The Key to Finding Peace When You’re Overwhelmed, Anxious, or Stressed | Dr Caroline Leaf

What if in the moment you feel most overwhelmed, anxious, or stuck, it's actually your mind's invitation to reclaim peace right in the middle of the chaos. And as a follower of Jesus, how are we to understand the mind and how we can take control of it, renew it so that we may know and understand the will of God? On today's podcast, I got to talk to Doctor Caroline Leaf, who is a cognitive neuroscientist and author, and a mental health expert. She has spent over thirty years researching the science of thought, neuroplasticity, and how mind management impacts mental and physical health. She has a brand new book out right now called help in a Hurry Simple tips for Finding peace when You're overwhelmed, anxious, or stressed. And we dig into this crucial topic. We are in the middle of a mental health crisis, and it is so crucial to have Jesus following mental health experts like Doctor Caroline Leaf to speak truth and wisdom into this crucial subject. She is brilliant. You're going to love this conversation. Stick around for the whole thing and let us know what you think. You can send an email to provoke an inspire podcast at npr.org. Or you can just jump on our Instagram, send us a DM, join our broadcast channel. It would be very encouraging to hear how this episode, or this podcast in general, has encouraged you as you seek to live faithfully for Jesus outside of the church. As always, this podcast is part of Steiger International. It's this worldwide missions organization that my parents, David and Jodie Pearce, started to reach a subculture in Amsterdam, young people who saw the church as a negative tradition of the past. And now we're in over two hundred cities doing that exact thing, bringing the love of Jesus outside of the church to people who might otherwise never hear it. If you want to get involved and you want to find out more, you can go to Steiger. Org that's e e o. And finally, before we launch into the episode, I just wanted to thank you for your faithful support. God's hand is on this podcast and we are growing. We are gaining access to amazing guests and voices, and none of this would be possible without you. Without you sharing it, commenting on it, interacting with it. So thank you. Thank you for being part of this community and let's make it a community. Let's be a group of people who genuinely want to know how to faithfully follow Jesus outside of the church. All right. Well, I hope you enjoy my conversation with renowned mental health expert and follower of Jesus, Doctor Caroline Leaf. You're listening to the Provoke and Inspire podcast. Doctor Caroline Leaf. What a privilege. Thank you for being on the Provoke and Inspire podcast. Thank you Ben. It's wonderful to be here with you. Yes. So you are busy. You are in New York. Is that what you said? You're currently in New York, back from New York, but be on a tour around the country. So book tour around the country? Yeah. Okay. What is new with you? My book just dropped my new book in a hurry. Um, just dropped this week. So we've been in a very busy the midst of a book tour and launch and very, very excited because this work has been in the field for forty years. And this is my nineteenth book. And, um, this really is something I used to do with my patients all the time, was to help them to exit those modes where people where you feel like you're freaking out and just losing it, where the rug has just been ripped out from under your feet. And you just what do I do in that moment of overstimulation or people pleasing? Or you want to punch someone in the face because they've irritated you, or you just catch yourself in imposter syndrome? There's things or you get that shocking text, those moments, how do you get yourself back under control? And how do you get into the into wisdom so that you make the right decisions and choices and statements and so on in the next moment? And then how do you find out if these are patterns in your life, and then what do you do if they are patterns, which are habits? So that's something that I would do with my patients, because a lot of the work I've done is essentially helping people to understand their thought life, understand what the mind is. And I know we're going to talk about that, understand how to rewire using neuroplasticity, understanding mental health, understanding mind management. All these things work with traumatic brain injuries to traumas, all of it. And just being a human. And what I found missing in my writing was the things I would tell people to do. How do I manage the moment? And being it's interesting because so many conferences and so many interviews and I do so much media. Two of the most common questions I get are, number one, what's the difference between the mind and the brain? And I know we're going to dive into that. And secondly, what do I do when I'm totally in an anxious panic attack, stressed out moment, etc.. So this book helps in a hurry. I decided it was time to actually capture that from my clinical research and so on. And practical research, practical surveys from people. Put that into simple tips to help people to understand what's going on in this, in the science of the mind, brain, body connection and how can I manage it? So that's a long answer. That's what I've been doing for this last. Well, this is what I've been doing for the last forty years. Yeah, yeah. How have maybe this is a funny question, but how have you managed to maintain your own peace in the midst of all of the busyness that I'm sure surrounds the release of this book? I'm sure there's a touch of irony that that strikes you in the hecticness of releasing a book on being overwhelmed by the busyness and hurriedness of the mind. How have you managed that? You know, it's such a great question, and we and I'm sort of laughing, and my team is laughing because we've all consistently said to each other, you need help in a hurry, you need help in a hurry. It's become such a reality in our lives because we don't just talk. And myself, my team, we don't just talk this, we live this. It really is. It's coming from experience. It's everything I do is based on scientific research and clinical application, and that's really important for people to know. It's not just something I've made up or drawn out from, you know, psychology, social media stuff. This is real hard core stuff that has been scientifically tested and clinically applied. But we use it. We live this. We we find ourselves saying, oh my gosh, now I can see where this technique is amazing. Oh, I need that technique. So we love this. This is not coming from as I said, this is coming from reality. So yeah we do. So we fall, get ourselves up quickly. And I think that's the difference. We need to live an intentional and deliberate life that things are going to happen because they do. The unexpected will happen. It's not a sin. It's not a that you bad. It's not that. It's just life. It's humanity. We make decisions. We have free will. Bad stuff happens. Good stuff happens. The unexpected happens. That is life. So we shouldn't be living in this bubble thinking, oh, everything must be fine and I can just be positive and I can just pray it away and all that kind of stuff. And then the bad stuff hits and we think, oh my God, and people's it's all over. You know, the life is just people tumble. And so if we live what the research shows and it's a very it's a very spiritual concept. Live your life in an intentional and deliberate way to recognize that things can happen. And are you prepared? Do you know how to capture that thought and renew your mind in that moment? Do you know how to literally build insurance policies into your psycho neurobiological network, which is your mind brain, body network? Psycho neurobiology? That's my field of expertise. Mind, brain, body network, spiritual body. So do you know how to build like you think insurance policies. You take one for your house, your health, etc. in case and we live like that, but we don't live like that with our mind and we need to because sadness, happiness, jealousy, anger, frustration, anxiety, depression these are not bad things. These are emotional warning signals that give us information. And if we get freaked out by them, those emotions that that create such strong sensations in our body, we will then get caught in a trap and get stuck and not make the right decisions and not tap into that incredible, intuitive, godly wisdom that we have inside of all of us that are at the core of our being. And so that's why I try and help people to really live that life. And we live it ourselves. So the unexpected, the why are these things in and that's what I've done. So when we had situations where we have a million things happening at once, things going wrong, getting stuck at airports because of travel, whatever travel issues, and I've got to get to an interview or traffic or whatever, or just so many things happening at once, we can recenter back and catch that moment before it becomes before you're in a mess in your brain. Messy mind, messy brain, messy body, messy life. So long answer. But yes, this is lived experience. Yeah, and it's a challenge. Why do you think there's a lagging understanding between the integration between thoughts and our mental health? Like and maybe correct that question if it's incorrect, do you feel like there is a lag? Because I think in my life we can not always integrate them or recognize the connection between our thoughts and our mental health the way we should. And this is clearly something you've devoted your life to understanding and researching and then making understandable to the to the public. How important is that connection? Understanding your mind and thoughts is one of the most important things you can do as a human, if not the most important. Because when you understand your thoughts and your mind, you understand your superpower literally. And I say that with, you know, just tongue in cheek as well, because literally your mind, this concept of capturing all thoughts and renewing your mind is not something that you do now and then. It is your life force. It is quite literally, this ability that we have as humans to think, to feel, to choose to, to create, to imagine, to reason, to problem solve, to intuit, to have wisdom. This is an absolute underlying driving force of our us being alive. It's our aliveness. It's ninety nine percent of who we are. And then we have this beautiful biology, this brain and body. But when you die, your brain and your body pretty much disintegrate within Milliseconds of you, you know, dying. You're within 20s of your heart stopping. Your brain's already flatlined and starting to disintegrate. And it isn't long after that that everything just pretty much everything shuts down. Point being is that your mind carries on, and your mind is the collective term that is used for consciousness, which is the levels of mind, including spirit and soul, which we can dive into. So if the majority of who you are, Ben is mind which incorporates spirit, soul and etc., we'll break that down and help people understand that in a moment. Then we should be devoting ninety nine percent of our time to mind and to management of our mind, to self-regulation, to capturing thoughts, to renewing the mind. However, our mind needs a brain and a body or brain in our body. Don't think. The brain doesn't think. The brain's not generating thoughts. It's not generating your decisions. Your brain is simply a very, very complex and fancy storage place. Your mind uses your brain and your body. Your brain and your body are responders, not generators of thoughts and ideas. They are biology. They one percent. But we live in a world. To go to your question, we live in a world in the last fifty to seventy years, especially the last fifty, there's been a massive move as we've understood more about the brain to explain everything in terms of the brain. So if you're depressed, it's a chemical imbalance. If you are anxious, there's a panic attack. There's something wrong in your in your in your brain. If you've got up and down mood swings, you've got bipolar disease. There's something wrong with your brain. This is ninety five percent of the world's population. Believe that if they feel any kind of emotion that's strong, even not even that strong and just consistent or strong and or both, that's something's wrong with them, that they're mentally ill, that they have a problem with their brain. The messaging from the world is that mental illness is something wrong with your brain, and that you don't have much hope. You've just got to use some kind of tool, technique, medication or whatever to to fix you. But it doesn't even fix you just to help you get through. And that messaging is create. Yeah, that messaging has created tremendous disconnect because as we focus more and more on this physical diagnostic model of labeling and saying it's biology, which, by the way, works for physical things like the brain and the body and the heart and so on, brain, body, body systems. But it doesn't work for our mental experience. Our mental experience is a whole different category. So we've got this ninety nine percent of our mental experience. We've got this one percent of our brain and body. And the biomedical model works beautifully for the one percent, but it doesn't work at all for the ninety nine. And yet we are not we? I don't do that, but the general main messaging that's coming through to the general public in all spheres is that the the the same model of the biomedical model, if you get a symptom, we label it, we diagnose it, we find the underlying biological cause. We treat it with a medication. That model, which works beautifully for biology is has been um, concept. The concept has crept over into mind. It's a mental health arena. So what works for the one percent doesn't work for the ninety nine percent, but we're using it for the ninety nine percent, and that's the disconnect. So my work and honestly, hundreds of US scientists in this field have been trying to show people that this is not actually correct. It was never proven. The biomedical model for mental health, it was never shown to be the success. And in fact, if it worked, Ben, I would be happy to use it. But in fact it's got worse. So mental health has got worse. Not because mental health is a major crisis. It's because mind management is a major crisis. And in mind, management is a major crisis. It will lead to a messy mind that's unregulated, which will lead to messy brain, because the mind just tells the brain what to do and the body what to do, and therefore messy lives. And so we need to understand mind brain thoughts. What do I do? How do where's my level of control? And that's important. Wow. Okay. So for as technical as all of this is, it almost sounds like there's a metaphysical physical component in the sense that we have to tell ourselves, or we have to understand the foundational story, or at least if it's not just physical. As you said, there's this mind consciousness component. Has the reaction been to go away from that? Because as the enlightenment and materialism and secularism, the mind is a hard thing to explain from a rational or consciousness is a hard thing to explain from a rational, materialistic perspective. So as part of this, a worldview issue in terms of the way the diagnosis has gotten off track, because the fundamental story doesn't necessarily allow for understanding this mind component where it came from. Absolutely. So rational thinking isn't necessarily materialism rational as humans. So just quickly, let's define that. You said that beautifully by the way. Rational rational being, rational abstract thinking reasoning, etc. etc.. These aren't the domain of the brain. The brain doesn't do any of that. The mind does it all. Materialism, the concept of materialism, which is a very, very dominant philosophy and has such a shaky scientific foundation and has pretty much been disproved by physics and everything. Physics doesn't even really support materialism. If you really look at physics, and I've spoken and worked with top physicists in the world, so I know what I'm talking about. So materialism is seeing us as just physical. If you look at us as just physical, at the brain produces what the materialist says is that the brain and the more we've learned about the brain, the more materialistic people have got. It's called neuro reductionism. Reducing everything down to brain, brain, brain and brain doesn't do everything. It only does it. It does a lot, but not everything. Okay. And it doesn't. It doesn't do anything. Actually, it does nothing. It only does what the mind tells it to do, and it doesn't. Isn't that the only place where memory is stored? Memory is stored throughout. The whole memory is in your fingertips. Memories everywhere. Okay. so materialism doesn't recognize that. Materialism just says if you can't see it, touch it, feel it, hear it. Um, then it's actually one of those things. That's the hard question of science. So if you look at things from a perspective that the brain generates everything, well, then you're going to be stuck. You, you want to get, you'll get stuck. That's materialism. And then there's a, there's a form of rationalism that's stuck inside that materialism that doesn't see the bigger picture. And everything has to equate. So those people will say whatever they don't understand. That approach will then anything that they can't understand, anything metaphysical is considered woo woo, non-scientific. The hard question one day we understand it. And the gold standard, incorrect gold standard is that once we find the biological underlying underpinnings, then it will be a reality. Now that's totally back to front, because even if you just look at the research that they do to say that they've minds dominated the show. Simple example, they'll put someone in an MRI scanner, they'll tell them to think about a happy moment, um, and let them experience the whole thing and read them a narrative or show them a video or something. So they're doing something with their mind. They're doing something with their aliveness. Their thinking is stimulated first. Then they look at the response in the brain with the MRI or Qeeg or whatever, or a combination. And then they say, now listen. Listen to the illogic. They told the person to do some mind stuff. And then they looked at the response in the brain. But then they in the scientific papers, they'll say, oh, the brain made them think that. What came first? You know, it's like it's. And it's not a chicken and an egg situation. This is literally mind came first. Mind is the creative force we create every next moment. With the way we process stuff. We think, we feel we choose. Choose is is free. Will is a key factor. Um, you know, you know the scripture I lay before you, life and death, blessing and cursing choose life. You. You choose to get angry with someone. Someone doesn't make you angry. You choose to get worked up about something. Someone doesn't make you work. You choose to get upset about something. Someone doesn't make you upset. So in other words, you have creative power in your mind. Your mind is the force. The mind is, to quote Darth Vader, the mind is the force. Seriously. And our mind has these levels and it's connected to the source. And that's where we need to pay attention. And it is metaphysical, but there is physics to explain it. We have electromagnetics. We have quantum physics, we have all these incredible ways of explaining it. And I'll say one more thing. Just to support this, there is more accurate metaphysical or, um, research explaining that the physical, um, is is limited in existence. Once you once this, the soul goes on forever, the mind goes on forever. The reality, these reality beyond this physical life. When the physical body disintegrates, life continues. You continue. There's more evidence for that than there is for use for materialism. And that is interesting. And that's what the general public don't hear about. And that's why I do the work that I do to try and help people experience that. Because not everyone's into philosophy, not everyone's into understanding big words like materialism and reductionism, but everyone can experience life. And if they experience self-regulation, which is bringing a thought into captivity and renewing it on a consistent basis, like all day long, that's when you'll see, oh, wow, my superpower is in my mind. I can tune into wisdom, you know? So there's a long answer. But yes, when we look at it from the wrong angle, we mess things up. And, Ben, can I just say one more thing about this? But I want to bring it into the church. I work in all environments, but in what I'm seeing a lot of in the church and in any environment where there's a lot of rules and this is not meant as a criticism, it's meant as a wake up call. Uh, what I'm seeing is a lot of bias, literally the same bias that materialistic scientists have. I see that same kind of bias in the church where there is, if you mention anything like the word energy or whatever, there's oh, that's evil, that's bad, that's new age. Energy is what enables us to do StreamYard and have this conversation. No energy, no cell phone, no no zoom, no StreamYard, no lights in church, no, you know, no. No ability to drive your car. That's energy. You'd be dead without energy. Energy is the source. Energy is this creative power. God is the source of all energy. God is energy. And so the church has these rules and that that that that limit people's ability to see beyond. So if something feels slightly different, they don't question, they just immediately label and judge and all that kind of stuff. So it's to keep your mind very focused on open, keep your mind open to wisdom and intuition, and you'll find a lot more peace. Instead of thinking, oh, I'm depressed, I'm evil, I'm a sinner. It's a bad thing. No, what is that depression telling you? You're not depression. You're not anxiety. Anxiety and depression are absolutely wonderful warning signals telling you that something's going on in your life. And if you face them full on, you will get that information. So I just wanted to throw that in as a sidebar. No. No, please. I the more of you, the better. Honestly. Um, I've been reading Miracles by CS Lewis again, and it's really interesting because the first few chapters, he deals a lot with the non-materialistic origins of rationality and reason and how you just simply cannot. It's the reductionistic explanation of these things just it falls apart immediately. So the timing is fascinating on both of those polarities when it comes to the church. And I'm sure the world and I'd imagine secular colleagues where I'm sure you're very frustrated at their conclusions based on what seems like very obvious evidence, there seems to be, at the root of it, a core of of choice, of morality, of responsibility. And I think both polarities tend to get this wrong. So I'd love your input on how much is the secularist motivated? Not necessarily by a true belief in a purely materialistic world, but rather a desire to be morally, you know, have moral autonomy and or or let me put it this way, they don't want the responsibility that their choices could have impacted the place that they find themselves in with their their mental health. Were on the other side. Of course, you have the problem. Where in the Christian world, you know, there's no sense of it being something that is just part of a sick, broken world that needs to be dealt with with science and help and medication, etc.. Is choice and the resistance of it or the overapplication of it part of this conversation choice is absolutely key because that's what creates the choices, what creates. So it's the it's the activating catalyst or button or whatever you want to say for for things to be created, we create we've been given creative power, that concept of secular this and Christian that or religion that. Um, that's something I need to clear up because I see this. It doesn't. It doesn't matter what you believe, everyone falls into that same trap. So it's not that secularist thinking is this in Christian thinking is that there's a philosophy that's applied that's different, but the same underlying thing of, um, victimhood. Um, blame the devil, blame your parents, blame. It's happens. Whatever you believe in. It is a consistent human thing. And it comes from the fact that as humans, no matter what you believe, we have choice and we can choose as we operate as individuals in society. But at the end of the day, I can guide you, but I can't choose for you. You can only choose for yourself. So you can, no matter what kind of level of support or environment you grow up in, you make your own choices. And those choices are coming from the conscious mind. And there's different levels of your mind. And the conscious mind is is awake for simple, um, hang on, I need to explain the mind, but I just want to make sure that we that that I answer your question because part of this answer is going to be to understand the mind. It's really important. And where choice fits into mind and what mind actually is in a little bit more detail. But, um, so your direct question was, can you just say very clearly, I think that from those outside of a Judeo-Christian perspective, I feel like the deference to everything being a physical problem in some part, at least from my vantage point, seems to be a unwillingness to accept personal responsibility as part of the reason they find themselves in the position that they're in. Yeah. Okay. So maybe that is the best, most succinct way to ask that question. So the personal responsibility aspect, that's what I was also trying to say. And I didn't say it very I didn't clearly say it. So let me clearly say it. That thing of not taking personal responsibility is as strong in the church as it is in the world. So it is across the board. I don't see any difference, nor do other scientists that are in the field with me. Um, it's a human thing to not really look at, to look for any excuse. The devil made me do it. Um, the. This made me do it. It's my mother's fault. It's that one's fault. It's the society I'm in. The fact is that we are affected by everything that we live in. As a human. You live in life. You live in your environment. You live in your belief systems. You live in your, um, home that you were brought up in the nurturing. You live in a socio political economic environment. You live in a country. You live in a philosophy in a country like individualism in in United States, versus more community orientation in somewhere like Taiwan or something. So there is all of that is your environment and it's affecting you as a unique individual. It's coming at you as a unique individual. You have the power, the ability, the skill, the brilliance to be able to stand back and observe. This is who I am at my core. This is the influence life is having on me, from my belief systems to the traumas, to the good things, to the bad things, to the everything else. And I can decide how I want this to affect me and how I want it to play out into the future. And that applies to humans. And that can be disrupted in multiple ways. It can be disrupted by a very materialistic view, which is one of okay, you don't really have any control. I mean, there's there's been a lot of popularity around. I'm trying to think of the scientist's name. And then it kind of fell out of popularity about the there's been a lot of discussion that we don't have free will as humans, and that there's everything just is. Well, Sam Harris yes, but there's that other scientists that just would. And his name will come back in a moment. His books were all about two months ago. Um, and he was all over the place. But his arguments are very, very flawed. And other scientists, even that other scientists have pulled out the flaws. And in any of those, we don't have free will arguments. One of the main flaws that is always consistently pointed out by the other side of philosophers and scientists challenging those ideas, um, is that you chose to say we don't have a choice. And that's a very core underlying. Then there's a lot more as well. And then there's just the inconsistencies in science about physical generating, the metaphysical and so on. So having said all of that, we we've got to recognize the essence of our responsibility, that our choices have impact. And this is where I love the field of psycho neurobiology, because psycho meaning mind or the level spirit, soul, spirit and soul. And there's I'll give you the sciency names in a moment. And then body, which is brain and body. Body refers to brain and body the biology. So psycho neurobiology is mind brain body connection. And what we do with and the order is mind brain body not body brain mind or brain body. It's mind ninety nine percent brain and body one percent. And obviously because we live through our nervous system, we set up feedback loops. So if I may, I would love to just briefly explain the levels, how it works and where this whole exiting exiting a triggered moment works and how we can change and what capturing thoughts. If I could maybe just take five minutes to explain that, or six minutes to explain that. Is that good with you, Ben? I'd love it. Anywhere you want to go. Okay, okay. I think it'll just help people understand, um. The concept. Okay. So I keep saying ninety nine percent is mind and brain and body are one percent. So brain and body are physical. Yeah. Those of you that are listening, I'm holding up a model of the brain. The brain isn't you. The brain is something you control. You are your mind. So mind is Eunice. Your aliveness, your ability to love, to hate, to question, to be curious, to, um, to experience a sunset, to think abstractly, to create, to imagine, to intuit all those beautiful things. To perceive, to see things in different ways. To change, to grow, to learn. That is mind. It is all that stuff. But there's another aspect to mind. It also drives your physiology. So it drives all the psychology stuff, but it drives the physiology. So right at this moment you are breathing oxygen in. Carbon dioxide out. When you dead, you don't breathe. What controls breathing while you're alive? Mind. Your heart's beating. What controls your heart? Beating mind. What controls your brain? Being able to process and wire networks into the brain and the body. Mind. Mind drives your physiology. At this moment, you are making eight hundred thousand to a million new cells literally every second of every day. Your mind controls that. The moment you stop physically living in a physical body, that stops. So mind drives your psychology, your neurology and your physiology. Down to the chemicals, down to your immune system, down to your DNA. So those cells that I spoke about, the eight hundred thousand, two million cells that you make every second, the those cells build your organs and your organs build your systems, and you make you constantly rebuilding the organs of your of your of your systems, of your body. There's these cycles. And scientists have even, you know, managed to kind of estimate the sort of time that it takes to rewire or Network, rebuild organs of your body and all that kind of stuff, which is super interesting, but your quality of the cells, which means the quality of your organs, which means the quality of your system, which means the quality of your physical nature and your physiology is based on your thought life, which is your mind in action, your thought life is your mind builds thoughts. Your mind builds life into thoughts made of memories. So this conversation is an experience. Your mind takes this conversation and builds all the details, which are the memories of what we're saying into a thought. And that is this conversation between Caroline and Ben about mental health or whatever. It's about mind or whatever. You label it so your mind does that, then your mind takes, makes, and it's literally if you can imagine if I do a circle around me, that's kind of what we we don't know for sure. But what we estimate that your particular electromagnetic gravitational quantum field of your mind is using physics terms, and you have yours and I have mine. And then we interact. So we each have this uniqueness and it goes through our body as well driving all this physiology and stuff. So and and in this mind zone as you, as people are listening to me at four hundred billion actions per second and foster my words. Your words are memories that are accumulating into a little cloud of energy, which is a thought. So we've got these each experience we have or these little clouds, if you can visualize around you and through you and as your as you make them with your mind, as soon as they are, as they're being made, they get copied and put into the brain, literally like a little energy flow into the brain. And as soon as that energy flow hits the brain, the brain responds because the brain's a responder and it will respond electromagnetically and chemically neurochemically genetically. And that makes something because our mind makes physical. And what physical thing does it make? It makes little proteins and chemicals. And those proteins hold my words as little vibrations. I mean, this is what we're doing. This is the creative force that is inside of us. So if I'm thinking in anger or if I'm someone irritates me in that moment and I feel the need to get angry and, oh, they make me so mad and and you feel yourself getting all worked up, that's what you put in your brain. And that protein is not going to fold properly. It folds incorrectly. It upsets the neurochemical balance. It alerts your hypothalamic pituitary axis, which controls stress, which is a great thing, but only if you putting good stuff in your brain. But you put bad stuff in your brain. So now it's alerted. Oops, there's a problem and it goes into high alert. Your immune system is activated. Soldiers get ready. Your heart starts pumping more blood. A whole lot of physiology without going into hours of detail is responding. That's this is this is psycho neurobiology in action. So you with your thought life, determine literally the health of those cells that cumulatively over time, if you constantly getting angry and getting triggered by that political situation that social media those comments and you don't manage it. You don't capture those thoughts and renew the mind. Guess what? You're building all kinds of distorted networks into your brain and body, because not only do you build the little networks in your brain that look like trees, but you build, you build into every cell of your body, and you have thirty seven to one hundred trillion cells of your body. The network travels throughout the brain and the body. This conversations in your brain and even down to your fingertips everywhere. So if it's chaotic and I don't manage it, I am going to build this wiring into my brain cumulatively over time. That drains my physiology because God made us perfect. Our body is wired for love. Our mind is wired for love. Our psycho neurobiology is wired for love. But we have free will. So knowing that we would make a lot of bad choices because you have to. Because that's how you learn. That's how you grow. You make a mistake. We take responsibility, which goes to your question make a mistake, take responsibility. Don't blame the devil. Don't think I'm a bad, big, terrible person. Don't blame someone else. Take responsibility. That then rewires your physiology, changes the thing you learn and you grow. You're on this earth to learn how to learn and grow in love, and reach out to humanity and contribute your gifts to humanity. You're not here to judge others. You're not here to criticize others. You're not here to get mad all the time. And if you stay mad and in that mad zone which we see all around us in this country, all around us, in the world, and people get so worked up, you are consistently battering your brain and your body. Now, what does that do to your mind? Okay, so your mind, you're thinking, okay, well, my mind's doing it. How do I control my mind? We've got three. We've got different parts. So we've got this one part of our mind that's called the conscious mind. And the conscious mind is only awake when you're awake. It's very focused. It can handle one conversation at a time. Like you. And I couldn't have concentrate if someone else was talking to us. That's your conscious mind. It's awake when you're awake, right? And it has two parts. It has what I like to call the messy part or the toddler part that is beautiful. Messy in a beautiful way because you're learning. Hungry to learn. Think of a toddler always learning new stuff and making mistakes. And and then the parent guides the toddler. So I'm doing this with my hands. For those of you that are listening, I'm holding up my hands in like a seesaw and think of two sides of a coin. Visualize that one side is this messy part that you need to gather the data and process it. And then the other side of the coin is to guide that gathering and and processing. And then together a choice is made. So gather all this data in this up down way and make kind of messy way. The guiding part is to guide that gathering of the data and processing. And then collectively, a choice is made. Now all of that is informed by the biggest part of you, which is your non-conscious non not unconscious. Unconscious is when you're asleep. It's a brain state, not a mind level okay. So your non-conscious inner in your non-conscious drives. The show, your non-conscious is just phenomenal. Gift. It is brilliant wise. Every memory you've ever built into a thought is stored there. It is your ability to reason logically, to think in an abstract way, to create, to generate, to intuit, to get wisdom, and to know when you need to reach out to the wisdom from God. I like to say godness, because I think it keeps the bigness of God in place and reconnected to the source of wisdom. But we have to get into our level of intuitive wisdom, and that's through a process of reasoning and logic and creativity and imagination and abstract thinking. And then we get to intuition. When we get intuition, we get wisdom, and wisdom says, I need more wisdom. And then we set up this pathway that a Christian would describe as talking to the Holy Spirit. That's pretty much what I've just described. Okay, but we have to do that. So our messy mind, it's very independent. That's the word I was looking for like a toddler's independent. That's why I use it. And that you need to be because that's how you gather data and grow. But the problem is, if you leave a toddler to their own devices, we all know what would happen. They'd hurt themselves all the time. Okay, so you've got to have the guidance of the parent conscious mind. And the minute that the parent conscious mind starts guiding, that activates the connection between the parent guiding conscious part of your other side of the coin, parent mind, whatever you want to call it. And that deep, intuitive, non-conscious mind. You could talk about that as being your spiritual level. You could talk about your conscious mind being your soul, and you could talk about your non-conscious being, your spiritual. That gives you a nice anchor in the wording that people that listen to this podcast are used to. Spiritual body. Okay. So in between that we have the subconscious, and the subconscious is like a holding room or a waiting room at like a doctor's office where you wait for the to go in one at a time. The reason we have that is because the conscious mind is slow and not in a bad way, but it handles one thing at a time. The nonconscious handles an infinite. It's no limit. It can handle infinite number at a time. So your conscious mind and body can't handle the power of the nonconscious. The spirit's too powerful for the physical body, so it has to be slow down so that it's slowed down, and only certain things that are major issues in your life that you need to focus on, good and bad, are placed at any one moment into the subconscious. Okay, so there's this big, brilliant, intuitive twenty four over seven powerful unconscious, the subconscious, which is where things like a holding room and in the conscious mind. So now what happens is when we start making and then the conscious mind puts all that into the, into the brain. Okay. So now if I'm triggered and worked up and someone's irritated me or someone said something and I catch myself in a people pleasing moment and then being mad at myself, whatever those moments that, um, all of that, what was being said by that person is first absorbed by the non-conscious mind milliseconds before you consciously aware you won't feel the time difference, but a whole bunch of stuff has happened. Your unconscious mind is filtered, neutralized, found the thought, that toxic thought that, um, this sort of thing has happened before it's activated. But not only does the unconscious mind find whatever's linked to what's currently happening, it also has the solution. Let me stress that you have the solution inside of you so it activates the problem with a solution, puts that in the subconscious, sends signals via your emotions, your behaviours, your perceptions and your bodily sensations. And so by the time you consciously aware, you've already had a bodily sensation, blood rushing to your face, gut gut wrenching, whatever, and you've already and now you've got all these, you've got these thoughts coming up. So you've got thoughts coming up, you've got sensations from your body. And this is where we need help in a hurry. This is where you now in this state where if you don't self-regulate, if you don't capture that thought, if you don't stand back into the parent mind, stand back and observe, which is a skill that we have as humans and need to develop more mind management is self-regulation. It is in that moment learning to okay, I'm irritated. I'm going to stand back and observe instead of oh, he's making me mad. I shift to I am irritated, I stand back, I activate the conscious parent mind, I activate, which connects me to wisdom, reasoning, intuition, all that good stuff. And now I can say, okay, I acknowledge that that person's working me up. I can feel it in my body. I'm going to take a few deep breaths, which is going to signal to send brain waves to my brain and my body signal to the different parts of my body that I need to calm down. ET cetera. ET cetera. And so I get my physiology under control. Now I can focus on the thoughts coming up. And so. And then I can start doing a mind shift. So in summary, helping Harry, I give you a process with lots of techniques. So if you find yourself shifting into people pleasing or you find yourself getting angry, or if you find yourself whatever, um, thing, black and white, thinking, wanting to punch someone in the face, imposter syndrome, all these things that can trip us up. Regret cycles. Big one. Feeling under pressure. Feeling totally stressed out. Exhausted. When we have those trigger moments, we can practice in that 60s in that minute we can practice. Aha! Instead of being consumed and drawn in and getting stuck in the one percent. If I do that, I ignore the parent. The the messy part gets more messy, and then I create a loop between the conscious mind and the brain. And the brain just does what the mind tells it to do. So now we get a messy reaction in the brain. We get consumed, we get lost. We get more depressed, more anxious. We fight more. We suppress it for a moment, and then it comes back again. And we live in these loops, which is just such a waste of time and eventually build up to illness and mental challenges and so on. Or I can say, okay, in these next 60s, I'm going to stand back and I'm going to observe myself. I see I'm frustrated, so I'm going to mind hack, okay, I'm going to use a mind hack. And I acknowledge, Caroline, you're frustrated. That person said something that really upset you. You're going to shift into people pleasing so you don't ghost yourself. You acknowledge that immediately gives you power, changes your psycho neurobiology. You're in the driver's seat. You can do some breathing which signals and calms down the brainwaves and all that stuff. And then you can do a mind shift, which is okay, I choose to be angry or irritated. I choose not to be. I choose in this moment not to be. I choose to go and do something else for a few minutes, or I choose to just keep quiet in the meeting and let them mouth off, but I'm not going to absorb it and then whatever. So it's it's basically the mind hack and mind shift. And I explain the process very clearly in the book with lots of techniques. But that's the basic underlying philosophy and the power that we have. It's almost as if, you know, we started this with the idea that the mind is, of course, integrated in part of the body, but it is something separate. And part of what the mind is capable of doing is standing outside of the body. Maybe I'm not using the exact right vernacular, but but, but what I love about what you described is that in some ways, the remedy for the mind is to do the very thing the mind was created to do. Exactly. To step outside of the process and say, whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay, I understand what's happening here. I'm going to take control of the situation. I'm not going to allow it to victimize me, but I'm going to establish rhythms and patterns to better regulate what's going on here and take control of the situation. And it's so brilliant. The one thing I would say, and you have very little time left. So I would be remiss not to get your quick thoughts on this before I let you go to your very busy schedule is I feel like part of the world's trouble is it's unmoored from a from the source, and it's unmoored from the sense of what's true. And so how much of the ability to stand outside of what's happening to you can be done outside of a grounding and truth about who I am, about where my value comes from, about why I'm here, all of these sort of big existential questions almost feel like the recalibrating foundation required to put that process back into place and take control of that again. I know I keep coming back to the metaphysical side. That is obviously my area of passion and the subject of this podcast often. But what are your what are your and again, you know, we can just you can just be like, hey, I love this, but I got to go. You can tell me at any time. But thoughts on that before we end here. So quick quick quick answer. So the mind is the biggest part. So the metaphysical is the biggest part of us. It's knowledge. Knowledge is power. Understanding the mind not just quoting something, not just saying bring all thoughts but actually understanding. What does that look like? That is where our power lies. And so this ability that we have to stand back, visualizing in the conscious mind the messy parts. Good. But you can't get stuck in the messy or you will stay messy. You've got to act. You've got to. As you stand back, you immediately activate the parent mind. You immediately act. Activate access to intuition and that's a skill you can develop. It's mind management. It's learning self-regulation and we need to make a choice to actually do that, because we can get very sucked into the messy mind brain loop of the overstimulation of technology, information overload, etc. so you can just absorb all the stuff, but you don't think deeply about it. We need to stop and say, okay, I'm not going to scroll through Instagram. I'm not going to listen to all these things people are saying. I'm actually going to just take one thought, and I'm going to step back and I'm going to think deeply. Practice thinking people don't think deeply enough often enough. Mind management is a skill that is critical, and it involves stand back, think deeply, don't react. And that's why I hope with, with, with this book to just start training that. Because when you experience the success. I saw this with my patients. I've seen this in research. When you experience success with just the one little thing in 60s, you can you can change your life. Then it takes around seven days to identify a pattern. So if you see, gosh, I keep getting wired and worked up by this, I'm sucking. I'm getting sucked into the social media pattern. It's exhausting me. I want to see, is this a pattern? So you catch yourself in the moment. You learn a technique from the from the book and then catch yourself in the moment. The book trains you how to get into the conscious, into the conscious guiding mind and access the intuitive mind. Then. Then it trains you how to look for a pattern. It takes seven days to more or less seven days to identify patterns. So I've given you tables and things. But watch yourself. How often do I do it? Where the who? The what? The when? The where, the why, the how. If it's a pattern, it's a habit. If it's a habit, it's been there. You took at least sixty three days to wire it in. Habits don't build in twenty one. They build in sixty three. So I've done a lot of research on that. I've got books on that. I have an app called the Neurocycle app. I refer to it in this book. I teach a basic form of it in this book too. It's the underlying principles of how you rewire, how you capture a thought, how you stand back, capture the thought and rewire it. It's it's the process. The neurocycle is the process. You use it in a quick way, in helping a hurry with lots of really cute techniques to, to to help you. And then you use it in over sixty three days in a, in a slightly different way to rewire the habit. So start with the moment. Identify the pattern over seven days and whatever pattern is disruptive, work on that over sixty three because it takes sixty three days at least from the scientific research, not to anyone. That's not even science. That was just a myth. Sixty three days to rewire a network. Okay, so there's there's the short, long answer, but people can find out more. I mean, I've got my podcast doctor, TV show I've got or I'm on every social media platform. Doctor Caroline Leaf, we put up a lot of good posts and things like reels and all that kind of stuff. Lots of books. This book is available wherever books are sold. And then I have doctor. Com is my website and my social media handles are doctor Caroline Leaf. Awesome. Yeah. And we'll put all that up in the intro in the show notes and the links. It'll be everywhere that you can find it. And when this comes out, the book will be out. And I'm assuming they can buy it everywhere and anywhere that books are sold. Absolutely. Um, look, I know you don't have time, and we're out of time here, but, doctor Caroline leaf, thank you. When someone devotes their life to an area of expertise, and then allows the rest of us to grow and learn and benefit from that. That is a blessing. You are doing great work. My prayer is that God uses you extraordinarily, as he already has, but even more. So thank you. Thank you for doing this. We went over about one of twenty five questions. It's probably pretty common, but hopefully we can do this again sometime. We hit a lot of those. You had great questions and I was aware of them. So we kind of hit a lot of we didn't get into the I thing, but we you hit a lot of of the basic things. But I have a whole if people do want to know my opinion on I know you wanted to ask me. I have a whole podcast we did recently and social media posts. If they go to my podcast, they'll find a lot of the things that you want to ask me. I've covered in depth in in the podcast and this book. I talk about it in the book as well. So awesome. Well, there you go. It's the perfect tease. And thank you so much for your great questions and I really enjoyed the conversation. So thank you. Awesome. Well thank you. And uh, yeah, I hope you have a great rest of your tour and great success on the book. Thanks, doctor. Caroline Leaf, thank you, and thank you for your kind words. I appreciate them very much. Thank

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