Dr. Caroline Leaf: How to Crush Negative Thoughts & Transform Your Mental Health | Mental Health | YAPClassic

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24:41Hello, young and profiters. Running my own business has been one of the most rewarding things I've ever done. But I won't lie to you. In those early days of setting it up, I feel like I was jumping on a cliff with no parachute. I'm not really good at that kind of stuff. I'm really good at marketing, sales, growing a business, offers. But I had so many questions and zero idea where to find the answers when it came to starting an official business. I wish I had known about Northwest Registered Agent back when I was starting Yap Media. And if you're an entrepreneur, you need to know what Northwest Registered Agent is.

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25:44Don't wait and protect your privacy. Build your brand and get your complete business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com slash yap free and start building something amazing. Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at northwestregisteredagent.com slash yap free. I want to know about your perspective in terms of the soul and your perspective on source energy and the universe and what you believe knowing what you know about our mind and our brain. Because I feel like you are one of the few people in the world that really, really understands what's going on.

26:23So what is your perspective on spirituality and all of that? I love that question. So spirituality is science. So it's the same thing, two sides of the same coin. So when I talk about all these science-y things, I'm talking about the spiritual nature of man. So I'm talking pretty much, and there's all these different words we can use in every single religion. You're going to find different names, but it's all pointing to the same thing. So I like to talk about the concept as the soul, like in the Christian religion, they'll talk about spirit, soul, body, but you'll see representations of that in everything.

26:59You'll see it in Islam, you'll see it in the Jewish tradition, the Torah, you'll see it across the Ayurvedic texts. So you'll see it in all the ancient texts, you'll see a version of that. So everything points to the same concept that mankind has this spirit, soul thing and a body. And the spirit, soul is this gravitational field. So I see the soul and the spirit. You could say this, I talk about the spiritual level being this gravitational field that moves through and this think, feel, choose. And you could take it, and I often talk about that as well. I do talk about it in the book as well, is you can take the spirit and the soul and you can say the spirit is the sort of deeper part.

27:37But I prefer to explain the soul and mind as the same thing. I think it pretty much is the same thing. It's our ability to think, feel, and choose. But you can look at it in this way. You have a messy mind and you have a wise mind. Every human at their core, their spiritual core has this wisdom. And this wisdom is this in neurobiology and neurophysiology, we talk about being wired for love, that the brain and the body doesn't have any structural design for anything that is toxic, unmanned toxicity. So we have design for making a mess and repairing the mess, but not staying in a mess. So we have the design for maybe getting into an argument because that's the messiness of life.

28:22But if we stay in the argument, we don't have design for that. What we have design for is having the argument and then fixing the argument, managing the mess. That's why I talk about cleaning up the mental mess. We're designed to clean up the mental mess. And that's a very soulish, spiritual thing that we're doing. And we're using the brain and the body. So without the brain and the body, we can't express ourselves. So the mind and the soul, the spirit, soul, mind concept, that's why I lump it under mind. And if you look at a lot of the ancient texts, you'll see mind is referring to spirit and soul as the same sort of thing.

28:54So, and that's the, you can also talk about it as consciousness, but that's also not enough because consciousness, and I talk about this in the book, you've got, the mind has got different levels. And the one level is the conscious mind. Then you've got the non-conscious mind and you have the subconscious mind. You have three levels of mind. and that people get very muddled up as well. So to make this really super simple, think first of all of mind and brain as I've described. So mind is this force, this gravitational field and it's think, feel, choose, brain and body is the physical. Without the two is separate, the mind can't express itself or the spirit or soul can't express itself.

29:30But with body, it has a place now to store and express so we can express ourselves. So through the body, that's where the magic happens, the mystery of this connection between the mind-brain-body integration. Okay, then think of, okay, so mind is the soul-spiritual level. And if we think of mind, the easiest way to explain it is let's go back to the messy mind versus the wise mind. Let's start there. So think of being a pilot in a plane. This is often how I explain it. And in a plane, you have the pilot and you always have a co-pilot. And the co-pilot gives the bigger picture, kind of looks into what's going on, keeps a handle on planning, looking present, past, and future.

30:08It's kind of the best. So there's wisdom in the co-pilot. Not that there isn't wisdom in the pilot, but the pilot's really experimental. They are actually doing the action of flying. And so that's your messy mind. And that's what we, when you wake up in the morning till the time you go to sleep, the messy mind is operating. It's your conscious mind. So consciousness, when you talk about a stream of consciousness, that is when you're awake. So you open your eyes, between the time you open your eyes until time you go to sleep, you're experiencing the stream of consciousness. And your messy mind is experimenting in that process.

30:44So we don't know what's coming up. We can't control people. We can't control events and circumstances. So it's very experimental and that's why it's messy. But messy is okay because messiness allows us and affords us the opportunity to repair and to grow. So if you do get irritable and snap at someone, you can either stay irritable and stay snapping and keep the damage. Your brain and body are not designed for that. Or you can respond to your why it for love design and your optimism bias. Recognize that as an imbalance. Recognize the impact it had on you and on the person because it will cause brain damage in both you and the person.

31:16And you can mind manage that. You can self-regulate that. You can apologize and you can change your behavior. That's mind management. That is you using your mind to manage your mind. That is the messy mind that experimented and made a mess. And then the messy mind is actually listening to the wise mind, the co-pilot, and drawing on intelligence. So the ability to correct yourself, the ability that we're having now to have this kind of conversation, we're exploring the deep things of life and we're getting kind of deep. This is the wise mind analyzing life. When you give someone advice and someone comes to you and they ask you a question and you say, you give them and you think, wow, this is like amazing advice.

31:55I wish I could take my own advice. That's your wise mind. When you're in a situation and you know what you should do, you don't always do it, but you know what you should do, that's your wise mind. So your wise mind is at the core of your being. It is your, for want of a universal kind of word, I use the word godness. It could be godness. It could be your ancient wisdom, source energy. Makes so much sense to call it source energy because that's why I don't like to talk about God because it defines it to a religion. And this is, we're talking about something that's beyond just man's religion. This is, we're talking about life, the essence of life.

32:28So source is a great, but there's the wise source where you can, and so what we do in life is we've got to train ourselves to listen to the source, to listen to the wisdom. And that is cleaning up the mental mess. That is the messy mind learning to listen and tune in and introspect and find that wise mind and connect with that. And we can train ourselves to do that. If you played a music, maybe you play a musical instrument. Do you play one? I sing. I can play piano a little. Okay. So let's say now you wanted to become an expert piano player. You would have to spend a lot of time with a great teacher, maybe a series of teachers.

33:08You'd have to spend hours every day. and you would eventually master it. And maybe you have a natural talent and you become brilliant, but you'd certainly become very good because you dedicate a lot of time. In other words, the point I'm making is you could train yourself to become a really excellent piano player, maybe even a brilliant piano player, but it requires very deliberate and conscious attention and a decision to do that and do the development. Or you could just be sort of an average player and just play now and then. And, you know, like me, I'll play chopsticks and that's about it. But I used to play the mandolin and I don't play it anymore, but I could do the same thing.

33:38I could go and relearn it. So the point I'm making is we can just, our mind is working anyway. But if we don't manage it and we don't develop it, if we don't decide I'm going to develop to the level of brilliance and skill, then you stay in a messy mind. So cleaning up the mental mess, the concept that I'm delivering to people and helping people to understand is that mind is this developmental process. It's this thing that you can grow. It's malleable. It's trainable. It's a deliberate and it's always working. I mean, you can go three weeks without food. You can go three days without water. You can go three minutes without oxygen.

34:10but you don't even go three seconds without your mind working. So your mind is working regardless. So my question or my proposal is if your mind is always working and it's working with this messy mind, co-pilot mind, we can improve how that happens. So we can get our messy mind to constantly be listening or to be listening the majority of time to the co-pilot, working with not even so much listening, but working hand in hand with. Because messy is not bad if it leads to growth and repair. or repair and growth. Messy is only bad if you don't repair and grow and you get stuck. That then maintains brain damage in the brain and body and increases vulnerability to disease because it changes the environment of the whole gravitational field and the body and increases vulnerability to disease by 35 to 98%, which is phenomenal.

34:57So we, but with mind management, you can reduce that risk factor in your body. You can create and you can then activate the natural pharmacopoeia and natural healing. Thoughts have weight. These things that are products of mind, these have weight, these have physical structure in the brain. And collectively, as you train your mind and as you train yourself to work on these, and as you train yourself to access the source to build these, your wise mind, you are building incredible, powerful weight into your brain. So in other words, you are creating. Every time you think right now, you're creating because your brain is changing.

35:32That's neuroplasticity. neuroplasticity this is the question that they told me was ridiculous in the 80s which I showed by the late 80s I showed some of the first neuroplasticity research saying that hey if you change your mind you can change your brain which they didn't believe by the mid-90s it was accepted when we had fMRI technology and we could not just I just had ct scans when I first started which is a static image by the mid-90s we could see the changes happening and we could start seeing what was going on so therefore now we know that the brain always changes the mind is always changing The brain is always changing.

36:02So at this moment, you are being a creative being. You are changing your brain. Your brain is not the same as it was when you started the conversation. That means you are creating structural change. So my point is that you can design that. You can direct that change by how you're managing your mind because your brain will simply do what your mind tells it to do. So if your mind goes down the route of complaining or negativity or that's just, and you practice that enough, within 63 days, you've built a habit. It takes 63 days to build a habit. within 63 days of complaining, so nine weeks of complaining, you have wired in a toxic pattern.

36:36So here's a toxic tree. I'm holding up a wiry tree. I was going to ask you, what do they look like? Yeah, they literally look like misfolded proteins. So that's why I use these two analogies. It would be healthy and it would be toxic. So she's carrying up one really healthy plant and then one that looks like dead and black, basically. And the black one is the negative thought. It's the toxic, healthy versus toxic. So, and I'm saying healthy versus toxic because negative and positive are too narrow. So healthy versus toxic, because you, healthy is, you may still feel depressed, but the fact that you're working on it, and you're trying to find out why, you're still depressed, but you're working on it, that's healthy, versus saying that depression is all bad.

37:17See, so, because depression is not bad at all. Depression is a messenger. Depression is a signal telling you that there's something you need to work on, you need to become a thought detective. Because everything, if you recall in the beginning, I explained how we build a thought with our mind and this is then how we show up. So if you want to know what's going on in your mind, you just got to look at what you're saying and doing. What are you saying? What are you doing? What are you feeling? What are your emotions? How are you showing up on all those levels, your behaviors, your emotions, your perspective and your body, what's your body telling you?

37:46And when you look at those as warning signals, those are what this is generating. And then you can look at what you're generating and you can track it back. Why am I? And that's generating this. That's what the neurocycle is, which is the second part of the book, which is the system I developed over 38 years. Developed as a therapeutic tool, but now adapted to make it very simple. So by using the neuro cycle, which is the five-step system, you can learn to track from your behaviors back down to the root and then reconceptualize that, deconstruct and reconstruct. So you can take these things and deconstruct and reconstruct, which is an energy transference process.

38:21So you can take those negative thoughts that you have that are built in your brain. They actually look like dead trees. Physical substances. And you can recreate them, I guess, neuroplasticity, right? Actually change the way your brain is wired into something healthy. Is that correct? That's exactly what's happening. And you're using your mind to do that. So your mind changes your brain. And when your mind changes your brain, your brain controls your body. So then your mind changes your body. But your mind is moving through your entire body all the time. That's why we'll have researchers that talk about the intelligences in the cells of the body, because your brain and your body are made of 37 to 100 trillion cells.

38:58And each cell has got the DNA and it's responding. So as you are listening now, your trees are building in your brain, but your whole body is responding. So your mind is a global thing over your entire body. And it's changing your body. So you are a change agent. You are actually making change. Thoughts have got weight. They're substance. So we've created some, so from your mind, you create physical structure. And then what you say and do, so let's just think of the invention of Zoom that we're also reliant on now. The team of people that created that concept, that started as a thought. So there was a problem, how do we communicate via technology?

39:36Zoom was developed years ago, but some person asked a question, how can we communicate in a more effective way? Whatever the question was. So that was the experience that they had an experience that required this. And they then started thinking and working it out, which then led to the streaming build, which then this then led to the invention. The invention doesn't have just a random, it doesn't just pop out of the air. It comes out of someone's head. So someone's mind created that and then worked with a team of other, anything, everything you look around, just look at a painting, look at the cars, look at buildings, look at architecture.

40:11It's phenomenal. What we've been doing as humans, it's all come from the mind. The mind is doing that work and using the brain and the body to be able to express it, so to make it happen. And that's what we can do. Now, we look at the bad things that have happened. I mean, look at the negative things. Look at the wars and look at how this incredible knowledge we have as humans can be misused. So mind can be misused, and that's very toxic. And people that are very toxic, that will do the genocides and, you know, terrible things that happen. and people that rape and murder, their own brains are damaged because their brains are not wired for love.

40:45So those toxic thoughts, this is brain damaging. This is increasing vulnerability to disease. This is creating, you know, this is very real. But this is not the norm. So therefore, keeping these, suppressing trauma or growing toxic, whatever you think about the most will grow. And if this is what you're thinking about, this is what you see. Look, I'm looking through the tree. I'm looking through this toxic tree now, as opposed to looking through a healthy tree. I'm holding up the healthy tree in front of my eyes now. So how we look at life and what we think about the most is growing into our brain, changing our brain and our body.

41:20And that then produces what we say and what we do. So we impact the world with our thoughts. The world's impact is coming from every invention, everything that happens, every political decision, every racist, systemic racist decision, every person that's hurt. It's come from someone's mind. It's so powerful what you're saying. Like it's literally so groundbreaking what you're saying. I can't believe that they don't teach this stuff in school. When I was reading your stuff, I just, I couldn't believe that like, we don't know about this. It's not commonly talked about. We only hear about positive affirmations.

41:55We don't really hear the science behind it. It's all kind of woo-woo when it's actually real, when it's dictating the whole world and everything we live in and everything we experience. So it's so powerful. No, you've got it exactly. mind is considered, or consciousness is considered the hard question of science, but consciousness, which is what we have when we're awake, which is conscious is just our mind when we're awake. We haven't even spoken about the non-conscious yet, which is so powerful. But it's not the hard question of science. It's the most obvious because just to ask that question, you've used your mind.

42:26So how is mind hard? If you want to study mind, what are you doing? That's all you have to look at. What are you doing? What are you saying? That is evidence of mind in action. That's the iron filing shape on the paper. Remember the magnet, you can't see the field, but put it in iron filings or put it next to a paper clip and suddenly there's something happening. That's what mind is. So you want to study mind. What is the person saying and doing? Just look around you. Just look in your room. Look where you're sitting now. Everything around you has come from mind. And if you look at, so therefore mind can be studied.

42:54So then mind, you need to look at conscious mind is you can't talk about consciousness, which is what they do in the literature. They talk about consciousness and you hear people talking about stream of consciousness. and that often the source research, they'll talk about stream of consciousness, but there's more, there's the unconscious. The unconscious mind is the biggest part of us. The non-conscious mind is only 10 % of the mind and the mind is 99 % of who we are. So what's the other 90 % of mind? It's the non-conscious and that's where all of our thoughts are stored. And it goes, it works 24 seven.

43:26It works at 10 to the 27, which is faster than 400 billion actions per second. It moves beyond space and time. so therefore it operates present, past and future all the time. It can be understood to a certain extent using things like quantum physics and gravitational fields. And that's what is operating 24-7 and that's connected to the source. Every human has that. It's connected to the source and the source is uniquely playing out in each person. So that and what we need to do is find our own unique intelligence, which then is part of the puzzle of every single human on the planet. And, you know, when mankind gets to that kind of level, when we start recognizing that because it's survival, it's actually love.

44:06We're talking about something that's love-based because it is for survival. It is for positivity. It's for health, love. That's the basic core tenet of humanity. And the basic core tenet of wisdom is basically operating together as a community for the betterment of mankind. And we've been very bad about that in the last 150 years, but really in the last 40 years, it's been really, really, really bad. Yeah.

44:36Young end profiters. I know there's so many people tuning in right now that end their workday wondering why certain tasks take forever, why they're procrastinating certain things, why they don't feel confident in their work, why they feel drained and frustrated and unfulfilled. But here's the thing you need to know. It's not a character flaw that you're feeling this way. It's actually your natural wiring. And here's the thing. When it comes to burnout, it's really about the type of work that you're doing. Some work gives you energy and some work simply drains you. So it's key to understand your six types of working genius.

45:11The working genius assessment or the six types of working genius framework was created by Patrick Lencioni, and he's a business influencer and author. And the working genius framework helps you identify what you're actually built for and the work that you're not. Now, let me tell you a story. Before I uncovered my working genius, which is galvanizing and invention. So I like to rally people and I like to invent new things. I used to be really shameful and had a lot of guilt around the fact that I didn't like enablement, which is one of my working frustrations. So I actually don't like to support people one-on-one.

45:42I don't like it when people slow me down. I don't like hand-holding. I like to move fast, invent, rally people, inspire. But what I do need to do is ensure that somebody else can fill the enablement role, which I do have, Kate, on my team. So Working Genius helps you uncover these genius gaps, helps you work better with your team, helps you reduce friction, helps you collaborate better, understand why people are the way that they are. It's helped me restructure my team, put people in the spots that they're going to really excel. And it's also helped me in hiring. Working Genius is absolutely amazing.

46:12I'm obsessed with this model. So if you guys want to take the Working Genius assessment and get 20 % off, you can use Code profiting, go to workinggenius.com. Again, that's workinggenius.com. Stop guessing. Start working in your genius.

46:27Happy New Year, Yap Gang. I just love the unique energy of the new year. It's all about fresh starts and fresh starts not only feel possible, but also feel encouraged. And if you've been thinking about starting a business, this is your sign. There's no better time than right now. 2026 can be the year that you build something that is truly yours, the year where you take control over your career. And it starts with Shopify. I've built plenty of my own businesses on Shopify, including my LinkedIn Secrets Masterclass. So it's a two-day workshop. People buy their tickets on Shopify. And then my Mastermind subscription is also on Shopify.

47:02I built my site quickly in just a couple of days. Payments were set up super easily. And none of the technical stuff slowed me down like it usually does because Shopify is just so intuitive. And this choice of using Shopify helped me scale my masterclass to over$500 ,000 in revenue in our first year. And I'm launching some new podcast courses and can't wait to launch them on Shopify. Shopify gives you everything you need to sell online and in person, just like the millions of entrepreneurs that they power. You can build your dream story using hundreds of beautiful templates and setup is fast with built-in AI tools that help you write product descriptions and edit photos.

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49:17Restrictions apply. Services not available in all areas. Let's talk about the last 40 years because I hear you talk about this often how, you know, we've had so many medical advancements, but in fact, we're dying a lot earlier. 18 to 25 years earlier is what I remember you saying. So why is that happening? Like, how is that possible? Like technology is, you know, accelerating so fast, but yet we're still dying earlier. It's really counterintuitive. So can you explain that? Totally, totally counterintuitive. And thank you for asking that question. It's very intuitive of you to have picked that up because it's something that we should be telling everyone.

49:54And you're quite right. We should be teaching this in schools. I did in South Africa. I was huge teaching across the country there, teaching in schools, teaching this. I've done a lot of work in this country, but it takes, it's a very different way of thinking. So it takes time. So I'm always grateful to talk about this like on a, anywhere to help try and expand this concept and get people thinking. Okay, so that's the one thing. So basically what's happened is that we were very good about exploring mind up until about 40, 50 years ago. And really, and you still got your philosophers of this day, there's still a huge body of science, but it's been pushed aside by a dominant classical philosophy of reductionism, which basically means that we have become very advanced from the mid-90s with neuroscience.

50:35The brain has taken over. And it's great that we understand the brain. It's led to the most phenomenal discoveries, but it's became at the expense of mind. So everything became mind. So instead of mind being separate and it's forced the way I've described it, the brain has become it. And they talk about mind being almost like a mistake, a byproduct of brain. So they talk about brain producing mind. And that then leads to this concept of you're not a human with a story. you're just basically your brain, you're this mechanical thing. So if you feel depression, regardless of your story, you've got something wrong with your brain.

51:11You've got a brain disease. You've got a neurobiological brain deficit. You've got a broken brain. You've got some whatever. So they're always looking for the neurobiological correlate, which means they're looking for where in the brain is this emotion, is that experience, is that thinking that it starts there and produces. So therefore your individuality or uniqueness, your perspective of life, the beauty, the core of humanity, which is this individuality that is accelerated, I mean, or that is accentuated or enhanced in community. It's not about you, it's about you in the world, but it's the individual pieces that make up the whole.

51:43That's been pretty much obliterated, all reduced down to brain, brain, brain, brain, brain. And at the same, when you do that, you then, as I said, you ignore the person's narrative. Now, you can't ignore 90 to 99 % of humanity. You can't switch off the gravitational field. You can't switch off the basic laws that what you're experiencing is affecting how you function. So you can't tell a child who's repeatedly abused and then gets put in a foster care system and gets more abused and then gets labelled with all, as in this climate, gets labelled with all kinds of labels and maybe gets more abused and then gets medically abused because they get given all these drugs and so on too because they so-called behavioural issues, who's schizophrenic or learning disabled or something, you can't tell that person what's happening and they shouldn't be happening, is that they're telling that kind of person, oh, you're a broken brain, you're diseased.

52:35Now, they're not diseased. They've had a terrible life. They are having a response, a reaction. If you're repeatedly abused, obviously you're going to be a behavior problem. You don't even know how to cope with yourself. You're going to hate yourself. You don't know what to do. You don't know who to trust. You don't know where to turn. So that will manifest in whatever you can do to cope and that's going to be different for everyone. And obviously it's on a negative spectrum, but that's not a disease. So what has happened over the last few years is prior to that, we would see your experience as a reason for how you show up.

53:06Now, your experience is not the reason for how you show up. It's your brain is broken. That's the reason for why you show up like you do. So if a child's battling with behavior issues or the person's really depressed, it's not about your story. that, you know, yes, your story is going to make it worse, but they're saying it's your brain, it's your genetics, and that's wrong. And when you have that view, it's unscientific, it cannot, the science, 40 years of science has shown it's the wrong way of doing it. It doesn't work. It's made things worse. Depression, anxiety, et cetera, haven't magically gone away.

53:39Like cancer's been, we've got cancer pretty much under control with advances in medicine, and we've got things like heart disease tremendously under control because of advances medicine, that works for the body. It works for the physical parts of the body, but it doesn't work for mind. Mind can't be put into that kind of category. Mind is so massively expansive and everyone's, there's no cookie cutter framework. You can have two people in the same home that have had the same abuse and one will be a total success and one will be a drug addict. And they've had exactly the same upbringing. We see this with identical twins.

54:13They're totally different pathways in their life. In other words, the uniqueness of humanity has been obliterated. The story of humans has been obliterated. And when that happens, you will have a major problem. So for years, for decades, we have been living longer because of advances in medicine and technology because medicine was so bad and like non-existent. And then medicine developed, which was phenomenal. And it's continued to develop. So it's kept people alive. But we've reached a point in history where that advance in medicine, technology, brain science, is we know how to keep a person alive, but we've taken away an ingredient that is the most important ingredient, and that's mind.

54:51And that then has caused, so for the first time in decades, people are not living longer, they're dying younger, eight to 25 years younger. And it's called death of despair. So people are dying literally from lack of hope. When you have a person who's been through multiple abusive situations, you take a woman who's in an abusive marriage, and it goes on for years and years, and she gets extremely depressing, it goes to the doctor and it's been really bad and gets labeled as schizophrenic and bipolar and gets given medication. That's totally ignoring the person's story. You don't need to give them a label.

55:24They're not diseased. That person has been through trauma. That person's story needs to be heard. That person needs support to be a thought detective, to be able to recognize that that depression is a warning system. It's a signal. It's basically your, if you think of being a detective, it's your clue that there's something going on. So the top of the trees is how that person is thinking, feeling, and choosing about the experience. The roots are all the abusive experiences over time, which are manifesting in how that person is functioning, which is then all of this is showing up in the depression, the withdrawal, the breaking down, the whatever it may be.

56:02So if we see it like that, then we can say, okay, your depression is not a disease. It is telling us, it's a messenger. It's telling us about your story. let's be thought detectives and let's understand your story let's deconstruct it and then let's reconstruct it you can't change the the fact that the abuse happened but you can change how you respond to it and how you want it to play out into your future so if you look at this tree and if you look deeply inside and i'm holding up the green tree again and some of the branches for the for the viewers some of the branches are light green and some are dark green and they like that for a reason.

56:38The dark green is how you want to be in the future. You want to be free of that abuse. You don't want to be depressed. Depression will still come. It's a normal part of life, but you don't want it to be controlling you that you're depressed all the time. You want it to, when you have a bout of depression, you want to be able to recognize what it is and manage it. So this person, let's take the scenario of the woman who's abused multiple abuse in a marriage situation. The process, looking at the abuse, deconstructing and reconstructing over time, and this takes cycles of 63 days. Eventually, you're going to build a new thought, this thought will lose its energy.

57:10This energy will be transferred from this toxic thought, this of all the abusive situations and all the memories surrounding that, that energy will be transferred to the new tree. Energy is never lost, it's only transferred. So if I take the energy from here, this dies. And if I put it here, this grows. And in this, the light is the story, this, but reconceptualized. This is what happened, but this is how I want to live my life. The dark is the how I want to live my life in the future. How do I want this to play out? I want to have a happy relationship. I want to feel good about myself. I don't want to feel the shame.

57:41I don't want to feel the fear. I want to be able to wake up in the morning and be happy I'm alive and not terrified of the day. So that's the dark green. And that's what you're moving towards. That's not going to happen with a label and drugs. That's going to happen with you understanding how to manage your mind 24-7 because you're living with your mind 24-7. You wake up with your mind. You go to sleep with your mind. Your conscious mind's awake when you're awake. Like your non-conscious mind is awake 24-7. So while we're awake now, the non-conscious is working with the conscious. So that's why we get triggered.

58:12So now this person, this woman is in a situation, let's say she's now working through the situation and she's now maybe in day 42 or something. And a situation happens that is triggered. She maybe sees a picture of the ex-husband or something like that. And that then triggers a response. But because she's in the process of healing, the trigger can be recognized for what it is. It's a trigger of that fear, that pain of what happened. And there's a logic, a wise mind can then co-pilot, can say to the pilot, okay, that's what happened. But this is how we're going to manage the situation. We're going to practice this.

58:44By day 63, when the trigger happens, you're not going to respond with a flight from fright. You're going to have this so strong and so full of energy. It's got to grow, like a plant's got to grow. It's only small. It takes 21 days for this to go and this to grow. but it takes another 42 days to make this strong enough that it's a habit, that it actually impacts your behavior. So by day 63 onwards, when you're in a situation where something triggers a memory from your past, you still feel the anxiety, you still may feel a bit of depression, but the difference is you now know why and you now know what to do.

59:21So instead of you falling into a slump and not being able to function in your day, you can have that moment of acknowledgement of the pain, where it's coming from, the source. And this is what your plan is to overcome that. And so you move forward into a new relationship. You see what I'm saying? That's the power that we have within us. So I'm not going to, I don't say that you're going to eliminate depression. I say you're going to eliminate the source of depression and therefore increase your management of future bouts of depression by 81%. So therefore, what that means is that all of us are going to have periods of depression.

59:57It's so normal. We've got to normalize what they've taken away and abnormalize. They've made it abnormal. If you have any kind of depression or up and down moods, or you're feeling suicidal, 95 % of people have suicidal thoughts. And I'm not overriding that. These are vitally important. In fact, I'm giving more level of importance when I say it's so important to pay attention to your mind, that I'm saying self-regulate your mind all the time. Neuroscience shows us we can do that every 10 seconds. That's how important it is. I am saying that if you just give it a label of bipolar and a medication, you're taking away the importance, you're dishonoring and invalidating that person's whole life experience.

1:00:34And you're not giving that person the power in their lives. You're not empowering them to face this toxic issue and reconstruct it to a point that they can actually have mental peace. So when we have a day where, let's say now that you've gone through this healing and it's 20 years later and you're 20 years after the abuse, but you're in a situation where something bad happens and you feel a bit depressed. You're in the pandemic. Maybe this happened 20 years ago. Now the pandemic happens and these things that can make us all depressed doesn't mean we're brain diseased. It means that we're having an adverse experience.

1:01:03Okay. So that's the concept. So people, when you take that away, what happens then is that moving the mind in keeping these, keeping that abuse, keeping the trauma, this increases vulnerability to disease by 35 to 98%. So here's the math. If you don't deal with your stuff and you just get it labeled and suppressed because that's what the current narrative is doing. The current gold standard of psychiatric treatment is label and there's therapy, but the therapy is very often also just a band-aid on a wound. It's not really solving, deconstructing and reconstructing and equipping people. If you do that, you then increase the vulnerability to disease.

1:01:39If you increase vulnerability to disease, what's going to happen? You're going to die younger. So this shift over the last 40 years has been happening. So people are now getting, not processing, keeping this, which is then shortening lifespans, and also being given drugs that also shorten lifespans. Psychotropic drugs shorten lifespans. They double the risk of suicide. In women, antidepressants increase the risk of suicide by three to four times. And in kids, it's even more. Antipsychotics increase the risk of suicide. All of these psychotropics increase the risk of anxiety and depression. So the very thing they're supposed to be treating, they're actually increasing.

1:02:17And we've been sung, the wrong message has been sung. The science is evident. These things do not work. People are dying. So in 1996, they started seeing this trend. And by 2014, it was confirmed that people are dying younger. And then the pandemic hit just a few years later. While we're in the midst of the pandemic that hasn't been spoken about, which is not dealing with our mind. And now the pandemic happens. What are they saying? There's an increase in mental health, disease. and we have to give more diagnoses and more medication. It's going to make it even worse. It's not the solution. The solution is we have to listen to people's narrative.

1:02:50We have to work as communities to help people to cope with these changes. And we have to deal with things like systemic racism, et cetera, et cetera. We have to make massive community changes, not just individual changes. Wow. Sorry, I was a long answer to a very good question. No, it was so good. And don't be sorry, that was amazing. So if I could just kind of regurgitate what you said, we are living in a world of labels, right? We're always labeled. You're depressed, you're bipolar, you're sick, you're diseased. And these labels are just covering up and suppressing us. Even the medicine is numbing our thoughts and...

1:03:30The psychotropics, yeah. Yeah. It's basically just covering it up. It's not actually fixing anything. And so the dead black thought trees that you were telling us about. Which are very much alive, which are very volcanic in nature. Okay. So they're alive. These toxic trees in our brain keep growing because we're not actually fixing the problem. We're not actually rewiring our brain to heal ourselves. So it's so crazy. Like it's actually unbelievable that this is happening right now. It is unbelievable. And what, you know, what's worse, sorry to interrupt you, but that, you know, what's worse is that even the day-to-day stuff is not being managed.

1:04:06So we think, okay, well, the odd irritation, the politics happening, the systemic racism, and, you know, seeing the, reading the news, we think, okay, those made, I'm reading the news, it didn't happen to me. We don't think it's a fake, but it is because those little traumas are basically converging and growing and becoming as traumatic as these, and we're not managing those either. So that's also what I'm proposing. Not only do we need to detox the traumas of the past, we need the patterns. We need to look for the patterns. The patterns tell us what is big. And then we need to spend dedicated 15 to 45 minutes a day working on the patterns.

1:04:40But you've also got to manage your moment by moment. You wake up in the morning. You've got to go to work. You've got to do this. You've got to do that. You've got to be a parent, whatever. Whatever it is that you do, how are you doing it? Are you getting mad? Are you getting irritated? Are you getting crazy in traffic? Are you snapping at everyone? Are you freaking out at every news bulletin? Are you scrolling through social media and getting imposter syndrome every time you look at the comments or someone else's post? You know, what are you doing? No one's talking about that. We have to manage that too.

1:05:08We have to self-regulate 24-7. And when I say 24-7, consciously and deliberately when you're awake, you can actually do it every 10 seconds. The neuroscience shows you can stand back and observe your own thinking and monitor yourself and change yourself. So like in other words, if you're in a conversation, in a business meeting, and you find yourself getting terribly worked up because of what someone's saying, and you're getting really mad, and you want to say something nasty, you can do the neurocycle in that moment in five seconds, and you can get yourself calm and under control. Then let's say you can benefit from the meeting.

1:05:39Then you can go from that meeting. Maybe you pick up the kids from school or something, and they're all fighting in the car, and you're going crazy because you haven't quite processed the meeting, and you're upset about that, and now the kids. Or you can do a neurocycle and get yourself under control each time. You can have an argument, have to get onto a podcast, or someone says something, or you get a terrible email, now you've got to interview someone, because you're not doing that a lot. Interviewing people, you've got to be really focused. It's not easy to interview someone. And then something may have upset you.

1:06:07So you could have done a neurocycle just before to get your mind back. In other words, we should be monitoring our mind, and we are designed to do that every 10 seconds when we're awake. And then at nighttime, our mind's still working and sorting out what we've done during the day. So if we've got a good neuropsychal system, if we are managing our mind, if our mind management's in place during the day, that means when we go into the night, we go in with a more peaceful sleep because sleep has been so badly affected over the last 40 years as well. Oh my gosh. I interrupted you there, sorry. No, it's okay.

1:06:36I need to bring you back on the show because I feel like there's so much that I need to talk about. Maybe I'll bring you on Clubhouse or something soon. There's so much I want to ask you. I guess where I want to kind of close this out is actionable advice. So let's say that one of my listeners out there, and I know that there's somebody listening and we're on the topic of depression, that's probably medicated right now for anxiety or depression. And they've been told that this is how they're going to heal. And this is the only way to treat what's going on. So what advice would you give them to kind of start improving their lives and moving towards healing themselves, using their mind rather than using medication?

1:07:18That's a great question. So first off is that medication, I'm not anti-medication for heart disease and diabetes and just general medication for medicine and surgery. I think it's a fantastic, phenomenal thing. And your mind is so important in getting the benefit from that. And research has shown just very quickly that if you are, let's say, getting cancer treatment and your mind is not, if you're not managing your mind, you won't get the same kind of benefit. There's huge amounts of bodies of research showing that to get benefit from medication for physical illness, you really need to have your mind involved.

1:07:49Okay, so that's the first thing. So when we talk about psychotropics, we're talking about antidepressants, anti-anxiety meds, antipsychotics, and stimulants. Now, the anti already is the wrong word because they're not anti-anything. They're based on the concept of an antibiotic. And an antibiotic is given to phytobacteria, so it's anti the bacteria. So psychotropic language has been stolen from that. And the impression is that, okay, well, if I take the antibiotic, it kills the bacteria. If I take the antidepressant, it kills the depression. It doesn't do that because depression isn't a chemical imbalance.

1:08:22Depression is coming from, it's a signal, it's a warning signal. It's not an it. It's not a chemical imbalance, an it causing a chemical, it's not a chemical imbalance in your brain. It's not an it. There's no research to back that up at all. It is a response to an underlying cause. And because it moves through your brain, your brain will respond with imbalances, chemical imbalances and neurotoxicity and all that kind of thing, but it's different for every person. In the book, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess, I do show how I looked at things like inflammation, cortisol, DNA, and how when we don't manage our mind, those get worse.

1:08:56But as soon as you manage your mind within nine weeks, you can change your telomere length, which means that you literally can increase your lifespan. We had people that were so depressed at the beginning of the study, that at the beginning of, and this is one in the book, that they had been clinically diagnosed with depression. And I'm holding up now, for those of you that can't see, I'm holding up what I call QEEG head maps. And it's just basically photographs. It's QEEG image of inside the brain. And there's three rows, the top row is blue and the bottom two rows are gray. Okay, so what that means is that looking inside a person who's very depressed, the energy in the brain, the energy response in the brain, the blood flow, all that kind of stuff, the blood flow, oxygen, et cetera, is very flat.

1:09:40And you don't want that. You want it to be like waves in the sea where you've got the big waves at the back and then they build to the breaker and they crash on the beach and there's the ripples. And you want that kind of flow in your brain across both sides. And that's a gray brain. When that's happening, we'll see shades of gray. When a person's very depressed, we'll see blue. Now, when you manage your mind, the blue changes to gray. So what that was showing is in our clinical trial, we showed that people that were diagnosed with clinical depression and had tried everything, Once they were managing their mind using the neurocycle, the five steps, which is in the second half of the book, very, very simplistically explained, et cetera, the depression lifted within 21 days.

1:10:17It didn't go away. It lifted. And the difference was instead of them saying, I am depression, which was their identity, by the 21 days, they were saying, I am depressed because of. Huge difference. By day 63, they were not scared of depression. They recognized they could use the depression to help themselves. So that's massive. Okay, so basically to come back really to the medication, then on a practical level, you cannot just stop a psychotropic. Psychotropics are basically like anesthetics. So they numb the brain. And that's why people feel better on them very often because the pain is numb.

1:10:49So that terrible pain that you can't get out of bed, that lifts so you feel like you can live again. And that's what a lot of people do say. So, you know, maybe for 24 hours or 48 hours, but not longer because they're very addictive and they do change the brain. So some of you may have been on these drugs for years and now you're thinking, oh my gosh, I've damaged my brain. Yes, unfortunately you have damaged your brain, but your brain can heal. That is the beauty of this. But you never just stop them immediately. So I have to put a disclaimer in here. Do not just stop any kind of antidepressant or antipsychotic or a stimulant because your brain will go into shock because your brain is physically changed.

1:11:24So you have to come off very, very slowly. So if you make the decision to choose to come off, you need to get with a medical professional who understands how to get you off medication and then you taper off, taper, T-A-P-E-R. You can Google tapering. And we're putting up a lot of reference. We've got a lot of resources on our site too and drleaf.com and we're putting up even more. But basically tapering means that you take fraction less every day. So your body, so you help your brain to heal in the process of tapering off. That's vitally important. I just have to stress that upfront. You cannot just stop cold turkey because suicidal thoughts and all kinds of things will come back.

1:12:00And then you'll get told by your doctors that the disease is coming back. It's not a disease in the first place. It's withdrawal effects. The drugs create withdrawal effects. And the last thing with drugs is that you can request from your doctor, whoever's put you on, for the informed consent, which is a big document that tells you everything about drugs. Doctors legally are required to do that before they put you on, and most doctors don't, and it's a legal requirement. And if you read that document, you would have very strong second thoughts about taking them because that document's filled with all the things that the drug could do to you.

1:12:32But it's really important that you find the source. So see the depression not as something negative. See it as a helpful messenger. It's telling you something. So embrace it instead of suppress it. And don't see depression as an it. See depression as a clue. Be a detective. Be a thought detective. Say, okay, that depression is a messenger. It's helpful. As soon as you do that, 1400 neurophysiological responses in your brain and body will start working for you and your resilience will increase. So your attitude to, okay, this depression is fine. It's okay. there's a reason for it. It's not a disease.

1:13:04I'm not a broken brain. I'm okay. This is just a response. It's a clue. It's a signal to something going on. And then you begin the process of being a thought detective. Then you start doing the five steps every day for 15 to 45 minutes for the first 21 days. And from day 21, 22 to 63, you just do step five. The five steps, and then there's a million other things that you can do around this. There's so much in these tables, there's explanations, there's examples of how to use for detoxing and everything. But basically the five steps train you to become, to gather awareness of what the signals are, what they mean.

1:13:40So what are the emotional, what are the physical, what are the behavioral, what are the perspectives, signals, all the signals. So I teach you in the five steps how to gather awareness of the signals. But you're doing it as the pilot and the co-pilot. So you're distancing yourself. You don't immerse yourself in that tree. You literally imagine flying over a forest as pilot and co-pilot, messy mind and wise mind, and you're paying attention to the signal. What's the signal? Depression. It's like, imagine a little signal coming out of the tree, a little smoke signal. There's a little wire sticking up there.

1:14:09You land your plane. Instead of just going over and ignoring it and suppressing it and pushing it and hoping it'll go away, you land your plane. You get out your plane with the co-pilot. So you're always with your wisdom and you stand back and you observe. So I'm not in it. I'm not under it. Imagine it's full of rotten apples. You don't go stand under it and then all the apples fall on your head. You stand back and you pick the apples. You gather awareness. That's the concept. That's the sort of how you come into the process. And you gather awareness of all the different signals. Then you start reflecting very objectively.

1:14:41You've got to go through the sequence. Each sequence is creating more the brain, two sides of the brain to work together, increasing blood flow to the front of the brain and oxygen, increasing your decision-making capability, pulling in more gamma activity that's increasing integration. and there's all the science of what's happening in each step I've put into the book, not all of it, but a simple version. So each step is sequentially designed. You can't skip a step. You do all five steps because it's progressively taking you into a deeper state. So the second one is basically a deep reflection.

1:15:10The third one is, third and fourth steps are writing steps. You do two very specific ways of writing. They're not just standard journaling, but each is taking you deeper and deeper. And then the last step is an action that ends the work for the day because you don't want to be working on, you don't want to get stuck in this all day long. You just focus on that toxic stuff for that 15 to 45 minutes. So the active reach, the action step five is just something that keeps you anchored back in a safe space. So it's just, I am not shame or something like that. So it's a statement that every time your mind wants to go and ruminate, you don't allow it.

1:15:40You capture that thought, you put it in the box. You say, tomorrow I'll work on it for today. That's all I'm going to do. And you work because the whole point is that you do it over time. You're not going to get everything revealed in day one. It takes a full 21 days to embrace, process, and reconceptualize into the healthy tree. And then you would do step five for the rest of it. So, I mean, that's a quick, brief walkthrough, but it's in detail in the book. And there's an app too, the NeuroCycle app that is also, it's all literally giving you therapy. I was just going to say, guys, she has so many different resources.

1:16:12She has her book, The Mental Mess. Then she has an app. She has a podcast. So I highly recommend, like, honestly, guys, I've recommended books in the past, but I really, really recommend this one. I feel like you guys are going to find so much value. Dr. Caroline Leaf, this was amazing. The last question I ask all my guests is, what is your secret to profiting in life? Mind management, without a doubt, is it's all driven by mind. So everything is driven by mind. So that's the, without managing your mind, you cannot, your life is just a mess. And from there, it's just a natural profiting in everything, relationships, yourself, peace, finances, business, etc.

1:16:51And you also get better perspective. You don't look at anything, I don't look at anything as an external thing to bring into me. Everything's from inside out because it's mind out. And then I'm much more accepting of everything that happens. And I have goals and visions, obviously, but they're not external that I'm trying to get in. I'm growing from the inside out. I feel like what you're talking about is literally the future. Like you were talking about the future, what everybody's going to learn in school 20 years from now, but we're learning it now and you can take advantage of it now, even though it's not mainstream.

1:17:25So I want everybody listening in to realize that. Thank you so much, Dr. Caroline. Where can people learn more about you and everything that you do? Absolutely. Thank you so much. Dr. Caroline Leaf is my Instagram handle, all my social media handles, obviously from Instagram, we all know you can get to everything. that book, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess, and is available wherever books are sold. And also on our site, drleaf.com. We've got a store there. All my other books are there. The NeuroCycle app you can get on Google's iTunes. Everything you can get through my Instagram page will take you to everything like everyone knows.

1:17:56And then my podcast is called Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess. Perfect. And I'll stick all those links in the show notes. Thank you so much for your time. It was such a pleasure. Thank you so much.

1:18:10Thank you.