Master Your MIND, Detox Your Brain & Own Your Identity w/Dr. Caroline Leaf (Part 1) EP 1127

“Toxic positivity is like putting a bandaid on a bullet wound.”Today's guest is Dr. Caroline Leaf. She is a communication pathologist and cognitive neuroscientist specializing in cognitive and metacognitive neuropsychology. Since the early 1980s she has researched the mind-brain connection, the nature of mental health, and the formation of memory. She was one of the first in her field to study neuroplasticity and how the brain can change with directed mind input. She’s also a speaker, podcaster and the author of multiple best-selling books, with her latest being “Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess.” She’s also created an app called Neurocycle which has a 5 Step Process to help you take back control over your thoughts and life, with scientific research showing it reduces anxiety, depression, and toxic thoughts by up to 81%. As a warning, we do briefly go into the discussion around sexual abuse and healing from that. Our conversation was so powerful that I had to split it up into 2 episodes. Make sure to look out for the next episode coming out in a couple of days! In this episode Lewis and Dr. Caroline Leaf discuss how important food is when detoxing the brain, how to get your messy mind under control and what happens if you don’t, why you should do an identity check on yourself once a year, the link between unmanaged stress and the impact on our body, and I open up about some of my experiences overcoming trauma. For more go to: www.lewishowes.com/1127Check out her earlier episode on The School of Greatness: www.lewishowes.com/1079Check out Dr. Caroline Leaf’s website: https://drleaf.com/ Read her new book: Cleaning Up Your Mental MessThe Wim Hof Experience: Mindset Training, Power Breathing, and Brotherhood: https://link.chtbl.com/910-podA Scientific Guide to Living Longer, Feeling Happier & Eating Healthier with Dr. Rhonda Patrick: https://link.chtbl.com/967-podThe Science of Sleep for Ultimate Success with Shawn Stevenson: https://link.chtbl.com/896-pod Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is episode number 1,127 with New York Times bestselling author Dr. Caroline Leaf. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week, we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Lynda Point Dexter said, "One small crack does not mean that you are broken. It means that you were put to the test and you didn't fall apart." And Dan Millman said, "You don't have to control your thoughts.

• 0:42Lewis Howes?

  You just have to stop letting them control you." My guest today is Dr. Caroline Leaf, and she is a communication pathologist and cognitive neuroscientist specializing in cognitive and metacognitive neuropsychology. Since the early 1980s, she has researched the mind-brain connection, the nature of mental health, and the formation of memory. She was one of the first in her field to study neuroplasticity and how the brain can change with directed mind input. She's also a speaker, podcaster, and the author of multiple bestselling books, with her latest being Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess. She has also created an app called NeuroCycle, which has a five-step process to help you

• 1:24Lewis Howes?

  tape back control over your thoughts and life with scientific research showing it reduces anxiety, depression, and toxic thoughts by up to 81%. And in this episode, we discuss how important food is when detoxing the brain, how to get your messy mind under control, and what happens if you don't, why you should do an identity check on yourself once a year, and I loved her thoughts on this, the link between unmanaged stress and the impact on our body, and I open up about some of my experiences overcoming trauma as well. Our conversation was so powerful that I split it up into two episodes. So make sure to look out for the next episode coming in a couple of days. And as a warning, we do briefly go into the discussion around sexual abuse and healing

• 2:10Lewis Howes?

  From that, if you're inspired by this, make sure to share this with someone that you think would be inspired as well. You can copy and paste the link wherever you're listening to this, or just use the show notes link at lewishouse.com/1127 with all the information there. Again, I'm so excited about this. I hope you enjoy this as well. And in just a moment, I bring you the one and only Dr. Caroline Leaf.

• 2:34Lewis Howes?

  Welcome back everyone to the School of Greatness. Very excited about our guest. Dr. Caroline Leaf is back on the show. Good to see you Caroline. How you doing?

• 2:42Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So good to see you Lewis. I enjoyed our conversation last time and it definitely didn't end. So I'm really, really excited to be back.

• 2:47Lewis Howes?

  It didn't end. I wanted to go for like 10 more hours.

• 2:50Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Me too. We were just so into it.

• 2:52Lewis Howes?

  The comments, the engagement, the, uh, the results people are getting from your strategies and tools have been mind blowing. And I'm, I want to continue the conversation because I think there's a lot we could do to help people improve the quality of their mental health, improve the quality of understanding their minds, their body, their emotions and their life. And the first question I wanted to ask you is how important is, is food when we are looking to detox our brains in general, how important is the foods we put in our body for our brains?

• 3:23Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  I'm so glad you asked that question. And just quickly to pick up on, I was telling you just before we started how people are still commenting after, like weeks later, months later, after the last podcast on how they love your show and how they loved our conversations. So thank you for the opportunity. You know, really you're a great interviewer and it's just wonderful chatting to you. Food is such an important thing. So basically we know that and, but it does have a massive impact. But what so much, so for me is so interesting about the food side is the fact that our mind controls the digestive system. So our mind is our aliveness. So the difference between you and I and a dead person is our mind.

• 4:00Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So for our gut to function and to be able to digest all the parts of our gut to be able to digest food, our mind's actually running the show. And most people don't actually think about it like that. But if you're eating a really healthy, organic, sustainable farm to table, local, all the right, you know, the real food.

• 4:16Lewis Howes?

  Right. Non-GMO, dairy.

• 4:18Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Non-GMO, the whole, what, yeah. And you, but you're in a, in a, in a mood or you're not dealing with something traumatic, you know, you're not dealing with an issue that's like a relationship issue. You're just in a bad state of mind as you're eating. You will, you could lose up to eighty six percent of that nutrition just by the state of your mind, because your mind is driving your, your, is, but your mind is basically that, whatever you're thinking about is activated in your mind, in your brain and in your body. And then your enteric nervous system, the whole thing is activated and your enteric nervous system, which is the connection between the mind and the brain, this feedback loop, is driving the whole process. So, or being driven by your mind. So it responds very, very quickly. There's a very quick direct link between mind, brain, gut, very,

• 5:02Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  very fast. It's throughout the whole body, but it's extremely fast to the gut. And the gut has as many neurons in as the spinal cord. So we have about three hundred thousand neurons in our gut, as we, as which is about the amount we have in our spinal cord. So we, you probably, you would have heard of it, the gut-brain connection. And these, in the last ten years, it's become a huge field of research in the microbiome and all that stuff, and how that's very, a lot to do with our intelligence and how serotonin ninety five percent is in the gut and ninety percent of dopamine. And so all these things, there's such a relationship. But what we don't always think about is that that thought that you're thinking in your mind is actually activating and growing that, whatever you're thinking about and whatever you're adding on, changes are happening in the brain, that's going

• 5:43Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  to your gut. And everything involved in the process of digestion, including the pancreas and the gallbladder and the different parts of the intestine, the stomach, everything is being driven by these energy waves from the mind. So if our thought is toxic, you can, for example, let's just take one of the organs, the pancreas. The pancreas secretes twenty different neuropeptides that are required for the assimilation of food. And if you are in this mood or worried or anxious or not dealing with something or having a fight with someone, those twenty neuropeptides won't be secreted properly, or maybe only a few of them. And that's going to impact everything else. And then you just don't digest. The bloating people get, the gut issues, the sore stomachs, or leaky gut, constantly

• 6:25Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  not dealing with our stuff, wears down the lining of the gut. I mean, it's just creating inflammation, the, that gut bacteria get affected, your good bacteria go into hiding and it's a chameleon different things. So that is so important. So I like to talk a little bit about the mindset behind the meal. As opposed to just the meal and we focus so much on the food and diet that I think we've forgotten the most important component, which is mind. So I think that should be, we should manage that first and then use that to manage.

• 6:55Lewis Howes?

  So can you eat, so can you eat um bad foods and still have a good mindset around it and process those foods in a healthy way? So you actually

• 7:06Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  I've been asked it.

• 7:07Lewis Howes?

  To take the nutrients out of it or it doesn't affect you, your gut or your, you know, building fat cells, whatever, with this greasy fro- fried, um, you know, sugary processed foods. Could you still have a healthy body with the right mindset? Or do you also need the right nutrients and the right mindset to go?

• 7:27Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  You need, you need both. You need both. Eventually that junk food is going to accumu- accumulate in your body. And we, you know, we know that we are eventually going to create an environment because our brain and body are the environment for the mind to operate in. So if the environment of the brain and the mind are affected physically by, you know, junk food and as you said, the processed foods and things, it is going to wear the body down. Those excess chemicals, they, you know, they cause leaky gut. They do all those things to the cardiovascular system. And we know there's just so much research around that. So it's both, it's both.

• 7:57Lewis Howes?

  But what I'm hearing you say is you could have all the healthiest foods and be thinking toxic thoughts or in uh, uh, you know, abandoning yourself over and over or staying in the wrong relationship or not speaking up for yourself or not forgiving something from your past and holding on to that. And you, it won't do much for you to have those healthy foods or it might create inflammation still or have leaky gut because of the mindset. Is that what I'm hearing?

• 8:23Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Exactly. That's exactly what I'm saying. And that's, that's an aspect that people don't recognize. And it's not spoken about. It's not studied enough. It's, you know, we always talk about four pillars or three pillars. People talk about diet, exercise, managing stress. As though they're three separate components. Meanwhile, the driving force is your mind because if you did, none of those other things matter anyway. So your mind is your life and it drives the, drives all the others. So we've got to focus on the mindset because you, you maybe, how many times do we hear of people that they are in their early fifties and they've been Exercising and they've been eating well and they seem to have they're always smiling and they seem to be fine and they dropped down there.

• 8:58Lewis Howes?

  They have a heart attack or something, yeah.

• 8:59Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Yeah, they have a heart attack or they, you know, they, yeah, something like that and think how, I mean, they're so healthy. So your, your mind overrides that benefit. So you, you've got to think of mind creates the changes in the brain, which then, which and, and the changes in the body that are either strengthening, strengthening the environment of brain and body or weakening. And if you cumulatively don't manage the toxic issues in your life, your, your body slowly but surely changing the, the, the brain body environment slowly but surely changing in the wrong direction. So we move between this percentage of thirty five to ninety eight percent increased invulnerability to disease. The more we unmanaged, the more we have an unmanaged mind.

• 9:40Lewis Howes?

  So I have two questions. The first one I ask is about, what are the most important practices for first detoxing the brain and then I want to talk about the mind afterwards, but what are the, the actual practices for detoxing the brain?

• 9:55Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So the, so the mind is going to do the detoxing. So the primary, the primary thing is that the mind detoxes. So the brain isn't self-generated, generating and like genes aren't, aren't, um, it's, it's, there's a fancy terminology for it, but basically it means that the genes, genes can't switch themselves on. The brain can't change itself. And we often hear the brain, often hear in the media, things like the brain can change itself. But if you did, give me a dead brain and show me a change and it doesn't change. But if I put Q E Gs and F M R Is on you and I right now, in this conversation, we'll see massive changes happening inside of our brain. So the first aspect is brain health is very reliant on mind health. And that is, that is very primary. And so mind health is very much around keeping a messy mind managed.

• 10:39Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So I'm not sure if we spoke about this in the last interview because you spoke about so much stuff, but what I, how I explain it is that we've got a messy mind and a wise mind. And that's like coming from, we can define each of those, but basically your messy mind is, it's experimental. Um, every moment is an experimental moment in the life of a human when you're awake, because if you don't know what's happening next to you, we can't control people, events or circumstances. So everything is chance that's coming up in the next few moments. We can predict to a certain level of accuracy of what's coming up. And the more familiar you are with an environment and people, the more accurate your prediction, but it's still a prediction. It's not an accurate fact. So based on that, we are very experimental. And, and that is okay. We have a psycho, neurobiology, mind, brain, body.

• 11:22Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Is very geared to experimentation. It's very geared to hypothesizing. So we live a very hypo- hypothesizing type lifestyle. So all happening very fast on the unconscious level. And so we hypothesize and experimenting and we make mistakes, but that's okay, because in a mistake, if you're managing it, you'll you'll take the messiness and you'll repair it and you'll grow. So it's kind of experiment, mess, repair, grow, experiment, succeed, don't then you grow. And you're kind of doing this all day long in everything that you do, relationships, work, relaxation, sport, whatever. Um. So that process is something that we are designed to go through. The problem is that uh brain health is, and that's right, that'll bring brain health and that'll bring body health, because it's mind, brain, body.

• 12:05Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Um. But if we are have a messy mind only and we don't manage it or we only manage it intermittently. It's because our mind's always working. It never switches off until you die. So it's working at night, you dream with your mind. You you can even train yourself to dream differently. I mean, that's how powerful the mind is. You can, and I'm about to do a research experiment on that, where you can train your mind to train your brain to actually change things like nightmares and things like that, which is super interesting. So it's really interesting. So in other words, messy mind, messy man, brain, messy body. So that's really vital. So that'd be the first thing. The second thing.

• 12:36Lewis Howes?

  Messy mind, messy brain, messy body.

• 12:40Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Yeah, so it's.

• 12:40Lewis Howes?

  You can't you can't detox the brain or well, I guess you could detox the body a little bit by not by the physical environment, the substances you put in your body. But what I'm hearing you say is if you don't learn to detox the the mind first, you won't get the optimal benefits of that environmental uh substances.

• 13:00Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Exactly. So for example, if you go to do a workout, but you're going to do a workout with an attitude of, ah, I just got to get it over and done with, or um, I hate this, or I wish this was over. And if you, I I never let yourself do that when you're working out, because as soon as you do, you send a message to every DNA, every part of every cell of your body to actually go into like a, almost like a. Um. A freeze mode. Do you know when people are starving and then their body hangs on to food? If you send that message to your body that you don't want to be here while you're exercising, you actually reduce your um the DNA's functionality and it drops down, your your benefit drops in in the exercise routine. So you may be doing the most amazing workout, but your mind will determine the effectiveness and the benefit of the workout. So it's got to be mind, but we do have to eat properly. And I've written books, thinking eat yourself smart.

• 13:45Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  I I am a avid avid believer in eating healthy and and um and we can talk about that real food and exercise every day. I'm just come out of hot yoga two hours ago and sauna, infrared saunas, I do it all. I do everything that I can do possibly because I am looking after the organs through which my mind works. So I'm trying to create a very compatible relationship between them because there's a magical relationship between them.

• 14:08Lewis Howes?

  Has there has ever been a time where you, I mean, you've been studying this for decades?

• 14:13Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Thirty eight years.

• 14:14Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, decades. I mean, when you were like six years old, you started studying this, so. Um.

• 14:22Lewis Howes?

  Was there ever a time during your intense research where you knew this, but you were practicing something different? Maybe you're eating clean and you're working out, but you're like, gosh, I don't want to be here or I'm stressed out by this or my work or whatever it is. And you you saw the negative effects of that. And then was there a time when you switched it? I'm assuming there was, and you never went back and you started to see other benefits.

• 14:45Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Definitely. It's been up and down. I've always been very driven, so I've always been very into exercise and and throwing myself into everything. So everything I do, I throw myself into one hundred percent. But as I as I've gone through life experiences, you know, having I've got four children and they're adult children. And that comes with its own incredible joys, but incredible challenges. And as you would know, and so there there's been times where you, you know, even like in I've I've been married for thirty four years and we have an incredible marriage. But we've had our ups and downs. So whenever there's been, it's the relational stuff that's grabbed me the most.

• 15:15Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 15:15Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And.

• 15:16Lewis Howes?

  It seems like relationships are the things that bring people the most joy and the most pain.

• 15:22Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  It's because we are enhanced by each other. And that's something we should talk about. Enhancement versus competitive culture and the whole deep meaningful relationship thing. That is such a cool. Incredible concept and it goes beyond Darwin back to Lamarckian theory and that kind of stuff. But it's really and it it does impact. So to to it's a great thing to discuss it in in terms of. I mean, there also there's been like over the years, business stuff and things, but I think the thing that's affecting me the most. I find myself maybe working out at Orange Theory or something and something's happened in a relational si- situation. And I find myself so absorbed with that that I'm I'm exhausted on the treadmill. I can't. So then I.

• 15:57Lewis Howes?

  Focus you don't.

• 15:57Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Yeah, no.

• 15:58Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 15:59Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And I'm just not able to do what I could normally do. So then I immediately will switch back and say, okay, I'm here now for myself for this. I need to, I need to, I can't help others unless I'm actually building my own body up and I discipline my mind, I catch it. Push it back into that mode of totally focusing on what I'm doing and it shifts completely. My suddenly I have all the energy in the world and there's a difference.

• 16:20Lewis Howes?

  Is that part of getting rid of the messy mind?

• 16:23Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  It's managing the messy mind. We never get rid of our messy mind. We need to be friends with our messy mind. It's a very nice concept.

• 16:30Lewis Howes?

  What is the messy mind? What is it? What's it feel like?

• 16:33Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  The messy mind is the experimental mind as I was mentioning. So basically it feels like I don't know what I'm doing or somewhere. And I'm kind of like, I'm not sure what I'm doing. I don't know if this is right, if this is okay, if this is the. It's it's also things like someone says something to you and you react and you realize, oopsie, I said the wrong thing. Or I misheard or I made an assumption or um I'm being, you see a pattern in your in your life where you keep on reacting to certain things. Or you see that you're waking up in the morning complaining all the time and you know that that's that's messy mind. It's where where we find ourselves feeling discomfort, feeling like something's just not right, feeling ourselves irritable, worked up. All those those those emotions, those are messy mind and those are totally fine. Now, here, this is so fascinating because those are are fine if they're managed.

• 17:17Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So what we need to do is own them, give ourselves permission to experience them because you cannot grow unless you understand what they feel like. So get irritated. Not, I'm not saying choose to get irritated, but if you get irritated, own it. And then say, okay, well, why did I do this? What can I learn from this? How can I grow from this? That's a managed mind. That's what our psycho neurobiology is designed to do. We're not designed to be these perfect toxic positivity creatures. We are very, we're very normal. Yeah, we're not supposed to be these, it's okay to get, it's okay to, it's way better to actually get frustrated and say, I'm so sorry, I got frustrated because of, I'm not gonna do it, I'm gonna do it less next time or whatever. That's so normal.

• 17:57Lewis Howes?

  What's the difference between toxic positivity and wise mind?

• 18:02Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Okay, so wise mind is the ability to recognize, I don't have, I don't know everything. I need other people. I um, I recognize I've hurt other people. I recognize it's okay to cry, it's okay to be sad, it's okay to be depressed. I recognize that anxiety, depression, these are signals and when my body aches, this, that's telling me something. It's the wisdom to stand back and see another perspective. It's the, it's having deep discussions like this where you explore philosophy and explore, that's wise mind. It's if you ask me um, for advice on something, or I asked you for advice on something and you gave me advice, wise mind. When you talk to your, your kids and your, your, your, your partners or your friends and you say, hey, this happened, what do you think? And they give you advice, wise mind.

• 18:44Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 18:44Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So wise minds in all of us, but we don't tune into it sufficiently. And it's at our core of being and, and we see this um, playing out in the neurobiology. Because we don't have any, um, any proteins or, right, let's take it from the organs to the cells to the the, the parts of the cell, down to the subatomic particles. We have nothing in our entire physi- physique, physical body and brain that is for toxicity. What we, uh, what we have is for managing it. So that's so different. We, so in other words, we have grace to make mistakes and toxic positivity is all about. That kind of almost putting a bandaid, it's like a bandaid on a wound. It's it's one of my friends says bandaid on a bullet wound.

• 19:27Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Um. You mean, you can't put a bandaid on a bullet wound, and that's what toxic positivity is doing. And things like gratitude statements and affirmations. If used incorrectly, well, but they are very much tools of the toxic positivity movement. But if you're not dealing with your issue. You can't just slap a positive affirmation on or a gratitude statement or practice. It's not gonna do anything.

• 19:46Lewis Howes?

  So how do you?

• 19:47Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Kidding yourself.

• 19:48Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. So should we use mantras and affirmations? Is there a way to use them in a positive way, an effective way, I should say, or?

• 19:54Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Definitely.

• 19:55Lewis Howes?

  So how how do we use mantras, tools, affirmations? At positive attitude without it's um being toxic positivity?

• 20:08Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And I would do the way that I explain that is you do it in step five of the neurocycle. So the system I've developed for over thirty eight years, which is basically a delivery system for how to. It's not a technique. It's a delivery, like like Amazon. Amazon's a delivery system that works brilliantly. Even if you don't like Amazon, it works. The system works. It delivers anything, anywhere, anytime. Then the concept of the neurocycle is is a system of how we can directly. Manage our mind, our inner wise mind, talking to our messy mind to direct the neuroplasticity of our brain to be able to then. Move in the right direction and accept the ups and downs of life and get that sense of peace, which is not toxic positivity. It's actually a sense of peace. It's an acceptance of the uncertainties of life and so on.

• 20:49Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So um the the what I have found from my research is that if you have an issue in your life. And there's something that you're battling. So maybe it's just that you wake up complaining every morning or something. I'll take something like that because it was a discussion recently I had with someone. And something I used to do. I used to wake up like worked up in the morning and I got that under control and it changed my life completely. Because it wrecks your brain, totally wrecks your brain, wrecks the day. And you can chat about that too in more detail if you want. But that's so what we. What I what you've got to do is you've got to recognize that um if you are in um. If you are, if there's something you're trying to work on, so let's say that there's a complaining thing. Just by saying, okay, I'm gonna wake up in the morning and I'm gonna say ten gratitude statements instead of ten complaining statements.

• 21:30Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  That's gonna work for a time and will not be sustainable because all you're doing is slapping a band-aid on a, on a bullet. Or you're chopping the head of the, of the weed and it will grow back. As we know, if you go chop the head of the weed, they will grow back.

• 21:41Lewis Howes?

  So it's not, it's not getting to the root of.

• 21:44Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  You have to.

• 21:44Lewis Howes?

  Why don't you just feel appreciation at all times, not try to act appreciation?

• 21:49Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  That's it. It's not a being, it's a doing. And so you've got to find out why, whatever you're doing. There's a reason because at your core, your identity is this wired full of nature in our neurobiology and in our mind. We see that in the love waves of the physics of the mind and the gravitational fields and things. We see that in the, that literally the, the, it, it, the quantum physics has shown us that the immersing gravitational fields that are. And you, they change when there's negativity. So when people are angry and fighting, it's different. When there's a lot of war, you can feel that. You can walk into a room and you can feel that stuff. So essentially our environment is very, it's all very, this is all very deep stuff and it's all very real stuff too. And it's, and it's not something that we can ignore because it's very, we all experience this.

• 22:32Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So, um, yeah, you can't just go and say, um, ten gratitude statements. You have to find out why I am complaining. There's, there's, I'm showing up for a reason. There's a reason why I'm doing this. At my core, I'm this wired full of person. So if I'm waking up complaining, I'm always irritated in certain situations. This triggers me all the time. Or if I have certain patterns, there's a reason. Don't be hard on yourself. Be kind to yourself. Give yourself grace and just find the reason. And it's such an easier way, so much of an easy way to live, Lewis, than like beating yourself up. Or forcing yourself to be something else. Just say, okay, I wake up complaining. Why? And then go and solve it. And that's where you can then work through the process of solving it. And it's a very sequential time process. That's why there's five steps you do over time.

• 23:16Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And when you find the root, then you can do the positive affirmations. It becomes the step five. Then it works because you're actually doing it in the right place.

• 23:24Lewis Howes?

  What was the biggest challenge for you to overcome mentally with your messy mind that was holding you back? You know, something that was, took a long time for you to finally like, okay, I know the science, I know the research. I've been teaching this, but I still haven't been able to do this myself. What's that been for you?

• 23:41Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Two things, the complaining in the morning, waking up very negative in the morning. And that is.

• 23:44Lewis Howes?

  How long were you doing that for?

• 23:46Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Oh, for years. I I remember from, I remember the what, it was like all through the first few years of my marriage. And I remember as a at at high school, turn, wake up in the morning, like on edge and anxious and so for years. And I remember one day my husband saying to you, we've been married for about, uh, maybe ten years or something. And he turned around and said to me, you're always so negative in the morning. And he wakes up bright and happy. Go away, you're too happy for me in the morning. You know, it's like, it was, and he just said, you're always negative in the morning. And I didn't, until he pointed that out to me, I hadn't realized I was doing it. But it affected the first half of my day and would keep me in a kind of negative state. And here I'm doing all this brain research. And soon as I did the research, I'm like this, I would go into a high. Because it immediately, soon as my work immediately um changed things, because it's brain building.

• 24:29Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And and that's really important for mental health. Brain building is something that we definitely need to explore in this discussion, because it's phenomenal. Anyway, so brain, so it got back, so complaining was set my, uh, because it basically creates neurochemical chaos. Now, when you wake up in the morning, as you're going from sleep to wakefulness, there's a massive shift in neurochemistry and brainwave activity. And literally things that were flowing this way now flow that way. And the brainwaves all, like delta is very high, now suddenly it drops down and theta will change and beta comes on board. So there's a whole shifting pattern. And if you don't manage that moment, you can set yourself up for failure for the whole day or a miserable day. And everything just becomes so much harder. So it's just a matter of mind managing it. And I trained myself.

• 25:12Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  It took me s- uh, multiple cycles of sixty three days, using the neurocycle to train it. But it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. It actually took me, it honestly took me about, um, I think it was two cycles, if I can stand corrected. Two cycles, so it's eighteen weeks, um, which is not that long if you think I've been doing it for maybe twenty years. And the other thing that held me back, which I've been doing from a child as well, was if only, I was, I I used to say if only to everything. And I used to lose them.

• 25:40Lewis Howes?

  If only I would have got this opportunity, if only this wouldn't have happened to me, if only, whatever.

• 25:44Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  If only I said it this way, if only I did it that way, if only we had this much more time on this holiday, only. And one day, one of my daughters, and I've got four kids, and my second daughter, two, three of my daughters actually work for me. The one who's my producer, Dominic, turned around to me and she said, Mom. You are spoiling this holiday because I was going on about all the if only's as you were leaving the holiday and it was once again, it took a person in my close to me to actually turn on, say, you know, we should stop. And it was a child. I was, gosh, I'm having this impact on my child. And I went into a, and that took me much longer because I had been doing it for so long. And that was, even now on my, I have an app called the Neurocycle app. And it's, it's on iTunes and Google Play. And it's all, it's literally me giving

• 26:25Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  you therapy, taking you through the neurocycle. I use that every day. I mean, literally, I mean, I know the system off my heart, but I use that to feature reminders because you can type it in. And every day, seven times a day, still, it pops up on my phone, remember your if only's. So I no longer do it, but I still remind myself. And I now can just glance and remember, and I can catch myself like that. So I've become eighty one percent more effective in managing something that was so toxic to my mental health, that it has completely revolutionized my life. I cannot tell you how that's changed my life.

• 26:57Lewis Howes?

  I can imagine when we come from a place of if only, what is that saying about us and our life?

• 27:04Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  That nothing will ever satisfy you. Nothing will ever give you peace. You will always be looking for the grass is greener on the other side.

• 27:11Lewis Howes?

  Man, that sounds exhausting.

• 27:13Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  It's, it's exhausting. You, you constantly can't see what you've got because you're always thinking what you just lost and how it would have been better. I think, I think a level of, you know, once I did the work, it came from, from a desire to be, to be perfect. Perfectionism, which comes from a very poor identity, basically, and need to prove myself. I was the youngest of four kids. I had a pretty, um, yeah, okay. So I had my two elder sisters. I mean, my family are amazing, but like any family, every family has crazy things going on, which is very normal, too. That's something that we all need to kind of realize. And obviously not extreme stuff. That's not normal. But my two elder sisters were really battled a lot and they just, and I was the youngest and

• 27:54Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  I was kind of, had to prove myself, you know. And so I went out in every aspect from academics to sport. And I was always the top academic in the top sports. And I drove myself to a point where it was just too much. And it was, I was always trying to please. And my mom was very British and very, you don't compliment children, you don't give them a big head, you don't. So I, I remember going up to her as a little child and she knows the story. So she's good with it. We've talked this through and I have a great relationship with her. But I was maybe six or seven and I drew this picture. And I went up to her and said, Mom, don't you love, mommy, don't you love my picture? And she said to me, That's vain. Don't ask me. Don't look for compliments. And it shattered me. And

• 28:31Lewis Howes?

  That's six or seven. That's tough.

• 28:33Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Yeah, it shattered me completely. And she wasn't intending to shatter me, but it shattered me. From that day, I never asked. I just proved. And I drove myself. And it was never good enough. Nothing was ever good enough because she never complimented me. Now, as a, as an eighty five year old, she needs stops because she's changed and she's apologized. And she said, I realize I didn't. Because she started doing it to my kids and being hard on them. And I said, no, I said, but she said, you, you, you compliment your kids too much. I said, you never complimented me enough. I said, my kids, when they do something that's great, I am going to be their biggest cheerleader. And she saw that and she, we had, we had this whole discussion around that. But that's where it came from. And now it's sorted out. Now she's, I mean, she makes a point of, of like everything. It's like really sweet.

• 29:15Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Now she's trying to make up for it, which is great because you do, you can forgive and forget. You can't change what's happened to you, but you can change what's in you. But that's where it came from. And once I had made peace with that, it definitely, once my mom and I had that discussion, um, it, it freed me. It was definitely a massive part of my healing.

• 29:31Lewis Howes?

  Wow. How do, how impactful does perfectionism? Or how impactful is perfectionism on the brain in holding people back? And how does someone let go of this idea to be perfect when they feel like maybe they had something similar with you, or they feel like that they need to be perfect to be loved or accepted or get acknowledgement or attention or affection or whatever it is? What does perfectionism do to the brain? And how do we let go of it?

• 29:59Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  That's really, that's an excellent question. It's very distorted because it goes against your natural whiteness of nature. Because when you are, and it's all, all to do with identity. So it's, and it's all to do with, and, and when we talk about identity, we've got to talk about it as, as a verb as opposed to a noun. It's something that's organic and growing. So you are Lewis, but you're constantly growing and changing from life experiences. When you're growing into yourself, when you're growing, and as we go through messiness and repairing growth, it's, it's enhancing and growing and getting. Better and better all the time. And perfectionism is is is a sort of non-acceptance of that. It's like, I haven't had a chance to really see that my identity is good enough. And so it's like, you've got to always do something. And there's something that's happened. It's generally, you you can't, you know, everyone's got their own narrative.

• 30:44Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  But at some point in our lifetime, we've had something that knocked us. And I it seemed to be for me that that was where that knock happened. And so they're growing up in that kind of environment when there was never any compliments and not even a child needs that sort of thing. So you you it affected my identity. I always felt like I had to prove myself in every instance. And it became a very big thing. I was like living for approval until I could accept who I was. So perfectionism, what it does.

• 31:09Lewis Howes?

  And you never accepted yourself, probably.

• 31:11Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  No, not totally. And it's it's and I think a lot of us battle with that. Identity is one of those very, I always recommend that people do regular identity checks. That you go and at least once a year, you do a full-on identity check and just find out that you haven't been, because it's so easy to be shaped by experience and and because we it's nature, nurture and I factor. There's the nature part of identity that is you have your genetic makeup, I have mine. You have your own unique way that your proteins vibrate. They don't vibrate the same way as mine, even though we have the same brain structures. We have different protein vibrations and the way that our proteins fold. I mean, I held up this tree before. The thoughts that you build look like trees, the roots are the source, but the branches are your interpretation.

• 31:53Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So every listener listening to this now, they're hearing the same source, so the same roots that they grow in their brain. But every single person is growing their own interpretation, their own thought feelings and choices around the content we're talking about. And that's identity. So those those are proteins and the vibrations are different. So our wiring is unique nurture wise, nature wise. Nurturing we have our environment impacts us, whether we like it or not. Culture, religion, where we live, the philosophies of the day, all of that impacts us. But overriding both of those is the I factor. And that's your growing identity.

• 32:29Lewis Howes?

  Are the perception we have of ourselves.

• 32:31Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Yes.

• 32:32Lewis Howes?

  What we look like in the mirror.

• 32:34Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  What we look like in the mirror and how we perceive the world. That can, that is very malleable. It's very strong, but it's very vulnerable too. And it gets very influenced by, very, very strongly influenced by nature nurture. And that's why it's so important that we build an identity. So people that are confident, people that seem to get, like, no matter what happens, they just seem to bounce back. Even they will have identity issues, but they've reached a point in their life where they they can bounce back quicker. Maybe than someone else who's got more identity issues who gets crushed. So for me, that was been my practicing, still practicing. Um, I would spend a large portion of my work with my patients on identity. Cause most of the time, they first would be the first sort of thing that I'd work on. And then I would do brain building and then I'd do emotional work.

• 33:19Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  You know, so it would be to to first build the person, this you're amazing. This is how we get resilience in your brain. And you asked earlier on about how to be big brain health. Brain building is one of the most powerful ways of brain, using your mind to get brain health. We never got to that point, so we need to do that too.

• 33:34Lewis Howes?

  We'll come back to that, yeah.

• 33:34Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  You better keep a note of all these things.

• 33:36Lewis Howes?

  I've got, I've got the notes here. I've got the notes here. I'm curious about the identity check then. What does an identity check look like? And how do we build our identity to become more confident, resilient, loving, energetic human beings?

• 33:48Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Absolutely. So when we, when we, oh, when identity shatters, we start, you'll see a difference in the vibrations in the brain. You'll see a difference in the energy flow in the brain.

• 33:57Lewis Howes?

  What's the common, what's the common ways it shatters? Sorry to interrupt.

• 34:00Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Uh, no, no, no problem. Um, they.

• 34:02Lewis Howes?

  A breakup, uh.

• 34:04Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  No, environment, experience.

• 34:06Lewis Howes?

  Something happens, a death in the family, uh, something.

• 34:09Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Those, those will shatter, but it's, it's more when, when you are told you're broken in some way, even if it's not direct. So it's like if someone tells you, you know, you've gone through an adverse circumstance and you're feeling depressed. And someone tells you you've got a brain disease, that'll shatter your identity. Because now your identity is, oh, I'm broken, I'm a broken brain. I'm, I'm a useless person. Or if someone feels they're not valued. So a statement is made that's that the core of their humanity, who they are, is not valued. They're not valuable enough. Um, we see this a lot with gender, gender issues, people that, um, that aren't allowed to identify with what they believe their gender is. Tremendous, tremendous attack on identity. That's why there's such an increase in suicides in, in that kind of environment. Generally, I've worked with a lot of suicide survivors and a lot of suicide, families of suicide victims.

• 34:55Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And, um, that who've experienced suicide in their family. And the core is identity. Because if you don't feel you valued, if you feel that what I can bring to the table isn't enough. No matter what, why should I even be alive? And that for me is so important. I did a whole podcast recently on identity and the importance of identity. And it looks different in the brain. When your identity shatters, your energy, um, we can pick that up on the Q E G. To Q E G technology doesn't read detail. It's very crude, but it does give you an idea of the level of anxiety it creates. So when you're not being yourself or you feel that you're not valued, we will see asymmetry, for example, in the brain. We'll see a lot of low energy in the front of the brain, very, very low energy in the front of the brain.

• 35:38Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  You see it with people that have been labelled, their energy, blood flow. It's asymmetrical and it's very low in this, particularly this part of the brain. And then we have two hundred specialisations across our brain that are unique to each of us. So it's designed because your brain's only limited in size, your skull's limited in size. So you can't keep going, your brain, so you can't do everything more, can I? So there's something you can do that no one else can do. And that's, that's within these two hundred specialisations of our brain. But it creates a need because there is this stuff you could do that I can't do. So therefore I need you and you need me because of what we can, because that's enhancement. And, and, and when that's when people think, okay, there isn't something I can contribute. The, the identity gets broken.

• 36:20Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So we see that in those changes and when you get that change in the brain activity and inflammation and blood flow. We're going to see an increase in, um, in, in the immune system inflammation. The immune system will respond and react because now your survival's threatened. So you're going to get inflammation, then that has a downstream effect in your endocrine system. Then your telomeres and your chromosomes start getting short, which then ages your body. And I mean, it's, it's, it's, I can go on and on.

• 36:44Lewis Howes?

  Goes on and on, yeah.

• 36:45Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  The neurophysiology, neurophysiological effects are enormous. So an identity check is critical because the only way you're going to bounce back from what is going to happen. Because life is traumatic, no matter what we, what we would love to know, we would love the world to be perfect. The reality is. No matter what you've had tumors, you will have tumors. That's just, it's inevitable. Um, so in order for

• 37:09Lewis Howes?

  What does the identity check look like for you? You say you do it once a year or?

• 37:12Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Yeah, I, I, I just want to see whenever I feel that I'm out of sync, where if I start feeling like, and it could very quick recognition of identity check is if you're starting to feel envious and jealous of others. And if you're starting to feel that um, something that you know, that you're just not good enough, imposter syndrome, you know, the typical those, those are very key. That, hey, I'm gonna stop and do an identity check. So then I do it with a neurocycle. I'll go and look for all the, I'll, I'll go and gather awareness of all the, the signals that I'm starting to see like this. Okay, there's a lot more imposter syndrome than normal. Cause we all get a level of it. So it's okay. It's when it becomes an invasive pattern. So you look for the invasive pattern signals that are affecting who I feel about myself.

• 37:52Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And so I recognize, I know how to recognize the general unease and then you'll start working through from the signals and then start reflecting why, what's happened? You know, ask, answer, discuss with yourself, what's happened to get myself to this point? And then I'll take time to write it down. The third and fourth step, it's describing the neurocycle now. The third and fourth step we're writing. The third step you write in the form of a meta cog. And a meta cog is one of the most powerful things out there to get into your unconscious mind and find out what's really going on, to really tap into the wise mind. You wanna get your conscious and unconscious mind talking to each other. And if you go through these five steps that I'm describing, the neurocycle sequentially, you are training and forcing blood flow, those two hundred areas of specialization,

• 38:32Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  the different structures of the brain, the neurons, the, the neurochemistry, the endocrine, you, you are forcing it to actually work for you. You're kind of making all the ducks line up in a row, if that makes sense. And when you're in that stage, you're much more intelligent, you're much wiser, you have more clarity, you have more perspective. So that's the objective of the five steps to really give you that level of clarity that can help you dive down deep into an unconscious mind and find out, you know, find the toxic issue that's caused this identity issue, because it's gonna affect everything. Your identity starts shattering. It affects your work, your relationships, your

• 39:04Lewis Howes?

  Your mood, your energy, everything.

• 39:05Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Mood, energy, exercise, diet, everything.

• 39:09Lewis Howes?

  So step one is reflection of your identity is what it sounds like.

• 39:13Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Very important.

• 39:13Lewis Howes?

  A lot of these things. It's interesting you're saying this because when I was younger, I've said this on the show a few times, uh, but when I was younger, probably like seven, eight, nine.

• 39:24Lewis Howes?

  I would get in elementary school, I would get in trouble a lot. Or at least this is the stories I remember. I remember getting in trouble and being sent to the principal's office. Maybe not that much, maybe, I don't know, half a dozen times or something, right? In a couple of years. For whatever reason, acting out or saying something or. And I remember. Kind of being scolded or told, being told that I was doing something wrong by the principal. And I remember saying vividly. Like, I wish I were dead. Like, I just remember saying this as a kid over and over, like, when I would get in trouble, I was like, I wish I were dead. And I, hearing you say this now, I feel like I just never felt valued, you know? I'm sure people valued me, but I think I didn't know how to receive it, or I didn't feel it.

• 40:08Lewis Howes?

  Uh, and I, and I think. Thankfully, I never said that after those, those years, but, and I don't feel that anymore, but. I remember. If I would have went down that path of never feeling valued for. Five, 10, 20 more years. I, I don't know why I would, I don't know why I'd still be here. I don't know why I wouldn't. I'd be building a case of what's the point of my life? Why should I be here? No one cares about me. No one values me. No one sees me. No one acknowledges me. I'm pointless. I'm worthless. I have no meaning, so I might as well end it. And so I have a, I have a. A lot of, I guess, compassion for people that feel that because.

• 40:47Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Yeah.

• 40:47Lewis Howes?

  You can kind of get sucked into it. And you could, you could easily get sucked into it from a major breakdown or. Breakup or. Heartache or something. You can get kind of sucked into this, well, I don't matter if this person doesn't love me and I don't matter if I'm not good enough for this job and I don't ma. We can kind of get sucked in if we're not. Taking care of our mindset from what I'm hearing.

• 41:09Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  That is, that, I'm so sorry that happened to you and it's, you, you reflect so many. Um, people that have gone through that and you managed to kind of adjust, but the fact that you could actually recall that incident shows you that it's still. You know, maybe now there'll be more healing, but it, it impacted your life and how many kids? Yeah. And how many kids go through that? In fact, there was a post that I just happened to, I put up a couple of days ago and I just happened to. Scan through because you get so many comments, I want to try and read as many as I can, but I don't, but one caught my attention and it was. Literally what you're saying now, it was someone saying how they were as a child told that, you know, you're not good enough and. You know, you have a bad attitude and it was just like. Disciplining a child without, and what we don't realize is when you do that to a child, you're actually breaking them.

• 41:53Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And I remember my mom saying to me, again, my mom comes up with this thing, saying to me that when I would tell my kids, hey, listen, that's not right. But you do this right, this is the good, but this is what, and it's not you, but what you're doing. So it wasn't, and, and I was so emphatic on trying to, and I, I don't know if I did it every time, and I'd have to go ask my kids.

• 42:11Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 42:11Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  But I really was conscious of not saying it's you that's bad, you're amazing.

• 42:16Lewis Howes?

  Action that you did, the behavior is not good, but.

• 42:18Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Yes, that's separation.

• 42:20Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:21Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And I remember my mother watching me doing this one time, and she said, why are you doing that? Why are you telling them that they've done something wrong, that they're good? I said, because they are good. They're, they're cool, they're just learning, they're just experimenting, they're just, yeah.

• 42:32Lewis Howes?

  If you're constantly telling a child all the things they're doing wrong, they're gonna believe they're wrong.

• 42:36Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Exactly, that's the perspective that they're building, because you, the, you, the adult in their life, you, the, the caregiver, you're the person that they look up to the most. And you're shaping them. And so they relying on you to model behavior. So if you are modeling back to them all the time that they are bad. Instead of saying, okay, you're doing this, there's a reason why. And that's what I used to always do with the patients in my practice. When parents are not helping with behavior, because I worked with a lot of adolescents that were behavioral juvenile delinquents and that kind of thing. You would always look at, I'd always explain it like this, the way you turn up or the way you are, what you're saying and what you're doing. Are simply signals of an underlying issue, it's not the person. You can't say little Johnny is a behavior problem. That's a terrible thing to say, because you've shattered that child's, and they'll just think, oh, what's the point?

• 43:21Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  I may as, I may as well live up to what they're telling me I am, you know, and.

• 43:25Lewis Howes?

  Be more of that.

• 43:26Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Exactly. So we've got to be so careful that maybe a person, oh, you're always so aggressive. You know, when you say you always, you never, those, you actually.

• 43:36Lewis Howes?

  You're building an identity.

• 43:37Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Exactly.

• 43:38Lewis Howes?

  You're shaping an identity and the person's becoming more of that identity.

• 43:41Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And you're not giving them any skills to change. So, but if you rather say to them, okay, what you've done is actually pretty aggressive. I know that's not who you are. Let's see why you did that, because why you did, there's a reason why you did that. And honestly, I cannot tell you how many times I've been saying this recently. We've got to keep give people grace. We've got to give ourselves grace. If someone in your environment or your work environment or your family are being impossible or difficult or whatever, instead of getting mad at them. Um, remove yourself, create a boundary, but change your perspective. There's a reason. There's a reason why they're like that. So get yourself in a safe place that you can actually process it. And that you get your own mental health under control and and then go back in and try and say, okay, look, that really hurts me.

• 44:26Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  The way you do this, but I understand that this is not who you are. Can I help you? You know, get through this. Is there something that's going on? And that shifts things totally. Cause you're nursing people in kindness, which is something I did a podcast on recently. It changes that kind of thing. Changes the way that the brain functions immediately in both parties and you can get to the core issue. And that goes back to the child. You can do the same thing with a child. You don't have to then break their identity. So kids are growing into adulthood. There's so many bad behavioral. And issues that have come out of generations of bad parenting. And we do, I mean, I don't, I'm, I'm much older than you. I think. I don't know how old you are, but I'm fifty seven. How old are you?

• 45:04Lewis Howes?

  I'm thirty eight.

• 45:05Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  I'm twenty years almost older than you.

• 45:09Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Okay, so my parents parented me in a very um different way where it was very much, you know, had oxygen in the sand mentality. Children are seen and not heard. Um, you know, don't, you need to pull yourself together, get up and keep going, hide your emotions, don't. Show the emotions to the world.

• 45:26Lewis Howes?

  It's so hard when you're developing.

• 45:28Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 45:28Lewis Howes?

  Child's brain that is developing, it's hard to.

• 45:32Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  It's very, very.

• 45:32Lewis Howes?

  Manage your emotions.

• 45:33Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Exactly. So I'm part of the baby boomer generation and we grew up like this. And that's where you see a lot of issues in the baby boomer generation. And a lot of us have carried that on with our own kids and hope, I didn't, because I recognize and I'm doing the work. Thank God, I'm doing what I'm doing. So I could change that. But that's that has created a whole breed of people. And if you don't change that, we then impact the next generation and the next generation. So we have to. But yeah, you've got to be able to express yourself. And one of the things when I was working in therapy was doing a lot of family therapy, I would tell the parents that you've got to be authentic. You've got to explain, hey, I'm sad today. Mom's sad, and it's okay to be sad. And this is why I think I'm sad, and I'm working on it, and I'll be better. So you've modeled now for a child that you said.

• 46:15Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  That child, if you, a parent is sad or worked up or irritated or angry or snap you, and you don't explain to a child, the child will immediately think, I'm bad. They their identity gets attacked. So if you don't explain to the child why you their identity is affected, and then they think, okay, that they only adults. Are perfect. So adults, a sad adult means that I'm the bad person, the adult's the good person. And that's the worst lie out. All of us are a mess, no matter what age you are, adult or child, you just happen to be an older version of being a mess. And there's hopefully some growth. And what we should do is model authenticity and say, I am sad today, or I am depressed today, or yes, I yelled at you. I'm sorry, that was wrong. It's my bad. I did it because of this.

• 46:57Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So then you model to the child that's, oh, okay, it's okay if I get mad. Then they start saying, Mom, I'm mad because instead of I am. Mad is my identity. It's not mad is my identity. That's what I'm doing. So it's a doing, not a being.

• 47:11Lewis Howes?

  It's interesting because this morning I woke up and I was feeling a little sadness and I didn't know why. And I remember thinking, okay. Let me just sit with this for a minute. And I don't need to stay here, but I can be here and reflect on it. And I remember it was just kind of like chatting with a friend. I was like. Yeah, I'm just kind of feeling sad. I don't know, I didn't really know why. Um, maybe I'm feeling like a little. You know, I went through a a transition in a relationship lately. I'm like, maybe I'm, you know, a little bit of sadness from that and. Missing this experience and I was like, okay, you know, but there's, there's a reason why the transition happened. And e- even though I'm grateful that, you know, for the lessons and the process of moving on from this relationship.

• 47:54Lewis Howes?

  I can still be sad for the loss of something, the, the

• 47:58Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  It was beautiful.

• 47:59Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, something that's not there anymore, that was there at one point. And, uh, so I just kind of sat with it for twenty, thirty minutes and I was like, okay, but I don't need to stay here because staying in sadness is not going to support. My joy, my authenticity, my vision of helping people. So I want to make sure that I don't like reject these range of emotions. But I also, but I also don't want to stay in the negative, not a negative emotion, but the emotion that maybe will hold me back from helping people or. Uh, having a positive attitude. So I think it's a

• 48:33Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So good. You just, you just, sorry, I can't.

• 48:35Lewis Howes?

  Go ahead, go ahead.

• 48:37Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  You just did a neuro cycle. You basically gathered

• 48:39Lewis Howes?

  The language, yeah.

• 48:40Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Yeah, you did. You, you gathered awareness of your sadness. You embraced it. You were okay with it. You gave yourself permission and it's so good. Because it's really okay to be sad. It's such, totally normal. Then you reflect it. So you gathered awareness. You then reflected on why. You, you maybe didn't do the writing steps, but you visualized it. So this

• 48:57Lewis Howes?

  I was talking with someone, I was talking with someone about it.

• 48:59Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So you talk, so you did, so, so there we go. So there's kind of the writing. If, um, if it comes up again, you could maybe try and do a meta cog and we didn't get to finishing that, but the, the different types of writing. Just can take you deep if you need to, but you basically did that as a visual discussion. And then you got into, you reconceptualized it. You said, okay, there's a reason you said the breakup, you're moving on. And then it's okay to be sad because it's you, you're grieving the loss and that's part of it. And now you're moving on. And so your first step was. You've accepted it, but now you're moving on and you're quite right that. So you've given that sadness, you pro, you embrace processed and you reconceptualized. So you turned what, if you didn't, if you pushed it down, it would have grown because whatever you. Suppress will get bigger and then it's going to permeate other parts of your life. And then this confusion because you think.

• 49:42Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Why am I sad when all this is happening? And then why am I feeling this? And it end like a little virus, you know, just starts spreading. And so you caught it there and you allowed yourself, but you're also limited. And it's so important with any emotion that is, no emotion is bad. Every emotion is telling us a story, but there were these certain emotions that make us tired. Our brain is, our brain, body and conscious mind are limited in energy. The unconscious mind is unlimited in energy. So the unconscious mind will keep driving us to just keep going. So we have to discipline. Or you have to literally create a discipline, almost like boundaries between the, you know, the conscious and the unconscious. We have to tell, so a wise mind is saying, okay, if I stay, your wise mindset, if I stay in sadness, I'm going to get drained. You, you, you instinctively recognize.

• 50:26Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 50:26Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Exactly. So that was your wise mind telling you. So you put a cap and you put a seal on it. And I always say that with the neuro cycle, when you're going through the process and you're working through a sixty three day cycle, you sit for fifteen to forty five minutes, not longer. And you limit and you have an active reach, which is then what you did. You reconceptualize and you said, okay, well, this is, I'm moving on. I'm just, I had a moment of sadness because I'm grieving what's happened and that's okay. So you, if, if you're during the course of the day, if you, if you found yourself going back to sadness, you can instead of allowing yourself to go and revisit the whole um transition, you can go to that statement. And you can build on that statement of it's okay to be sad. I'm grieving a loss.

• 51:07Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And that's part of it. And then you move on. So you're training your mind to discipline itself, not to stay in something that will drain you. But you see how you made it work for you, because you can't change what's happened to you, but you just change what happens in you. So you just did that. So, good job.

• 51:21Lewis Howes?

  Uh, thank you. Yeah, you know, I, I just feel like so many years of my life where I would stay in sadness, anger, resentment, uh, what if statements, uh, where I just ruminate on these emotions for days, weeks, months, years, and it only left me with a lack of sleep, with stress, frustration, overwhelmed, never feeling good enough, asking why me, all these things. And I never felt peace when I stayed in the emotion and I allowed it to consume me as opposed to uh, be a momentary or an hour thing as opposed to

• 52:01Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Exactly.

• 52:02Lewis Howes?

  days, weeks, months thing. So.

• 52:04Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  You literally had to rewire your brain. Because we get into patterns of allowing ourselves to do that ruminating. And I can honestly relate to what you're saying. I did it too. And you know, as I've learned more and more and done more and more research in this area. Yes, I've got an advantage because I'm seeing it directly with the research I'm doing. But it's just so freeing. You get so much meaningful peace when you recognize, okay, I'm in that state. And yes, you can, you can have a concern in your life. You can have a concern that is, I mean, you're not just going to not think about a transition and a breakup. You know, there's going to be a lot of time that you spend on that because it's different processing, but it's how you do it. You know, each little moment, is it a rumination on a, on a hamster wheel? Or is it a growth, a messy repair, messy repair, hypothesizing messy repair, you know, are you moving forward?

• 52:50Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And that's what's, what's so good. Cause if you get stuck like in the if only, like you said, in those negative emotions. We're creating so much neurochemical chaos in our brain and our body and increasing information. We aging our body, we aging it, we just doing everything we shouldn't be doing. And we don't have to. That's staying in the messy mind. The wise mind catches that and disciplines and trains it. But it's also not going to happen overnight. And that's where people in this technological age think, okay, well, I've done it once. Why am I still doing it? No, you're going to have to, it's going to take you probably nine weeks. If you had to actually look at the time you spent to break that cycle, which meant that you rewired your brain. It would have, it's, it's, it's weeks. And if you have breaks in between.

• 53:30Lewis Howes?

  Months.

• 53:31Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Yeah.

• 53:31Lewis Howes?

  Back in the day when I had to go through that, yeah.

• 53:34Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Yeah, absolutely. Multiple cycles. And that's why.

• 53:37Lewis Howes?

  You know what's interesting? It was like eight years ago is when everything started to really shift for me when I turned thirty. Because I don't know if I mentioned this in our last interview, but I've talked about it on the show a lot. Where I started to truly address and heal the root cause of a lot of my pain, anger, resentment. From sexual trauma that I went through as a kid, from the other things that happened that I never expressed, that I never brought to the surface. That I always kept hidden with shame and insecurity and frustration or anger. And when I started to process the root causes of a lot of my insecurity and shame. That's when everything started to rewire. So if I would have just said, okay, I'm going to process these things on a surface level for a certain amount of days.

• 54:22Lewis Howes?

  I don't think it would have ever found that ability to create that peace within. Because I was always holding on to some type of. Trauma that I was unwilling to talk about, whether it was a big T or a little T, I was unwilling to talk about it out of shame. And when I started to share it, it was freeing. And I'm not saying everyone needs to share these things publicly or whatever, but just talking to a friend or a therapist or a coach, it was allowing me to start rewiring. Okay, I can process these, these heartbreaks or these tragedies or these moments in life that bring me stress and pain and grief and sadness. I now don't need to hold on to this pain from my whole life and add to

• 55:07Lewis Howes?

  it. I can process it and move on.

• 55:09Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  That's beautiful. That's amazing that you did that. And it's interesting that you did that around your thirties and your twenties were really turbulent in terms of trying to suppress.

• 55:18Lewis Howes?

  My whole life was turbulent, but until thirty. I mean, still my thirties, there's been some ups and downs, but it's been, I've been able to process and I've been able to emotionally have a more tools to experience and process and not hold on to. And I think I'm still learning because I mean, I'm gonna be learning for a long time.

• 55:37Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Yeah, it could be your whole life.

• 55:38Lewis Howes?

  I'm not, I'm definitely not perfect because I still make a lot of mistakes and I still stay in things longer than I should and want to make sure I give it my all and you know, all those things. But I think I've gotten to a place where I know when to walk away from scenarios as opposed to be the perfectionist, make sure I do whatever it takes to work. Like, I'm like, okay, if this situation isn't supporting me or the other person, like at some point, we gotta, we gotta transition the situation. So.

• 56:05Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  That's incredible. And you've done so much incredible work. Then you've literally, what's, I can explain to you scientifically, if you're interested in what you've actually done, because I think what you've, what you've gone through, the story you've gone through is especially having the sexual trauma. Azia, how old are you again?

• 56:21Lewis Howes?

  Five.

• 56:21Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Five. And that, that, that's like you, think of it like this, as a five-year-old, you look at your caregivers, your environment, as your heroes, as your people that look after you. So the distortion is so, is so absolutely, it's just such a distortion. So what's happened if I use my toxic tree? And for those that are listening, I'm holding up the wiry toxic tree that represents toxic thought as opposed to the healthy green tree. The, the roots over here, this whole thing's falling apart.

• 56:48Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Um. The the root part over here is the source of the pain. So that's the source of the trauma. So that's the actual events, all the data, the emotions.

• 56:56Lewis Howes?

  The the memories.

• 56:57Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  The mem- yes, the memories. So a thought is made of memories, root memories and branch memories. And so the memories are the, if all the, all the things that actually happened and all the emotions that went along with it, the full data. As it's happening, simultaneously, we interpret what's happening. And then there's these repeated patterns that happen. You, this, the, this part over here, the branches are your interpretation. So you said things like, um, shame. And what were the other words you used, you used?

• 57:24Lewis Howes?

  Insecurity, shame, anger, resentful.

• 57:26Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Resentful, or and seeing yourself, your, your identity was broken. Because you didn't see yourself as having value, all those kinds of things because of that complete distortion. Now, as a five-year-old, you cannot process this. So this was the way you cope. This is, this always is the balance to that. And even though this is a distortion, you do this to balance that. I mean, it's healthy, it's all great, it works out because the eunus comes out. But here, this is all not the eunus. So there, that would account for when you were at school, maybe you were called to the principal's office. A lot of those behaviors would have come from you not valuing yourself. And then if them come in heavy again, just added more fuel to it. It was just another, it was just another layer added on.

• 58:06Lewis Howes?

  More anger, more frustration, more, yeah, everything.

• 58:09Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Yeah. So instead of them looking at why Lewis is doing this, they just told you you were wrong and punished you. That would be the worst thing in your situation. And that would have just made it worse and worse. So that, then we push that down because we don't know what it is, what, what to do with it. So you just keep going on and you just keep hoping for the best and you keep, our kids just seem to be so resilient. But this, this is building and building. So in your non-conscious mind, this whole, these thoughts that we have, these experiences that we have are building through our mind into our brain and into our body and into our mind. So this is not only a thought tree in your brain. It's also in the DNA of every cell of your body. And it's in the gravitational fields of your mind. So it's in three places. That's why it's this whole psycho neurobiological impact. That's why it's this whole effect that it has in us. It's a whole body experience. So when you do things like

• 58:55Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  EMDR therapy, did you ever do EMDR therapy?

• 58:57Lewis Howes?

  Uh, I've heard great things about it. I haven't tried that yet.

• 59:00Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So when you, you've done a bit of therapy over the years?

• 59:03Lewis Howes?

  I've done a bunch of different therapies.

• 59:04Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Things to things.

• 59:05Lewis Howes?

  Intellectual intelligence experiences and workshops and yeah.

• 59:08Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Which have helped to pull the stuff from your body to your brain into your mind. So we work, so we work both ways. You get from body, brain, mind, mind, brain, body, and your net kind of all works back and forth. But if these aren't dealt with, they get suppressed, they get suppressed, they get suppressed. And then maybe only when you thirty, like you said, then you started actually doing the work or maybe during your twenties. I don't know when you started first remembering the, the, the trauma. I'm not sure what age you were at when you started facing that.

• 59:33Lewis Howes?

  Every day I remembered the trauma. I thought about it, but it wasn't until thirty when I had the courage to start talking about it.

• 59:38Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Okay, so it was in the, okay, so what, what you had was the situation of some people completely hardened. They don't even know what happened. Then it suddenly comes back. You were constantly.

• 59:47Lewis Howes?

  I was always.

• 59:48Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  You were living it all the time. Okay, so it was in.

• 59:50Lewis Howes?

  Daily or maybe, maybe not every day, but once a week I probably thought about it, you know?

• 59:54Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Okay, so this was constantly moving from the unconscious to the conscious. So the, the awareness was increasing. So when we have increased awareness but no management and no processing.

• 1:00:03Lewis Howes?

  There's gotta be a way to, there's gotta be a way to get it out somehow.

• 1:00:06Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Exactly. So you, so it's, so it's coming up, but you're not processing. So it keeps coming up, down, up, down. Each time it goes back down stronger than before. And we see when you have increased awareness without processing, it increases anxiety in the brain. So if we had to scan your brain at that time, we would have seen a lot of red pockets of high beta energy across your brain, which would have made you be quite edgy, you know, like looking for things to constantly like keep you busy distractions on the go, whatever. I don't, I don't know exactly what you did over that time. But you may be just always trying to, you said perfectionism, always trying to achieve, you're trying to prove yourself in a way.

• 1:00:41Lewis Howes?

  Of course, constantly. Yeah, I mean, I threw, I threw into sports. So I was just playing sports all day, practicing, trying to, you know, get better and achieve my goals.

• 1:00:49Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And then that would have given you a lot of, um, release of adrenaline.

• 1:00:52Lewis Howes?

  Absolutely. Every anger, frustration, everything.

• 1:00:55Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  You channeled into the energy. So it's almost like you use that to cope, almost like an addiction, but in a sense it was a coping mechanism. Cause addiction is not a disease. It's purely a coping mechanism. It's a coping signal that you're trying to deal with the stuff.

• 1:01:07Lewis Howes?

  Of something that hasn't been healed yet.

• 1:01:09Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Exactly, that's exactly what it is, cause eighty six to ninety eight percent, ninety five percent of addicts get out of addiction through choice, once they are ready to do the work to find the root cause. So you channel for a time into that energy, you also got things like anandamide being released in your brain, which would have given you some bliss hormone, would have given you a sense of excitement and you would have had dopamine rushes and all those things that were being drained. So this was draining all of that, so you're doing sport to put it back, but eventually it explodes. It's like a volcano, if you think of a volcano.

• 1:01:37Lewis Howes?

  Well then sport, well then sport ended, so I was like, well, what am I, channel my energy? And that's when everything started to come to the surface where I was like, oh.

• 1:01:46Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  You gotta deal with this now.

• 1:01:47Lewis Howes?

  I'm not liking my personality in these scenarios when I'm feeling triggered. And people aren't liking my personality around me. And it wasn't, it wasn't fun anymore to be around me for, you know, a year or two when I was like, I don't know how to get, I don't know, how do I get, how do I express myself? I know, happy and angry, like I don't have a range of emotions, like how do I learn how to express? And I think a lot, and I empathize for a lot of, um, a lot of humans, but I mean, men in general who are kind of built and raised in the same type of dynamic. I'm like, it's, it's, when you've never been taught how to express yourself without being shamed, without being made wrong, without being like, don't, don't do that, that's not okay. You can't show this emotion, you're supposed to be a man or this, or whatever it is.

• 1:02:32Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Toxic masculinity.

• 1:02:33Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, for women as well, like you need to be this, this and this, you can't do this. Um, it's just a challenge, cause then you're always suppressing something.

• 1:02:40Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Hmm, it's always suppressing and you have to go back and, and that's volcanic in nature, because like a volcano will bubble, eventually explode and the lava will pour out. That, that's what these eventually do, they eventually, and it did explode, as you've just described, it was exploding in your behavior, where it was now becoming very in your face, and in people's faces. And that's, and that was then signal, so all of those behavior patterns, the emotions, the behaviors, the perspective on life that you had, the physical sensations in your body, those were all warning signals that your body was trying to restore balance. So your unconscious mind was trying to draw your attention to the fact that you need to identify the source. Your immune system was sending out all kinds of signals to that, to this actual physical

• 1:03:22Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  experience in your brain, this physical thought in your brain, your body, trying to get rid of it. So it's trying to eject and get rid of this thing that's causing imbalance. And it comes out in our emotions and our behaviors.

• 1:03:34Lewis Howes?

  Well, it also comes out physically. I mean, I was I was going through a a challenging scenario where I knew a relationship that I was in needed to end. But I was I was staying in this certain relationship for for longer than it needed to be. And I knew and I started to get I never in my life have had this, but I started to get like eczema breakouts on my skin and different parts of my body. And I was like, what is this? And I was like, never had this in my life. I started doing all the allergy tests. I had no allergies. I was like, maybe I'm having too much almond butter or frigging, I don't know, gluten. What is it? Is it dairy? Eliminating all these foods, nothing is changing. And I'm like, well, maybe it's just, I'm just gonna live with this forever then. And, okay.

• 1:04:19Lewis Howes?

  And literally, I kid you not, once this uh, the dynamic of the relationship shifted and and transitioned. My body had, it's going away. And I was just like, this is crazy. Like, the physical symptoms is gone. Uh, this eczema outbreak or whatever, which I thought was gonna keep spreading all over my body, it's now gone. And it's it's crazy. When we, like you're saying, we we need to be aware of the signals. We need to be aware of the emotions, the feelings, the frustrations, the thoughts, the sadness, the anger, and be aware of them. And we also be be aware of our physical symptoms.

• 1:05:00Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Absolutely.

• 1:05:01Lewis Howes?

  And, you know, am I drained? Am I emotionally tired? Am I frustrated and triggered all the time? And do I have eczema? Is my hair falling out? I don't know, whatever. Am I losing my vision? You know, something, am I getting heart palpitations? Like, you've got to be noticing the physical symptoms as well from the emotional stress.

• 1:05:20Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Exactly. That that is so important, what you said. And and fascinating that you've got, you know, that you you've highlighted a key psychoneurobiological link. And in my in my most recent book, The Tenemental Mess, that one that you interviewed me about last time. That there I talk about some of the things, I didn't put my whole clinical trial, but I talk about some of those impacts. But there's so many, so many studies around the link between. Unmanaged mind and unmanaged stress and the impact on our body. So it's directly like this. You you were going through this relationship that was not good for you. You hadn't dealt with these issues yet properly. So that combination was you your your mind was an unmanaged mess.

• 1:06:01Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And that would generate a lot of basically toxic energy waves, gravitational fields, electromagnetic fields literally through your brain and your body. So therefore, nothing you you would have had high gamma, high too much high gamma, too much high beta, probably not enough oxygen and blood in your brain, that they had and constricted blood vessels around your heart. Um. All things that, you know, the the the immune system would have been autoimmune because that's Xmas autoimmune response. Um. That's you know, everything was so you've all got genetic weaknesses and generally when you're under toxic stress. And it's come through the generations. It just happens. It's mutations that happen through generations. And they're dormant and they're activated and the mind is the activating factor. So so it manifests in so many different ways. So

• 1:06:46Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  definitely you've hit the nail on the head. You go for the allergy test, it's not the allergies, because we immediately think purely physical, but the physical is dominated by the mind. The physical, you don't, you don't have any, you can't have X, but you did. You can only have it if you're alive. And generally, if it's not a food allergy, there is a a mind and I'm dealt with.

• 1:07:04Lewis Howes?

  A mental allergy.

• 1:07:05Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. That's literally, literally mental allergies. These are literally mental allergies and they threaten your survival. So your that X was your body saying, hey, Lewis, please pay attention. There's something in your mind that you need to deal with.

• 1:07:20Lewis Howes?

  And it's, yeah, it's interesting because, you know, I take full responsibility for my thoughts and my and and staying in something that I know I'm not supposed to say in something. Um. Or for not speaking up or for abandoning myself like so.

• 1:07:33Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:33Lewis Howes?

  As I reflect and throughout the entire time.

• 1:07:39Lewis Howes?

  You know, I'm in no place to blame someone else. I take responsibility for, I take responsibility for, what am I doing to be a co-creator in this? What are my thoughts doing to manifest this physically? And how am I responsible for choosing something different? And it might be a hard decision. It might be a courageous decision that I've been afraid to make, but that's the one my body is telling me you need to make. Or you need to shift, you need to shift something. You need to shift something within this relationship experience. You need to, whatever it might be.

• 1:08:08Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Something.

• 1:08:09Lewis Howes?

  And, and I think a lot of times people will blame others for their feelings, their emotions, their physical manifestations of their mind. And maybe they're a part of that experience, but you can't blame someone else for the way you're thinking and you're feeling. Or, or can we?

• 1:08:25Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  You, you could, you've hit the nail on the head. You can't, you can, there's, there's two un- parts to that answer. Our environment affects us. So when you were abused, you were a victim. There's no lesson to be learned in that victim, that what you, you went through as a victim. There's only healing that needs to take place. And, um, but so then you, that's what you are responsible for is your healing. And that's always sounds so hard when someone's been sexually abused to say that you're responsible for your healing.

• 1:08:52Lewis Howes?

  No one else can heal me.

• 1:08:53Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  No, no, people can support you. That's the difference. And that's that whole enhancement culture. We need each other. So you need someone cheering you along. You need the therapy, the coaching, the counseling, whatever version of that, whatever combination of that. But you, you also need to know how to manage your own mind. Because at the end of the day, you're not in therapy 24/7. You're not in coaching 24/7. People go to sleep. You're awake at night. You, you, you, you, you wake up with your mind. You're sitting with your anxiety, your thoughts. What do you do? So mind management becomes absolutely essential in us being able to cope with anything that we've gone through. And yes, that is our, we can't change. I keep saying it. We can't change what's happened to us. We can change what's happened in us. So that abuse that you went through, there's never anything that can excuse that.

• 1:09:34Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And you are not, there's no lesson to be learned and you were a victim and that person was wrong and needs to be. And person or persons, you know, they they they need to be punished and that those are facts. Those are facts, but for you to be disengaged from that is extremely important. And the only way you can disengage from that is through embracing, processing and reconceptualizing.

• 1:09:54Lewis Howes?

  Um.

• 1:09:55Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So it's a deconstruction reconstruction process. Otherwise, you keep this in your brain and this drives you and it controls you like it did for so many years. Every day, this was controlling you, coming up and controlling you. So until you did the work which you did to start recognizing those signals, the physical signals in your body, the eczema, whatever it was at that time, the heart palpitations, gut issues. The emotional signals, depression, anxiety, panic, frustration, whatever worry, the um perspective signals, how are you looking at life? What is your general view of life? And then also looking at which one of our left out. Um this the physical, emotional is four, emotional, physical, perspective and. Why am I blanking on the fourth one? There's four different areas that we look at. We'll come back in a moment.

• 1:10:36Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 1:10:36Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So once we gather awareness of those signals, then what we do is we can then start, um once we've gathered awareness, we can then start uh doing the reflection, the why. But you've got to do very sequentially. You first got to pay attention. So the signals are warning, um the warning signals, they clues. So you become a detective in your own life.

• 1:10:54Lewis Howes?

  Well, why is this happening? Okay, let me start to do some experiments, get some tests done and realize, okay, I'm eliminating this, I'm eliminating that. Then where's the root cause?

• 1:11:04Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Of that things. You've got to start there, but you've got to start with your signals. So these these are the four, emotional, what you're doing, behavioral, physical, what's in your body and perspective, okay? So emotional, physical, behavior and perspective. And you've got to, you've got to find those first. As soon as you're aware, you then pull this up. And you change your, you change fourteen hundred neurophysiological responses in your brain and your body. You shift the resilience of your brain and you start now enabling yourself to be stronger to face that stuff. And your mind, brain and body know it's going to be hard.

• 1:11:34Lewis Howes?

  Thank you so much for listening to this episode. If you thought this was powerful, make sure to share this with a friend, post it on social media, make sure to tag me and Dr. Caroline Leaf as well. And part two is coming soon, so stay tuned for part two and make sure to go to LewisHowes.com/1079 to check out our previous interview with Dr. Caroline Leaf that blew up all over the internet as well. And if you are here for the first time, click the subscribe button over on Apple Podcast right now or Spotify and stay notified and up to date on the latest and greatest from the School of Greatness. We'd love to have you a part of the community, so click that subscribe button right now. And I want to leave you with this quote from Abraham Maslow, who said, "In any given moment, we've got

• 1:12:13Lewis Howes?

  two options: to step forward into growth or to step back into safety." I cannot emphasize this enough. The mind, the way you think, will dictate your behaviors, your actions, and your life. So we've got to be willing to learn how to master the mind. We've got to learn how to understand how the mind works and then use the strategies and the tools backed by science that prove that you can increase the level of your life, the quality of your life, the quality of your thoughts, which will help dictate your behaviors and your actions and your life. Again, you were born to live in peace. You were born to live in harmony, to experience love, to experience fulfillment. And if you're feeling

• 1:12:55Lewis Howes?

  anxiety, or stress, or frustration, or overwhelming in your life, then please use these tools. Make sure to get the book, listen to these resources for free here on the podcast, and use these tools for the betterment of your life and spread this message to someone that you think would be inspired by this as well. We all need tools to help us increase the quality of our life. So I hope you enjoy this. And I want to remind you, if no one's told you lately, that you are so loved, you are so worthy, and you matter. I'm so grateful for you. And you know what time it is? It's time to go out there and do something great.