Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess || Caroline Leaf

In this episode, I talked to doctor Caroline Leaf about managing the mind. The world is a crazy place and our minds can get disorderly trying to keep up with it. But according to doctor Leif, to have a messy mind is to be human. We don't have to pathologize our emotions and thoughts. Instead, we can embrace them and implement strategies that allow us to better direct ourselves. Doctor Leaf shows us how to make sense of the messy mind

and the scientific research behind those steps. We also touch on the topics of self compassion, consciousness, trauma, and neuroplasticity. It's always fun chatting with Caroline. I was on her show a little while back, and I've been looking forward to having her on my show for a while. So I'm glad to get this out there, and I think she's going to really help you clean up your mental mess and get order in your life and make some sense of your life. So, without further ado, I bring

you doctor Caroline Leif. Doctor Leif. It is so exciting to have you on the Psychology podcast.

They did a mixed up medicine, psychology, communication pathology, neurology. So we had all this incredible and neuroscience and its infancy. We had this incredible degree with all this clinical application, with work seven days a week. They nearly wiped us all out, and only sixty of us actually qualified before they decided they needed to split up the degree into two years, because they into two separate degrees because they

put seven years in four. But I tell you say that to say to you, I'm so glad I did it. I hated it that I loved and hated it at the time, but barry, what it taught me to do was to think very critically. It taught me to see things from a different angle, from a medical perspective, from a psychological perspective, from a neuroscientific perspective, from a communication

pathology perspective. And essentially what I was trained to do was to look at how people shut up and to try and help understand what experiences in life have resulted in that, and how is that impacting the physical functioning of the brain and the body. So it was a unique angle that didn't get me stuck in a field, and it launched me into doing a lot of research, which one of my nearest neurology professors one day really triggered that by making a comment that, hey, listen, the

brain is fixed. This was in the eighties, Thank goodness, we don't think that anymore, and if someone has brain damaged, you just have to teach your patients to compensate. And proceeded to give us a whole lecture about that, and I remember raising my hand saying that that doesn't sound realistic, because as humans be constantly changing, we're having multiple experiences be different all the time, so there must be something more to this, And he actually said, well, that's a

ridiculous question. I'll never forget that. I actually did a TEDx talk called the Ridiculous Question of neuroplasticity, and at that time there wasn't even a word really around that. It was such a new concept. He said. I said, okay, well, he said, go do research. I said, well, give me the area that you think is the most challenging. And so he threw out you know, you could see was dismissal. It was go and research traumatic brain injury because it's

a waste of time. There was so little research on talk TBI in the eighties. So I thought, okay, well I'm young and don't know much yet, and then you go do it. So I just dived in and solid researching TBI and looking for systems of how could I help someone with traumatic brain injury improve cognitive, social, emotional functioning. And that launched me into where I am now, where I did intensive research in that area. I worked with

people with all different kinds of emotional constraint. It's traum, severe trauma, traumatic brain injury, neurological impairment, stroke would be called ADHD, but more learning disabilities because that terminology of ADHD is always questionable to all the neurological plus the trauma side and worked. I was in South Africa at the time, so I did a lot of my work

in the pre apartheid transition and post departed era. Worked in schools with people, went to under I went almost what I call underground for almost twenty five years, where I wanted to understand the human experience from a multicultural perspective and from all different angles. So I was working in very poverty stricten areas as well as working with people that receives of companies. My objective was really to

understand mind mind brain connection and how people function. And then I'm basically practiced for twenty five years and now for the last five years, we are doing a lot of formal research myself and my team and busy with publications and research studies and whatever in this field sort of all coming together and I write box and I teach the stuff in my podcast and conferences. So there's a quick overview.

week and saw the most absolutely shocking things. And you will wonder over the genocide and just post genocide and that kind of thing. When you've seen that level of pain in humanity and you see people coming through, I know that the hope for humanity and the whole thing of mental health is such a human experience. And I think that's maybe what appeals to people is understand that

mental health is part of our human experience. It's ok to be a mess, and is a way of managing the mess that can help us find a level of peace and embrace all of the humanity, including the bad stuff. Not to be scared of the bad stuff, but you see it for the message that can bring.

and this cookie cut of mold. And if you're not, you know, if you're still experiencing grief after losing a loved one off to x amount of time, sudden you've got a disease. You know, Meanwhile, that is such a unique experience for that person. No one's an expert on your experience, only you are. And even we try to

get to grips with what that is. So, yeah, I think massiness is part of a huge part of when we start embracing our business, we start embracing our humanity, and that's where we can start finding acceptance for things that we can't understand and find a level of peace. Yeah.

consciousness is considered the hard question of science. I come at this from another angle to to why talk about the messiness of the mind being okay and what it actually means and all that stuff, is that I don't think that the mind is the hardest question of science at all. I think it's the most obvious question. The mere fact that you and I can have this conversation, that we both have a level of expertise in our fields, that we can converse around these topics, that's evidence of mind.

Like I am not floating and you're not floating, that's evidence of gravity. You can't see gravity, but we can see the product of gravity, which is us not floating. So we may not be able to see mind, but we see physically, and we can actually see it physically because then I'll come to that, But we see the evidence you and I having a conversation, being able to process, being able to answer each other's questions, being able to experience the what we experience before and what we're going

to experiencing afterwards. That for mes evidence of mind. I'm thinking and feeling and choosing in response to your questions, and I'm formulating answers. That's all mind and action. So the mind is almost is literally like a gravitational feel,

quantum energy, et cetera, by electromagnetic fields. In so many ways we can understand the physics side of mind, but there's this very impactful side of mind which is the sort of psychological side, which is our ability to think and feel and choose, which is what we do now in response to each other. But that choose, which is what we do now in response to each other. But that thinking, feeling, choosing, which is all this energetic force, et cetera, is moving through the brain and the body.

So the mind has to have the involvement of the brain and the body in order for you and arch Sharp in this conversation. If we were dead, there wouldn't be us, if we wouldn't be having the conversation, there would be nothing happening in our brain and body. But the fact that we have a mind and we are alive. Our mind is this energetic force that is driving the

functioning of the brain and the body. So for example, you and I are both making and all the viewers and listeners are making somewhere between eight hundred thousand and a million cells every second. If you were dead, you

couldn't do that. So there's some kind of energetic force that enables our bodies to run, our brains to run, to process these experiences of life, intrastructural changes in our brain, intrastructural changes inside the pyticistus and of our cells, which we feel in our experiences that traum and we feel it in our body memories in our body as well.

And some kind of relationship between this force of our mind, which I choose to call the mind and spiritually or whatever you want to call it, and this functioning of us as a human. There's something that they're in our liveness, and so mind is this driving force, this energtic force. And then I see mind also as having two parts to the messy part, which is so acceptable. Like we've been saying, it's so much part of being human. We don't know what's coming up in the next moment. We

can predict a certain extent. I know, you interviewed me about my work, so I can predict with the seventy percent accuracy kind of the conversation where it's going. But I don't know what you're going to do after this. I'm going to have a very low understanding of what you're going to do after this. In other words, we live in a world that you can't actually plan. So there's a lot of experimentation that we do as humans on a daily basis, and that's a messy process and

it's very normal. You don't know what someone's going to say to you or email to you, or you know, throw at you. And so we messy in the processing of life's experiences, and we messy in our responses, and that is okay because that's how we learn. We make a mess, then we see, oh, gosh, I shouldn't have got irritated, or I needed to plan better, or I needed to respond differently, is that it had an impact or that wasn't the right decision. So we see and the mess and then we can repair and then we

can grow. So messiness has to happen in order for us to function. It's very scientific. The mind brain body connection is very systematic, very organized, very scientific. And in the scientific process, we're making all these little hypotheses and then we've got to prove them or reject them or accept them. And that's what's happening very fast all the time,

and that's what our mind is doing. So when I talk about managing the mind, which is a big part of kind of the philosophy and the way I approach the work, is that we can actually accept our messiness and we can also learn to then manage our messiness, which is recognition. Okay, that was messy. It's okay to be messy, but I can't stain that because it's having a consequence. It's maybe impacting my work relationship or my marriage, or my relationship with a friend, or my quality of

my research or whatever. So I can say, okay, that's what's happened. Now I can stand back and I can manage that, and I can change and reconceptualize, and that we can. That's a build big sort of cliff note to you. We can extrapolate that then too. Everything So in terms of how we've dealt with COVID, how we dealing with everything, our anxiety, depression, all of that can be viewed in a d of. I can be missing.

Life is hard, it's got good and bad, the toxic stuff, the experiences of life or process by our mind into our brain and body. We are having an impact in our brain and our body, and that mind brain body impact needs to be is going to express itself and how we show up and how we show up may not be the healthiest, it may be a copy mechanism. But we can then go in and say, okay, well that's what's happened. How can I change that. How can I rectify? I can manage that all the time, not

pushing what's happened aside. Because your story is your story. What's happened to you and is happening to you you can never change, but you can change what it looks like inside of you and how it plays out into the future. So that's kind of what I mean by cleaning up the mental mess.

So like you have diabetes or cancer, and they can diagnose and they can track it to a biological cause, and they can give you a treatment that there is as specific as they can get in medicine to that cause that works with that kind of physical thing. But that model has been adopted into mental health, as you know, and that has then reduced its reductionistic and it's taken us down to a level of trying where researchers have tried to say, if you feel depression, it's an it,

it's a disease. It's got they are biological markers. So there's other genetic calls, or there's it shows up in your brain as a difference in your brain or something with your chemicals. And as we know that that chemical myssge just has once again been in a recent paper by your animal grief being shown not to be true. So based on that, we have mind management shifts away from a biomedical model looks at you as a human,

as a unique human having unique experiences. So this is not anything new, we all get that, but it's it's the narrative of your life and the narratives of your life that we have to actually honor. So if you are have a traumatic childhood in the ACE studies, or if you have a traumatic marriage, or if you're going through something during COVID, which everyone's had different experiences, these are toxic experiences, so they are going to be processed

by your mind. Your mind literally kind of grabs the process, puts it in your brain, build it in those neural network changes. Change. That's in the influence a message to your body, and it's built into your body. So we have this mind being body connection translating experiences into our brain, mind, brain and body. So mind doing it, but it's also

in the mind. It's in three places. So if we having a toxic experience, that translates into because it's going through the brain, it has an impact on the brain, so the brain and the body will then respond. It's a response versus it's not generating. So if we feeling if some let's say, for example, there is a very traumatic event that you went through childhood, you suppressed it

for years and something recently has triggered that. Because thoughts, these experiences are volcanic in nature, you could suppress for only so long and then they will explode. And we get good at suppressing for various different Sometimes it's just coping, it's a trauma response, whatever, but eventually it will something maybe triggers it, and it manifests itself and there's now it's so overwhelming that you go into a deep depression.

So if you had to go and see a psychiatrists or potentially some psychologists, they would say, yes, questionnaire and use a DESM and something like that, and they give you a diagnosis and say you have clinical depression. And that's initially very nice to note because now you have a reason for why you feel like you do, because

it's so overwhelming, that feeling of depression. But it's kind of an empty gift, and it's like a gift that seems to be something that you open it up and now what It doesn't actually tell you anything because it's not a true diagnosis. It doesn't link you back to a biomedical cause, a biobiological correlate, because they haven't ever discovered after billions of dollars in euros and years and years and fifty sixty years of research, they have not

been biological, genetic or chemical correlates. There have all been theories that have been construct so them or that's the word. Clinical depression is a construct It's a description of an emotional what I call an emotional warning signal. So let's say you have this thing from childhood, something triggers it. Now in the current state of your mind and in your life, something's happened and you've got overwhelmed by this depression.

I would say this in terms of my management, you don't have clinical depression because you can't have clinical depression. You're experiencing a very dominant emotion. Now, I want to put a proviso in there. I don't believe that you need to have a medical description of something like depression to make it valid. It is valid. In fact, I believe that that actually stigmatizes and moves away from the true story and doesn't honor what you've gone through sufficiently.

So mind management says, hey, I see you, I hear you. What you've gone through is significant, and what you're experiencing is huge, and it's knocking your life upside down, and

that needs to be rarely dived into. And you need all kinds you know, you need whatever level of support but in addition to the support that we all need, there's also a level of eternal mind management that is important, and that mind management will help you understand, to help you, to a certain extent, get to a level of understanding of the origin story of where this has come from, which is environmental. There's things that have gone on. There's the thing that happened as a child, so that's a

nurturing maybe aspect, or a severe trauma. So there's things that went on. It could be racism, it could be some political situation, it could be in other words, all the environment impacts us. It's not about us, it's about us in the world, and we have to consider the environment. So mind management is looking at you feeling extremely depressed and recognizing that that is a warning signal filled with messages that isn't alone, because if we feel depressed, it

changes our behaviors. So there's a second warning signal, and that may be withdrawing, maybe can't get out of bed, maybe just can't talk the moment, just can't sleep, whatever the behaviors are, that will also then trigger a physical response because that experience wasn't just built into the mind. The gravitational fields and electromagnetic fields of the mind. But it was also physically the structural change in the brain

and a change in the body. So we're then going to have this physical response, and that could be anything. I mean, we're all different. It could be that you as you this is triggered, you suddenly discover that you get sirisis, or you have tremendous gut ache, or there's suddenly whatever. There's so many physical impacts that have happened because of what you went through, and as this is triggered, it brings those back ups. So that's the physical warning signal.

So my management is the honoring of I feel depressed. I'm not depression. I feel depressed, extremely depressed because of and there's a because of and I'm going to embrace that depression to find that message behind it. And depression is not an illness, it's not a disease of the brain. It is a warning signal coming from what I call an unconscious and we can dive into that maybe in the next question or something. It's coming from your mind,

bring body into action. That's your best friends on your side. It's coming through from the non conscious levels of the mind. As an intrusive thought, with all these signals, and if we embrace them, we then get a level of control over them or a level of autonomy. That doesn't mean you're going to be walking around like an avatar or happy. It means that you could for months be in a state of tears and crying and not being able to out of bed and not functioning. But that's still progress

because you are allowing yourself to embrace the grief. So I'll give you an example. I've got a case study in my latest book, this one over here, so that there's a case study in here of a client and my recent clinical trial, which is a great example of this, who had experienced incredible childhood trauma but so bad that the only way they could cope was suppression. So it was sort of the flight trauma response, and that was what they loved in and you know, we can cope

with those things. That's what you needed in the moment whatever. But as a young adult millennial hitting their thirties, next the volcano exploded in their life and everything was going wrong. They meant for all the therapies, got all the diagnoses, and they were just getting progressively worse and wanted to just sort of leave the planet, so my management how does a supply? So basically what this person wanted, what we needed was to understand the story. And initially, when

starting out, this person saw themselves as depression. Once we introduced a level of mind management, I didn't get them therapy. It's in an I put my systems into an app on the phone. So they literally went way once they had all the assessments and brain QG, blood, narrative, psychological, very big matrix of of assessment. They were then had the apploaded by my team into because I was double blind,

so they didn't meet me into that. Now, the point that I'm making is that I do believe in support absolutely. As humans, we need deep, meaningful connections and whatever that looks like, we have to have it. But at the same time, you're not with your therapist, coach or other people twenty four to seven, you wake up with yourself. You're living with your own anxiety in the shower, with that trauma or that intrusive thought tho. So another way,

we need two things. We need mind management all the time because our mind never stops, and we need that support to help facilitate and collaborate. It's a collaborative process. So in this particular case, giving that that particular person this ability to go and say, hey, this is what you do when these emotions, when these emotions come up. Let's look for the associated behaviors. Let's look for the weeds coming out in your body. Let's look at the perspective,

which is the fourth one. Because your emotions, your behaviors, and your physical sensations or channel, by the nature of the mind and body connection will channel into our perspective. So it could be and this is kind of what this person said life that extreme depression, not sleeping, not functioning while at work, just literally giving up incredible, incredible issues with GUIDs, etc. And life sucks. So there's a

very simple example of that. It would be deeper. So in mind management, you would look at those signals, you would embrace them and give yourself permission to feel those and experience those there. And then basically, once you've gathered awareness of those, you don't want to just be aware. If you just become awaren in to do nothing else, you'll get worse. So mind management involves preparing the brain because it's very scary to look back at your passer, to

look at a trauma or something like that. So we need to know how to decompress, and that's breathing. All that stuff that we know about that's so spoken about, very good for the neurophysiology. Then you're going too this gather awareness looking at those signals. Then you would move into a process of what does this actually mean? You would reflect, so it would be a why question, why more details? Why am I feeling this? What's going on here? Why? A little bit of the like why do I feel

this emotion? Why is it linked to this? Then you would write that down, because your brain goes through stages. Then you would check what you've written down, and then you would actually end that little process with an action. Now, what I've just described as the concept that I developed called the neurocycle, which is the tool of mind management, which is based on thirty ideas of research of how can I, as a person, directs the europe Ester city

of my brain? How can I get my mind missing mind under control, which implies I have a wise mind. I have a part of me that's not messy that can kind of stand back, give myself permission to experience the messiness, and then try and make some sense of it and go through and that's a process. What I showed with the research is that you can't just become aware.

If you just become aware, you're going to increase levels of anxiety if you've got to land the plane, and landing that plane is slowly over time, for just a limited amount of time. In today, starting to unpack the intrusive thought that the signals were attached to, because that signals attached to something. In the case of the case study, I was explaining they initially, obviously on day one, they

weren't sure what was going on. By days four to seven, they were starting to see, okay, there's something from childhood. By day twenty one when they came back into the clinic for into the clinic for the next part of the next lot of testing and so on for the research, that person wasn't saying I am depression. That person was saying that I am because of And they said I'm even more depressed and I'm now anxious and extremely anxious.

Now that immediately sounds, oh, they've gone backwards because we've been trained to think, oh, I'm gonna suppress those thoughts. Those are bad things. Depression and anxiety are bad things. Those are illnesses, No they're not. They are wonderful messengers, awful to experience. But if you embrace them, there's something behind them that's going to take you to the details

of the thought that they're attached to. And that thought is the experience made of loads and loads of memories, could be thousand different memories encapsulated into that thought, which is that intrusive thought that is making us feel that depression. So in my management, what I do is I actually pay attention to the signals, track back to the intrusive thought, and then I go through a process over time, and the time is actually sixty three day cycles and in

verse twenty one is very deconstructing work and reconstructing. And then the second four two is a stabilization in order to bring behavior in order to be able to apply in your life. And so a day twenty one, this particular subject you said, I'm even more depressed than before and more anxious. But there's growth because they're saying, I'm not depression, I am depressed because of and I'm starting

to see what. And that person started seeing the early childhood trauma and they were grieving, so they were having an incredibly normal response to an adverse circumstance, which is terrible childhood trauma, abuse, terrible for years. So that's your ace adverse child experiences. But they had managed to suppress it for so many years with certain burst in between which they had none with medications and so on like that.

But this is they managed to, in a very day to day basis slowly manage it through this very systematic process of driving the neural rewiring in a way that you can't fix us in a day. You'll overwhelm yourself and you'll fall apart. It's a teeny bit each day, and so by day twenty one they were able to say things like, I'm the depression and increased depression and anxiety is coming from the fact that I am now facing the issues and grieving. So they were in a period of grief.

my patients. So from very early on, I started seeing things in my own life that I was backing with. I use this every single day. This is a lifestyle. I'm always working on a sixty three day cycle where I'm working on a particular concept over a very structured time.

But I also use it very quickly because the neurocycle is not something that I've externalized and made very conscious, a very natural process that we us humans go through actually at four hundred billion actions and foster per second.

So the non conscious mind that's driving off functioning. This is quite a complicated thing of science, and I want to give you a whole lecture, but the simplified cliff version notes is that the driving force of our non conscious mind and not subconscious, not unconscious, the non conscious, which is the most intelligent part of us, that is experiencing life, that has all these thoughts of their memories collated and organized, and it's on your side, scanning and searching.

What's disruptive, what's enhancing? All of that is working and moving through the subconscious into the conscious mind and alerting us through those signals. Okay, so what I found when I was working with my patients is that, hey, these are things, all intrusive thoughts and signals are coming into my own mind and one of the things that I battled with for years that stole so much joy. I can tell a lot of different things, but this is

very relatable to a lot of people. When I've shared this before, is I used to say, if only all the time, I couldn't enjoy a moment like I'd finished an interview, and I think the whole time of what I should have said or could have said. Or I go on a holiday and I'm enjoying the holiday, but as the day ends, I'm thinking I could have done that, which would have made it better. I don't do it anymore. It's taken me multiple cycles of sixty three days to

not do that. Every now and then I get back into something will trigger and I'll fall back in the pattern. But through my management, I can catch it, because it steals my peace and it stole my ability to enjoy my moment. Now you met Dominique before we started. We

were on a holiday back in South Africa. When we left when we still lived there, and we had this beautiful holiday house by the sea, and Dominique was about I think seven or eight years old, and we were leaving our holiday house to go back to our home. And I hated leaving holidays, like everyone that I'm really bad at leaving. I don't like holidays ending. And I was a whole way in the car for about two hours.

I was going on about I wish with this, so I wish that, and if only this, I mean, I'm this adult, was four kids, and I'm saying these stupid things, and it was I was getting so anxious and so tense and so depressed about the situation that my little hure old dominique pipes up in the background. Mom, you are spoiling the holiday with your if onless. It was the first time someone had actually took an old children are very insightful to actually say, you know, that was

my intrusive thought. I was living in a world of if only and losing the joy of the moment, and I decided right then and there what I was doing with my patients was what I needed to apply for myself. And it did take me a couple of months for me to really understand how to navigate this, but it refined the process quickly as I applied it on myself.

And so that has been I mean, that's just one that set me free from everything, because along with if only, could have, should have, would have the ugly cousins as my husband call them, you know, because it leads down, You just go down a rabbit toile of regrets and you lose the moment. So that was a big one in my life that set me free.

about what you're going through. So that's a key issue with trauma, is that whatever you are experiencing as an intrusive salt, and all the signals that are attached are yes, the experience may be very bad and traumatic, but the fact that you're experiencing it is I know it sounds so hard to perceive it, but it is actually working for you and not against you, and you know how

to manage it. So if you are getting if you're finding yourself ruminating, which is very much what an intrusive thought that's unmanaged will make you do, you just go round and round in circles like that. If only just go round and round in circles like a hamster wheel, and you just get worse and worse. Rumination, intrusive and rumination. And what we see with neuroscience is that whatever you think about the most will grow. Essentially, whatever you think

about the most growth. So neurologically, as you are thinking that if only or that interest of what comes up, and you're getting caught up in the pain of that moment, and you're ruminating over and over what that person see to you, or what the experiences done to your life, or how it's messed up, or how you feel why did that person do that to you? And why did this happen to me? As you're giving it, you're giving it energy. Think of watering a plant and how a

plant grows when you give it energy. Neural networks work the same way, and a neural network is pretty much is the thing that inside the little protein structures called that of that makeup branch is called dendrites. That's where you're stalled just being it's growing. It's stored there, It's stored in your body and stored in your mind, so three places. So I give it energy. It's getting bigger, and the bigger it gets unmanaged. The more we ruminate.

So that's the one principle. The other principle is that I'd like to use it to continual I developed with my patience years ago. It just helped me to explain this concept. Think of a continuum from one to ten. So one to one and two is the just the ups and downs of life. That just there's the joys and this, there's a little things that we can irritating email and nothing that's too radical, that's just the kind of day to day stuff. Then we can move up to the sort of three to five where it's more

of a struggle. It's a day to day so it's not the end of all that maybe an irritating boss or a child that's going through a difficult phase, or a project that you're working on that's really challenging new time wise or you put it, but something that is

not unmanageable but could become unmanageable. Then shift over to the sort of six sevens where we're starting to tip now from healthy stress, which is what will happen in first two levels, which is where your blood pressure increases, so you've got more oxygen and blood furrture brain and a good sense and Therefore your decision making is more effective because your brain is going to work better and your brain, your mind needs to work to your brains.

You want all the pathways clear, the fault clear, and all that stuff that I think that's good. Stress Westing stress is bad. But where we start tipping is when we start feeling that those day to day struggles are accumulating and forming an aggregate, and it's starting to shift us from icncope. This is too much. This rumination that was maybe intermittent is now happening almost five times an hour or five times a minute. I'm starting to feel

like it's consuming all my time. Now I've shifted where instead of the blood vessels around my heart dilating and pushing more blood to my brain and activating my HPA axis, which is the stress access to work before me, now shifted into a toxic mode to my physiology. My neurophysiology is now shifted where one of a lot of things is that your blood vessels will now contract instead of dilate, So now there's not enough blood for and ouxygen to

your brain. So now've tipped into toxic stress. Another HPA axis is working against me quarters all risers and blah blah blah, oh when just downstream effects not happening. So I'm feeling really bad. So my tip for someone who is experiencing trauma, when trauma is triggered, sorry may mean the last scale part of the scale, you get the eight nineteen. Now, those are those things that happened to

us where we were the victim. So the big stuff, the huge things from childhood at any stage of your life that are a war, an abuse, a sexual accounted loss of a loved one, car accidents, physical traumatial body that's changed your life. Those big, gigantic things that are very very hard to process and take a lot of time to process, and very often meet suppressed for a

time while we're learning to cope. So what I'm saying with the continuum is the first piece of advice is just try and rank, you know, stand back, observe yourself. We're very able to do this. You can put two cheese next to each other. Used to do this when I was practicing. Put two cheeses next to each other. You sit in one and you all say in the other, the messy minds in this one where you are, and

then the wise mind's in the other one. And what you can do is almost shift chairs and say, I'm going to step into my wise mind, and my wise mind enables me to stand back and give advice if you want to know what that is and feels like. Think of when someone comes to you, Scott and they say, Hey, I've got this problem, can you help me. It's so easy to guide other people, so it's so difficult to guide ourselves. So you want to do that. You want

to get into that mode. You know, it's a distancing concept of psychology where you stand back and you observe yourself and you give your self advice. So it's almost like, okay, Caroline, you're feeling, how are you feeling? You're feeling like this, Tell me how you feel, you know what's coming out of you. How can I help you? And you shift between those two modes, and when you do that, you create a safe space where you can allow yourself to

experience with no judgment, no guilt, no condemnation. This is what I am feeling in my emotions in my body, this is what I'm doing in my behaviors, and this is my perspective, and you kind of itemize as you gather wellness of flows in this way and in this very objective way, and then you start going to the rest of the neurocycle. So it's the continuum. First, I just said, okay, this is this is definitely a seven, This is in that eight nineteen range. This is big stuff.

Then you make a decision, Okay, we're not going to fix it today, We're going to move into a period of time. What support do you need? Do you need therapy, do you need coaching, do you need a friend, what sort of that kind of thing. That's what I would recommend that people really try and give themselves grace and peace and be kind to yourself. You know that brings in all those things. It's quite like negative self talk and creating self boundaries and all that kind of thing.

dangerous in a lot of aspects. Is that it actually are functioning drops. If you try to be like an avatar, you try moderate, moderatecitement, and happiness is very much more balanced and helps us to develop our characters and embrace suffering and all that kind of stuff and grows human.

changing all the time regardless. So the plastic paradox is that your brain's going to change regardless if you don't direct thee it's going to change in a direction that's not going to help you, affecting your body and feeding back into your mind. So the neuro cycle is a system burst all those years ago and developed and are now. As I said, you have like five different trials running

at the moment. You've got all kinds of papers that are we've prepared with like five papers and currently under public preparation for publication, peer review journals, et cetera, showing the development of this concept. So it's a system within which you can put whatever you want. It's a framework, it's a vehicle. It is you can bring in if there's certain techniques that work for you, meditation techniques CBT

techniques act. I mean, there's a million different things, but you just want to put this in this framework that you can drive your direction in the way that you wanted to drive. So yes, it's greatful. The big stuff, the big traumas, the eight nineteens, even the seven six sevens eights. That takes time to rewire, and the rewiring process works in cycles of sixty three days and not

necessarily one. I've had patients who've had to work over two years, which is twelve cycles over two years before they've felt each neurocycle, you'll feel all level of control, but before they feel like they've actually got to a point where they started to feel like they can, you know, make positive strides in their life. So each is a positive stride, but it's accumulative day to day. It is amazing.

I'll give you a simple example. My whole research team was meeting at my house for my studio home office situation, for a big research meeting, and I had to go to the dentist in the morning, and the dentist, like normal always runs let and this was a really critical meeting and nothing could start because I'm driving this process. So now, but all these people all over the waiting for me. They've arrived and the dent and I'm sitting

in the dentist chair. I can't get out of there, so I'm getting really anxious and edging because I'm getting all these texts that I can have pink, pink pin and some So this is a silly example, but a neurocycled I realized, okay, I gathered awareness. I calmed myself down of my emotions, what my body was doing, and just doing that calmed my neurophysiology down, gave me permission to feel this way. Then I reflected I, which is, you know, why why am I feeling like this? Gave

myself the answers. It was very calming. I couldn't writecause the dentist hand with in my mouth, but I visualized, Okay, they're sitting there. I know that they'll be getting my husband will be entertaining them, my staff will be giving them drinks, so they'll be having They'll be fun, you know. And then I rechecked that, saying okay, we can. They'll make up the time. And my active reach, which is

the footstep, was an action. I'm going to calm down, let the dentists finish and tell the dentists hurry up and get back and when I'm there, I can we can make up time. So it sounds so silly, but I was in a completely calm state before I did that. Prior to that, I would have made such a mess of the poor dentists. Was I was wiggling because I was trying to get away and I'm trying to tell them hurry up. They wouldn't have finished what they had

to do. I would have been in pain and I would have had a terrible meeting because I would so anxious. And it's happened to me before. I mean, I don't knew they've experienced that. You know, your brain just fogs up with you in a state of anxiety and so on. I had clarity of mine. I walked in, I laughed, I told them, I told them about the neuro cycle, and it was no. They were having a great time anyway. They didn't bind a few minutes, but I had made

a huge deal. So there's an example of a day to day in my own life.

love all those descriptions. That's great. But if you have all of that which is reality, and you just try and say, okay, well that's all bad and I need to think of something new, it creates the white bear effect. You know, that's whole research that what you don't want to think about, you're going to think about more. So, what CBT does really well is that it will bring in some techniques that will help you temporarily band aid

the situation. So there, it's because the remission. The research shows that TBT is not as Yes, it's evidence based, Yes, it's part of the gold standard treatment, but it's not actually as successful as people think it is. If you look at the evidence and the research, it's very questionable in terms of sustainability. So where it does work when and I've tested this out is. It's a great way.

The neurocycle is five steps. The fifth step is called an active reach, and that's where you do something based on a deconstruction reconstruction process. So the five steps of the neurocycle are embracing processing and reconceptualizing through a very systematic process over time. It's a deconstruction reconstruction process where you accept I can't change what's happened to me, but I can change what it looks like inside my brain, body and mind, and a change how it plays out

into the future. So that's the kind of philosophical component. So if I've done those four steps of doing the deconstruction, I'm not saying don't be messy. That's a bad emotion, that's a bad you want to get rid of that. I'm not saying any of that. I'm saying, that's okay, you can be messy. Remember this way we started the conversation. But now in order for me to cope where I am right at this moment in today's day one of sixty three or day five of sixty three or whatever

you or what do I need now? And that's where I found CBT techniques to be very useful as a little exercise that I can do during the course of my day because you take your active reach, and your active reach is how you discipline almost discipline your mind to not allow yourself to go back to the if only rumination or something's okay, I was doing that, but I'm going to do this to manage that. So there. It works really well, along with things like positive affirmations,

but they go at stitch five. You use them earlier, you're not going to You're not going to get the same sustainability and behavior change or life change that people are looking for.