How To Manage Your Mind During Chaos | Dr. Caroline Leaf EP 734

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation show. Today's episode is all about unlocking the power of your mind. Having a growth mindset is one of the most crucial decisions you can make in your life. Mental toughness can allow you to respond instead of react, to be in control instead of out of control, and give you the endurance you need to follow your dreams.

0:32the biggest thing with the mind and managing mind Lewis is to accept that depression anxiety even the scary words like bipolar and schizophrenia and then going to the more sort of things like that we can accept grief anger etc these are not illnesses this is the biggest message that I probably have the second biggest the first is that mind is the source and if you don't get mind right everything else you can read all the great books you want and go to all the great seminars and self-help but unless your mind is right you won't ever use that stuff it's just data and so you do these there's that's there's another step missing and it's understanding that autonomy that sense of agency that we have to manage what's going on around us and to accept part of mind management is not to make the bad stuff go away but to know how to live in the bad stuff because it's not going away so despair anger depression anxiety these are all completely normal responses.

1:25In fact, they're very helpful. They're helpful messengers and warning signals as opposed to being scary illnesses. They are not neuropsychiatric brain diseases like we've been told. They are actually responses. And because they are responses of our mind in the world, we use our brain and body to express them because the mind has to have the brain and body to build the thoughts. And then we use that to speak. We're using our physical to store what we've processed and to convert and then to speak. So obviously, if our mind's a mess, our brain and our body will be a mess. But because our brain's neuroplastic and if we manage our mind, we can change our brain.

2:03We can change our DNA. Literally, that's what I've shown in my research. You can literally change your DNA, your blood markers. Literally. If you change your mind, you can immediately influence your biomarkers. So for example, I've been testing out a continuous glucose monitoring device for some research purposes. And I happened to, while I was wearing it, because you wear it and then you track your levels, and I wanted to see in terms of mental health and the neuropsycho that I've developed, I wanted to see the impact. And I happened to be going through the experience of very acute trauma in our family over December.

2:34And in the moment of the trauma, I happened to see on my glucose monitor that my glucose had shot up to 240. Now, that's heart attack level. And I immediately managed my mind through the neuropsycho, which is the concept that I've developed, which is just a system anyone can learn it. and I dropped my glucose levels within seconds back down to a normal level. And as it cycled up, I could manage it. And if glucose is at that level, your cortisol is shot. Your brain's immune system and your body's immune system will recognize that traumatic event or that established trauma or that mismanagement of whatever.

3:10It will recognize that as an invader like a virus, like COVID. So you get the same response to a thought, which is the consequence of mine. And this is toxic. It will stimulate the same response in the immune system as if I had COVID or if I had a flu virus or if I had measles or something or any kind of damage in my body. The immune system sees that as threatening survival because we are wired for survival. So this is not survival. So your immune system says, hey, that's a threat. Let's send out the army. Let's go fix this thing. And it creates inflammation, which is a temporary state of healing.

3:44So initially, inflammation is to isolate and fix. Exactly. and then you're supposed to fix this up and sort this out and find the root cause and then this goes away and then the anti-inflammatory factors come in and the inflammation goes away. You know, we all have these toxic patterns. No one's immune. And the signals of those are things like depression and anxiety and those are simply telling you, hey, there's a pattern. It's either a trauma-based pattern or it's a toxic habit you've developed but that pattern is actually putting your body under tremendous stress even to the point where your DNA is affected.

4:18And I showed in my research that if you think of the DNA ladder, if you pull out a chromosome, it looks like an X. And where you see my fingernails, pink fingernails, for those of you that are listening, the pink fingernails would then represent what we call telomeres. And telomeres are a proxy for how you are managing your mind. Very interesting. So we had subjects at the beginning of my clinical trial that I put in this book. Their narrative was a tremendous trauma in their life. They were offline. They were battling with work, relationships, a lot of stuff. Everything was off. Everything was off.

4:50Sleep, you name it. They were at like really to check out. This person's telomeres, when we looked at their DNA, we looked at their telomeres, they will tell you the shorter they are, the weaker your cells, the shorter your lifespan, the more vulnerable you are to disease. So they were sitting, so that will show in terms of your biological age. So their telomeres were short and unhealthy. Their biologically, chronological, their actual age was in their mid-30s. but their biological age. Like 70 or something. Yes, a sickly 70-year-old. That's crazy. Crazy. Within nine weeks of mind management, here they were saying, I am depression.

5:26I am hopeless. All the biomarkers, DNA. Here they're saying, I now know why I feel depression. I'm not depression. I now know why. And depression is simply a signal of an underlying cause. It's not who I am. It's not an it. It's not an illness. by 63 days, and these numbers are very significant, they were actually seeing behavior change in their life. They were saying, okay, so I know I'll still get depressed, but I know why and I know what to do. And there was changes in their behavior. They were back at work. They were back sleeping, 25 % improvement in sleep. And I mean, all kinds of like the relationships, not suicidal anymore.

6:01And I mean, that's, I can go on and on and on. With mind management in nine weeks, we showed how you can literally change your telomeres, which are your markers for aging and for health, mental health and physical health. And that's pretty unusual because most of the work on telomeres has been done around diet. And also there's been some work on meditation, but I think this is the first study that's been done on actually doing deliberate, intentional mind work to change. And then we saw significant drops as well in inflammation markers and blood markers. But the biggest thing was the narrative, the person's story.

6:34So if we go away from the biology for a minute and we listen to the person's story, that person was offline. They were online. They were living again. And they had also had this acceptance. And this is what I wanted to kind of circle back to when we started, was life and managing your mind doesn't mean that it's going to be one big rosy, you know, put on rose-tinted glasses. That's crazy. It is actually the ability to be okay and at peace with having moments of depression and actually looking for the message and seeing them as helpful. We have this really weird philosophy, which has been about 40 years in the West now, where we look at depression and anxiety and those kind of things as illnesses and neuropsychiatric brain diseases and as bad symptoms that we must suppress, like cancer symptoms you must suppress.

7:18So it's been lumped on misery of life has been medicalized, to quote a brilliant psychiatrist. So we've got to really watch out for that. But actually, the real truth is that those depression and anxiety are not illnesses. They are just survival instincts. It's telling you, hey, pay attention. There's something going on. you need to go and unpack. Something's not working. Something's not working. And it's manifesting as a pattern that needs to be addressed. And that'll block the greatness. And I know this counters the current philosophy, but if you look at the science, there's a large body of science.

7:49In fact, if you interpret all the science around this field, you really look at what's being tested, you actually will see it's not a, they've been looking for the neurobiological correlates. They've been looking for where in the brain is depression. And for years, we've been told about the serotonin imbalance causing depression. I mean, that's not even – it was a theory never proven, great for marketing, for telling drugs, and also a simplistic way of telling someone, hey, you're depressed. Don't worry. It's chemical imbalance. Let me give you a drug to fix it. We want this quick fix mentality.

8:19So as medicine has advanced and technology has advanced, so we've become very caught up in the quick fix. But life's not like that. Mind is not like that. Mind is separate from brain and body. you can apply that kind of thinking not quick fix but you can apply a symptomatic diagnosis treatment approach to body to physical brain and body but when it comes to mind there's this this gravitational field this force this think field choose thing it's not going to go in a medication is not going to change how you're thinking feeling and choosing it's not going to get rid of this it's just going to numb your brain so maybe you don't feel this for it while it's working but at the same time as then when that drug wears off this is still there this is still being recognized by the immune system of your brain as a problem.

8:59So this is increasing your the longer it's there the more you increase your vulnerability to disease. Oh my gosh. You know and this is what gets you stuck and these are the patterns. So no it's not an illness it is a normal human response.

9:16I am so excited for you to finish the rest of your day strong. If you enjoyed this episode make sure to click the link in the description and it'll take you to the full episode of my other show, The School of Greatness. Make sure to come back tomorrow for another episode of The Daily Motivation Show.