant I could drive because they understood that I came with the message of hope
Starting point is 00:17:10 so I worked for years and I'd go in and thousands of people would turn up and there were no microphone so I'd have to like stand on a like a bench for something and teach the stuff and the point is that I that I told them about
Starting point is 00:17:23 how I couldn't fix everyone's problem but I could empower them to understand how they worked and how they could change and how they could learn and how they could deal with the trauma and, you know, so long story short, that, those, that combination of seeing people, the one day I had this one guy, this is quite a dramatic story. It also was an epiphany moment. I was teaching a group, this one very scary looking young man walked.
Starting point is 00:17:46 It's like the Red Sea party. Everyone just moved out of his way and he went to the back of the, one of the main sort of rooms that I was teaching in. And he just stared at me the whole time. And my first thought was, okay, this is someone that when I go home, I need an escort because this is someone scary. That's how scary it was. And as the five hours that I was teacher, I'd sit there for hours. They wouldn't move. At the end of it, when that one of the teachers, or one of the, yeah, one of the teachers came up and said, does anyone want to thank Dr. Leaf?
Starting point is 00:18:11 And this young man ran to the front, tears pouring down his eyes and held up a pen and he said, now I know what to do with my pen to study. And now I know what to do with my mind to get healthy. And he went, he was a drug addict. He was, he was everything bad that you can imagine he was involved in. but he had such a hunger to learn that he would turn up at schools and try and just learn he was about 25 and anyway long story short that changed his life he became a pillar of the community went back to school transformed whole communities and it was i can tell you a thousand stories like that and so it's like it was almost wasn't one epiphany but it was a whole pathway of seeing that that if we can just help a person understand what the mind is and how you can manage it no matter
Starting point is 00:18:56 watch your circumstances. It doesn't mean you're saying you're saying you're saying you're saying. That's not what I'm saying. But it means that within the means that you have, you can transform yourself and transform communities. And that's what's kept me going all these years. So I don't want to bore you with too many stories. But I mean, that's like... Those were good ones. Those are so good.
Starting point is 00:19:11 It's a good answer. I think that's, it's so cool what you do because, I mean, myself included, like, a lot of us just feel like, I don't, like, I don't, like, not thinking I'm capable of changing how my mind works. not thinking I have the right tools or I need to, you know, go do all these classes on
Starting point is 00:19:32 bettering my mental health or something or go spend all this money on different types of therapies. But really, it is like you make it such an accessible thing for everyone. So it's really awesome. That awesome and just really encouraging. Like it made me think of when you were talking. We got our brain skin at the beginning of the year. And mine, I had my therapist that told me that I had PTSD, but my brain scan proved and showed me that I did have it. And honestly, knowing it and like knowing that I could change it, like, that the power was in my hands to like change it was really empowering. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:20:10 I just, I don't know, like just learning about how, how these things work and that we have the power to change them is just, is really cool because a lot of people don't realize it. No, they don't realize it. And it seems, you know, with the current biomedical model, it almost feels like, well, that's it. I'm a broken brain. That's all I am. Or I've got this genetic flaw or something. Meanwhile, every human being is a mess.
Starting point is 00:20:33 We all have, no one has a normal brain. That's what research has shown from a very famous research out of coming out of Yale. There's no normal brain. We're so unique. And our brain is changing every moment of every day. It's not the same as it was when we started this interview. It's changing all the time. And the beautiful thing is you can direct that change.
Starting point is 00:20:50 The research that I do, and we're actually going to be building this into our app, which is really cool. I use QEG technology in our research, which is we put a cap on your head, and that gives you a very, very, very good and accurate scan of the brain that tells you how your brain is responding in the moment. And our brains change all the time, and we've all got like what we call the Goldilocks principle, which is sort of, you know, the Goldilocks approach is just right. You know, we've all got our just right way of functioning, which is different for everyone. And the beauty of knowing that is so great. And to be able to show someone as you experienced, hey, like when you are feeling very anxious, this is what it looks like. That's not a permanent state.
Starting point is 00:21:31 That's just a representation of now. And if you do this, you can change. So a lot of the research we do, psycho-neurobiological research, we'll look at someone's story, what's going on in your life. We'll do very self-regulation scales and psychological scales to get those, there's a whole psychology site. So that's the psych side. Then you'll look at the brain.
Starting point is 00:21:50 neuro and we'll look at how as you tell your story and and so on, what does it look like in your brain? And then we'll also look at the biology. So in other words, what's happening, for example, in your telomeres. And I don't even know what a telomere is, but I can explain it very simplistically.
Starting point is 00:22:06 I do not. Okay, so if I cross my fingers like this, is a really simple example. My nails would be the telomeres. This cross is a chromosome and chromosomes unwind into our DNA. So in the cell, we've got our chromosomes. We've got 23 sets. and the end of them we've got our telomeres, which are nails.
Starting point is 00:22:24 So now your nails can break, telomeres can break. And telomeres are very important for the ability of cells to divide. And when cells divide, they make new cells, and cells make your body. So your telomeres tell you a lot about your biological health. And what we ideally want is for your biological health to match with your chronological age. So I'm 60. So ideally, I want to have a body that's 60, but actually I want to. wanted younger. My biological age is about 12 years younger than my actual physical chronological age.
Starting point is 00:22:57 And I really attributed to my management. So forget about me. But look at our research, for example, we've had people that when we look at this combination and people that have come into that study where they have so much, they can't function, they're so depressed, they're suicidal, they've been multiple diagnoses, polypharmacy, which means multiple different drugs, tried everything, life falling apart. I mean, really extreme states. Maybe I've had others that have been, you know, maybe not as bad, but are battling as well. And because everyone battles.
Starting point is 00:23:28 There's no one who's excluded. It's totally normal to be a mess. Okay, as I said in the beginning. Long story short, if we take them through a process of mind management over a period of time, and I can tell you the details of the time and how you do the mind management in a moment, if you would like me to explain, I can with pleasure. But essentially what we see over time, is that people, one case studies coming directly to my head, this person was in their mid-30s
Starting point is 00:23:56 and totally like really everything flatlined, depressed, couldn't sleep, wanted to give up on life. They were kind of persuaded by a friend to come into the study. And they'd done everything, polypharm, every drug therapy you can't imagine. And within three, within nine weeks, their biological age had increased by 35 years. So what that meant was at day one, they were 30 in their mid-term. 30s, but their body was of a sickly 65-year-old. A lot of inflammation, physically had a really bad, they're telling me is very short, not healthy.
Starting point is 00:24:29 Life, they were saying, I am depression in my life, so over that kind of thing. By the day 63, which is nine weeks later, which is the timeframe that our psychoneurobological networks work within to make changes that will actually impact your life. Within nine weeks, that person was saying, I'm not scared of depression, I'm not depression, I'm depressed because of, and it turned out that that had years of terrible childhood sexual trauma, and that's the coping mechanism was suppression, but you can't suppress it because eventually it would explode, which it did. It exploded in their sort of teens, and so long story short, they, within nine weeks of mind
Starting point is 00:25:06 management, every biological measure that we did, including telomeres, showed that they had gained 35 years of biological health and felt that they had a sense of peace. They knew it. They were sad and grieving what they'd gone. you're in depressed and anxious because of that. But that's normal depression, normal anxiety. Of course you're going to grieve if you think of what you lost. So it's that kind of thing.
Starting point is 00:25:27 And we do a lot of that. We've got a lot of studies going. We've got a big study running at the moment on this whole timeframe thing. And I mean, it's fascinating the sort of changes that we see. So I mean, sorry, I can go on forever about the stuff because it's just to give people. I bet you do. You're like, how do I sign up? Yeah, that was us going into our brain scans.
Starting point is 00:25:48 because I was like, I'm pumped. And Taylor was like, I do not want to go. He only did it because he's a nice husband and did it for me. That's where you want to go in and make it nice and easy. So we're going to be building that into our app as well. So you can do it in your own home and you can do, you know, which is nice and, you know, calm and that kind of stuff. Okay. But you don't even have to do the scan.
Starting point is 00:26:10 I mean, the evidence is there. This is the beauty of science. The system that I've developed, when you do it, that's the sort of thing that's going to happen. You know, that's the sort of thing you can expect. You're going to, but the biggest thing is not even so much what your brain looks like and what your body feels. It's what, how do you, how are you functioning? How are you feeling like you, or are you giving herself permission to be sad and to be anxious and depressed? And because those are very normal.
Starting point is 00:26:32 If you think of a scale and, you know, there's old-passioned scales where you've got two little plates in a balance beam in the middle and you put weights on and they go like this. But if you think of all of life's experiences and all the emotions, this could maybe be the things like depression, anxiety, etc. this is all the happy stuff. We want a balance of the two. To be a whole person, we need both. And essentially what's happening as we go through life is that we have these challenges. And so we need depression and anxiety to help us understand the challenge. So depression and anxiety on illnesses, they are telling us something.
Starting point is 00:27:04 If we embrace them as a message, we can actually say, okay, I'm not depressed because I'm depression. I'm not depressed because I'm mentally ill. I'm depressed because there's something going on. So, you know, why am I depressed? And you can go through a process where you can actually rewire the network. And so then depression then works for you, not against you. But if we do, and that's mind management.
Starting point is 00:27:24 If you don't manage your mind, that depression, which is, and that stress and all that stuff that we think is bad is actually good for you. But if you don't manage it, it works against you. And that's when people go into extreme states and so on. But even then you can help someone get back up. And you was saying earlier on Taylor that about the child, the sort of idea of being empowered constantly, if you think of it, you wake up with yourself at three in the morning. You know, yes, you're lying next to each other, but let's say you're having a panic attack.
Starting point is 00:27:51 We're on the road driving somewhere. You know, you manage, you don't, not with your therapist all the time. You're not with each other all the time. You're not with a counselor all the time. You're with yourself all the time. Your mind is driving everything. So if we don't know how to read the signals of where we're at and how to keep ourselves under control, things just get out of control.
Starting point is 00:28:07 And that's essentially what we can learn to do. Okay, you posted something on your Instagram that I just wanted to, to highlight because it really stuck out to me and Taylor's going to laugh at me because I don't even know if he knows what I'm about to say and he's going to roll his eyes and be like this is the most you thing I've ever heard. But I think a lot of people relate to it. So I want to read the post that you said. You said that just because you aren't stressing out or anxious about a task, job, goal, or project doesn't mean you are doing something wrong. Maybe it means you finally figured out how to do it right. And I just, I totally relate to that because I am the type of person
Starting point is 00:28:53 that needs to be like busy all the time. If I'm not doing something, I feel like I'm being lazy. I feel like I'm not giving it whatever it is 100%. I just constantly need to like, not that I think I need to feel stressed, but maybe I just, I struggle with having downtime and not being stressed. Yeah, I don't know what it is, but she definitely needs that in her life. Like convincing her to sit down and watch a TV show with me, very difficult. Because all that goes through her mind is, what else can I be doing? Like there's a million other things I can be doing to be productive right now, rather than spending an hour or two watching a TV show.
Starting point is 00:29:33 Yeah. Yeah. So I just really related to that. And I thought our listeners would like to hear because it's so true. I'm not being lazy. I am working as hard. I have maybe figured it out. Maybe I am doing it right. And doesn't mean that I need to keep piling these things on to, you know, feel busy or that, you know. So I just, I really, I really want to put that out. Thank you for, thank you for being that up. I mean, it's really important because we live in a hustle culture. And Taylor, boy Taylor, you like my husband. You've kind of, you've kind of managed to balance it. And if I look at, in my whole family, we've got four adult children and they all work for us. And if I look at it, I am the one like you, Girl Taylor. I am literally always, they literally tell me, okay, you know what, calm down.
Starting point is 00:30:23 So I've had to train myself over the years to see that watching that movie or lying on my balcony, watching the sea and reading a book or just playing with my dogs is as productive as, you know, doing it. And you don't have to feel this all the time. But on the same note, there is a level of satisfaction. Like when I do research, it's relaxation. It's not difficult for me. So to tell me to stop doing that.
Starting point is 00:30:47 So I want to bring some balance in here to this because there's this thing that you've got to do self-care. In fact, there's some quite funny article about, what was it? That's someone, one of my kids sent through some article about how self-care is almost created rotten bed, something. People are like sitting in bed and there's so much emphasis on self-care that we feel guilty if we're not doing the formula. Meanwhile, everyone's got their own unique bio-individuality, their brain is different. We do need to make sure, though, that we are resting. So there's a combination of finding that balance of am I stuck in hustle culture where I feel, like unless I'm achieving something, I'm wasting time, or am I able to evaluate what does
Starting point is 00:31:30 time wasting mean? Why is not watching a movie productive? And understanding that, thinking, okay, well, maybe I can watch a movie once or twice a week, but I really love to read reading. It's to work out what works for you, but to be completely honest and evaluate because unfortunately the brain and the conscious mind get very tired. They're like yourself, they are going to run out. But your non-conscious mind, which most people don't even understand exists, so it's not the
Starting point is 00:31:56 unconscious. The unconscious is when you're asleep. The subconscious is actually just a portal. It's a doorway between the conscious mind and the non-conscious. The non-conscious is the biggest part of you, never stops. It's how you build life into your brain. It's how to protect you. It's always looking for things that are blocking and sending signals to use the conscious mind.
Starting point is 00:32:15 It is sorting out things when you're asleep. So it's your best friend. And literally your unconscious mind uses things like intrusive thoughts to catch your attention, depression and depression and anxieties to catch your attention. So it's sending messages to you all the time. And what's really important is for us to be honest and open and to look at those messages and say to ourselves is how, I'm showing up with the need to do so much that I feel like unless I feel this level of whatever, I'm not satisfied in who I am. If that's really what you need to survive, always to be in mind that there's only so much
Starting point is 00:32:48 energy your brain has, so to make sure that part of that busyness is also some sort of relaxation busyness. So maybe you do need a read a book or you do need a read a research study or you do need to have a certain amount of things filled up in the day. That gives you peace. That's great. But to work out where the balance is and to read the signs of where you. you're starting to get tired.
Starting point is 00:33:07 And one of the classic signs of someone who wants to keep busy all the time, and that's part of who they are, is a feeling of flatness. So when your brain starts getting flat, you feel flat. And if you've done it like a few days in a row, you may wake up and think, okay, I'm actually feeling a little bit depressed and there's no reason for me to feel depressed. That could be that your brain is really tired and needs a rest and that you do need to watch that really, if that makes sense. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:33:34 Interesting. Yeah, you're going to be making me watch a lot of movies with you now. Do you ever feel flat? Yeah, I think so. That's a really classic feeling because the kind of, I mean, that's how I tell when I, that's, that's the way that I can judge when I know like, okay, I'm feeling flat. I've overdone it. I'm over excited. I'm overhyper, you know, those energy as bunny things.
Starting point is 00:33:55 It's time for me to deliberately and intentionally go and have a sauna, go for a longer walk, lie on the balcony, literally force myself. Even if I'm still reading a research paper, I'm lying on the balcony as opposed to sitting at my desk or something like that. Yeah. So those are... I think that's all good things. Yeah, that's a great thing to implement. All right. Well, we're watching a movie tonight. Okay, so you've written quite a few books, and I wanted to dive into a couple of them. So first, in your book, cleaning up your mental mess, you go over five simple, scientifically proven steps to help reduce anxiety.
Starting point is 00:34:33 anxiety, stress, toxic thinking, could you give us and our listeners a little sneak peek of what these steps are? Because I would personally love to help start incorporating them. Absolutely. So the whole psychoreobiological network thing I spoke about and mind management and all that stuff, the five steps are how you make the psychoneobiological network work the way you want it to work. So your mind-brain-body connection, you can drive it in the right direction with the five steps. So it's the tool. It's
Starting point is 00:35:10 the system of how you make your brain rewire itself in the way that it should. Take that energy that's toxic and take those protein because thoughts, experiences like this discussion now isn't just words. It's actual electromagnetic light forces and
Starting point is 00:35:26 all kinds of auditory sound waves and quantum waves and it actually goes in your brain and your brain then responds and bold, proteins out of this information. And so this conversation, for example, is growing into a tree-like structure, which is a thought. And everything we talk about is all the little memories. So you grow trees in your brain.
Starting point is 00:35:45 So by the time we, at this stage in our lives, we've all got trillions of trees because we've had trillions of experiences. So the good, the bad, the ugly are all built into your brain networks as these trees. And they never go away. They can just get changed. So once they're there, they're there. That's it. but you can change them.
Starting point is 00:36:03 So if it's a toxic experience, think of an ugly looking tree. And if it's a healthy experience, think of a healthy tree. That's a really easy way to understand it. And not only is it a tree in your brain, but it's also a change in every cell that you have. And we have about 37 to 100 trillion cells. And those cells are, the memory is going to those cells as well. And that also goes into your mind as it like a field. So we've got to deal with all of that.
Starting point is 00:36:27 This field, this trees, these changes in our cells. So just saying I want to change, or just doing a breathing or meditation exercise, or just doing positive affirmations. None of those are wrong. They're all important and they're all achieve a goal. But what I found from our research is that and my clinical application and so on is that you've got to follow a sequence. To get things from the mind into the brain and into the body, there's a sequence that the brain actually goes. The mind, not just the brain, the mind, the brain and body, they separate. The brain's physical.
Starting point is 00:36:58 The mind makes the brain work. It's that energy. So there's a root, and those five steps have grown out of that. So the five steps are called the Neurocycle, which I mentioned earlier on, which is in an app form. So the app is like literally me walking you through the five steps in a sort of therapeutic sense. And you can also use it in the moment. So the Neuropsychel is five steps for dealing with big stuff like trauma, dealing with middle of the road stuff, like patterns that are maybe disrupting a relationship or something.
Starting point is 00:37:27 And then the day-to-day stuff like irritating traffic or an irritating email. stuff that's not so big. So you can use the nearest five steps in 30 seconds in the midst of an argument to calm things down. If there's a big pattern in your life, you would use the neuropsychol daily for about five to 15 maximum 45 minutes over cycles of 63 days, which is the time it takes to rewire the networks. So that's what the thing does. It's the tool of how to change the networks. And why do you need to change the networks? Because those networks are producing you, how you show up. Everything you do, every moment, every day is not just happening randomly. It's attached to the networks in the psychoneurobiological field. And therefore, if I want to change
Starting point is 00:38:13 how I'm showing up in certain circumstances, in other words, if I'm feeling very depressed or very triggered or very anxious or having panic attacks, that's what is that related to, if there's some reason behind that. That is coming from, those signals are coming from the network. that you've built. So by using the five steps, you learn to observe how you show up, and then you reverse engineer to find the thought that it's attached to in your brain, which has got all these memories. And then you can break that down, go to the root, which is the origin story.
Starting point is 00:38:45 Where did this thing come from in the first place? So the branches are kind of how you're showing up. And then the roots are where it comes from. And then you can't ever get rid of the tree, but what you can do is heal the roots. And then that then grows, the tree turns from an ugly tree. to a pretty tree. I mean, that's so simple, but that's what you're doing. When that happens, then your body responds.
Starting point is 00:39:05 So that's kind of the behind it. So do you want to explain what the five steps? I'll give you a brief overview of what they are. Yeah. Sure. Yeah, I'd love to know. Okay, so the five steps are called the gather awareness, the gather awareness, reflect, right, recheck active reach.
Starting point is 00:39:22 Each word is deliberately chosen. And as you're doing it, all this fantastic brain stuff is happening. So it's like a lot of stuff happening. And I've got charts in the book if you want to go into. the detail in the children's book, which is how to help your child clean up their mental mess, which is releasing in August. That's got all this in very simple language. So a lot of the adults love this because it's all pictures and there's a little character
Starting point is 00:39:41 called Brainy that walks you. We've got this little character called Brainy that walks you through the whole is your mental health, mental health journey. We'll send you a brain in the book and whatever. Anyway, so the cartoons are a great way for kids to relate to. But it's the same concept. You can teach a child as young as two how to do these five steps. You just got to do it slightly different.
Starting point is 00:39:59 Okay, so this is what you do. The first, just before you start the five steps, you need to prepare your brain. Because your brain and your body and your mind, you've got to prepare the psychoneurobiological network because the chemicals are flying like crazy, the energy's gone crazy, there's chaos. Depending on, and it may be a little chaos or big chaos, it's messy. So if we're going to do some work of changing stuff, of trying to find out and change something in our life, we have to calm down the brain first. do the brain preparation, and that could be anything from breathing, meditation, awareness, whatever,
Starting point is 00:40:36 anything in that region, it could be something as simple as if you've very worked up or you're trying to just get your mind calm, you could think of five things I can see, three, four things I can small, five, three things like that. So it's all, there's a million techniques out there that fall in under the brain preparation active kind of area. And that's not enough, though,
Starting point is 00:40:58 to finish you. That just starts the process. A lot of people only do that. And it's like a band-aid. On their own, they do not work for long-term. They don't create long-term change. You can keep using them,
Starting point is 00:41:11 but it doesn't solve the problem. But you need them to get the brain under control. So you need them plus. So the neurocycles the plus. And so therefore, once you prepare the brain, then you're going to gather awareness. Now gather,
Starting point is 00:41:22 note the word gather. Gather means that I'm in control, I'm selecting, I'm choosing. So you're going to choose what you want to focus on in the moment. It's not all over the place in chaotic. It's very focused. And you gather awareness of force signals. So we show up as a collective in force signals. So all the way we, in a comment, let's say that you have an argument with someone.
Starting point is 00:41:44 The way you're showing up in that moment, you're going to have emotions, you're going to have a response in your body. You're going to have behaviors, how you're speaking, what you're saying, what you're doing. And you're going to have a perspective in that. moment. So angry, tense shoulders, irritated speech, and I hate this person or whatever. I mean, I've just saying stupid stuff, but it gives you the idea.
Starting point is 00:42:05 So you gather awareness. Now, that simple thing of just labeling in four sentences starts to change the networks. It brings stuff into the conscious mind and it makes the trees weak and malleable. So now I can change it. It also makes us aware of stuff
Starting point is 00:42:21 we weren't aware of. And so we could start breaking patterns and so on and breaking responses that will maybe tumor responses for coping and stuff like that. So it brings into awareness and it's very focused. Then you immediately go into reflect and reflect is why do I have this emotion and what are the emotions I have and why is it cheering up like this in my body and where, when, what, why, how. So it's like shining a light through a prism, a white light becomes a rainbow and it comes
Starting point is 00:42:44 out the other side. So the reflect is taking those four things you gather awareness of which are all little sentences and doing the why stuff. then you've got to write that down. And I'm not talking journaling. I'm talking literally throw it on a page. The messier, the beta all over the page, colors, pictures, arrows, circles, whatever you want. And whatever comes to your mind.
Starting point is 00:43:05 Because at this stage, you've opened up the networks and you've opened up access to the non-conscious mind in-on. And that's where all of our networks are stored. And it's kind of like the, sure, you've seen the big redwoods in San Francisco, the root systems. That's what our networks look like. They connect it. So once I pull up one associated. thoughts will be pulled up. So sometimes there's a whole bunch of associations.
Starting point is 00:43:27 Okay, so you get that idea. So the writing starts putting that up and giving you insight. And what's really important about that stage is to just get it all on a piece of paper and not to worry about, oh, what does this? This doesn't make sense. Just get it down. Then in the fourth step, you go back and you look and make sense of the whole situation. What are the patterns?
Starting point is 00:43:43 What are the triggers? How can I reconceptualize this? Look at it to another lens. This has happened. What can I do? And then you close the cycle because your mind, brain, body network works in cycles. So the first four steps have taken you in a cycle like this. Now we need to close the cycle.
Starting point is 00:43:59 So the active reach closes the cycle and then another one will start. And the action, which is a little action that you can do, simple thing. Like it could be just a statement, a positive affirmation, a little visualization technique. It could be anything related to the work that you've just done. And whatever. So now let me talk through this very fast. Let's say that you're in an argument, in a meeting, and someone says something that really triggers you. and you can feel yourself about to explode.
Starting point is 00:44:24 So you can quickly do it in your cycle. So you can quickly, in your mind, like 10 seconds, I'm angry, I'm going to explode. Notice this, I'm angry, emotion. I'm going to explode behavior. I've got immediate fluttering of my heart. I'm getting like, and then my perspective, this has gone on too long. Quickly say that, why? Okay, there's a situation here.
Starting point is 00:44:46 This is happening too often. I can't. This has got to be dealt with its impact. Quickly in your head. Just give yourself the reason why. So you're validating yourself, you're allowing yourself to be messy, you're not denying, you're not whatever. Then you may not be able to write it down. Maybe you can.
Starting point is 00:44:58 Maybe you have time to write it down, pretend you're taking notes in the meeting, but maybe you don't. So if you don't have time to write, you just visualize as though you're taking a movie through your iPhone camera, you know, on your phone, stuck your first video and you're video. And what you do is you kind of fly above your head in your mind. It's called a multiple perspective advantage and you watch yourself in that situation. You watch the other person. You watch yourself and you listen. You observe.
Starting point is 00:45:21 You've distance and you observe, and that helps you kind of get all of the situation out. So when you're writing or observing, you're getting it out, and that pulls things up and it's not showing you. Then you're going to go into the quick recheck, okay, I see that this is happening. This person's losing their call. But it often shifts you into empathy where you think, okay, well, maybe they're showing up like that because there's something that they, whatever. So you start seeing that other perspective, that that is very powerful. It starts showing you another, a bigger bird's eye view of the situation. So your recheck is, okay, well, I can't explode.
Starting point is 00:45:53 Now, I feel much karma. Just having done those, you feel calmer. That person's saying that ridiculous thing. I don't agree with the word, they said, but they've got a reason. So let me try and get that reason out of them so that I can reason with them or whatever, and we can solve this problem. So that's kind of a recheck. And then the active reach, you calmly say to them, is this what you mean? And you maybe repeat back what they said to them, to reflect back to them what they said.
Starting point is 00:46:16 And then they can say, oh, no, I didn't actually mean it that way or whatever. And you can actually move forward. Now that can happen in 10, 20 seconds and can turn a potentially explosive situation into something that actually can be taken to the next level to analyze what a better solution is or whatever. So that's an example of in the moment. But if you're doing this over time, if it's a big trauma that you're dealing with and how do we recognize a big trauma, changes in our patterns or consistent patterns that are disruptive,
Starting point is 00:46:44 whether it's in a relationship or at work or just in how you feel about yourself. There's a lot of negative self-talk and that's a pattern. there's a reason. And then you have to do the neuropsychle daily in this planned and guided way over time to pull all of that up and change. Because habits don't form in a day. They form in cycle of 63 days. So that's the basic principle. So cool.
Starting point is 00:47:04 Yeah. I want to like learn how to do that. You wanting to learn? I know. I have a problem. I like learning. But when you start doing it, it's unreal. I've done this for years now, obviously, because it's developed a system.
Starting point is 00:47:19 years ago and proved and whatever, but I use it daily. And I'm always doing, like, when I get up in the morning, that's what I'll do in your cycle to get me into that frame of mind and check if I'm not complaining or something because the way you wake up sets the tone for the day. So you can quickly get yourself under control. And what I'm getting ready, I'll work on if there's a pattern in my life. In a situation, like if I get thrown and I react, I can get myself back under control. So I don't have it all together, but I still lose it and get frustrated and still get
Starting point is 00:47:45 upset. But I don't stay like that for longer. It's like this would happen before. I'll get stuck. Now things happen. I get thrown, but I get back up quickly. So my resilience has changed. And that's what I found with my patients and whatever over the years. So it's a life skill. This is not a new therapy technique or a new self-care thing. It's basically a life skill. Your mind drives everything. So if you don't manage your mind, all those self-care and whatever, everything else you do isn't going to be functioning at the level it should. So your mind,
Starting point is 00:48:15 because your mind drives everything. Wow. That's so awesome. I want to stick on on your new book that at this time is not out, but by the time this episode comes out, it will be released. So congrats on the new book. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Super excited for you.
Starting point is 00:48:32 Need a little brainy, a little brainy guy over here. And that's so cute. We'll make sure you get a brainy. It's very cute. I love a little brainy. So cute. But I do want to know on the note of your new book.
Starting point is 00:48:44 I mean, I think we kind of touched on it. So maybe this is the answer. But if not, I would love to know about like how do our mental messes from our childhood follow us into like adolescence and adulthood? Is that kind of what you were saying with the trees? Is that how they're they follow us because they're there?
Starting point is 00:49:03 Excellent question. Anything that we've experienced is influencing how we show up. So all our collective experiences are influenced. That's logical. We all know that. But this is real nuts. It's really real trees inside your brain. So if it's a toxic tree, it is influencing.
Starting point is 00:49:19 how you show up. Anything that's toxic is because it's not normal to be abused or not normal to be bullied or whatever, unless it's processed, we develop coping mechanism. So you can almost think of the branch, the roots as the experience, and then the branches of how we interpret that experience and how we cope. And then collectively that tree works with the mind and the body. And here you are in life at school, at work, in relationships, etc. So that never goes away until we do something about it.
Starting point is 00:49:49 And that's that explosive thing that I exposed earlier on about that one client to, I mean, the one person in the study, you had that extensive childhood trauma and so. So it carries through in that, whatever you think about the most will grow, whatever is unmanaged or undealt with, the tree in the forest. Think of it like this. A tree that's in a forest, if it's planted in the soil, it's still getting nutrition, it's not going away until you actually do something to the tree, maybe chop it down, or change the heal because you don't want to chop down trees. So we're going to, and you can't in your brain, they never get chopped down. They'll just grow back up again. So you might chop it down.
Starting point is 00:50:28 They're going to just pop straight up again. They're even more toxic than before. So we have to go to the source and we have to heal the nutrition, the roots and things like that. So in childhood trauma that is undelt with, we've got that toxic tree that unfortunately is growing. It's organic. It's dynamic. It's not just stuck in time.
Starting point is 00:50:46 And that's why we hear so much about people going back to the inner child, because someone who's, for example, been abused or in any way, whether it's sexual or physical or if it's a short period or long period at any stage in our formative years and as adults, that is organically growing. You may not be consciously aware, but you're in a situation where there's a similar smell or a similar sound or a similar-looking person or a statement or a movie, and it gets triggered. And every time it gets triggered, it grows a little bit more. And eventually it's so big that you can even, it can get so big that we can look at life through just that tree.
Starting point is 00:51:24 So here I've got a forest of a trillion trees, but I am stuck in this part of the forest that's toxic. And that then influences. So there's a story in the book of someone that I had never actually met until I had actually written, was almost finished writing this book. And it was someone who got on my research team and was a, was a part, it was new on the research team. Unbeknown to me, they had discovered the neuropsycho app and were using it. Now, this is just very quickly backtrack. This is a stepmom of a child who was her, I mean, she married her husband.
Starting point is 00:51:57 It was his child from his first wife. And that child, he left her immediately, whatever, there was no, it wasn't a good relationship. She wasn't a great mom. But he didn't realize how bad she was. And so basically the child was physically abused from physically and sexually abused from the age of three months. I mean, it's horrific.
Starting point is 00:52:13 It's a terrible trauma. They only realized a couple of years into that child's life that what was happening and it took them another whole year to get the child away from that mother because of whatever social services and whatever. Long story short, they got the child, but now that child was manifesting with all kinds of behavioral problems and illnesses.
Starting point is 00:52:32 And I mean, this child, by the time the child was eight, this child had every label under the sun, from autism to bipolar to everything you can possibly give someone. This child had it at eight. and they were, you know, they were literally forcing them to put the child on medication because that's what the current system says. If you don't do it, the schools will report you. And so they were really in a tight place.
Starting point is 00:52:52 Anyway, long story, very, the story ends up very happily. The mom is a research, was working for a company that works with me on my research team and happened to be part of the detail on one of our studies, started using the neuropsychiatric, and to help herself just cope because the situation was terrible. This child wouldn't sleep at night. They couldn't go anywhere. They couldn't do anything. The child would sleep less than four hours at night.
Starting point is 00:53:20 They'd wake up every couple hours at night. It's just because of everything that had been happening. Impossible at school. They had to homeschool. She was falling apart. And essentially, she then used the neuropsychel and started changing. And so this child that she was homeschooling and trying to work saw her change. And this is key.
Starting point is 00:53:38 If you're going to help your child, and that's really the principle of operating here in order to help our children with through this mental health crisis that we're in. We have to teach them mind management, not more medication, not more drugs. This child saw the mom change and said, I want to do that. What are you doing? And I didn't have the children's version out yet. She just adapted it down and the child did it with her. Within four days, this child was sleeping through the night.
Starting point is 00:54:00 And there's interviews and things that I did, which I put into the book. But it was such a, I could have put it, there was a thousand stories I could have put in this book. But I put this one in because it's so dramatic in terms of this trauma, child's trauma, that persisted from three months through to eight the child's now, almost nine and a half. And the difference is phenomenal. The child's at school, coping. Still has issues. I mean, who doesn't?
Starting point is 00:54:24 And there's still going to be stuff that carries through. But as something comes up, this child will turn around and say, okay, I need it. I know what to do. And this child will tell you, I mean, it's unreal the kinds of comments that when I interviewed him, he was eight and a half. other sort of things that he would say that once he knew how to do the neuropy he said if I'm feeling bad if I must one day
Starting point is 00:54:44 I'd go do my neuropsychil and it helps me and he'll draw pictures like I don't want to have nightmares tonight and here's my picture of a nice dream and there's a house or the chimney that's got the parts coming out of it versus a little chimney
Starting point is 00:54:57 that's got black smoke coming out of it and he said I go to bed and that's my active reach I go to sleep thinking I'm going to dream the heart I'm going to have the hearts coming out of I mean kids are brilliant in how they how they talk about it. Today I was speaking to a 16 year old
Starting point is 00:55:10 that I didn't even know was doing my neuropsychle was someone that was a group of athletes that we're going to be working with and the daughter was battling and sort of using the neuropsychle and it transformed your life. I mean, I'm not trying to push my stuff really.
Starting point is 00:55:23 It's not the neuropical. It's the neurocycle. It works. And that's why we, I don't practice anymore. Why we don't, we put in something for $99 for a whole year you can get on the app. The book is, I don't know how
Starting point is 00:55:37 to keep anything back. I give every skill possible that you can be empowered to help your child and not break the bank in the process. It's, it's our right. It's our human right to understand how to deal with that stuff that has happened to us and to help us feel like we've got an identity again, that we have value and that I can do it. I don't have to rely just on the external. I can actually learn how to do it myself and I'm not broken. You know, that's not forever broken, and, you know, that kind of concept. Yeah. That's true.
Starting point is 00:56:08 I get so passionate about this because I've just seen such transformation and this is why, you know, this is really why I do what I do. Yeah. I was like, push it all you want because it's clearly, it's clearly worked for a lot of people and it's so cool that it's been able to help so many people. Were you going to say something? No, I was just going to say that it's unbelievable. And, yeah, the power of the brain is unbelievable.
Starting point is 00:56:31 And those example stories are just phenomenal. Yeah, they really are. Very eye-opening. Yeah. Last question, before we let you go, I would love to know what, I mean, you can answer this however you want. But what do you think is maybe wrong with how we're currently treating depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues in children today?
Starting point is 00:56:57 Thank you for asking that question. And my answer applies to children, but it also applies to adults. Okay. The short end of the sort of the clip notes version is that things shifted around about, the way we do with mental health shifted dramatically around about 40 years ago, 40, 45 years ago when they discovered the first medication to give to people that were really out of control and it sort of it calmed them down. So a whole industry of drugs for helping control mental health.
Starting point is 00:57:27 At the same time, the psychiatric guild was very, threatened because they weren't seen as real doctors. So it was now a thing of, oh, okay, cardiovascular surgeons have got a heart, we've got the brain, we can now medicate and whatever. So there was a lot of that kind of thing going on. And that combination is a very powerful combination that then pushed in the concept of mental health into the world of the biomedical model. So it's kind of what I said in the beginning.
Starting point is 00:57:54 You can't just, if someone has a, like the story of the child I just told. What happened with that child is that the symptoms were the only thing that were, it was the symptom that was the focus and elimination of the symptom. This child's showing these behaviors. Let's eliminate those behaviors through a diagnosis and a medication. And yes, there was bits of therapy, but the therapy was around that sort of focus. So that shift from looking at the whole person in their circumstance and understanding that anxiety, depression are not illnesses, but are emotional warning signals that are very normal.
Starting point is 00:58:28 responses to adverse circumstances. That focus shifted to, uh-uh, that's not what you're looking at here. We're going to treat it like diabetes type 1, which we know is a problem with the pancreas. You can do tests, you can diagnose, you can track it back to the underlying biological cause, and you can aim a medication at that. That's a medication. It's identified, it's trying to help with the lack of insulin. So it makes sense. But when it comes to that child story, that's not a chemical imbalance that that child has, that you can fix with a drug. That's not a drug-related problem. That's not a brain-related problem. Although the brain has been damaged because the mind uses the brain and that toxic, constantly having those toxic trees
Starting point is 00:59:09 in the brain will affect the telomeres and the hormones and the stress system and physically weaken the biological age of the body. So therefore, illnesses will develop, which this child had, which people, which that case study I gave earlier on in my clinical trial, they had physical problems. So that's very normal to have the physical sicknesses, but that's not the cause, that's the result. Because if you're constantly take a computer and throw it on the floor, it's not going to work properly. So that's the principle operating here.
Starting point is 00:59:36 And so essentially what we need to, what we, what that shift then led to, um, the situation of instead of looking at the whole picture, diagnosing symptoms. And if you do that, you're going to land up with a crisis. Now here's the question very quickly to summarize this. If that system worked,
Starting point is 00:59:55 wouldn't things be better today than they were? 40 years. we're sitting with a problem that was picked up in the early 90s, and that between 2014 and 2015, a huge studies were done over a long time from 96 to 2014 and multiple studies globally, that the federal data that was released on the study showed that people are dying 18 to 25 years,
Starting point is 01:00:16 8 to 25 years younger than they should from preventable lifestyle diseases. There's these things called death of despair. In other words, there's a bunch of stats and statistics and research saying that, hey, the billions of dollars that you've thrown at this approach to just diagnose and medicate and try and say it's all brain related is not working.
Starting point is 01:00:34 Not doing anything. But it's still being done. It's still being done. And that's the, so there's been global surveys done on mental health. That we do these global surveys. And generally, adults come out worse than kids,
Starting point is 01:00:46 but the last couple of years, kids have come out worse than adults. So this drug focus, not allowing a child to be pathologizing childhood, medicalizing misery has been the result. And then that leads to this increase in mental, health crisis. So I don't believe it's a mental health crisis. I believe it's a mind management crisis. So if we can bring mind management back in, we can shift things.
Starting point is 01:01:08 Yeah. Does that make sense? It's a complicated answer, but does it make sense or I can try and simplify? No. It made pretty good sense to me. Yeah, that made complete sense. Yeah, that was good. Ooh. Good. Carolyn, thank you so much for being with us today. That was, um, that was all. Awesome. I learned so much and I hope everybody listening did too, but we were really honored to have you and just thank you for your time and everything you do. Yeah. Go get the book. I'm honored and thank you for your great questions. There's a lovely discussion. I'll make sure you get a brain. Okay. Perfect. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for squeezing us into your day.
Starting point is 01:01:53 Please be sure to rate, review and follow our pod and check out full episodes on YouTube. You can follow me at Taylor Lautner, my lovely wife, at Taye Lautner. Check out The Squeeze on Instagram at The Squeeze. And also give a little glance and a follow to Lemonsby Tay. That's at Lemonsbytee on Instagram and lemonsbytea.com. And also be sure to email us, Lautner. Dot the Squeeze podcast at gmail.com. If you guys have any questions, any guests you'd like to see,
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