How To Trick Your Brain Into Having Positive Thoughts | Dr. Caroline Leaf

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation show. I have a brand new book called Make Money Easy. And if you're looking to create more financial freedom in your life, you want abundance in your life, and you want to stop making money hard in your life, but you want to make it easier, you want to make it flow, you want to feel abundant, then make sure to go to makemoneyeasybook.com right now and get yourself a copy. I really think this is going to help you transform your relationship with money this moment moving forward. We have some big guests and content coming up. Make sure you're following and stay tuned to this episode of The Daily Motivation Show.

0:48The neurocycle is how you get your mind, which is always working, under control. Acute trauma creates a red brain. That red brain means that I have a tidal wave in my brain. The left and right brain will be out of harmony. I'll have a drop of blood and oxygen to the front of my brain. That's kind of the Y state. X is what happens to us. Y is that state. So X happens and then that Y state gets thrown off. Because mind works through brain and body and mind is experiencing this trauma, which is a mess, our brain and body just do what the mind's doing. So then there's a mess in our brain and our body.

1:20But if I have that kind of chaos, I can't think straight. I'm not going to have any wisdom. I'm going to fall apart. And in this situation, I would have. What I did was to try and get myself back under control. Now, in that state, you don't know what to do. But I knew from my science and from my knowledge, so I'm proactive, so I could go into two zones. Imagine yourself being in a helicopter that's like a time capsule. And you're flying over this forest, and the forest is your mind with all these trees. And this acute trauma has just grown because it's instant. And your helicopter's drawn to this because you are in shock and terror and fear and deep panic and anxiety.

1:55That is all the smoke signals. My pilot's going like this. The co-pilot is also me, but it's my wisdom. Because inside of each of us is our survival. And that's our instinct. You know when you give someone great advice and you just think, oh, wow, where did that come from? You get that depth. Like we know what we know. We know how much we can handle. We'll say, I know this, that kind of thing. That's the co-pilot, this wisdom. So what we want to do in those states is to get ourselves into the co-pilot. Remember the co-pilot and the pilot. And you use the you language. So here you're flying this plane all over and the co-pilot saying, okay, let's calm down.

2:29Let's land at that tree. So you land this time capsule and you get out, but you're with the co-pilot. So you're safe. This is the mindset that I have trained myself to come into. So I can go into an acute trauma in that mind. I'm still crying. I'm still freaking out, but I'm freaking out in this zone because I know that I need wisdom and I cannot get through this chaos unless I've calmed it down. So I have to get through this because I'm stuck in that black tree and I'm stuck in this chaotic brain. So you're going into a level of fight and flight. So everything physiologically, 1 ,400 neurophysiological responses are activated to help you focus.

3:02But they can't work for you unless you do what I'm telling you to do, which is to shift your perception. So this is step one. You're going to gather awareness. And gather means you're controlling it. You're not sitting under the apple tree and all the apples are hitting you on the head. You are standing back and you're picking the apple. So there's control. There's a sense of autonomy, a sense of agency. So in the midst of chaos, you can create agency mentally. because your mind's driving it. So you stand back and you say, okay, I picked that apple. So that's my emotional warning signals. Terror, despair, totally traumatized, like whatever they are.

3:34You pick those apples, you put them in your baskets, you're gathering. Because the more organized you are, the less chaos. Then you gather awareness of your physical bodily response. So here's your co-pilot saying, okay, how are you feeling? Gather that apple, gather that apple. What is your physical? Fluttering in the heart, panic, tension, gut-drenching, adrenaline, whatever flight and fright, freeze mode you're in. Then your behaviors, is what are you saying what are you doing i'm grabbing this i'm grabbing that get this get that you know so what is that and is it working just doing this changes how you do things it's amazing you immediately go into this different mode fourth one is perspective what's your perspective this is doomed this is terrible this is end or okay this is bad but so gather you gather then as soon as you've got those you then go into reflect so it's very systematic and then as you've gathered and done all this preparation thing you've got the two sides of the brain we've got coherence again.

4:23You've got blood flow back to the brain. You've got oxygen back to the front of the brain. When you've got low oxygen and low blood flow at the front of the brain, which happens in a trauma, in an acute situation, in those sudden things, it drops. Then you are impulsive. You're going to make bad decisions. You're going to react incorrectly. You're going to create incoherence. So then you start now reflecting. Okay, what have I got in my basket? So number two, reflect. When you think of light going through a prism, it reflects all the colors of the rainbow. So there's depth. And so reflect is this process of being a detective.

4:52Okay, well, why am I having that reaction? Now, when it's something in the moment, we pretty much know why. I mean, I knew why I was. So I didn't have to do too much reflection because I knew the cause. But the difference was I needed to reflect to say, okay, if I react like this, this is going to happen. It was questioning, what are you doing with that emotion? What are you doing with that behavior? Is that behavior helping? So the reflect in that situation would be different to a reflect for someone who is having a complete and utter imposter syndrome attack. And it's a pattern and they keep doing it.

5:22So they're now working sequentially through the process. So they're going to have to start finding why. What is the origin story of it? The reflect in that case would be ask, answer, discuss, why do I feel this? Why, why, why? But reflect is to just, you know, get meaning. But in a very comprehensive way because there's all these patterns of meaning. Third step is you write. Writing, I recommend if you write, write. A metacog is a pattern form of writing that looks like a tree. You start in the middle and you work on branches and you put words and you don't write whole sentences. You basically just pour information and you literally let it just come out in this pattern format.

5:56But one of the key things is as something comes up, you put it on one area and as something else comes up, you put it wherever. So you have these clusters of information and every word's on a line and every line goes out of the previous line. And that format is unbelievable. It just drags the two sides of the brain together, digs deep, and you start getting insight into what you didn't even know was there. And then the fourth step is to then go and sort out that chaos that you've just written down. So the fourth step is to, okay, I've gathered awareness, I've reflected, I'm writing. What does this mean?

6:24What's the mental autopsy? What's the pattern, the activators, the antidotes? How can I reconceptualize this? And then you end off the cycle with a little action. And that action, if it's in the moment, like in that five seconds or whatever, it's okay, I'm going to actually take a deep breath and I'm going to act like this or I'm going to say that or I'm going to do this. So it's a little action that anchors you back in a state where you can function in the next moment, in that acute trauma or in that imposter syndrome moment. And you've now got to go into a business meeting and you're feeling like you can't because the imposter syndrome frauds.

6:54So in doing it in the quick moment by moment, you're going to have a simple, quick action.

7:10Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. that will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on the School of Greatness. And if you are loving the daily motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

8:07Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.