Reprogram Your Brain & Heal Your Immune System | Dr. Caroline Leaf EP 378

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation show.

0:10I firmly believe that taking charge of your mindset allows you to be in the driver's seat of your life and unlock your potential. And that's why I'm thrilled to share that my new book is out right now. It's called The Greatness Mindset. In it, you'll learn how to build a plan for greatness through powerful exercises and toolkits designed to propel your life forward. This is the book that I wish I had 20 years ago. It's everything I've learned in the last decade with the research and the science to help you unlock your mind. Make sure to go to lewishouse.com slash 2023mindset to pick up your copy of my book, The Greatness Mindset, today.

0:52So how do we learn to reframe our mind or rewire our mind so that we can have inner peace when there is trauma or pain around us? It's a skill that we learn. So that's really nice to know. The sooner, it's never too late to start, but the sooner we start, the better. So I have four adult children. They learned this. They grew up with this stuff. And as I've learned new things, they've been my lab rats. So they've been trained. The 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, et cetera.

1:29but 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. 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. In fact, they're very helpful.

1:58They'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.

2:35We can change our DNA. Literally, that's what I've shown in my research. You can literally change your DNA, your blood markers. Okay, let me explain it in a very simple way. I've been testing out a glucose, continuous glucose monitoring device for some research purposes. And I happen to be going through, we experienced a very acute trauma in our family over December. And 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 neurocycle, which is the concept that I've developed, which is just a system.

3:07Anyone can learn it. And I dropped my glucose levels within seconds back down to a normal level. And as it cycled up, it cycled, I could manage it. And if glucose is at that level, your cortisol is shot up at that level. your DHEA is dropped, your homocysteins up. All that means is that your immune system is going crazy. It's under attack, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. 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. That, it will recognize that as an invader like a virus, like COVID. So you get the same response to a mind thing, a thought, which is the consequence of mind.

3:46Think, feel, choose, you build thoughts. Thoughts are made of roots and trees, branches, which are the memories. So thoughts are made of memories, like trees are made of branches. 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, T lymphocytes, B lymphocytes, macrophages. is let's go fix this thing, and it creates inflammation, which is a temporary state of healing.

4:21So initially, inflammation is to isolate and fix. To protect, yeah, yeah, yeah. 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. But if we don't deal with the stuff, and we don't deal with our past traumas, and we don't deal with those patterns in our life that we are enacting, constant arguments you know they all have these toxic patterns 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 with mind management in 9 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.

5:15And also there's been some work on meditation, but there's been no, I think this is the first study that's been done on actually doing deliberate, intentional mind work to change.

5:29Thank 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.

6:24Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.

6:41Thank you.