78. Dr. Caroline Leaf on Nueroplasticity, the Brain vs. the Mind, and Cognitive Detoxing

Nov 23

listen to this episode:

Today I am joined by Dr. Caroline Leaf, a communication pathologist and cognitive neuroscientist specializing in cognitive and metacognitive neuropsychology. Since the early 1980s, she has researched the mind-brain connection, the nature of mental health, and the formation of memory. She was one of the first in her field to study how the brain can change (neuroplasticity) with directed mind input. Dr. Leaf is also the bestselling author of Switch on Your Brain, Think Learn Succeed, Think and Eat Yourself Smart, and many more. She's also the host of Cleaning up the Mental Mess, a top-charts mental health podcast. (bio via drleaf.com)

Dr. Leaf's Website: https://drleaf.com/

Dr. Leaf's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drcarolineleaf/

Dr. Leaf's Podcast: https://drleaf.com/pages/podcasts

This week's DBT skill is turning the mind. Learn more here.

Dr. Leaf and I dive into the following topics…

+ The difference between the mind and the brain and how this connects to neuroplasticity

+ How childhood traumas can manifest in both the brain and body but can be rewired with targeted neuroplasticity

+ The think-feel-choose process through which we interpret and internalize experiences

+ Why depression and anxiety aren't illnesses but rather emotional signals and how to effectively treat these from a non-illness perspective

+ The neurocycle approach to healing both your physical & mental health after experiencing ineffective and/or distressing patterns

Mentioned In The Episode…

+ Nuerocycle App

+ Dr. Leaf's most recent book—Cleaning Up the Mental Mess

SHOP GUEST RECOMMENDATIONS: https://amzn.to/3A69GOC

Episode Sponsors

⚡️This week's episode is brought to you by MagicMind! For 20% off MagicMind—an all-natural energy drink with adaptogens, nootropics, and matcha to boost productivity + focus while decreasing stress—use code 'persisted20' at magicmind.co/persisted

About She Persisted (formerly Nevertheless, She Persisted)

After a year and a half of intensive treatment for severe depression and anxiety, 18-year-old Sadie recounts her journey by interviewing family members, professionals, and fellow teens to offer self-improvement tips, DBT education, and personal experiences. She Persisted is the reminder that someone else has been there too and your inspiration to live your life worth living.

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a note: this is an automated transcription so please ignore any accidental misspellings!

Sadie: Welcome to she persisted. I'm your host Sadie Sutton. Every Friday, I post interviews about mental health, dialectical behavioral therapy and teenage life. These episodes break down my mental health journey, teach skills to help you cope with life and showcase testimonials from individuals, including teens, just like you, whether you've struggled yourself or just want to improve your mental fitness.

This podcast is your inspiration to live a life you love and keep. This week on to Persisted,

Dr. Caroline Leaf: what is depression and anxiety? We told him today's narrative that they are illnesses, but they're not illnesses. There's no research to confirm that there's no neuro-biological current mix or in the brain.

Chemical imbalance is a theory that has been disproved multiple times, no scientists and people in Harvard Kings all over the world in top. Universities will tell you that that is not an acceptable view, but that's what the public are given. And most doctors will tell me patients, oh, you have to keep a clean balance.

Sadie: You like, let's fix it with the medication,

Dr. Caroline Leaf: fix your broken arm. You're having broken. Raymond's fix your brain. That's the wrong messaging. And it's also, and the research shows it's actually make things worse this week.

Sadie: DBT scale is turning the mind. Turning the mind is like facing a fork in the road. You have to turn your mind towards the acceptance road in a way from the road of rejecting reality, you're choosing to accept. The choice you accept does not itself equal acceptance, but it puts you on the path towards acceptance rather than continuing towards rejecting reality.

So here's the steps. First, you're going to observe the fact that you're currently not accepting. Look for the anger, bitterness, annoyance, avoiding emotions, those thought processes that are like, why me? Why is this happening? I can't stand this.

It shouldn't be this way. You get the point next. You're going to go within yourself and make an inner commitment to accept reality as it. There, you're going to do it again over and over and over again. You're going to keep turning your mind to accept each time when you come to the fork in the road where you can reject reality or choose to accept it.

Lastly, you're going to develop a plan of catching yourself in the future when you drift out of acceptance, whatever that means for you.

This is not an easy skill. It's one that takes a really long time to master. And it's constantly something that you're continuously doing. It's not like you're doing deep breathing one time, and then you get out of that emotional state. You're revisiting, turning the mind every single time you feel yourself rejecting reality.

So it's a great practice and tool to have in your toolbox, but it's again, an ongoing effort that you're making, but it can have a huge benefit. So with that, let's dive into the episode.

Hello. Hello and welcome to she persisted.

If you're new here, I'm so happy. You're here. Make sure you head over to Instagram at, @shepersistedpodcast. Send me a DM and say hi. If you are a returning listener, we'll come back. I have an amazing episode for you today, and I know you're going to love it. Today's guest is Dr. Caroline leaf, and this is one of literally my favorite interviews that I've ever done.

She is just an absolute. Phenomenal clinician individual. She has her own podcast. We'll get more into her in a minute, but no matter where you are at in her journey or supporting someone on their journey, this episode is going to bring you so much value. And I can't wait. It is almost Thanksgiving. I'm recording this episode the night before it's going to go live.

And I just wanted to put a little reminder in the intro to put your mental health. First this week, we can't help others unless we help ourselves first. And I think it goes for any interaction. If we're not taking care of our own mental health, we're not going to be able to validate others and offer support and resources.

We're going to be irritable and it's just not going to go well. So especially for me this week with family time with going home, From college. That's something that I'm focusing on is making sure that my mental health is in check and place in its best spot so that I can show up as my best self and my relationships.

So I wanted to give you that reminder to put your mental health first and prioritize what makes you feel good and show up as your best self that you can give that version of yourself to others this week, as things are more stressful during the holidays.

So happy early Thanksgiving. I hope you have a wonderful week and let's get into this week's guest. Today. I am interviewing Dr. Caroline leaf. She is a communication pathologist and cognitive neuroscientist with a master's and PhD in communication pathology, and she also has her bachelor's in science and logo poetics.

So she specializes in cognitive and metacognitive neuro-psychology. And since the early 1980s she's researched the mind brain connection, the nature of mental health and the formation of memory. She was one of the first people in our field to study how the brain can change.

Also known as neuro-plasticity, which we dive into in so much DAP. So if you're like, what the heck is that? Don't worry. I got you covered. We talk about what that is and then how it applies to things like depression and anxiety and trauma. So this is just a phenomenal episode. She is also the best-selling author of switch on your brain. Think, learn, succeed, and thinking, eat yourself smart as well as many other books. And you might remember her books from various guests on the podcasts that have said that they're some of their favorite reads and resources.

So she's just an absolutely amazing author and clinician. The other way that you might recognize her is that she is the host of cleaning up the mental mass. It's a top charts, mental health podcast. It's an amazing resource in all of course, Lincoln in today's show notes. So if you enjoy this conversation, make sure that you head over to her podcast. So you can continue to consumer content, learn more about your mental health and cleaning up the mental mass, which we dive into in a really brief way in this episode.

So all the ways that you can connect with Dr. Lee will be in today's show notes, but if you want to follow her on Instagram, her handles at Dr. Caroline leaf and her website is Dr. leaf.com. All of that will be linked in the show notes. Don't worry as well as her podcast, but if you want to give her a follow and connect, that's where you can do it. So with that being said, I hope you love this interview and learn so much from it just like I did in this conversation with her and let's dive into it.

Thank you so much, Dr. Lee for joining me today on to persistent. I'm so excited to have you here and to dive into this amazing conversation.

Dr. Caroline Leaf: Thank you, Sadie. And I'm very, very excited to join you and very impressive what you're doing.

So thank you for what you're doing. It's just so necessary.

Sadie: Same to you, same to you. So I want to start by setting a foundation for listeners and talking about what neuroplasticity is and your work there. I think it's difficult to kind of move into how we can shift behaviors and thoughts and all these things without talking about neuro-plasticity.

So walk me through that and how that connects to mental

Dr. Caroline Leaf: health. Okay. So in your plasticity is the ability of the mind to change the brain. So implicit in the, in the. If the mission is the fact that the mind and the brain are secret, and that's not a conversation that many people have or here, because we are sold the concept that the mind is the brain, but it's not.

And as long as we understand that the current narrative, which says your mind is your brain and your brain basically makes you do it. So it's almost as though the message is that you've got this illness inside your brain and it's just waiting it's disease in waiting. And then life happens and the disease gets triggered and not manifest.

And then you get a diagnosis and a label and a treatment and a cure. But none of that actually works. And that's been that philosophy I've just described has been going on for back 40 years, actually a hundred, but very strongly for the last 40 50 years. And the last 40 50 years has also been tracking research wise and it's been a disaster.

It hasn't worked. It's exacerbated the problem. It's made it worse and it's more suicides there's, it's actually made of. I've just been writing a journal article on this this morning for based on my research. So neuroplasticity is the ability to understand that with our mind, we can actually change the brain.

So the brain is never the same. It always changes. So right now it's changing at 400 billion actions per second, because of your mind, if I had a date person next to me, that person's brain wouldn't be doing it. But the fact that we were alive and having the conversation and these viewers and listeners, we, if I had to link you up to the technology I used to in your scientific technology, I use for my research, we would see massive changes have inside of your brain and response in your brain.

So neuroplasticity means that our brain changes in response to our mind and you take that little deeper. It means that what is our mind? Can we control it? And the answer is yes. And we'll talk about what mine is maybe in the next questions or whatever. And so we can actually direct neuroplasticity so we can direct the changes.

And that's so important because how our brain changes will manifest in our behaviors and our behaviors, our, our communication would be saying what we do. So life happens. On mind processes into the brain, the brain changes, and the weekend, I can show you images and pops in, in a moment. And then what if the way our brain changes then basically producers our communication.

So if you've been abused maybe in childhood or had some severe trauma and that's effect is processed into the brain, changes the brain in the wrong way, also changes the body because the brain and the body work together. And then that manifests as basically toxic behavioral symptoms. And it doesn't mean that you're a bad person or that there is a brain disease.

It just means that there's something going on and you have. Rewire it so neuroplasticity wonderful aspect that you can actually tune into your behaviors and this way to these four signals. And we can talk about how to do that too, but you can tune into your patterns and your signals and become like a sort of detective literally, and change your brain back and re reorder it and rewire it.

And it obviously takes time, et cetera, but that's also part of the city. So it's a great thing. It's, it's

Sadie: crazy to think about it kind of hurts your brain. You'd be like, whoa, like the, the amount of change and how much potential there is there, but it's no one came to like, well, this situation is unchangeable or this experience, this depression anxiety, because that's not possible.

Our brains are constantly changing. So I absolutely love that. Another thing that I want to clarify before we dive into specifically depression and anxiety and chasing the mind there is detoxing the brain. I know this is a huge part of your work and what you talk about. So what does that mean? To detox your brain or your mind.

Dr. Caroline Leaf: So I talk a lot about cleaning up the mental mess, and I talk about the fact that we can clean it up because we are actually empowered to do that. And what that means is that we, when we are going to be toxic experiences, adverse experiences, whatever they are, whether it's persistent stuff happening in childhood, early adolescence, et cetera of the pandemic, whatever it is, that is everything experience you have.

Good, good, bad, and ugly goes into. Brain to the mind and basically anything that's toxic. Why is it as a toxic change in the brain? And that thing changes brain functionality actually causes brain damage and stimulates the response from the immune system to try and fix that because the news a little about your survival and a toxic experience threatens to survival, and that then sets off a whole cascade of reactions through your body right down to the level of your DNA.

And basically detoxing is becoming a way of your firm as actually mentioned earlier on the phone from the patterns in your life. So maybe there's a persistent depression, which is just one part of the pattern. So I actually. The patients that a disease it's basically, it's a warning signal, but it will come along with behaviors and perspective.

It comes along in a package with three or four different types of signals. So the pattern to the signals that then comes from a change in your brain. And so detoxing, your brain is the process of looking at what is the big pet in my life. I'm feeling excessively anxious or depressed, then actually looking deeper.

What is that? And down to the, all the way down to the root cause. So it's a process of embracing processing and reconceptualizing. So deconstructing and reconstructing, you can't change. What's happened to, to you because it's happened, but you can change what's in you because whatever's happened to you.

It gets wired into your brain and into the genes of every cell of the body. So not only is the experience going to go into your brain and it goes into your brain like a tree, and I've got a little plant over here. That's that would be a health experience. And this would be a toxic experience. So we need to provide detoxing the brain.

We literally want to get rid of these and turn them into these. So brain ever experienced looks like becomes a tree in your brain. This is the change in your plasticity is changing. It's growing these inside your brain. And then they made of proteins detoxing. Finding what, finding these tuning into them and then getting them up.

Like they've got a route, you know, you've got to pull a route out of a weed out of the garden roots and all, otherwise it will grow. So that's basically what it is. So yeah, I've spent the last 38 years researching that. And funnily enough, Sadie, the back in the eighties, when I started my work, that they didn't believe the brain could change.

And I was sitting in your science lecture and the neurologist who was taking, giving us at lecture said, oh, the brain can change. And when people have had any kind of paramedic experience or traumatic brain injury or sports injury, you just got to teach your patients to compensate. And I immediately thought that cannot be right because.

We are always changing every moment of the day's different and our mind use our brains. If our mind is changing, because experience is changing. That means our brains changing. And I challenged that professor and some of the first neuroplasticity research back in the eighties. There's a Ted talk on. I did a Ted talk on this, on the ridiculous question of neuroplasticity, but it's cool because what it does is it tells you an I and anyone who's battling and that's all of us, by the way, it isn't anyone who isn't battling.

Sometimes it gets worse in our life and sometimes it's not as bad, but it all battling with mental health. It's just, life is just very tough and this adverse senses, but it tells us that it's okay to be messy. And there is a way of managing the mess and cleaning up the mental mess. So detoxing, the brain is this recognition.

That's okay to make a mess. It's not here and it's coming because of let's find the because of, and it's reconstructed into something that actually works for me. And not again,

Sadie: It's it's crazy how far we've come. I came from a psychology lecture, literally 20 minutes ago, and we were talking about neuroplasticity and how the brain is constantly changing.

And during your critical period, it's so important for these connections because the brain changes, then you're less able to acquire languages easily. So it's, it's insane how much we're still learning about the brain and how things are changing and how far we've come from that belief that the brain is stagnant and unable to adapt.

Dr. Caroline Leaf: That was as recently as the eighties, it's only since the, is with the advent of MRI technology that people have actually been able to see the changes in the brain. So I can feel them. I mean, when I did my research in the late eighties, early nineties, it was totally new to talk about the city. I had neurologist saying, oh, it was just lucky on your scientist.

And at that stage, neuroscience was in its infancy. Oh, well, that can't happen. You're just lucky. And again, it's happened to thousands. Thousands of people. It's not lucky. It's a medical miracle, is it? Yeah. I could say that. It's the reality. It's how we are. And to understand that you really have to understand mind and brain and the difference between the two and how they work together.

And the other thing very quickly, you mentioned certain periods is a lot of teaching around that. And there's also been a lot of counter research showing that they, I don't know what they telling you, how they teach you. And hopefully they're giving you the most up-to-date research, but you, you're not stuck in critical periods.

They are critical periods for development, but if you miss out on a certain period, it doesn't load it. Doesn't set up the rest of your life in a negative tone. You can actually catch up your brain. Why it rewires. It never stops. It's doing it at 400 billion actions all day long for the rest of your life.

So you'll always be changed. Whatever's happened to you. Doesn't matter what age, what stage, how far you can change. The brain can change itself. You change the brain.

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So when you are specifically getting rid of like bad trees, if we're using that metaphor again, is that rewiring a thought pattern? Is it changing a behavior?

Are you working to shift emotions? What exactly are you doing? I'm going to

Dr. Caroline Leaf: explain what that is. So that's where sometimes psychology can be very confusing cause it throws lots of words around. So any breakdown, the whole process. So he has a brain. Okay. And in a skeleton, a real one for your listeners, I'm not holding a real brain.

It's just a mind just pulled it off her desk off my desk. You know, I did, I did used to have a real brain in a jar and everything, but this is a little easier to track. Okay. So essentially this is natural mind and I have another model here. It is. And then the model I'm holding up now is typically you would have seen this all over the place in doctor's offices and sign.

This is a brain and a body. So this is not your mind. Neither of these are your mind, because if you were dead, as I already said, they would just be disintegrating. But as you're sitting here, listening to me, your mind is Abe is stimulating these to actually respond. So you're alive. Furnace is your mind.

So your mind is the driving force that actually makes your brain and your body work. And so therefore, if therefore that's the case. If we have a messy mind, an unmanaged mind, we're going to send an unmanaged signals to the brain and the body, and that's going to create a mess in the brain and the body.

So our conversation right now, we talking as we started out, as you would have set this up, you would have put in the show notes, you would have had a title that could be like the seat. So we take a client and you think of, if you're growing a tree, you plant the seed. So the title of the. I think of it as being the seat as we started speaking and all back and forth.

And as I'm answering your questions and explaining that is all electromagnetic sound waves, electromagnetic light waves that are coming at you, the visuals are holding up. All of that is coming at you. It's coming from my mind through my brain, to you. You're as electromagnetic light waves and Citra, your mind grabs that.

Cause your mind is actually an electronic electromagnetic energy folks. It's a gravitational field and it's all around you and it's through you. A data person doesn't have that. For example, if I could acute EEG on you and I, now we would see energetic rootsy energy, the different frequencies of the brain.

If we did a speak scam, you would see oxygen in MRI view. If you did an EKG and. That we would see response, but if we did that on a dead person, wouldn't see response. So the mind is that alive, miss that response that we see. So this conversation, the seed was as the person read the title of the podcast. I mean, as we speak in all these sound ways in grabbed by your mind, and they been built into the root system of this, of the street.

So the roots are the source. Of the information or the experience. And then as soon as you build it, because this is happening at speeds of 10 to 27, which is inconceivable in, on equal, on non-conscious mind, which is the unconscious, it's not the subconscious, it's the non-conscious inner in. So all of that stuff has been root system.

Everything that I'm saying. And then immediately at the same time, you uniquely interpret what I'm saying and that's these punches. So the brunch is above the ground, all the interpretation of the source input. Now your interpretation is different to your listeners, to every listener that you have. So if you have 500 listeners to the show is 500 different interpretations of what I'm saying and all of them are correct, because all are your own unique interpretation.

So this is what I've just described is a. Tree a tree. It's the product of the mind. So when we talk about neuroplasticity, which we did, and we talk about change in the brain, what we're doing is we're talking about the thought being both into the brain and the change is that you grow these trees, they grow on the neurons in the brain and they feed by the glial cells, which you would have all learned about in psychology to a growth.

So this, this part, particularly the, this whole system over here is going to grow on the Dane drives so different that as the neurons connect, you have a signups in the brain and that's something memories grow. It's just where you have the initial contact, the initial and short-term phase of the memory.

But the actual about the cell body, you've got like branches. So growing out of the head, if you think of a head and hair growing out of their head, that's where these are growing. So these are made of proteins. And the, and the neuroplasticity is that you take you taking my words and energy goes in the brain.

As soon as it shows up in the brain, the brain is then responding electromagnetically and candycane genetically and you make proteins. So you're actually growing proteins and those proteins arrange themselves into trees. So these trees have quotes and a thought they'd of memories. So thoughts are not the same as memories, as much as mine is not the same as brain.

So mine works through the brain and the body and bolts treats stimulates the building of trees. So these are native proteins and they're growing on the Dane draft. So that's what neuroplasticity looks like. So a thought is the product of the mind and a thought contains memories. So, so one thought can have, like at the end of this conversation, you you're going to have built probably close to 2000 branches.

What I'm saying, interpretation, how you interpret it. So that's a lot of memory. So this particular tree of this conversation may have 2000, 2000 memories in it. So then you bring this thought up into the conscious mind to the subconscious. It's not just going to bring up one thing. It brings up the concept, which is the name of the tree, and then all the details are coming up.

Okay. So how is the significant, that's a healthy tree? He hasn't toxic tree also branches also the roots and so same process. Let's say, now that you get bullied at school, you have a terribly abusive childhood or whatever, this, all the different things that can happen to us, the adversity that is going to be received by them.

All these energetic fields and everything, and psychologically the mind is how we think and feel and choose you're asking what the feeling is. If you think, and feel and choose to build these thoughts. And these thoughts are built of what the product of thinking, feeling and choosing. So emotions are actually memory.

Okay. Emotional memory data. So emotions are inside there and inside there, the source is what happened. And this is the interpretation of what happened. So totally

Sadie: makes you think of that scene inside out where all of the different memories are tagged with each emotion and then categorized and logged into the long-term memory.

But you still remember what each emotion was and as each of their responsibilities to manage that because

Dr. Caroline Leaf: you have some, that's very good idea. It's a very good example, because if you think of it, there's a multitude of experiences that we have. If you have the same memory tags, like that will makes you sad, but there's a thousand things that connect.

You said the sad, it's not in its own. It's, it's, it's an emotion attached to data. So that's where we have inside. This will be the motion. It's it's an emotional data attached to the actual one. That's the, what happened? And this is how you've processed, what happened? So this is kind of the coping. So let's say that this is an abuse and it's repeated sexual abuse, for example, from maybe a family friend or something like that, or a parent or whatever that, you know, whatever that processing.

That's going to be think, feel, choose. You're going to, as you experiencing that, you're going to be thinking, feeling choosing. So all that is built into here, the experience, and then you're thinking, feeling choosing is the interpretation of that too. And interpretation of here, there's going to be memory.

Data is going to be all the things that happened. And the interpretation here says, oh, I'm a bed or I'm worthless, or I must have done something wrong. Meanwhile, you totally innocent. So this and that's distorted. So that's distorted. So that's distorted. And because that's counter to our natural wiring, which we, we actually wired for healthy, for love.

That's what the scientists talk about. Provide for these. This is distorted. So it's not going to tell you the truth. You're not going to see the truth about yourself and that all that then produces what you say and what you do. So this will produce problems in relationships. And if it's suppressed, it will produce excessive levels of depression and anxiety and withdrawing.

And I hate life and suicidal thoughts, et cetera, et cetera. This produces that because this is. Toxic. And so to summarize, that's the thought it's a product native proteins and that's the neuroplasticity change. We use our minds to experience and we take that experience. We put it into the brain and we build these.

Our mind is how we think and feel and choose. So as we think, feel, and choose to be bold or thinking, feeling, and choosing into these trees, this part is the source. And this part is our interpretation. So think, I think feeling and choosing in this case is distorted because those facts are distorted the whole toxic.

It is messy, whereas this would be, you know, more accurate. These would be healthy, healthy interpretation versus, okay. So that's the thought made of the memories and the emotions are inside of yet attached to the data, the specifics of this memory. So these would be all distorted emotions, anger, frustration, hatred, self hatred, and fear.

I mean there's thousands and thousands of emotions, and there would be attached to the data of what happened and the interpretation inside of it. Does that make. Yeah.

Sadie: So in practice, if you're experiencing a distortion, whether it's a thought that's not necessarily accurate, that you're not good enough, not loved all of these things.

How exactly would you shift that? Because again, it is a distortion it's not accurate and it's impacting this whole process. What are you doing there to rewire

Dr. Caroline Leaf: that? Excellent question. So here is the whole. Can you have it now and maybe taking repeatedly and you don't always know the roots. This is very often because we suppress it.

Sometimes it's just so bad.

Sadie: That was another one of my questions. It's like I would wake up and feel depressed, but being able to identify why was so difficult.

Dr. Caroline Leaf: Yeah, there we go. So that's very often because you've had accumulated trauma over time and because it's so traumatic when you're a child and you trust your period, you know, you trust adults or whatever in your life that or whatever.

However, there's so many different ways we can experience trauma, but your child, you trusting it's so distorted. So it doesn't, there's no sense to it. So you're just trying to cope. So this. This part of the here is trying to make sense of this and then this becomes distorted. So the whole thing is distorted.

So very often it's suppressed and it comes out in early, early childhood trauma very often when it comes out in adolescence and over the years of bull. So it can start off with a child being more withdrawn and certain behavioral symptoms. And then very often kids are very good at masking for a period of time, but then adolescence and 18, 19 20, we see the most severe, the complex, the trauma, and the more it's been suppressed by between 18 and 24.

It's like your quantum brain just can't keep it in anymore. It explodes. And there are two major depression, major anxiety in a severe where it's still not an illness. And we need to talk about that, but it's become so severe that it's debilitating. And if you just treat that as though it's an illness, a symptom.

The illness. You never going to find the root cause. So you need, you're not going to ever really manage it. It's gonna give you managing you and then the drugs and I'm your brain and any subtypes your brains, you still are dealing with it. So that doesn't help. Okay. So these produce the behavior. So what we want to do is to, to fix this is we have to look at the patterns in our life.

And I referred to this earlier on. So the most obvious pattern is those very strong emotions like depression and anxiety. Now, what is depression and things. We told him today's narrative that they are illnesses, but they're not illnesses. There's no research to confirm that there's no neuro-biological correlates or in the brain.

Chemical imbalance is a theory that has been disproved multiple times, no scientists and top people in Harvard, Kings all over the world in top. Universities will tell you that that is not an acceptable view, but that's what the most of the public are given. And most of the doctors will tell me patients, oh, you have a chemical imbalance.

You like

Sadie: fix it with a medication,

Dr. Caroline Leaf: fix your broken arm. You're having broken brain. It's fixed your brain. That's the wrong messaging. And it's also, and the research shows it's actually make things worse. As I mentioned as one in the beginning. So what you're going to do is recognize that you can't actually have depression.

You experienced depression and because depression is not an illness, it is actually an emotional. Warning signal. Hey, so you need to become like a thought detective where you looking for clues. So you're a thought detective, you're an archeologist. You become a brain surgeon and you're, you're trying to put all the pieces of your life together.

So you're kind of drawing on all those skills and we all capable of doing that. So we, we step into what I call the wise mind. And we've all got that because we see that in our psycho neurobiology, which is our mind, mind, body connection that the actually wired for love, which means you don't have any structures for toxicity for this. So as soon as we have these in the brain, the immune system rejects these like Virgin COVID virus or any virus.

So these give these stimulate an immune response. Like I saw my research will get a high homocysteine levels, which shows inflammation, which shows that there's an immune response. You've got T cells out there working. And the longer you keep the suppress the issue, the more T-cells, for example, you're having place in the more side, you'll get cytokine storms.

And so all the things that you hear with the language of COVID, you get the same kind of thing happening with your thoughts, because there is real as COVID. Made a proteins that in your brain. So they create a mess, but not only are they in your brain as these protein briefings, these thoughts of memories, they also in every cell of your body.

So as you experienced something and now we're going to begin to get to the heart too. But as you, as you experienced that toxicity and build it into your brain immediately, it is built into every cell of your body. And that's what we have body memory. So medic memory, that's why things like EMDR work and we yoga.

And when we tune into our body, because it's in the. And it's in the body, in every cell. So as you are hearing this part cost not talking, you are actually putting this information into every cell of your body in addition to rain. So it's building here and there's a genetic change in every third.

There's 37 to a hundred trillion cells. If we have an old brain and our body also storing this as a change in your gene code and it's invitational fields that are all around and through you. So you think of like, when you look at the using Costa, you know, it's got the little lines that go, that's sort of a nice analogy to think of what the thought looks like in the brain and the mind.

Sorry. So in the brain, it's a tree in the body. It's a change in your DNA and in the, the, in the mind, it's those little like fields that even for health system. It's going to be back there to the brain, a good positive change in your gene code in every cell. And it's going to be a healthy flow in the little gravitational fields, electromagnetic fields of the mind.

But if it's toxic, it's the opposite. So instead of ice floats and crazy, okay. So that energy is hitting the brain and the body and everything right down to the level of the DNA. So, for example, you're telling me is, I don't know if you know what telomeres are. If you think of the DNA, the DNA strand, and you can pull chromosomes out of there.

And a chromosome looks like an X and my fingernails would be the, would be the telomeres. So chromosome looks like an X and the ends of chromosomes have things called telomeres. Now those telomeres are basically a proxy for how you are managing your mind. And so if you did nothing happens with your telomeres when you're alive, you're telling me, or involved in making about a million new cells.

If we second, I mean over time, basically replacing our entire brain and body over time. So if the telomeres are healthy and long and strong, you build healthy cells. Healthy or wins, which means a healthy system. But if you are a mess and not managing and suppress thoughts and not detoxing as telling me get very weak and that themes create cells that are unhealthy and therefore over time, cumulatively, your body becomes weak and vulnerable to disease.

So you have, you have suppressed thoughts doing that at the DNA level, and you have these things in your brain and your brain getting damaged and your immune system going crazy. And you know, all these things humiliated, and you've got this toxic energy moving from your mind through your body, that doesn't bode well.

And that's, if you think of it like that, that's very consuming. It's like mind that mind is driving the whole process and it's 99, 90 to 99% of who you are. So when I say you can't have depression, Belittling it I'm making, I'm making it as then, as I'm giving it the attention it deserves because that depression is your mind.

Brain and body is screaming at you to say, Hey, wake up, listen, tune in you. Aren't depression. You're depressed because of, so in other words, there's a message in the depression that oppression is your alarm bell going off saying, embracing. Embrace it and look deep inside. Okay. And I'm gonna explain how so don't see depression, anxiety, or any emotion as an illness, no emotions or illnesses, passion and depression are equally as important.

They're both telling you something. The passion's telling you that you're on a track to some wonderful feeling and relationship, whatever the depression is saying that, Hey, you've got something missing you up. You need to pay attention. And because of neuroplasticity, you can change where that's coming from because that depression is coming from.

One of these. So this thing is sending signals from the non-conscious mind through the subconscious, which is a bridge between the unconscious, into the conscious mind. And as soon as it hits the conscious mind and you pay attention to it, you said, okay, I'm feeling very depressed. And then you're going to, as soon as you do that, this thing starts coming from the unconscious to the conscious.

And we see from neuroscience that when you become aware of these, they start shaking and becoming malleable. And when they become malleable, you can change them. Okay? So here's how it works. And I've got an app called the neurosurgical in your assignment. We are literally give you therapy, teaching you how to do this.

So I'm going to give you the brief overview. And now I've got, I don't know which book you've read, but this is my most recent book. We are also explain everything you're talking about. Adept super easy to follow. The second half is that is the neuroscience neuroscience, which is the system I've developed for the city.

I use research and clinical application and patients and whatever. And I use it myself. This is not distributing. This is for everyone. Everyone's got a mind, not just if you're in extreme depression, To manage day to day stuff too. So it's the big stuff and the small stuff. And the second half of that, book's got this exact how to, and then I'll also have a podcast called cleaning up your mental mess, which I definitely want to invite you on to.

We, I explained all of these things as well, you know, subjects. Okay. So what do you want to do? What I showed from the research is that you are able with your mind to get from your messy mind, into your wise mind. And the easiest way is to tell my patients, get two chairs, put them next to each other and sit in both chairs.

But obviously you constantly both, but you, one of you is the Macy mine. One of you the wise mind, the wise mind is working with the missing. Right now, we get so caught up in our mess that we don't listen to her wisdom and the way the world works and all the social media, very often identity or wisdom, or in a call this wired for love nature it's shot.

And that's where suicidal ideations. And it comes in when you feel hopeless when you feel not valued, when you just, why is this happy to me? It makes no sense. Frightening. And unfortunately gen Z, which you quite off is the most medicated generation and the generation that is primed to dive a youngest in, in years in decades, which is terrible.

So the child, if you don't change the situation, gen Z is going to die younger. Then you're going to die way younger than your grandparents, even, you know, you're not going to predict sort of life span is maybe 60, 65 when you should. Yeah, like 25 years off, but the kind of thing that you're doing that I'm doing, having these discussions, podcasts, this is making people more awake because it doesn't have to be.

And the reason people are dying younger is because of what I was saying earlier, these things mess up your health of your body, those telomeres things. If your body is getting progressively weaker, then you're going to get sicker and your chance of dying younger exist. So we had subjects and the good news is, and I put these in here or certain of my subjects in my clinical trial and in my patients of the year, They bought it.

They were so depressed that the biology was like a sickly 60, 65 year old. And there were only 30. Now you can imagine if you, you 18, if your body was 30 years older, let's say that you had a 50 year old sick body. You wouldn't be feeling very great. And you will, you know, you've kind of lost 30, 35 years or twenty-five years.

So if you don't catch that and he showed within nine weeks of my management using the neurosurgical and an app, I didn't give them therapy. They did it themselves on that. They didn't go to a therapist. This is all we have in us that you go to therapy. I'm not anti therapy. It's fantastic. But it's vitally important that you know how to manage your own money.

You don't just have to wait for the expert to tell you, that's why I have done this work with the books that, you know, got the app so that you can do the stuff. So, and what is the staff to do? It's the neuro cycle. What is the neuro cycle? It's a five-step system that you do daily for around 15 minutes to 45 max, where you test.

Pattern, whatever it is, and you are going to, you're going to basically recon, deconstruct and reconstruct it. So you're going to find this thing. You're going to pull it up and you're going to fold it into this. That doesn't mean that the toxic issue goes away, but it just means I'm going to use a little stone.

That's the issue. It's now been reconceptualized into the, so it's now you now know what happened to you, but you've changed how it's playing out in you. So the first thing to do is to look at what is the pattern in your life. So what is the dominant pattern in your life? Are you consumed with depression?

Do you find it like it's just dominating everything or are you constantly anxious or are you with. What are the emotional warning signals, the patient anxiety, frustration, irritation. And it's normally a bunch of them, but just maybe start with, you know, like, like what is the, what is the main sort of emotional sense from that?

Try and see if you can label, what is my pack I packing is that I'm so depressed that I'm betting schoolwork. I'm betting to be motivated on there. I'm just not happy. So that's the name of the tree. Okay. So let's say that you're just like, like you just feel sad all the time. That's the name of the tree?

So to get to the tree, we have to go back to those signals. So the pattern is the constant sadness. It's the name of the tree? Cause that's that sadness, that pattern isn't just randomly happening. Everything you're saying is coming from one of these, but you can't see it straight away from the pack.

You've got to dig through some layers to get to this thing, and then you've got to dig down. So you look at your pattern from your pack and you look at your four signals for signals of emotions. The patient anxiety, whatever, being your behaviors. So what are you doing? Maybe more angry, more irritable, more drawn, more, what are you doing?

What are you, what are you, what is your communication? What is so be quite specific. Then the third thing is what's going on in your body? What are you feeling? Maybe you're getting these GI symptoms, or maybe you're getting high competitions, or maybe you're getting, you know, skin rashes or whatever. What are you noticing?

That's different in your physical symptoms? Are you feeling this gut-wrenching adrenaline shootings through you? Whatever. So look at your body and then you look at your perspective, which is your attitude to life. How are you looking at that? What's your view of life? Is it this view that life sucks. I hate life.

I can't do this. It's just too much. No one understands it, whatever. So those are the four signals. So from the overarching pattern, you dive into the four signals and then from the four signals, which are coming out of here, And all of this, by the way, you deal with your, to chase your wise mind, the wise mind is telling you, Hey, say to your amazing, you wired for love is something you can do that no one else can do.

This is not who you are. This depression. This is because of you looking for the cause of this is a symptom of you being sought, detective historian, brain surgeon, all the rest of it. So we better look at it. They use a lot of kindness when we do this, you're going to be very kind to yourself. And I hope podcasts on what kindness does in the brain.

I mean, it literally makes the two sides of the brain work together, increases oxygen and blood flow to the front of the brain and the thousand other things. But if you, if you hard on yourself, that inner critic and then voice going on terrible, I'm used to some, a waste of time. I can't do this and I'll never get this right.

That is going to reduce oxygen and blood flow to the front of the brain and created out of harmony. And the coherence between the two sides of the brain goes, and you don't want also get highly. Well, the high beta we'll get to tsunamis in your brain of energy. Really hard to think clearly when that happens.

So the system of the nearest cycle, you prepare first, so that you prepare. And that's why I said get to two chairs, be very kind to yourself, tell yourself things like this is not who I am. This is who I've become. And I'm showing up like this because of how are you showing up that pattern thing? What are the signals all the time couched in wise, mind pouring love on to me, see mine and you keep telling us up.

It's okay to be a mess. Even one's a mess. Everyone's a mess too. And we keep making messes and then nieces are great because that's how we can repair and grow. So when you work with our messy mind, we can repair. Okay. So then from there you start at other papers and things you can do when you sit down to do an extra session and on your own, either on your own using the book or using the app, you want to do a little bit more brain preparation.

So you set the scene, do the kindness and the chairs and finding the pattern and seeing those first 40. When you want to do maybe some brain preparation, because when you start looking at the status can make you feel a little anxious, it can increase your levels of anxiety and nets with things like breathing and meditation and Haven, which is basically using stimulation to stimulate the amygdala, to calm me down.

I mean, there's so many different things in the app. I have a three minute brain flip that you always do everyday before you dive into the hard work. And that just calms down. First of all, your electrophysiology. So the electron make the energy part of you. Then, then the chemistry, because our came on your chemicals can go crazy or too much cortisol too much.

You won't have enough serotonin and you won't have enough dopamine you'll get shots. You won't get enough. Amanda, my there's all these different chemicals that sends a whole signal through your hormone system, your telomeres, everything is affected. So you want to prepare your brain. Okay? And then you dive into the five steps of the neuroscience, which is essentially a systematic way.

You work through all five systematically or. And that each step is making your brain work more and more correctly in the neuroplastic direction. So in other words, you driving the neuroplasticity in the right direction. That means you're breaking these down and you building replacement thoughts. So that's kind of the system you do to have a 63 days.

And the reason I want to say why you do the reason you do it over 63 days and cycles of you may have to do multiple is because a lot of people think. Or made in 21 days. And you know, they think you have a habit, then you'll have a new behavior, but there aren't, you have major changes every moment. And you'll have periods like four days as a major time period, seven and 14, 21 is enough time to basically stop finding, going from the pattern to the signals, to what, how am I seeing myself down to start seeing the root so that you don't solve it in one day, you do a little bit each day.

So today I may just find I'm depressed. I'm Sima. I hate my, I hate myself. I hate life. I'm withdrawing and it's because of something that's maybe heave in your first five steps tomorrow and more. So each day you get more and more layers, but 21 days, this thing would have been apprehended and energy is and lost in the brain and the body. You would have built this and let's says, okay, The priest all the time. I thought I was depression. I'm not depression. I'm depressed because of that stuff. And that's, that's making me very sad, but that's not how I want to be.

This is how I want to be, but it's full. So, and this thing is much bigger. So this thing's got to compete with the, you haven't forgotten what's happened. So, and you've also got all other things inside of you. If you triggered, this is not strong enough to move into a conscious mind. So it's not a habit you've got to grow this thing.

So you've got to still practice the five steps, which are driving the mind with little actions and everything. It's a whole process writing. It's very systematized you by day 21. It's going to look. And so by day 21, it looks like this a day 42. Can you see it's growing and it's 63, you've got this. And so it takes around about nine weeks of the new behavior that you want in your life to grow to a point where when you triggered you remember, oh, I used to.

Sadie: Thank you for it to that.

Dr. Caroline Leaf: It's now been changed into this. You're a member how you were, but you've changed what's in you, which then changes how you communicate. And so, as you know, having gone through depression, yourself, and living, living with it, that depression is a signal. And once you started diving into it, you started seeing other emotions and fears and body symptoms and perspective.

And as you started finding the cause, it's only when you find the course and you know, Tried to reconceptualize that will you start getting free and even then you still going to have depression because depression is not to have depression. You're still going to express it and feel it. Yeah. Yeah. And it's normal.

There's nothing wrong with it. You must be scared of depression. We have think of depression on a scale of one to 10. What is that? I feel a little bit depressed because someone put a really bad posts on my, on my social media, or someone says something ugly comments about a podcast that you, that you would put out there and you put yourself out, then it can throw you.

But that could be maybe a one or two or three in terms of depression. You get yourself through it. And then you can use in your cycle. It's when things accumulate and you don't deal with stuff and we just keep pushing it and then it grows. And then it becomes big. As soon as it starts hitting five and above it's now moving into an extreme response.

And because our mind is not 99% of who we are, it's very consuming. So the big thing here is that it's not that depressions and illnesses. It's not a brain disease. It's not an illness in your brain, jumping out and being triggered and like a disease in waiting. You don't have to get a maid in waiting.

And those it's not like that at all. The brain will respond in your forties. You know, sick and less staff, because there's an impact of Macy mind on your, on your brain and your body support for that. And I'm not talking psychotropics, I'm talking, you know, proper treatment if you've got heart issues and sign from that.

But the big thing is that the course not in your brain, the causes in your life is something that's happened to you. You've experienced these adverse circumstances, and those are what's caused you to feel like that. So you need to find those disconnect from them and reconceptualize it and being, you can move forward into a healthier pattern of functioning.

And then the next thing comes up. And then the next day and the rest of your life, listen, I'm 58. I'm still being this,

Sadie: you know, you've built the toolbox to be able to navigate these things. It's easier to upend the beliefs that you haven't built up over years, and you're able to maintain your

Dr. Caroline Leaf: mental health.

Exactly. And this is something I've been teaching. My youngest patient was three, four adult children that they've grown up with us. Yeah. I, the schools that I worked in, we put this into teach, train into the school system. So kids from young should be taught how to manage the emotions and understand. You can show kids to say, I would have my simple language for three-year-old and an eight-year-old old and a 12 year old.

The whole thing is as adults, we need to allow children and adolescents and teenagers express themselves. You need to understand, like if your mom comes home and like, if I come home and I'm really worked out for a hard day and I'm like withdrawn and snappy and irritable, I need to be able to model to my kids.

Okay. This is how I'm feeling. It's okay to feel this. I feel like this because of side two, the whole five-step process, expanding, giving a modeling how I'm managing. I feel like the speakers of this is what I'm going to do, but if you just come home irritable and screaming at your kids, so you come home and you scream at your mom or whatever, and you just met her boyfriend.

They don't understand what's going on, but if you model a caffeine at this, because of this, I just need some space. I'm going to get it under control, but I just need to get this up and deal with it. That's what we shouldn't be doing. We should be teaching kids from young, but one in 12 kids are being missed in, in, in, in our, growing into adolescents and adults and young adulthood with all the stuff inside and net leads.

You get what you went through, you know, that kind of thing. Whereas, you know B I mean other adults in the house. Yeah. We've got to be thoughtful. We should have been teaching this lobbying, trying to fight the system for 38 years. So as I studied a lot, you wanted, you want to unpack any of that stuff?

Sadie: No, it's, it's so true.

And it's so profound and every single time you bring up these different things, I can connect it to my treatment journey and what I did without realizing I was going through those steps. Like, I, I recall not even realizing I was depressed because I was so. Like avoiding what I was feeling and thinking until I was literally in the hospital and then everything blew up because I was so severely depressed.

And then I was trying all of these different treatments, whether it was outpatient or inpatient and nothing was changing because I wasn't identifying the root. And it was only after I was in an intensive treatment and had taken a step back from my home life that I identified that I was. I very genuinely believe I don't deserve love and every single interaction I'm going through.

Yeah. So every single interaction I'm going through, I'm looking at the world to support the belief that I don't deserve love, and that I'll never be good enough for my parents. So those interactions became deeply traumatic because I felt invalidated and disconnected. And so I became suicidally severely depressed, but it was only after I unpacked that and learn to do self-love and self-compassion and realized that I don't need any external cues to be deserving of love and care and great relationships that I was then able to shift my mood and emotions and thoughts and things still come up.

They're still beliefs that you have to upend and rewire, but I've done that before, and I know how to do it, and I know how to navigate that. So it's just, it's so true. And so profound and universal. Anyone who is struggling.

Dr. Caroline Leaf: It's humans. If you're human, as I said, that you may be in a one to five most of your life, but then parts of your life in the 8, 9, 10 extremely manger of, of experience.

And then it becomes an extreme response. We don't need it. Z's label to validate that we just need to, as humans, we just need to be constantly validating the fact that you have a story and you're showing up like X because, oh, which is what you're describing. So those weak emotions, thoughts, and you see that.

So there's the thoughts, the emotions that are inside of that. And there's these thoughts with the emotions and the data, how we see ourselves interpretation data, or that the information, in other words, this is filled with information and emotion data, and that information and emotion data's come from how we think feel and choose it's both the thoughts and the sorts of then produce would be seen what we do.

So if you look at what we saying and what we doing and what we feeling and we're feeling in our body, which are those four signals in order to realize whatever I'm saying and doing, we need to say this just of, like you say, I'm feeling depressed. I'm feeling like I don't want to live I'm suicidal because of, versus that.

I am depressed. I've got a brain disease. So you throw that out. When you say I'm depressed and suicidal because of it's not who I am because of. And then you have the process of tuning into those signals and doing all the, you know, tuning in the rain and the five steps, which are basically the five steps are gathering, reflecting two steps in writing two very specific distinct steps.

And then an action. Now things like DBT and CBT, all the different techniques and things fit into step five. If you DBT and CBT in the wrong order, your brain won't rewind. If you don't do it long enough, your brain will rewire.

Sadie: And why did DBT like six or seven times until it actually worked? It's true over time,

Dr. Caroline Leaf: you have to do that.

That's what happened so much in therapy side is I'm so glad you brought that up with so many people that I interview and that I had come into my practice and they still send me emails, which is thousands I say, but I've been to therapy and it's going on for years and years. My. Same therapy for cycles of 63 days.

And sometime maybe you would reevaluate optic every 63 days. Do we need another cycle? What's the progress? Every six, every 63 days you moving forward. So I had some patients that were so severely traumatized and it manifested as like learning disabilities and almost like traumatic brain injury type symptoms.

And it took sometimes up to two years, but it was in cycles of 63 days because what often happens in therapy is that people don't go through the proper five step system. If you don't, if you don't get that objectively, do not reflect. If you don't systematic gather, reflect, do the two labels of writing one, which is like a vomiting on the paper.

So are your thoughts on the other ones organizing and then ended with an action and do that little bit by little, but all you're going to do is bombard yourself, your mind, your body. And it's just becomes like overwhelming. And then therapy becomes a venting station as opposed to progress station because no one knows you except yourself.

So all his therapists were counselor. Cultural period of support on can do, is LeBron can do, is to support us through that journey and give us some perspective. And maybe if you, maybe you go to someone you say I'm seeing it like this, is there another way to see it. That's what a good therapist for say a year, maybe a bit like that.

And that is this way to see what you were saying. The way you see things is coming from this part of the tree and that's producing those behaviors. So when you start the system correctly, then your cycle system, which you did without even realizing you basically are seeing you interpretation of yourself.

And where does that come from? Because every one of these comes from. And we distorted processing. And until you've gone from there, through there today, which is what the five steps do they take you through that you're going to get frustrated. So what happened? Yeah.

Sadie: No, my belief system was, there's no reason why I'm depressed.

Therefore I might just be innately depressed. I understand that other people can work through that and are not depressed, but that's not possible for me because a, this is all I've ever known. And B there's no reason there is no giant trauma that I experienced. I just was suddenly the super depressed teenager.

And so of course there was no progress that was being made because I didn't, I didn't believe that there was a cause I thought I was just innately, deserving being depressed forever. And

Dr. Caroline Leaf: that was the messaging that you didn't, these grownup things. I used to lecture to schools and to adolescents and teenagers and the university of Chapin.

20 years ago, peop people would understand there was a course. Now people will. The first thing I talked to a group

Sadie: of people, because there's these microtraumas, you can identify that X or Y happened over time. There's chronic invalidation or misunderstanding. You, you don't identify that these are leading to what you're feeling because they're accumulating so slowly

Dr. Caroline Leaf: over time, which is asset that they were saying, the telomeres that is the many, many tumors.

Causing many tumors in your telomeres causing many tumors in your body, which over time, many traumas in your mind crashing your body. And in the whole of crashed again, you're exploding like a volcano and that you age with gen Z, even, even the millennials will. And if I linked it to them now, the immediate thing is, oh, it's innate, it's biological.

I've got a chemical imbalance. What drug prosthetic and therapy scene as well, kind of like a fancy side, you know, sideshow kind of thing. It's only for really big people. Meanwhile, 10 years ago. If I spoke about these people with emotional issues, they would immediately, you know, issues, minor issues.

People would immediately say, oh, what's the course. So we've shifted in the last 40 years from looking at causes to it in the environment to looking at brain diseases. It's a disaster.

Sadie: And it's true. Well, because you're putting the blame on the person. You're like, what have you done wrong to be feeling okay.

I'm so

glad

Dr. Caroline Leaf: you said that. Same. As I said, I was heading up scientific paper this morning and I was just talking with my research team just before that we do clinical trials for them. One of the things that I wrote in the introduction was you've got to stop saying to the patient, what is wrong with you?

It's what has happened to you. If you are you, are you in chronic and living in chronic racism and fear of getting in your car? Cause someone might shoot you there at a traffic. Are you in constantly bullied at school or you been con and you talk about the micro tools. They people think they aren't relevant, but if you believe in this.

A big family and your parents let you do the base, but you may feel like no one is more a personality that more is more demanding. And so you quiet and you don't get enough attention. Those are many tumors that your parents didn't intend, but that can bold and create accumulate over time. All of this has to be paid attention to, so we've got a hundred people think, oh, there's something wrong with me when I've got depression, absolutely not grab the depression and find the story, find the was off and, but do it systematically because of the one thing I do want to mention is that we can get therapy.

You mentioned to the DBT a few times and people will use CBT techniques over and over again in the off for years. It's all good, but if you don't use them after you've actually gone through the first four steps of the neuro cycle, which is, you know, gather weight, the whole thing of finding what the root is, those techniques use on their own, or just an action.

So here's the problem. So you're putting a band-aid on a band-aid on and every single one of those things is brilliant. But at school you've actually, they're only work when you've actually worked at what is my tech, what am I, what am I thinking about myself? What did I process? What happened? And as you do that, then you can start, the action helps to take this and be constructed into this.

And that takes, I had patients that would come to me that had been in therapy for years. And then. They they'd done sort of something like this, but this is, this was not completely formal. This was only the status. This is easy to see visually small, but this is happening. So I know that's what I can be. I know I am, you know, all the things you were saying, I am with your blood.

I am whatever, whatever, all those things, but you're still thinking, but I'm still acting as though I don't think I'm worthy. It's like a chasm between the truth that, you know, is the truth, but you can't get there. And that's because it's time, you're rewiring takes cycles of 63 days, not 21. It takes up to nine weeks and maybe multiple cycles of nine weeks.

A lot of therapy goes around and around and around the first two days kind of, you know, weeks of the. Beyond and that's progress Ford and

Sadie: it's a hundred percent. And I, when you were talking about putting a bandaid on these feelings, emotions, behaviors, whatever they are, and make me think so much of peers that I interacted with and met during my time and treatment, because I think especially in adolescent treatment, you're so often going through the actions because you're not the one that's deciding to go into treatment or therapy.

You're not the one that is like admitting that you need support or help, oftentimes that autonomy is taken away. So the motivation to truly understand what the cause is and explore and want to get better. It's it's missing. So you're going Curry actions. You're doing the behaviors, you're making these shifts, but they're not long lasting.

As soon as you leave treatment and aren't continually motivated to change and improve because you didn't have that foundation. It's just lost. And I think that's what happened for me the first couple times of DBT, because the huge difference that I looked back on and identified when I did intensive.

Once I was sitting in this room during my intake appointment and they're like, why do you want to be here? And I was like, my parents said I had to, I'm not allowed to be at home. And they're like, well, that sucks because you can't be here unless you want to be here. And you believe this will work. It was only after I trusted them enough to help me, I let them help me.

I believed that there was wisdom in DBT and I had enough self compassion to want to get better that all these shifts took place. And I was able to unpack what had happened and what led to me feeling depressed and then shift the behaviors and emotions and thoughts. So within the whole

Dr. Caroline Leaf: reconsider DIA factored, and, but you had to, but they were saying, choose what your pattern.

And they didn't say these words, but essentially it was what does pattern, what are the signals tune in to the Y and do the deconstruction. And that takes time. It takes daily work. And that's why, because you go for therapy, but not everyone can go to treatments. Not everyone can afford it's. So

Sadie: time-consuming as

Dr. Caroline Leaf: well.

To me, it's expensive. It's not always viable. So it's. People will go to them, but there's millions. There's the whole plan is betting with your mind. So that's why we to have a daily mind management strategy, because your mind never stops. It doesn't even stop when you're sleeping. Your mind is always going.

And your mind, your current mind is influenced. The current moment is influenced by what you've think what's happened in the past. So these things just get in your face and you look at last to this. So anything that's in your face. What Ava's like, how you looking at it's toxic and it's tight. It's admit disturbing your peace.

That's where you would start. And that's why the dealer, that's how I went out of the therapy world of the 25 years and took all the knowledge and created this ethic. And initially was in books and online. Now you put it in at four, which is great because you can literally press play and you can listen 15 minutes and work through the five steps and whatever, you know, the whole preparation, Firestick whatever.

And you've got a system. And if everything you've learned in therapy or everything you've read about, or all the books are there, you can still do all of those, but you put them in the right place so that you can hundred percent, which is so amazing. So anyway, that's

Sadie: so amazing. Yeah, profound and university universally applicable, and I know this will help so many people.

So thank you. Thank you.

Thank

Dr. Caroline Leaf: you. It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me on

Sadie: if you enjoyed this week's episode, make sure that you send it to a friend or family member who you think would get some value from this interview. If you post about she persisted, be sure to tag me on Instagram so I can go ahead and repost. You, give you a little shout out and make sure that you're subscribed and have left a review so that you don't miss any future episodes of Sheba.

Thanks for listening and I'll see you next Monday.

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