Unlocking How to Hack Your Mind with Dr. Caroline Leaf

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Skot Waldron (00:05.538)
I’m Skot Waldron, and when I’m not hosting Unlocked, I’m speaking at events all over the globe, helping leaders and teams communicate better, build trust faster, and actually, enjoy working together. I know. Who would have thought? I’ve spoken for companies like the Home Depot, I’ve spoken at national architectural firms, at their sales training, off-sites for major pharmaceutical companies and industry associations, have thousands of attendees who have read my sessions with 99% of them saying they found the sessions valuable 97% saying they’d actually attend again. I’ve had caterers come up to me afterwards and thank me because they actually got something they could use when they went home or when they went back to their own jobs. I mean, if every keynote delivered those types of numbers, nobody would secretly be refreshing their email under the table. And let’s be honest, that’s a little bit of my nightmare. Maybe a little bit of yours. Yeah, something that keeps me up at night.

If you’re an event planner, looking for a speaker who’s easy to work with and delivers actual value that people can take away and use on Monday. Let’s make your event unforgettable.

Hi, everybody. Today, we are going to go deep, deep, deep inside the mind. And not the brain, well, kinda. Well, I don’t know, are we? I don’t know, we’re gonna talk about that at the beginning of the show. You’re like, what’s this brain mind thing Skot’s talking about? I don’t know. Well, we’re gonna talk about it here at the beginning because I will guess that some of you don’t really understand, most of you probably don’t understand the real difference between those two. Get ready.

Dr. Caroline Leaf is going to share her thoughts and ideas with us all about that, about her new book, “Help in a Hurry,” and also how we can hack the mind, how we can understand those thought patterns that are going to be hard on us through life, and how we can maybe help manage those a little bit better because that would be great, wouldn’t it? I think it would as well.

Dr. Caroline Leaf is a globally acclaimed communication pathologist and clinical research neuroscientist celebrated for her groundbreaking work in harnessing the power of the mind to transform the brain and unlock sustainable happiness and health. She’s a passionate advocate for mental and emotional well-being. She’s the bestselling author of transformative 19 books. They’ve been translated into 24+ languages and nearly 3 million copies sold. There’s a lot of books out there, y ‘all, and she’s written a lot of them. Her podcast has surpassed 50 million downloads, and her work has been featured in Forbes, CNN, BBC, TEDx, and a lot more. A sought-after speaker. She shares her insights, helping people take control of their mental health through science, and practical strategies.

And we’re going to talk a lot about the science today, some practical strategies, but mostly about the science. So, if you like the science stuff and the why behind why we do the things we do, get ready y ‘all because here it comes.

Dr. Caroline Leaf, what a gift to have you today.

Dr. Caroline Leaf (00:46.459)
Thank you. I’m so thrilled to be with you and to meet you for the first time and I’m excited about the show.

Skot Waldron (00:52.039)
Well, hopefully it’s not the last time. Hopefully you’re like, that guy was so fun. I just can’t wait to hang out with him more. And I’m gonna be like, all right, is it? Okay. Okay. Well, let’s, let’s, know, let’s set the bar high here. Um, all right. I’m going to give you a little like a brain warmup here. Okay. Are you ready for this? You’ve done like 4 million interviews. So, like nothing I throw at you. Yeah.

Dr. Caroline Leaf (00:54.349)
Good. I’m sure that’s going to be the case. You’ve already been cutting nonstop.

I’m ready. Yeah, probably close to that.

Skot Waldron (01:20.081)
Probably, probably. Okay, here’s a question I got for you. Let’s say you got 60 seconds, all right? You’ve got a marker and you’ve got a whiteboard and you’re standing in front of a hundred burnt out leaders, so completely burnt out. What are you gonna draw or write on that whiteboard first and why?

Dr. Caroline Leaf (01:46.542)
Oh, you just are such a great question. And I know the answer immediately. And I love the fact that you said 60 seconds because there’s so much science in 60 seconds about the work that around the work that I do. So, what I would do is I’d write the word mind on the board and I would put a big cross through the brain and say the mind is not the brain. And the most important thing as a leader is to understand your mind.

Skot Waldron (02:08.326)
Okay, that’s good. That’s really good because I think a lot of people talk about the brain just because it’s the thing. So, what is the main difference and what do you think? How do you describe that?

Dr. Caroline Leaf (02:24.042)
Massive difference, for any kind of just to function as a human, let alone a leader, is to understand that difference is massive. Because as you quite rightly say, there’s so much emphasis on the brain. I’ve been in the field 40 years. I’m a psycho neurobiologist, neuroscientist. I’ve been in this game for years, but I don’t subscribe to the sort of materialistic concept of the brain and neurocentricity, which I’ll explain as I’m talking, which means that people, even though we’ve advanced in our understanding of the human brain.

It’s not all about the human brain. The brain is a physical organ. When you die, your brain disintegrates. It is also not the organ that generates thought, which is what we hear a lot of. It’s not the mind. The brain is not the mind. They are separate things. So, the brain is a physical organ that is a very complex organ, and it simply houses. It’s the biology to house the mind or the mind works through the brain.

And it builds memories into clusters called thoughts into networks made of proteins and chemicals in the brain and body. What is it? The mind. So, the mind actually does all the work, not the brain. It’s not that the brain is in control. The mind is in control. The brain doesn’t generate. The brain responds and stores data just like a computer, but it’s a very advanced computer. Very, very advanced. So even with our AI current sort of move into explosion in AI.

AI, for example, to show you the difference between AI and the brain, AI is based on the firing power of one neuron, whereas we have 100 billion and we don’t even yet understand in science how the complex relationship between two neurons. We don’t even understand the firing, what goes on inside a neuron and between neurons. And that’s just on a physical level. So, AI has still got a long way to go, but the concept of AI is that it’s created by humans. We think it out, we tell it what to do, and then it just accelerates menial things for us and generates. That’s what the brain does. The brain is a data. It’s guided by the mind. The mind does everything. You are your mind, your aliveness, your ability to think, feel, have this conversation, think in an abstract way, create, generate ideas, intuition, logic, all of these things, fall in love, enjoy a sunset, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, experience pain, experience loss, experience grief, learn. That is mind. That is the whole psychology, psychological part of mind. Then the mind doesn’t only do all of that stuff, it also runs the brain and the body.

So, when I say run, it runs the systems of the brain and the body. So the fact that as we’re breathing now, and we’re breathing in oxygen and we’re breathing out carbon dioxide, that’s run by the mind. The moment you die, the mind moves on and your body disintegrates, you don’t breathe anymore. As you’re listening to me, you are building 800,000 to a million new cells every second that is controlled by the mind. The quality of those cells which form your organs and systems is dependent on the quality of your mind management in that moment. So, let’s say that you’re leading in a bad way, you’re actually influencing the kind of cells that you’re building and therefore your physical health. Your heart beating is run by your mind. Everything runs. Your mind runs the show. It runs the psycho neurobiology of you as a human. And this is why it is, we talk in science, we talk about the mind being 99 % of who you are, it’s pretty much 100%, but the brain and the biology is only 1%. And because we have a nervous system and the mind is using the nervous system to live through so that we can be human and have physical bodies on this earth and talk over Zoom like we are now, our physical sensations can be very dominant. So, the way we respond to things going on in our environment and if you get a shock or whatever in our body, have the feelings in our body. These are emotions. very strong and consuming, but they’re still only 1%. The big stuff is that thinking, feeling, choosing abstract creative power, superpower of the mind. And that’s how, when you said the 60 seconds, what’s the most important thing? The most important thing for any human is to understand what the mind is. It’s underserved in our current life, sort of zeitgeist.

And by that, I mean for the round about the last 70 years, last 50 especially, we focused so much on the brain because of all the exciting developments. And that’s what I meant by the statement when I said that we are a very neurocentric society. We’ve become very neurocentric, where you’ll see a lot of scientific stuff coming into the media. Your brain made you do it. You’re depressed because of imbalance of chemicals. Your brain generates thoughts as an epiphenomenon. You’ll see debates about how we have no free will, and I mean, you’ve got to choose to say that you don’t have free will. So, you use free will to say we don’t have free will. So it’s kind of tautologies and unrealistic reasoning. You’ll see studies coming through that say things like, well, when the person thinks in this way, this part of the brain fires up.

So, the brain caused that that’s back to front because the brain only responded to the person thinking. So thinking is first, mind is first, and then it uses the brain and the body. And why I’m emphasizing that point is because the mind then is complex, it’s consciousness and it has different levels. And when you get those different levels, you can learn how to exit a moment where you are activated or triggered into anger, frustration, worry, fear, shock, high anxiety. When you get consumed by that physical sensation of something that has triggered you in your environment, you can, when you understand mind, you can learn how to exit that in 60 seconds.

You can learn how to recognize the patterns that are holding you back as a leader period, whatever you do, but I know you reach out, your podcast is very much for leaders. And you can also then find those patterns that are holding you back and disrupting your function. And you can learn how to rewire those, takes, because rewiring, you literally have to rewire proteins and break down old networks. And that takes cycles of 63 days. So that’s why mind is vital. It drives the show. Doesn’t get enough attention. Yet a hundred years of neuroscience.

Skot Waldron (08:32.304)
Hmm.

Dr. Caroline Leaf (08:34.018)
has confirmed how important the mind is and thousands of years of philosophy as well.

Skot Waldron (08:41.104)
Poor mind. Like, can we give the mind just a little bit more love? Now, you should, mean, I think about this a lot. talk about the brain a lot, right? Cause that’s what people familiarize themselves with. And that’s just the common language you use. Hence, hence what all the things you’re saying. so, when, I mean, when we, when we talk about this, it’s interesting because, going back to your AI thing triggered.

Dr. Caroline Leaf (08:43.086)
Poor mind, I know. Exactly.

It is common language here.

Skot Waldron (09:10.542)
something with me that I was thinking about recently. you thought about this and I’m, I’m interested in your thoughts because I want to, I want to come back to what we’re talking about here. I just want to diverge just a little, this isn’t going to be an AI podcast thought, right thing, but I did pose a question on LinkedIn. did a poll on LinkedIn. Okay. And I asked, I asked people and I was curious about this because I was thinking about this my, and myself, right. that some people are, are using AI as a social companion for partnership or for something just for that, that companionship that they’re not getting something in life, right? They, for social, mental health or whatever they’re using it for. And I was starting to, I asked chat GBT, I said, “Can you empathize?” And chat GBT said, yes. And I was like, really? You know, so I started arguing with it a little bit.

But I asked on, on LinkedIn, said, do you want your AI to empathize with you? And, it was really interesting. So, I’ll share my results with you in just a second, but thinking about how we empathize and AI and is that even possible? Like in your, in your prediction of what’s going to happen in the world, you know, like on this show today.

Dr. Caroline Leaf (10:20.536)
Yeah.

Skot Waldron (10:37.136)
Dr. Caroline Leaf is going to reveal to us what AI is going to be capable of. Can it empathize?

Dr. Caroline Leaf (10:43.778)
No, never. It will never emphasize because it is simply, it’s computation. Computation is algorithmic. Electromagnetics or electromagnetism, which is what fires through neurons, is computational and algorithmic. The mind is the complete opposite. It’s not algorithmic. It’s quantitative. It’s not quantitative. It’s the opposite of quantitative and computation whereas AI is. So, all that AI is doing is we are putting in as humans, are building, we are feeding it information, we train it. And all it does is it feeds it back. So obviously if you ask it, do you have empathy? Because it’s going to recognize that question in all that it’s been fed, it’s simply going to feed that back. As you’re already seeing, AI at Apple and various different studies are coming out. They’re pouring out in this last month. been a lot. And by the way, I’ve done a whole podcast on this. So if people want to go listen to a whole 40 minutes of me explaining this, can on my podcast. I did it recently and we’ve got some social media on it as well. But essentially what it’s doing is it is it cannot empathize. It will never be intelligent. It’s incredibly useful. AI is like computers changed our lives. AI is going to change our life, but it’s still driven by mind. It’s like us trying to say the brain, it says, don’t want to say the word dumb because I don’t want to insult anyone, but it’s basic, limited thinking to say that the brain generates thought. It’s just wrong. There’s no science to prove that, but that’s what we hear all the time. It’s as wrong.

Skot Waldron (12:19.75)
So your argument is that the mind generates thought.

Dr. Caroline Leaf (12:24.502)
Exactly, brain can generate nothing. It doesn’t generate anything. It’s a responder. Same thing with AI. It is basically a very, very, very, very, very inferior version of a brain. And because it’s based on the model of the brain, but the modeling is based on one neuron firing, the complex computation of the electromagnetic firing through one neuron. And as I’ve said, we have a hundred billion or something in that range. We don’t even understand the relationship between two.

These people like a professor Henry Markham who ran the Blue Brain Project and it’s changed over the years, whatever, but 20 years ago, has this TED Talk out and he’s actually also South African like me. And he said, 20, I think it’s 20 odd years ago, he said, in 12 years, we will be able to have created a model, an AI sort of model that will be able to do what the human brain can do. 12 years, he said, that’s what he needed. 20 years later, he did another TED Talk.

And was interviewed saying that was completely wrong. In 20 years, all we’ve managed to do, and this is with billions and billions of dollars, he had the top scientists. He, I mean, he’s a phenomenal scientist himself. And he turned around and said, and I’m giving you the simplified version. In 20 years, all we’ve managed to do is to track one thought process in a mouse brain looking for cheese in a maze. And it’s infinite. That mouse thought is infinite.

Every thought you generate as Skot, every thought I generate as Caroline is so unique, it can never be replaced. That uniqueness and that empathy that comes from our humanity, being a human is not something any machine which is created by that could ever match. Now, certainly the technology is going to advance. will learn how we’ll be, I predict it down the line, we’ll start understanding the relationship between two neurons and that will change AI once again. And it’ll keep changing, but it’s still always going to be in terms of computation and algorithm, which is the opposite of what mind does, which is creative and abstract thought. So, to take that even further, Skot is one of the most, I would say, celebrated neuroscientists pretty much ever. I don’t know if anyone will come as close to Wilder Penfield. He did over a thousand open brain surgeries where he was testing your brain doesn’t feel because your skull and skull and stuff does so when they cut your brain open you can be awake during open brain surgery and then they were he was studying where the different parts of the you stimulate certain parts of the brain what does it generate and what that research showed now he’s he was an atheist he was a materialist he didn’t believe in anything except the physical and the brain was it.

He changed in his work, he completely transformed neuroscience and changed his opinion and there’s thousands of scientists that have followed in his suit and there’s lots and lots of research supporting his work, but he’s done the most probably one of the largest batch of neuroscientific research. And at the end of the day, I say all of that to say that he said, I can activate a part of the brain and suddenly that person will think, I remember that. Then a bunch of data will come back, will come up, but it’s data that is activated.

So, it will be ice cream, holiday, seaside, whatever. But the person turns those words, it’s like these flashes coming back and certainly emotions, happiness, joy, excitement. But the person on the table adds the context and turns it into a narrative. The brain doesn’t. In all these years of work, he showed that nowhere in the brain are you going to find abstract thought, creating meaning, generating ideas, because that’s not what the brain does. Now, the AI is not even close. It will never be able to do that.

It seems like it does. Why? Because we’re brilliant. Humans are amazing. We’re feeding all our amazingness into this machine and the machine’s just regurgitating our amazingness. And because we’re so good at doing that, it feels so real. So that’s the caution that I put out there. So, I’m very excited about AI, but I’m very concerned about how people interpret AI. If they come in with a very materialistic mindset, we will have statements being made by certain people in the field that we will eventually merge with.

Brains will converge with computers. I don’t doubt, I’ve seen in my own work how people that are can’t speak from cerebral, know, they have extreme cerebral palsy, and they’ve used computer interfaces. I mean, that’s fantastic. That’s going to happen, but they haven’t merged with the machine. They haven’t, they’re not, it’s not that they’re sharing one identity or one version of humanity. So, I mean, I can go on for hours about this, but that’s, that’s my, that’s my, my 10 cents worth.

Skot Waldron (17:01.068)
Said, preach.

Oh, my goodness. Um, yeah, your, your whole podcast episode, I’m gonna go check that out. Cause I would love to hear you talk for 40 more minutes about that. That’s um, that’s good. So, my, my results, you’re ready for this? So, 61 % of people said that, no, just give me what I need. They don’t want AI to empathize, empathize, empathize. They just want it to give it, give me what I need. Okay. Whether it’s some output, some email rewrites, whatever they need. Okay. Um,

Dr. Caroline Leaf (17:16.992)
Yes, I’m looking forward to it.

So interesting. Yeah.

Skot Waldron (17:35.814)
14% though said yes, they do want it to empathize. 18% said maybe. So that’s interesting. Like I don’t know the context, right? I don’t know why they’re wanting it to do that. I don’t know what they’re looking for, like what the use case would be for them. So, I don’t know

Dr. Caroline Leaf (17:56.166)
I think if I may offer an interpretation, I think based on what research is showing and just in terms of even come away from AI, just humans, and I’ve been in this field 40 years, so studying this kind of stuff and how we think and all that sort of thing, what you’re seeing there is a very interesting thing that people’s gut feel the majority or 60% of people, 60 or 66%, what did you say? 60% of people recognize that, intuitively, that this will never happen.

Skot Waldron (17:58.98)
Yeah, go for it. I would love to hear what you think.

Dr. Caroline Leaf (18:26.528)
And I think that’s a pretty good representation of, but then there’s the other factor of we don’t quite know. those ones that, you know, there’s a lot of people that really do not understand anything about AI and that’s going to change because we’re hearing so much more about it. So that’s very accurate. The ones that said that they’re not sure reflects, I believe, on modern society where it’s so individualistic. We know that community-based societies have much better deep, meaningful connections and all that kind of thing and are healthier and happier, blah, Longevity is different.

America is very individualistic and very not community driven enough and high achieve all those things that we know that have taken us to a certain point, but now we’re going backwards. That’s why what people I think it reflects that the loneliness aspect and the lack of community and that sort of thing. So that’s just my interpretation.

Skot Waldron (19:14.554)
I agree. I think that there is something very valid with what you’re saying. Obviously, it’s based on observations we’ve made over centuries and things like that. Well, thank you for adding your insights there. I wanna go back to this brain mind thing, because I think it’s gonna lead us into the leadership aspect of managing your mind and your thoughts and how you work with that. But I wanted to touch,

Dr. Caroline Leaf (19:22.316)
Yeah, so observations.

Skot Waldron (19:44.534)
on the idea of people struggling with different thoughts. Okay. So, in, your, in your new book, help in a hurry is, is out now and, and there it is. beautiful, beautiful. people can go anywhere and get that book. I was really intrigued and I thought it was super cool. First of all, you go through, you know, explaining what a different bunch of the things we just kind of talked about, but also about memory and all those other things.

Dr. Caroline Leaf (19:59.726)
Thank you.

Skot Waldron (20:14.494)
One thing you did like right at the beginning was that you have these specific statements that you’re going through. these thoughts that people typically have about certain situations, whether it’s I have it all together or I must succeed, or I can’t make a mistake or I’m going to let everybody down, things like that. Where did those, where did those ideas come from? Why did you pick those to feature in the

Dr. Caroline Leaf (20:25.87)
No. Mm-hmm.

Based on research, clinical application, years of being in this field. And then we also did some, we did some survey work too, with, we’ve got a pretty big platform. And so, we reached out to our community and so it was a combination. So, as I do every, as a scientist, everything’s research based. So, there’s a lot of research that looks at what are the typical kinds of issues currently in our current environment that we live in, this technological explosion and so on.

What are the things that people say the most and battle with the most? So, it comes from that. It comes from clinical experience, research, and surveys. And so, what we found was that the top was people saying, I’m under so much pressure because of our, you know, so many reasons, but besides the fact that we have access to knowledge, which is like we’ve never had before, which is so amazing. We have access to tools to change our life. I mean, there’s just so much that we’ve almost got so much to make our lives easier, but it’s made our lives difficult because now what do I choose?

And then your efficiency becomes inefficient because there’s so much pressure to be efficient. Like biohacking becomes, instead of hacking your life, it makes your life worse because there’s just so much to do. So that pressure kind of element and then people pleasing with all the comparison on social media, which is not just the only reason. Mean, people pleasing comes from a lot of things that we’ve gone through in our past and whatever. So that’s where those chapters, the chapter heads came from these 18 chapters and 13 are the sort of top ones that we found that are quite broad categories, but that are words that people use. I’m people pleasing. I’m under pressure. Don’t, tired all the time. I’m angry. I’m so triggered. You know, I want to punch that person in the face is one of the titles of the chapters. These are what people told us. And when we did like the surveys, we saw those were the top ones in that order, which was very interesting. And then it’s reflected in the research.

Skot Waldron (22:35.098)
Okay. You go through each of these statements that are very common based on your research. And I have heard them a lot myself, and in my personal life and just for my clients, that I’m coaching and just understanding what they’re saying and what they’re observing in their life. And you have these like mind hacks you call them, you know? And it always goes into, but you, you always tie it into the feel thing, right?

You hone in on the thought, then you go into the feel, but there’s this idea of a mind hack, like explain that to us and why, I mean, is it like hijacking your brain? Is that what you’re trying to, I mean, mind. See, I did it. did it. Are we, are we hijacking something in there? Like what’s going on?

Dr. Caroline Leaf (23:12.59)
Okay.

You ask great questions, it’s very intuitive. So not everyone picks that up. Basically you’re, I’m playing on the word biohack, that’s such a popular word. And what you’re using is a mind hack is your mind, and you’ve got different levels of mind. So, to understand this fully, I’m to give you the short answer and then I’d recommend I explain the longer version to make this even clearer. But essentially in a nutshell, a mind hack is how you get your mind in a self-regulated state to make your brain work properly because a messy mind, messy brain, messy body, messy life. And so, what we want to do is catch ourselves in those moments we triggered. And if we don’t catch ourselves and self-regulate those moments and exit that trigger reactive mode, we will stay in it. And that creates a tremendous amount of mess in our psychoneurobiology, psych neurobiology, mind, brain, body connection. And therefore, it’s going to affect our leadership, our parenting, our humanity, et cetera.

Not going to learn, we’re going to keep going around the mountain, whatever you want to use. So, it’s very much that concept. Also, when you talk about the feel, there is a lot of work that you can easily get your hands on where people talk about, we’ve got to be aware. There’s a ton of work. There’s all over the place. You’ll see social media, research, articles, to be aware and to be aware of your emotions and to talk about your emotions, which is not how it was 50 years ago, for example. So, there’s a massive awareness of those kinds of things. It’s also an increased awareness of let’s meditate, let’s do our green juice, let’s do our biohacks. So, there’s a lot of awareness of being aware of what we’re saying, but it’s an awareness that’s backfired because it doesn’t go further. So, if you just become aware of your emotions and you just think, okay, this is how I feel in this moment, and that’s where you leave it, and you don’t do it properly, you actually make more of a mess in your psychoneurobiology and you don’t really progress forward.

You’ll feel like you’ve moved forward, then you’ll move back 10 steps. So, it’s how it’s done. So, an analogy to explain this is if you think about flying a plane, you may not be able to fly a plane, but we all know what happens when you need a lot of skills and you need to prepare the plane and you need to know how to take off, fly and land. There’s a whole lot of skill required that is learned over time. If a pilot knows how to prepare the plane, but not fly, the plane goes nowhere. If the pilot knows how to prepare the plane and take off, but can’t fly, the plane will crash. So with that analogy in mind,

We have lot of self-help pouring into our lives from every angle of telling us, prepare yourself, meditate, breathe, visualize. Now I’m not anti, any of those. I’m just anti if they decontextualized at concerns because I know what happens. Okay. So, there’s a lot of that, which is great because it didn’t used to be, so it started the process. There’s a lot and that’s equivalent to getting the plane ready. There’s a lot of focus on taking off… plane taking off, in other words, becoming aware. So, my equivalent for a pilot taking off is, let’s be aware of our feeling, let’s talk about how we’re feeling, let’s talk about, you know, what we’re thinking. That’s kind of where it stops. You’ve got to know how to fly as well. And that requires a lot of processing, it requires stages of processing. So, once I’ve prepared my physiology through meditation, etc., visualization, breathing, those great things, and once I’ve now become got myself into the point where I can actually become aware because I’ve calmed myself down from the preparation, breathing and all that stuff. Now I’ve got to do something, and this is where it stops. And so, what we’ve seen from the research is that if you just prepare, meditate, et cetera, you just breathe, you’re going to have a quick fix. You’re going to have, you’re going to feel better. There is going to be change in your brain and your body. The study showed, but the sustainability goes, and the sustainability of change goes because you can’t just be aware and be prepared and aware.

Prepared and aware. You have to do something with that now what you’re aware of. So, stuff comes up when you do this awareness thing. Now what do I do? So, you feel awful. So you push it back down because you also live in a society that tells us if you feel anxious, depressed, this, have a DSM diagnosed mental disorder. You have something wrong with your brain. You’re broken. You have a mental illness. And I’m speaking in a slightly sarcastic voice because this is something I’ve been fighting for 40 years and it’s, it’s been a really bad move to classify mind stuff in that way. It’s a biomedical model. It’s been disproved It never was actually a scientifically proven way of dealing with people’s mental health problems, but it became an easy way a Way that you could verbalize a way that seemed to make sense But we see now 40 50 years later that it’s actually reversed the process made things worse if it worked Hallelujah keep using it, but if it doesn’t work, we should be fixing it, but we’re not we’re just carrying on in this Well, not me. I don’t do that.

So that’s created a lot of 95% of the public are exposed to that. 95% of people will think, oh, I’m away, I feel sad, I feel anxious, I’m feeling this a lot. I keep meditating, I keep feeling anxious. I have an anxiety disorder. Let me go get a diagnosis. And that’s so unfortunate because that then creates, locks people into a label. They think they’ve got an anxiety disorder. There’s something wrong with their brain. You’ve just removed a huge amount of self-power from that person, and you haven’t tapped into their superpower which is knowing about the mind, which takes us back to your very first question. What would I tell someone in 60 seconds? Learn about your mind. You need to understand your mind so that you can read all these things and understand and look at things differently. If your mind’s not working, you’re going to be conned by AI. You’re going to be conned by everything out there that hits you, everything you read in the paper, because you helmet with so much stuff that instead of really thinking things through, you’re just going to take surface things, build that in, and that becomes your bias healthy. That’s not going to lead to deep thinking people.

Skot Waldron (29:14.328)
I can agree with that. think that there’s, something you said with was, was quite interesting. want to, I want to clarify, just, just because you brought it up, right? Is the, is the diagnosis. I don’t want to ask you about that too, because we have, you know, social media and we, was talking about this actually with my brother and sister-in-law on Sunday. Their son is autistic and, and was diagnosed. we’re talking about it and talking about.

Do you navigate that world? He’s 10 now. I forget how old my nephew is, but he’s around there. And we were talking about school. He’s going into sixth grade and how to navigate social things. And they’re anxious about it, to keep talking about, there’s nothing other. I have an option. I can either think that my son’s going to have problems his whole life, or I can think that there’s nothing but success in his life.

Like that idea of like pushing that energy out. Now, going back to the diagnosis thing. Yes, it’s almost, it seems like, and we were talking about this, that everybody seems to like claim a diagnosis of some kind now, like whether it’s I took an assessment on Tik TOK or on Facebook or whatever. And, or are they diagnosing other people’s kids or situations? cause everybody’s an expert now. There is a huge mental health crisis.

We can, that’s a whole other show, but when do you think it’s okay for that diagnosis versus when we’re not doing ourselves any favor, getting a diagnosis.

Dr. Caroline Leaf (30:54.76)
So once again, a brilliant question. And if I may just say there isn’t a mental health crisis, there is a mind management crisis. And when you have a mind management crisis, you will have this move to materialism and reductionism, which says, okay, every symptom, every human emotion is a symptom of a disease, which is the biomedical model which works for heart disease, for medical things, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, just the word diagnosis it implies that there’s an underlying biological cause that you can target with medication and some level of treatment. And that works for the physical brain and body. It does not work for mind. Okay, so that’s the one thing on distinction I want to make there. The other distinction is that when it comes to things also in my practice, I work with traumatic brain injury. That’s a physical damage to the brain. I work with neurological issues, stroke, heart attack. I worked with autism a lot. I worked with people with learning disabilities.

We don’t even know really what any of the causes of that are. We know a head injury, someone has a car accident, someone gets hit on the head. That’s kind of easy to see where the source is of the damage. And even then, working with a damaged brain doesn’t mean that your mind’s damaged because your mind isn’t your brain, but your mind works through your brain. So if my brain is damaged from a head injury, that means that I’m not maybe going to be able to talk as well or think quite the same, know, sort of have the same sort of way or ability to function like I did, because my mind has to work through something that’s broken and that’s damaged in some way and it’s got to heal and that sort of thing. So that’s why we see changes in people’s functioning when they have neurological things. If there’s a tumor, if something physical goes wrong, the mind is kind of out here.

But it’s got to work through this damaged thing. So, it affects the functionality of the mind. And then that feedback loop is created depending on the level of severity of a neurological issue, et cetera. So, we need to make a distinction, which is not made currently, unfortunately anymore, a distinction between a head injury, a tumor in the brain, a damage because of some kind of physical drug or something that has physically changed the brain versus someone who’s experienced abuse.

Or consistent damaging relationships in marriage or work or socioeconomic situations, life, all the things that politics and poverty and these, our environment and how we’ve been in a position to process our environments. So adverse experiences generate adverse responses. If you’ve been abused and you’re depressed, that’s normal response. You’re not gonna be a happy chappy if you have had continual abuse.

So, what we’ve got to be careful is not turn around and say that person has a mental illness of bipolar disease. Without actually looking at the person’s story, we do them a disfavor. Initially, it might give the family, the parents, et cetera, comfort that, OK, this is why they’re like they are. But instead of seeing it as a label and a diagnosis, look at the story, look at the person’s narrative and see it as a description. So, they’re showing these types of schizophrenic type behaviors, these types of bipolar behaviors, these are just manifestations of a very traumatized experience that has been processed through the mind, brain and body. And that view is different. It doesn’t lump people into labels. When it comes to something like autism, we still don’t know why people have autism. So, if someone tells you that they do know, there’s been so much research spent. Do you know that how we can describe how they’re different and there’s different levels of autism.

But even that, I mean, your nephew has obviously these certain social, I don’t know him, I don’t know his diagnosis, but maybe he’s not talking Greek, maybe he’s not socializing, let’s take the word socializing out, but maybe there’s not good eye contact, maybe there’s a delay in language, maybe there’s certain things he does really well and other things not. There’s a delay in connection and communication. This is very real. There’s something, we know there’s something neurological. We don’t know why. In the 60s, they blamed the mother. In the 2000s, 20s now they blame some kind of brain damage or whatever. But then we have concept creep. Every second person’s being diagnosed with autism. get people, and I’m exaggerating slightly, but I get people on my research team telling me, they’ve just had a diagnosis of autism. Meanwhile, they just socially, they just feel uncomfortable in social situations. You know, so then someone who’s genuinely got autism, that we don’t really know why they got it or where it comes from, but we do know there’s some kind of something going on in the brain.

And they do need extra support, their problem has been minimized by someone who’s actually functioning fine, but they just have a bit of social issues because of whatever, whatever. So, we’ve got to be very careful of making that distinction. So, we don’t take away the importance of helping someone with some neurological stuff. And we don’t also invalidate someone who’s gone through adversity, which is pretty much every human. We have different levels of adversity that we go through in different stages of our life.

And I know that’s a long answer, but that distinction is very important because it’s all become mixed in one big messy pot, and no one knows what. So, they’re just throwing out labels. And I have a chapter in my book on this, and I don’t know if you saw, but they are, what is that figure? Got, Ashley wrote the figure down here. I always forget. A hundred billion views on hashtag mental health has had a hundred billion views. This was when I wrote this book a year ago and 60% of those are people under 30. That hashtag mental health.

So, it’s the tick tockification of mental health. It is so complex. You cannot take a list of symptoms and tell yourself that this is what’s wrong. Actually, it’s called prevalence inflation where people will listen to these labels and things on TikTok. And then they’ll blow something that’s a normal human reaction that we need to go through. You need to go through anger, jealousy, sadness, grief, happiness, up, down. You need it all. You need all of those. And you need to learn from them. And each of those is coming as a signal and data coming from an experience that you go through and learn from. You can’t just take that, suppress it, stick it in a box with a label, it’s an empty gift, and then think that you’re going to be okay. And that’s what the research is showing. People are worse for that than better. So yeah, that’s a, did I even answer your question?

Skot Waldron (37:13.282)
That’s good. Yeah, yes. Mean, I just want to hear your thoughts about it because I think it’s important and I like how you, you know, how you talked about it. And I think that’s important. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Caroline Leaf (37:24.386)
Can I say one more thing? You do not need a label, and I want people to hear this carefully. You do not need a label to validate depression or anxiety. These are very real. And if you have gone through something like tremendous grief loss of someone and you are feeling very depressed that you can’t get out of bed, you don’t need to have the label from a medical person telling you that you have clinical depression. You don’t need that to validate. It’s valid enough that you are depressed because you lost someone. You see what I’m saying? So, we’re not invalidating by saying it’s not a label, we actually invalidate by giving a label. Because if I had 10 people in front of me now, and they all had the label of clinical depression, and I actually took the time to sit down and hear their stories, I would tell every single person, you don’t have clinical depression, you’re a human who’s experiencing extreme whatever, and this is how you’re trying to cope, and let’s see how we can improve how you’re coping. So, I just want to do stress, because I don’t want anyone to think that I am judging or invalidating.

Skot Waldron (38:14.874)
Okay.

And thank you. Thank you for doing that. And I, and it is about mind management and how do we do that? Well, there are some people that have a harder time doing that because of trauma and because of other experiences, PTSD and, and other things that are real. And so that’s going to be tough. when we get in this loop and I, John Acuff, the author talks about, you know, soundtracks a lot and.

Dr. Caroline Leaf (38:33.56)
Yeah. I’m going to join you.

Skot Waldron (38:47.746)
And he’s And I reference that a lot. it sounds a little bit like, anyway, anyway, the same idea, like we have these repeating thoughts and patterns and, when you do your mind hacking idea, right, you are. Trying to stop that reframe the thought into something that’s not a complete lie. Cause your mind knows if you’re lying, it’s smart enough to know, but if we can re.

Dr. Caroline Leaf (39:04.845)
Yes.

Skot Waldron (39:17.638)
frame it, then there’s something really interesting there. And I was listening to something else also, that I wanted to bring up. had a note here that was, talking about the idea of, where is it? I had it in my notes. but this idea basically that, you know, if I see a lot of shark attacks on TV, I will believe that it’s pretty dangerous to sleep and just swim in the ocean. Right. But, and it’s the idea that I see it more often that makes it more real and believable to me. so, you know, saying your thoughts over with the shark thing, they were also talking about the statistic and I know if you’ve heard that before, right? There’s more bending machine deaths than there are shark deaths. Now it’s debatable what that number actually is, but per year. And so I was thinking about that in the context of this, whether that’s true or not.

Dr. Caroline Leaf (40:07.138)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Skot Waldron (40:15.386)
But the thoughts that we have, the repeated thoughts become a reality if we’re not learning how to manage them, right? Hack them, change them into something that might be different than what we would guess it is, right? But teaching ourselves that thought, that kind of, do I have that right?

Dr. Caroline Leaf (40:35.362)
Exactly.

Yeah, totally. You’ve got it right. That is, John Ackof, his little analogy he uses, then you also get the loops, know, you read this literature, you read all the stuff you teach it. Okay, so people talk about brain loops, patterns getting stuck, the brain gets stuck. We hear a lot of that. And if you just listen to that speak, it actually tells us that people realize that my brain gets stuck, but then who’s controlling your brain? You are your mind. So, the mind always kind of gets…

People get the impression the mind is running the show. I the brain is running the show when the mind is actually running the show. So, in terms of how this whole thing works, a thought is such a powerful thing. A thought is something that is created by the mind and put into or planted into the brain and body as a network of proteins and chemicals throughout. It looks like little trees in the brain and little hedges in every cell of the body. We have 37 to 100 trillion cells in our body. So, like this conversation is not just going in your brain.

It is going even in your fingertips. It’s everywhere, it’s throughout. There’s a network that is being created, but it’s first in your mind as a cloud of energy, which is nothing weird, it’s pure physics. Okay, so it’s clouds of energy that basically vibrate together because it’s similar information. And so, it’s all happening in this process. So, what we do with the thought, like if you’re watching the shark attack, you’re looking at something, whatever you focus on the most will grow.

So, I choose with my mind to watch all these shark attacks and read all these statistics and get absorbed in it. I’m putting all this data in forming these clouds, growing it in my brain. I do it again. I make it stronger. So, whatever I think about the most is growing. So that’s the energy I generate. That is the fear I go into the water with. And I mean, I’m terrified of sharks because I’ve seen two and nearly been eaten by two. So, whether I did that and created that environment, whatever, but that is I go in the ocean and I can pretty much guarantee that there’s going to be a shock and I don’t go in the ocean anymore because it’s pretty much happened to me. So, it’s funny you use that example because maybe I created that because I watched Jaws at age 11, it’s 50 years old now. Well, I don’t live in South Africa, we lived there, yeah, but that’s, and I’ve been done the whole whatever, but that’s just a funny thing on the side. And Jaws, I think it’s 50 years that they celebrating. you know, I watched it when I was 11 and we, up until then I swam in the sea all the time. After that, I was cautious. Anyway, that’s another, the point here is whatever you think about the most.

Skot Waldron (42:36.378)
Or maybe it’s because you lived in South Africa. Maybe it’s just South Africa, you know?

Dr. Caroline Leaf (42:57.826)
grows first in your mind, then in your brain, then in your body. Now here’s to answer this really well. Let’s, let me, if I may, explain the different levels of the mind and how we can exit forming the getting stuck in thoughts that create those loops, those brain loops, whatever you want to call them. Those things that keep us stuck doing the same thing over and over. Cause those things that keep you stuck are thoughts that have become habits. And in your brain, they simply are data that’s been plugged in, planted and it’s running. It’s just data that’s running. It’s a program that’s running in your brain. Your brain is all computation. But it got there via your mind. So how on earth did your mind make such a mess in your brain? How did it create those brain loops? So, there must be some dimension of the mind that is not so great, that is not so intelligent or doesn’t think that deep or something. And there is. So, there’s different levels of the mind.

And there’s the first name, the big picture, and then go into detail. So, the first thing is you get your conscious mind, which is awake when you’re awake. Then you get your subconscious, which is the next one down, which is between that and the biggest part of your mind, which is the non-conscious, not unconscious, non-conscious, N-O-N, non-conscious. The non-conscious is the biggest part of you, operates at 400 billion actions per second and faster. So, we estimate a scientist probably faster operates 24/7. Every experience you’ve ever had is stored in clusters of memory clusters that form thoughts. A thought is a cluster of memories similar from an experience. Everything that you’ve ever experienced from the beginning of when you began to what you’re at now, wherever that beginning point begins, that’s always debatable point, to where you’re at now, it’s all stored there. Everything you’re exposed to on a daily basis goes in there.

So, it’s this massive part of you that’s intelligent, dynamic. It’s then, it’s the wisest part of you. It’s your best friend. It’s your wisdom. It scans and it neutralizes most of what we’re exposed to. So, you neutralize most of all, you’re not even aware of this. It’s happening so fast. And it then finds the areas that you’ve really thought about, the show architect, whatever. And you’ve really spent a lot of time growing those patterns and it finds those knows that they’re disruptive, finds the most disruptive in your life at the moment. It also has the parallel solution. We have wisdom, we have intuition. When we talk about intuition and wisdom, we’re talking about solutions to life’s problems that we’ve created, or we’ve had done to us by trauma. Trauma is done to us, bad habits we create. But both of those get stored and both can affect how you function. So, your non-conscious mind finds those. But because your non-conscious mind is so, so incredibly fast.

you, has to work through the subconscious. So, the subconscious is slows down the non-conscious mind because our conscious mind can only handle one conversation at a time. I’m having a conversation with you. If my team starts speaking to me and your team starts speaking to you, we’re going to have three conversations going on. Well, four conversations, I should say. None of us will know what’s going on. That’s consciously we think, feel, choose in a very focused way to gather the data, make sense of it.

And then once you’ve gathered that data and made sense of it, we then start thinking about it in more intuitive way. And that’s gathering data and processing it is not done alone. It’s done based on all this tremendous experience we have in the non-conscious mind. So you experience, you’ve had life, you’ve got a whole life that you’ve lived. You’ve got your things you’ve studied. You’ve got the things that you teach. You’ve got your, a huge amount of brilliant experience built into the non-conscious.

So, every, could just see it flashing through your mind as I’m talking, you’ve got all this stuff coming up from your non-conscious mind, all this great stuff that’s there. That is part of what you have to offer the world uniquely from you that no one else can match. There’s something you can do that no one else can do, which is why each of us needs to fulfill our potential, et cetera, et cetera, another conversation. So this huge, speedy, non-conscious mind filters the disruptive patterns and solution into the sub-conscious, it’s got to be slowed down because this conscious mind that thinks, feels and chooses in a one conversational dimension can’t handle 400 billion actions per second. Bottom line, it only handles about something in the region of a thousand to two thousand actions per second, two to three words a second to make it easier for people to understand. So therefore, it has to be slowed down. So that’s what the subconscious does. It gathers its awaiting room, it’s a holding station, whatever you want to visualize.

So, it gets slowed down from this billions of actions, infinite simultaneous conversations, present, past and future all mixed up together, brilliant solutions, problems, all of it gets filtered down moment by moment to what you need to function now. And that’s property in the subconscious. The subconscious then takes those in order of priority. In medicine, we talk about triage. You’ve probably heard of it. You take the most important thing to deal with that, you know, the most life-threatening deal with it first. So, the thing that’s the most disruptive, that is activated in the subconscious and sends you, it sends you signals into your conscious mind. Your conscious mind is receiving signals from the subconscious, which came from the non-conscious and they’re relevant now. So, if you pay attention to them now, we can do something with them. Okay. So now this is all, all building the foundation for those loops. So now there’s this fear of shock or there’s this, people pleasing or this imposter syndrome or this get irritated easily with certain people at work, whatever. There’s this thing that’s actually just not, it’s impinging your creativity. It’s impinging your leadership skills, whatever it is. I’m just, you can create a scenario in your head, but this is the idea that you’ve developed so much that you’ve got that in the non-conscious mind. So now here you go into a meeting, the people that trigger you the most are in that meeting. Well, this non-conscious puts into the subconscious the existing memory related to that person.

Plus, the solution of how not to get triggered. So, both of them are there. And then you get signals coming up as that person opens their mouth and talks in that meeting. And those signals will be how you feel irritated again. Your body feels it. So where do you feel that in your body? Your shoulders tense up or whatever. How does that affect your behaviors? You’re about to snap back or you’re already building up this whole anticipation that that shark’s going to eat me or whatever. And then the fourth thing that affects your perspective, this meeting is going to be lousy. This person is going to do this again.

And that’s all those signals come up. Now those signals aren’t meant for you to stay stuck in the loop. They are meant for you to get out of the loop, to exit the loop. Because all your brain has done is as that information came in via the subconscious into the subconscious, because that parallel system is happening. And by the time it hits your conscious mind and you’re aware of what the person is saying, it feels like it’s immediate. But there’s all this other stuff going on in the background that’s finding the existing sort of all that stuff.

Pre-consciousness in your body, which enables your body to physically react, all that stuff. Because often our bodies react before we actually aware of what the reaction is. It’s all milliseconds, all this stuff’s going on. So, we have now an ability as humans, and this is what’s not taught enough. Because if this was happening, this is why my life’s work is dedicated. Mind management operates in this zone. It’s that 60 seconds question you asked me in the beginning, mind and mind management. So maybe I should have added mind management onto the mind. I did actually.

Okay, so now we in the state, we’ve got the situation, you’re in this meeting, you’re in the state, you’ve got all this stuff happening in the non-conscious, pre-conscious, subconscious, blah, all this is going on. And if you didn’t follow it, it’s a lot of stuff going on. Your conscious mind has got two sides to it. It’s like a scale. It’s got a toddler part, and I use this analogy because it’s easy to understand, and it’s got a parent part. Or you could call it a messy part in a guide. You can call it whatever you want. I’m going to stick with toddler and parent for this discussion.

So, think of two sides of a coin or balance scale. So essentially what happens is by the time it hits my conscious mind, it hits the toddler part first, because that’s the data gathering part. It’s brilliant. Think of a toddler. They’re learning, they’re gathering information, they are sponges. You have to have that. It’s a beautiful part of our human nature that we gather data to process and build. But now if you leave a toddler to go right, I don’t know if you have kids, but if you remember, if you do and you’ve, okay, when they toddlers, if you don’t step in as a parent, they’re going to the accidents that happen will be crazy. So, the parent, no, you don’t jump off the chair, you don’t jump off the table, you don’t stick your hand down the dog’s throat, all that kind of stuff. So, the parent needs to be activated to work with a messy mind. So, for us to function and not get stuck in loops, we have to make sure we activate the parent side of our mind as well. So how do I do that? I’m so activated and triggered by this person that I need to get myself back under control. For years in therapy, I worked on this with my patients.

Skot Waldron (51:28.038)
You.

Dr. Caroline Leaf (51:56.438)
The millions of people we reach on our platform, it’s one of the most commonly asked questions. How do I calm myself down in the moment? And that’s why I wrote this book now. So, it’s about time I write a book where I actually show people what do I do to stop the loop getting worse? What do I do to start redirecting that loop and rewiring? What do I do to, once I’ve caught that reaction, that loop and reactivated, what do I do with it? How do I find out if it’s a pattern and how do I completely rewire that? And this, that’s my life’s work basically, helping people to do that from all different aspects, from the traumatic brain injuries, autism to the traumas, to the day-to-day living, just being human. So, the first thing I have to do to get my conscious toddler, beautiful part of my mind listening to this wisdom of the, or the guidance of the parent mind is I need to understand what I’ve just said. I need to understand the mind. I need to understand the mind’s not this brain that’s stuck in the amygdala.

reaction and the prefrontal cortex and all these words people just love to use and they don’t have a clue what they’re saying when they use them because they read that executive functions happen in your prefrontal cortex and the amygdala is this and if you don’t understand, yes, we’ve seen that sort of thing happening there, but they’re not doing it. They’re responding. So, when you apply executive thinking, that activates the prefrontal cortex, not the other way around. When you have a shock reaction to something, that’s not the amygdala fear response.

Causing it, it is your mind activating the amygdala to process it. To store it, basically, not process, to store. It doesn’t even process your brain. So, if I can train myself to understand my superpower of the mind, I can then train myself to stand back in my mind. I can stand back and observe myself. All humans can do it. It’s part of our nature. It’s most natural thing in the world for us to stand back and observe. Here’s an example in point. It’s very, you give people advice.

It’s super easy to give people advice. People come to you, kids come to you, friends come to you. Friends go to friends. It’s really easy to give people advice. Even if it’s, you know what? I’m here for you. You’ll get through this. But give yourself advice. It’s much more difficult. It’s easy to give someone else advice. So, what we have to do is recalibrate, redevelop that ability to take our own advice because we do have advice for ourselves. We have our solutions inside. So, we need to listen to the advice of the parents.

So, we need to stand back and train ourselves to observe ourselves. How am I showing up in this moment? That person’s just triggered me. I can feel the irritation. I can feel the willingness to slap. can snap, slap, and slap, I can feel that I’m going, all the four signals. If I do that, all what I’ve done is changed my neurophysiology. I’ve changed my psychoneurobiology. I’ve put myself back in the driver’s seat. I have totally transformed that moment. In 60 seconds, I can get into mind hack mode. I can by stepping back and observing, I’ve already mind hacked. I’ve already allowed my messy mind to get the guidance from the parent mind with the toddler mind to get the guidance from the parent. The minute I do that, I’ve accessed the subconscious. can hear the signals more clearly. can see the thing. I’m irritated. I shifts to, I am experiencing irritation. I chose to feel irritation. No one can make you irritated, Skot.

No one can make you frustrated no one can make you angry you choose to be irritated you choose to be angry you choose to be worked up because of free will and that’s a big concept for people to get their heads around because we like to blame other people for what we’re going through but the mind biggest mind hack that you can part of this mind-hacking thing is to recognize Stand back observe and recognize that your response in the next moment is your choice And if you choose to react you’re going to switch you’re gonna switch off parent mind. You’re gonna just jump and you’re going to switch off access to the wisdom and you’re going to make a bad decision and you’re going to create a brain loop. You’re going to get stuck in that pattern and whatever, whatever. But if I decide to stand back and observe, can then say, okay, I’m feeling this hurt in my body. So let me calm down. Let me do a little bit of breathing. Let me get my alpha theta waves in my brain. give all those explanations in the book, whatever, to calm down. So, I’m not just breathing. I’m not just, I’m actually controlling how oxygen goes into my brain and body. I send a message to not going to flight in front. I’m shifting my mindset. So, the energy of saying, I’m irritated versus, hmm, that person irritated me. It’s valid that they irritated me. You don’t ghost yourself. Very important, your mind hack is not suppressing or ghosting. is acknowledging that person makes me feel irritated because they keep doing the same thing. And I’m valid being irritated.

But I don’t have to be irritated because I choose to be irritated. I could just learn from that experience and change how I interact. Could just not respond. If I respond, I bring the energy into me. I drain myself, I get tired, whatever. All these things that happen, I can choose to change and whatever. And then you go through this process of now I’m going to reframe. So I’m calm, I’ve done the breathing, whatever. I’ve started the mind hack. I’ve shifted into this. First of all, you shift into this observation mode. I call it the multiple perspective advantage. I explained it in the book.

And in that mode, I recognize the sensations in my body, I calm them down, I acknowledge and don’t ghost what that person’s experiencing and then I shift over to a mind shift. How can I see this differently? And then I shift into an action. What can I do in this moment? I can keep quiet, I can send a nice text, I can just sit back and let them shoot their mouth, self in the foot, or I can move on.

Skot Waldron (57:33.2)
Good. That’s really insightful. I love the different examples, the different angles, the different explanations. To wrap this thing up, want you to, I want to squeeze this last question in because I think it’s important for the people. I’m interested and intrigued by your thought process on this. And if I can give you another 60 seconds, right? I’m going to bookend it, right? 60 seconds front end, 60 seconds back end. And then I want you to…

Dr. Caroline Leaf (57:57.1)
Okay, sounds good. Answer in 60 seconds.

Skot Waldron (58:02.918)
Tell us when, where we can get the book. So, the question is the debate between the 63-day habit and the 21-day habit that we’ve heard before, right? So, 60 seconds, you ready? Go.

Dr. Caroline Leaf (58:12.91)
Okay, I can answer that fast. Ready. Okay, so 21 days came through from a plastic surgeon in the 60s where he found that stem cells replace themselves every three weeks, which is accurate. And he translated that into mental health, and he wrote a book and it became a myth. It’s never been proven. It’s only ever been disproved by researchers like myself who are in the field of habit formation. And so, the number that we find we’ve put someone to change something simple like frosting your teeth, you can do it quicker. But when it comes to stuff that you need to change from past traumas and habits and things that we’ve built in, stuff that really impacts mental health, mental management, mind health, et cetera, you need to be able to go deeper. You need time. So, what we see is that in the first 21 days, you can deconstruct and reconstruct and find the thought pattern that’s disruptive and go through this process of deconstructing and reconstructing.

And I’ve developed a formula over 40 years that I researched to do that called the Neurocycle. Called Neurocycle, I have an app, can stick the link in there where I walk you through that. And you’ll see versions, also explain the Neurocycle in here, but how to use it in 60, in a short period of time. Essentially what we see is in 21 days, what you will do is you will get in the direction, I want to change, this is what I want to become. And you even get to the point where you are maybe got that habit, new habit starting to change in your life, new way of functioning, whatever.

But then, you think you’ve got it. And what we see from the actual neurobiology is that the energy in the strength of that proton, the protein network and chemicals at 21 days is very, very weak. So, it’s got a chance of converting into heat energy. You can lose it. And that’s what happens around day 28. People will start remember what they wanted to do, but they can’t do it. So, you need the extra 42 days somewhere in that region.

56 to 63 days is what we need to stabilize that connection and make it strong enough that it actually shows up as a change in our life. Quick sidebar, if it’s a big trauma, you need to then do multiple cycles. You’re not going to sexual abuse and a bad habit of being irritated in the same timeframe. You’re going to need multiple cycles of 63 days. And all of that in my books and my app. In this book, I teach all of this too.

Skot Waldron (01:00:23.75)
Mmm.

I love it. I love it. Thank you for sharing that. That’s really interesting. And then you have the app, the Neurocycle app that people can access and get that. And then we’ve got the book, it’s called Help in a Hurry. And here’s something interesting that you said, right, is that we’re not into quick fixes. Well, I will say society is into quick fixes because we, instant gratification, et cetera, et cetera.

But this book, it says help in a hurry, but it’s not about the quick fixes. It’s about what you call strategies to help manage the mind and to help do the things that we can do to understand how to build healthy habits and how to.

Dr. Caroline Leaf (01:00:58.52)
No, the opposite.

It’s like an insurance policy. Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt you. It’s like an insurance policy. You take out insurance on your house, your health. It’s building in patterns, networks that will help you exit reactive mode so you can find the pattern, which it takes about seven days to find a pattern. And then you can rewire the pattern, patterns or habits, those habit loops we’ve been talking about. So it’s really insurance that in that moment I can get into that parent mind, out of the toddler mind, et cetera, et cetera.

Skot Waldron (01:01:12.997)
Yeah. Beautiful. And where do people find you?

Dr. Caroline Leaf (01:01:40.802)
Dr. Caroline Leaf is my social media handle. I’m on all the platforms, including LinkedIn. And my podcast is called Dr. Caroline Leaf. The book’s available wherever books are sold and our website’s drleaf.com. I’ve done this before and the app is on Google, iTunes, and there’s a web version. So you get it everywhere.

Skot Waldron (01:01:52.826)
You’ve done this before.

Very cool. Well, it’s been beautiful having you. Thank you for sharing your ideas with us. you have served me. Hope you’ve served my audience. I have no doubt you served my audience because they’re kind of like me since they listened to me. So that’s what’s great about it all. So, thanks for being on the show.

Dr. Caroline Leaf (01:02:13.464)
Thank you so much. loved all, I loved the conversation. Thank you.

We didn’t necessarily get into this phrase, but she says this often, that it’s okay to not be okay. It’s okay because it’s human. And when we accept that, when we recognize that, there’s a lot of empowerment that goes along with the acknowledgement that it’s okay to not be okay. We let go of, you know, expectations and blame and shame and all kinds of kinds of things that happen with that. And I think that, you know, if we can embody that thought process a little bit better, I think that that’ll go a long way. I really like this idea that when there’s a lot of messy, she said messy, messy brain equals messy minds, messy thoughts, messy, messy life.

But if we can learn hack that process a little bit if we can learn to breathe and pour oxygen into those areas where we’re needing oxygen that we can learn to control and manage those things and My kids I didn’t say this on the show, but my kids are Yeah, kind of tired of us saying hey, you know what? So-and-so didn’t make you mad so -and -so didn’t make you so and so it didn’t make you whatever. You chose to have those feelings as a result of your thoughts about those feelings or thoughts about that circumstance. And it’s really interesting to rephrase it into this idea of I’m experiencing, you know, irritation as opposed to saying I’m irritated. I’m experiencing irritation. Practice that. Try it out. It’s a really interesting hack, right? To switch your brain or your mind into having that thought. Again, it’s not wrong. So, your mind isn’t going to deny it. It will just kind of embrace it. And you’re kind of stepping outside yourself giving yourself advice. That’s another really good tip. I like that one too. When you have a problem, give yourself some advice. Talk to your person and talk to yourself in the third person. See if that helps as well. Thank you, Dr. Caroline Leaf for being on the show and thank you all for hanging out with me.