Overcome Negative Thoughts for Positive Thinking Feat. Dr.Daniel Amen

Overcome Negative Thoughts & Take Control of Your Mind Are your thoughts holding you back? In this mashup episode, we tackle one of the biggest challenges we all face—how to break free from the grip of negative thinking. Featuring Dr. Daniel Amen, Dr. Caroline Leaf, Andrew Huberman, and more, we explore practical ways to manage your mind and elevate your mental health. Dr. Daniel Amen explains how automatic negative thoughts (ANTs) can sabotage our happiness and success. He shares simple yet powerful strategies to stop these thoughts from spiraling out of control and offers actionable steps to rewire your brain for positivity. You'll learn how negative thinking patterns can impact your mental and physical well-being—and most importantly, how to overcome them. Dr. Caroline Leaf introduces her neurocycle, a five-step process designed to help you manage your mind and direct your thoughts. This system has been proven to reduce anxiety, improve focus, and even boost immune function. Meanwhile, Andrew Huberman dives into the science of habit formation and reveals how to train your brain to default to positive, productive behaviors. Here’s what you’ll gain from this episode: - Learn how to identify and stop automatic negative thoughts (ANTs). - Discover practical strategies to reprogram your brain for positivity. - Understand the mind-body connection and how it impacts your mental health. - Gain insights into how your daily habits shape your thoughts and overall mindset. This isn’t just about thinking positively—it’s about taking control of your mind and shaping your reality. If you’re ready to break free from negative thought patterns and unlock your true potential, this episode is for you. Let’s start rewriting your mental script today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Ed Mylett?

  So hey guys, listen, we're all trying to get more productive and the question is, how do you find a way to get an edge? I'm a big believer that if you're getting mentoring or you're in an environment that causes growth, a growth-based environment, that you're much more likely to grow and you're going to grow faster. And that's why I love Growth Day. Growth Day is an app that my friend Brendan Burchard has created that I'm a big fan of. Write this down, growthday.com/ed. So if you want to be more productive, by the way, he's asked me, I post videos in there every single Monday that gets your day off to the right start. He's got about $5,000, $10,000 worth of courses that are in there that come with the app. Also, some of the top influencers in the world are all posting content and they're on a regular basis, like having the Avengers of personal development and business in one app. And I'm honored that he asked me to be a part of it as well and contribute on a weekly basis, and I do.

• 0:45Ed Mylett?

  So go over there and get signed up. You're going to get a free, tuition-free voucher to go to an event with Brendan and myself and a bunch of other influencers as well. So you get a free event out of it also. So go to growthday.com/ed. That's growthday.com/ed. I hear so many small business owners say the exact same thing. They just never have enough time in the day. Well, I measure time differently. I've compressed, condensed, heck, I've bent time. My first day is 6:00 a.m. to noon. My second day starts at noon and goes till 6:00 p.m. And my third day, 6:00 p.m. to midnight. I now get 21 days a week. Stack that up over a month, over a year, over five years, and my life's completely different than it would have been otherwise. And if you want to win as an entrepreneur, you have to compress your time too.

• 1:30Ed Mylett?

  And you definitely can't afford to waste it waiting weeks on a big bank for capital. Your best bet's to work with my friends at Cardiff. They know how to compress time for entrepreneurs. They get your business approved in minutes and funded the very same day. They're America's favorite small business lender, and for good reason. Over 20 years in business, over $12 billion deployed to small business across America. Stop letting bank delays slow down your momentum. Head to cardiff.co/ed. That's cardiff.co/ed. Cardiff.co. Real growth, fast funding. Cardiff, borrow better.

• 2:08Daniel Amen?

  This is the Ed Mylett Show.

• 2:13Ed Mylett?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome to my weekend special. I hope you enjoy the show. Be sure to follow the Ed Mylett Show on Apple and Spotify. Links are in the show notes. You'll never miss an episode that way. I have a real friend here today and somebody that I admire tremendously. He's helped me. He scanned my brain. I think he's the foremost expert on brain health on the planet. He's a great friend of mine. I love him very much. He's a strong man of faith as well. Dr. Daniel Amen, welcome back to the show, brother.

• 2:38Daniel Amen?

  Thank you so much. Kids are in trouble more than ever before. It's horrifying. There's a new study the CDC put out that 54% of teenage girls report being persistently sad, that 32% have thought of killing themselves, 24% have planned to kill themselves. Just think of that. A quarter of teenage girls and 13% have tried. These are statistics unlike anything in recorded history.

• 3:10Ed Mylett?

  Why?

• 3:11Daniel Amen?

  Well, it's an interesting question, but we're living in a toxic society. So if you take the toxic food we feed them, the toxic products that go on their bodies, the toxic social media that creates this high level of self-absorption and self-absorbed people are never happy people, and then the toxic news, which really drives them to negative thinking patterns. Because you and I both know is the news is no longer the news. The news is like the crisis news network because if they scare you, you'll pay attention. And so you buy more copper underwear.

• 3:56Daniel Amen?

  But the negativity, and I actually have been studying negativity bias. So does your mind tend to go to what's wrong, or does it go to what's right? And if your mind goes to what's wrong, you're much more likely to be anxious, to be depressed, to have an addiction. And so I train kids to have a positivity bias and to take care of their brains.

• 4:24Ed Mylett?

  In the book, you reference the fact that they need to be working on their brains and their minds. Tell me, did I misunderstand that, or is there a difference between those two things?

• 4:34Daniel Amen?

  Well, your brain, the physical functioning of your brain, moment by moment, creates your mind. And like all the parenting books on the bookshelf, nobody's talking about brain health. But it's the health of your brain that then creates your mind. So if you think of it like hardware and software, you have to get the hardware right first.

• 4:59Ed Mylett?

  Okay.

• 5:00Daniel Amen?

  And then you have to program it properly. Like in the book, we talk about brain health and brain reserve and how to have a healthy brain. But once you have a healthy brain, well, how do you have a healthy mind? And we talk about killing the ants, the automatic negative thoughts that steal people's happiness. I was 28 years old in my psychiatric residency before I learned I didn't have to believe every stupid thing I thought. The brain is a sneaky organ, right? We all have weird, crazy, stupid, sexual, violent thoughts that nobody should ever hear. But there's nothing in school, I'm friends with Paul Simon, love Paul Simon,

• 5:45Daniel Amen?

  especially his song Kodachrome, which starts off with, "When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all." And if you think, schools really have not been redesigned in 120 years.

• 6:03Daniel Amen?

  We need to redesign them to create healthy people.

• 6:07Ed Mylett?

  Well, I was 48 years old before I learned about the ants, which was from you. And I remember leaving you that day and saying to my son, who was the first person I saw, "Hey, Max, I just had a revelation." He goes, "What's that, Dad?" I said, "I don't have to believe everything I think." And one of the thing I have a tendency to do, I want to know if this affects children, because really this book and today's conversation will be about mental health in general, but more specifically how it applies to our children. I do something when I have a negative thought, Dr. Amen, where I do what I call it like thought stacking. So I get a negative thought. I don't do this with my positive ones, I do with my negative ones. Where I repeat it over and over and over, and then I stack it. If this happens, then that happens, and this.

• 6:51Ed Mylett?

  And I create this entire almost narrative in my mind of what I determine, I coined thought stacking. Is that a common thing in people just like me? Or is that something that happens in children as well? Where maybe they're being bullied at school, they have a thought, I don't want to go. And then they repeat it and repeat it, and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And now you believe the bigger lie, it's even worse than the original lie you were telling yourself.

• 7:15Daniel Amen?

  Thoughts stack, the ants, the automatic negative thoughts. They link, they stack, they link, and then they attack you. And it's not hard to kill the ants, but it needs to become a practice. And I have my patients, especially the ones that are anxious, depressed, or obsessive, write down a hundred of their worst thoughts, and then take them through a process to get rid of them. And it doesn't work after you do it the first, second, third, or fourth time. But after you do it the twentieth or thirtieth time,

• 7:58Daniel Amen?

  pretty soon your brain is making new connections to attack and eliminate the ants. And in the book, I talk about nine different types of ants, so...

• 8:10Ed Mylett?

  Let's go through three or four of them if you don't mind. We want them to get the book, but let's give them to give...

• 8:13Daniel Amen?

  Fortune telling...

• 8:14Ed Mylett?

  What's that? What's for... I know what it is, but you tell them.

• 8:16Daniel Amen?

  Where you're predicting things are going to turn out badly, even though you don't have evidence for it. Um, there's mind reading, where you believe you know what another person is thinking, even though, um, they haven't told you that. And I have 25 years of education, and I can't tell what anybody else is thinking, the negative... You know, a negative look from someone else may mean nothing more than they're constipated. You don't know, right? It's like, clarify it. Blame is the worst ant. It's a big red ant. Because when you blame someone else for the problems in your life, you become a victim and you become powerless.

• 8:59Daniel Amen?

  So I wrote my first book many moons ago. It's called The Sabotage Factor. All the ways we mess ourselves up from getting what we want. And the number one hallmark of self-defeating behavior is blaming other people for how your life is turning out. There's guilt beating, ants. And one of the worst ones, it's happening, we're in a political year, is labeling. Whenever you label yourself or someone else with a negative term, you're liberal, you're conservative, you're a jerk, he's an idiot, you lump them with all the liberals, conservatives, jerks, idiots that you've ever known.

• 9:43Daniel Amen?

  And you can't deal with them anymore. Because you're not dealing with them. You're dealing with a group of them. So, here's the exercise. Whenever you're sad, mad, nervous, or out of control, write down what you're thinking. And then identify what kind of ant it is. And then we take them through this process that actually borrowed from my friend Byron Katie. It's like, Tana never listens to me. So that's an all or nothing thought. Whenever you think in words like always, never, everyone, every time, it's usually wrong. So Tana, my wife, never listens to me. I've had that thought. And so you write it down. And then you go, is that true? And if you're really irritated, you go, yeah.

• 10:29Daniel Amen?

  And then you go, is it absolutely true? With 100% certainty. I've written and produced 18 national public television specials about the brain. She has listened to all of the scripts. So it's like, no, that's actually not true. The third question is, how does that thought make you feel sad? How does the thought make you act? Mad. What's the outcome of the thought? Separation. So the fourth question is how would I feel if I didn't have the thought? Happy?

• 11:03Ed Mylett?

  Wow.

• 11:03Daniel Amen?

  How would I act? Connected? What's the outcome? We have a better relationship. And my favorite question of all of them is five. Take the original thought, Tana never listens to me, and flip it to the opposite. Tana does listen to me. Now, don't go to the narcissistic opposite, which is she always listens to me. Because that's not true either. And go, Tana does listen to me. And then, I'm completely not bugged by my thought. And you have to understand, thoughts are creations of your mind. And they come from all sorts of places. Sometimes, they're not yours.

• 11:45Daniel Amen?

  Sometimes, they actually come from your mom or dad, or from your grandparents. Because we know trauma, for example, gets transmitted epigenetically. So it actually comes through our genes. And so, if my grandfather, because he had a big trauma when he was 19 years old.

• 12:07Ed Mylett?

  Wow, wow.

• 12:08Daniel Amen?

  That can actually impact my dad's genes, and then, impact me. So this whole thing of epigenetics is so interesting. So thoughts can come from a different generation. They come from the voices, obviously, of my mom. You know, I'll give you something to cry about. Or, my dad, who told me, what did he say? I told him I wanted to be a psychiatrist. Why don't you want to be a real doctor? Why do you want to be a nut doctor and hang out with nuts all day long? So, voices come from our parents, from our siblings, from our friends, our foes, from the music we listen to, the news we watch. And they lie. I mean, that's the one thing I didn't know till I was 28. Thoughts lie.

• 12:53Daniel Amen?

  Just because you have a thought has nothing to do with whether or not it's true, whether or not it's helpful. And you can learn to direct them.

• 13:03Daniel Amen?

  Or you can become a victim of them. And one great strategy I talk about in the book is give your mind a name. It's based on this concept of gaining psychological distance from the nonsense in your head. So I named my mind after my pet raccoon. When I was 16, I grew up in the San Fernando Valley. I had a pet raccoon. I loved her, but she was a troublemaker. Would leave raccoon poo in my shoes, ate all the fish out of my sister's aquarium. And that's my mind. My mind will just stir up trouble. And I'll see, you know, everything's gone away and I died this horrible death. You know, my mind used to do the same thing you were talking about. It would stack and link and then attack me.

• 13:48Daniel Amen?

  Like if I almost got into an accident, I wouldn't go, oh, thank God, I'm fine. I would see the accident play out. I'd then see the car burst into flames. I'd then see the ambulance driver probably had ADD and got lost to the accident. And that I would be in the hospital and I'd be burned over 80% of my body. And the nurse was not cute.

• 14:12Ed Mylett?

  I was thinking two things. One, the separation from the thought. These exercises are separating you, that word that you used. And when you get distance or above your thought, you can begin to see sort of the folly of them and the ridiculousness of them. As you were describing it also, I'm processing because this is something that I really work on myself. You and I have talked about this. And the techniques that you just went through and more of them that are in the book,

• 14:37Ed Mylett?

  the lack of them, that pattern that we get is like you truly become a prisoner of your thoughts. And the techniques on the way out creates what I was thinking when you're saying it is freedom. There should be some freedom. If you could actually flip that, that strategy that you talked about, you go from being a prisoner of your thoughts to freedom. I just talked about this in the last interview. And there's this great quote that I mess up all the time from Gandhi that says, "I will not allow you to trample through my mind with your dirty feet." And in my own life, a lot of time, I'm the guy walking and trampling through my mind with my dirty feet. And I don't have to believe everything I think. So, hey, guys, as you know, I've partnered up with my good friend Brennan Burchard, who's created the greatest personal development system that has ever been designed called Growth Day.

• 15:19Ed Mylett?

  If you go to growthday.com/ed, you can get all the information. But it's that time of year where everybody's trying to form new habits. They've got new resolutions and goals, and you need an environment and you need some coaches, and you need to be able to do it super inexpensively. And that's where growthday.com/ed comes in. There's everything from journaling to accountability programs, live messages every Monday from myself and other influencers. There's an opportunity for you to get courses that would cost thousands of dollars completely for free. It's incredible. Go to growthday.com/ed and check it out. If we were to look at the scans of an unhealthy brain of one of these children or one of ourselves, what would we see, number one? Would we see this evidence if we looked at a scan?

• 16:04Ed Mylett?

  And two, the traditional world's prescription for that is literally a prescription most of the time, which is some sort of medication. And so I want your thoughts on that. What would we see if we looked at the scan of someone who's healthy versus unhealthy in these situations? And how do you feel about prescribing prescription medication to children, for the most part, as a general answer for these ailments or problems they think they have?

• 16:31Daniel Amen?

  Oh, two huge questions. I did a study with Noelle Nelson, who wrote a book called The Power of Appreciation. And we scanned her when she was appreciating her life. And then, and her brain was really healthy. And I'm like, we need to scan you when you're hating your life. And she goes, oh, I don't want to do that. That'll make me unhappy. I'm like, come on, you have to suffer for science. And so I remember it like it was yesterday. Right before I scanned her, she's, her dog was sick. And so her thoughts linked. My dog is sick. I have to stay home.

• 17:14Daniel Amen?

  I'm gonna lose my job. I won't have money to take care of the dog. The dog will die. And I'll be sad and I'll end up homeless in Malibu. I mean, like, within five minutes. That was the trail. And then I injected the medicine that we do the scans with. And the spec scans we do are so cool because we're getting that moment in time of that couple of minutes. But that couple of minutes seems to be your brain over time. And healthy, when she thought what she appreciated about her life and when she thought what she hated about her life or her fear, her frontal lobes dropped.

• 17:58Daniel Amen?

  So the frontal lobes is the break in your brain. Her left temporal lobe dropped, which is often a source of really dark thoughts, like suicidal thoughts. And her cerebellum dropped. Cerebellum's the back bottom part of the brain that's involved in physical coordination, but it's also involved in thought coordination. So she's not coordinated. She's irritated and she has less control. And when I saw that, I'm like, oh, this is negativity is the pattern that creates athletic slumps. Because if you think you're gonna strike out, you're a little less coordinated

• 18:42Daniel Amen?

  and you're more likely to strike out. Isn't that interesting? If I think I'm gonna miss the free throw, then I'm more likely to miss the free throw. And so negativity is bad for the brain. And I'm doing this study now on negativity bias. And it's just associated with every bad thing. Now, medication, that's a huge topic. And it's not the first thing I think about. I own a supplement company. So if you're depressed, I want you to be on a good multiple vitamin. I want you to take omega-3 fatty acids. And I want you to take saffron. Because there are now 25 randomized controlled trials

• 19:27Daniel Amen?

  showing it's equally effective to antidepressants. But rather than knock off your libido, it enhances it and it enhances your memory. So the science of saffron, very exciting.

• 19:41Daniel Amen?

  Now, if nothing is working, generally with kids, I don't give them antidepressants because they have black box warnings and can increase the risk of suicidal behavior. Now, if I'm really stumped, I might. The issue with ADD is different, though. And I know, everybody thinks all the kids are overmedicated, and they are. But there are a lot of kids that aren't medicated that should be. Because having untreated ADD, right, whenever the doctor says, "Oh, I think maybe we should treat him for ADD", you wanna go, "I wanna know the side effects." And they generally can lose their appetite, can develop tics, can have problems sleeping. I mean, it has side effects.

• 20:26Daniel Amen?

  But you have to ask the other question. What are the side effects of having untreated ADD? Which are things like school failure, friend failure, incarceration, bankruptcy, divorce. It's a lot.

• 20:40Ed Mylett?

  Identity and confidence starts to stack the wrong way.

• 20:42Daniel Amen?

  If you're not, if you really have ADD and you're not diagnosed by the age of nine, your self-esteem generally is problematic. Because you try and it doesn't work. You try and it doesn't work. And, you know, my first thought is not medicine. I have natural solutions, like decrease their time on gadgets, get them to exercise, more sunshine, simple supplements, like multiple vitamin, fish oil.

• 21:12Daniel Amen?

  Rodeo is one of my favorite supplements to help with focus and decrease stress. But if those things don't work, I'd think about it, stimulant.

• 21:21Ed Mylett?

  Okay, you would. Is it saffron? Is that how you said it?

• 21:24Daniel Amen?

  Saffron.

• 21:24Ed Mylett?

  Spelled how, so everybody knows.

• 21:25Daniel Amen?

  So, S.A.F.F.R.O.N. So, the spice. It's the world's most expensive spice. But if you just look at the science, it's stunning.

• 21:35Ed Mylett?

  Okay, that's crazy.

• 21:37Daniel Amen?

  And when I, when I learned about saffron, it was 25 years ago. I'm reading the studies, and they're pro-sexual. And that's the thing that got me. Because all the SSRIs I've prescribed, people don't wanna have sex. Or it takes longer to have an orgasm. Now, if somebody has premature ejaculation, that can be really helpful for them. It's like one of those little tricks with Prozac. I'm like, "You'll last longer, sometimes you'll last forever." Wear your partner out, very bad.

• 22:10Daniel Amen?

  But I saw it was pro-sexual and I'm like, pay attention. And then, so there's five studies showing sexual enhancement for females and males. But 25 studies on mood.

• 22:23Ed Mylett?

  Interesting. So, small thing, well, not small. One thing you emphasized with me was caffeine. And I'm just curious if you still feel strongly about that because I'm thinking about kids in general and I'm thinking of all these energy drinks. Everybody drinks coffee at about age three, it seems like nowadays, right? And I remember in my case, you were saying, hey, listen, this may seem insignificant and small and, yeah, I have omega-3s, but also like your caffeine intake is making an impact on your brain health. And I just, if people have children right now that are pumping them full of caffeine and soft drinks and all these other things, there's gotta be an impact on brain health for them as well.

• 22:57Daniel Amen?

  And why would you do that? It's clearly a drug. And it's just a bad idea, caffeine. And the reason, you know, I pick on lots of things. I pick on alcohol, I pick on marijuana.

• 23:10Daniel Amen?

  But I pick on caffeine because it constricts blood flow to the brain. And what we've learned is neurons, brain cells, don't age. It's blood vessels that age. And so, what you want, I often talk about brain envy, you know, you wanna want to have a better brain. Freud was wrong, penis envy's not the thing.

• 23:33Daniel Amen?

  You wanna have blood flow envy. Because you wanna keep their blood flow, your blood flow, right? Because to be mentally, have mentally strong kids, you have to model that, right? So it always starts with parents being mentally strong. But you wanna lose the caffeine and sugar, right? I mean, energy drinks are just a disaster.

• 23:55Ed Mylett?

  I have one sitting right over there. That's probably why I'm doing such a bad job in the interview.

• 24:00Daniel Amen?

  No, they're not good for you because, I mean, one, the sugar is pro-inflammatory. Brand new study out today on inflammation damaging the dopamine circuit in the front part of your brain. So, kill the sugar. And whenever it comes to food, you just wanna ask yourself this question. Do I love it and does it love me? And so with kids, when my daughter was two, we played this game called Chloe's Game. Is this good for my brain or bad for it? And so I'd go avocados and she'd go two thumbs up, God's butter. If I said blueberries, she'd put her little hands on her hips and go, are they organic?

• 24:42Daniel Amen?

  Because non-organic, blueberries hold more pesticides than almost any fruit. I'm like, no, of course they're organic. She'd go, oh, God's candy.

• 24:50Ed Mylett?

  Oh, God's candy. I love that.

• 24:52Daniel Amen?

  Hitting a soccer ball with your head, oh, very stupid. Brain is soft, skull is hard, skull has sharp bony ridges. Right? And it's playing these games, I talk about this in the book, playing these games with kids just to get them to love and think about and care about their brain. And a lot of parents, especially parents of teenagers go, I just don't have any influence. It's because you don't have a good bond with them.

• 25:19Ed Mylett?

  I'm so excited to have this guest here today. She's one of the most brilliant people you're ever gonna meet in your life. She's a bestselling author. She's got a PhD in communication pathology. She's brilliant and you're gonna write a bunch of notes today. I mean, like a bunch of notes. So Dr. Caroline Leaf.

• 25:32Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Thank you so much for that lovely introduction and I just absolutely love talking to you. We had the most amazing talk on when I interviewed you and I think you're incredible as well. So, thank you.

• 25:42Ed Mylett?

  Give us a quick, what's the difference between brain and mind? And what are these five steps to managing our mind? Maybe you just listed a few of them there, but I like lists, so I'm just wondering what those are.

• 25:51Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Absolutely. Well, first of all, the five steps, we call it the neuro cycle. So with your mind, you're cycling through your brain. You're directing the neuroplasticity, which is really nice to know. You can actually direct changes in your brain. So my whole premise is that if you are always, your mind is always working and it's always changing the brain and it's always happening, can we direct that process? So for three. Three, almost four decades now, I've been researching that. And the answer is yes, and that's what's in the book, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess. So if you add the neuro cycle to your lifestyle, and it's a lifestyle, you actually will literally improve your ability to manage your mind by eighty one percent and more, which is phenomenal, because it means that you influence cellular health through the telemers,

• 26:36Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  which we can unpack as well. You can reduce inflammation, you can improve your immune function, your cardiovascular function, neurological, kidney, like, everything about your body will respond to mind management. Because your mind basically is driving all those functions anyway. Your gut health, your gut-brain interaction, all of it isn't hap- if you're dead, your brain and body are dead. So what's keeping, what's the difference between a dead person and an alive person? Mind. So if mind is messy, brain and body are messy. If mind is cleaned up, and it's a process, because we're all going to be messy, because we have free will. And part of getting a mind sorted out, man, part of mind management is dealing with the mental mess. It's accepting, I'm going to be, make bad decisions, I'm going to get into arguments, I am going to make,

• 27:21Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  you know, misunderstand people, I am going to have acute traumas and toxic traumas and imposter syndrome and people pleasing and all this stuff all of us go through in different ways. So I'm going to have that, and it's okay, but how am I going to manage it? So for me personally, what's happened over the years is that I still go through these things, but the difference is I'm eighty one percent more efficient in identifying and managing. So instead of something that could throw me years ago for days and affect my work and everything, I can deal with it within seconds and minutes and get back on track. So that's one part of the answer. So before I go to mind-brain, do you want to ask anything or unpack anything with what I said?

• 28:01Ed Mylett?

  No, are there, are there specifically five things, like it are going in a sequence?

• 28:04Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Yes, it's a sequence. So, so before I tell the sequence, let me tell you mind-brain, because it'll make so much more sense. Because I've said, alluded to it a lot. So your mind is separate from your brain, but inseparable. So the, what is the brain? The brain and mind are not the same thing. And the, the brain and body collectively are made of thirty seven to a hundred trillion cells, and your mind Is and and then that those thirty seven to a hundred trillion cells arrange themselves into this incredible, the brain and and the heart and the lungs, et cetera. And your mind is what actually is the external force that keeps them going, the blood flowing, the chemicals, electricity, electromagnetics, all of that, which is phenomenal. So that's why if our mind's not managed, the body and the brain will be a mess.

• 28:47Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And so and that goes down to even like if you are eating, if you're eating, maybe eating a farm to table, wonderful diet, et cetera, but you're not dealing with your anxiety or you're not, you're trying to stuff it down, or you're not dealing with that bad habit or that toxic trauma, you will lose up to eighty percent of the nutrition. Because your mind has affected the ability of the digestive system to actually digest and get the simulate the nutrients. And sometimes it's kind of messy and sometimes it's great and we all, if we're human, we are going to experience messes and there's no shame in that. The sooner we get rid of the shame and guilt and condemnation around being messy and the sooner we as leaders talk about the mind more authentically, the more the more we give people that follow us a permission to talk about mind.

• 29:31Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Only three percent of leaders are talking about mind, which is terrible. So that doesn't, that's creating the stigma that they're pretending they'd be perfect. And that's why we see people that seem to be perfect in their lives and they're committing suicide. Meanwhile, it's because we've got this philosophy in this day and age of not being open and seeing um issues of the mind as helpful messengers of an underlying issue. The neurocycle then is these five steps. It is how you manage your mind moment by moment. So it's a lifestyle. So the neurocycle is what you do when you're awake and and conscious and it then automatically prepares you for sleep because sleep is fixing up your brain. So your mind is always with you, so your mind always needs to be managed. And so an analogy and then I'll dive into the five steps. You can go three weeks without food.

• 30:16Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  You can go three days without water, you can go three minutes without oxygen, but you don't even go three seconds without using your mind. So you're always thinking, feeling and choosing, yeah. So it's gather awareness, second step is to reflect, third step is to write, fourth step is to recheck, and the first step is an act of reach. So each of those, they're so profound, they do the most phenomenal stuff in your brain. And the first half of the book, where I talk about the mental health system and I talk about my clinical trials, I do explain what each of those steps are doing. So the first thing is to gather awareness. Gather awareness, and I've chosen words very carefully. If you think of a big fat apple tree and you're apple picking,

• 30:57Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  and this apple tree is so full that you actually can't, like you just go up and you just nudge it and this apple is just falling on your head. That's how we often feel when our mind's a mess. It's just, everything's just falling on our head and it's just too much. So what you can do with a neuro cycle is when you feel that situation coming on, remove yourself from the tree and stand back and watch the tree. And gather awareness of all of that. Don't be scared of it, don't run away from the apple tree. Just stand back and observe the apple tree, observe what's going on there.

• 31:25Ed Mylett?

  Let me jump in about that, this is brilliant. One of the things I've taught for a long time, I didn't understand the neuroscience behind it, was that for me, and there's four other steps, this is why everybody needs to get the book, but awareness of your thoughts, I've always said, when I'm aware of these patterns, when I'm aware of my thoughts, they begin to lose their power over me, their influence over me. And one of the reasons that, that you're, you're explaining it scientifically, which I've always wanted to understand better, because I do become separate from the thought when I observe it, almost like I'm above it and distant from it, like you said. And I realize I'm not just that thought and that it is a pattern that I'm running. And so I just want to acknowledge what Caroline's saying, because from a practical standpoint, when I coach people, this is something that I, the first thing I teach is just becoming aware.

• 32:07Ed Mylett?

  Now, to know that there's four other steps is obviously very empowering as well. But, and I want to just unpack this a little bit into another area. So I want to use your brilliance towards something else. One thing I want to acknowledge is that, what Caroline is saying is that neuroplasticity is real, that Mind can change matter, that literally that these thoughts, if you change them, change the protein structures in your brain, change the matter of your brain. So this is powerful to know that we can physically change our brain by using our mind. And this distinction between the mind and the brain is also a breakthrough way of listening to it or seeing it for me, as I'm sure it is for everybody else. Just those things alone, just those two things alone have made our time already incredibly

• 32:51Ed Mylett?

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• 33:35Ed Mylett?

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• 34:20Ed Mylett?

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• 34:55Speaker 03

  Wayfair, every style, every home.

• 34:58Ed Mylett?

  Very short intermission here, folks. I'm glad you're enjoying the show so far. Don't forget to follow the show on Apple and Spotify. Links are in the show notes. Now on to our next guest. I'm so excited about today because the woman sitting across from me is the definition of brilliant. And so Dr. Caroline Leaf, thank you for being here today.

• 35:17Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  I'm very, very flattered, very honored. Thank you. And I love talking to you. It's always just, you're an amazing interviewer.

• 35:23Ed Mylett?

  You wrote this for how to help your child, but when I'm reading the work, I'm like, this is helps humans, right?

• 35:29Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  That's what it's for.

• 35:30Ed Mylett?

  But so what is something, a strategy, you said awareness of the thought helps it lose its power over you? I'm using my description of it, right? So I've always said that. Now I know why.

• 35:40Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Yes.

• 35:40Ed Mylett?

  Okay. What is something, a tactic or a strategy or a technique that somebody can use for their child or themselves? That can help this in these 63 days that you would be proposing they do?

• 35:51Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Okay. So what you do is you do the five steps of the neuro cycle. Because what I did was strategically look over the years at how can you actually find the signals? And do this whole reconstruction, reconstruction thing? So you can't do it in one shot. So you, what you want to do is do a neuro cycle, which is five steps.

• 36:07Ed Mylett?

  What are they?

• 36:07Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And I'm going to, and I'll go through this in a moment, but you're going to do five steps in the sequence. The first part of the sequence is the first more or less three weeks where you go through the five steps in around 45, 15 to 45 minutes, not more and not less. Then the second 42 days where you're stabilizing, you just do it in five minutes. So the five steps are basically gathering awareness. And notice I say gathering. So it's a very conscious and deliberate, it's not like a mindfulness awareness, which this is beyond that. So when we talk about mindfulness, meditation, breathing. Decompression, all of those are very important to prepare the brain. So what you would do before you dive into the neurocycle, and you'll see this in my box and in my app. I've got an app as well called the Neurocycle. There's a two to three minute brain preparation, which is could be anything from focusing on momentum

• 36:52Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Mori to doing a seven three ten breathing exercise. So it's something to just get the neurophysiology under control. Then you, or it could be a meditation, a prayer, whatever. Then you move into the actual work, and I'm about to slip off this chair.

• 37:05Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 37:06Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Then you move into the, I get so into this, into the work of gather awareness, step one. So gathering awareness is a very specific process. Everything's very layered. Your mind, brain connection, psycho neurobiology, mind, brain, body. I'm actually a psycho neurobiologist, study that connection is very ordered and sequenced and structured. And if you want something to change, you've got to follow the steps of the order. So the neurocycle is a system in that you can put CBT techniques, you can put prayer, you can put whatever works for you. But put them in the right step. So when we gather awareness, we are gathering, like gathering apples off a tree. We're not just randomly looking at things. You're very organized, okay, what am I going to gather awareness of? My emotions, I'm feeling depressed, I'm feeling anxious, I'm feeling frustrated, whatever, just label them.

• 37:52Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  What am I, what related to that emotion? What am I doing? What are my behaviors? What am I doing? What am I saying? How am I doing and saying them? So maybe it's depression and maybe it's withdrawal. Then the third thing is you're going to say, how do I feel in my body when I'm feeling depressed and withdrawing? Maybe cardiovascular issues, heart palpating. And then fourth category is how am I looking at life in this moment? As I feel depressed, gut ache and withdrawing, I feel that life sucks. Very simple example, those are four signals. So you go, step one is to gather those four. Step two is to ask why. Okay, you're going a little deeper. Why am I feeling these emotions? And you're not solving the whole problem. Don't try and solve it in one day, just go as much as you can handle. It's very.

• 38:34Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Draining. So that's why I say limit. So it's why am I having this? Maybe I'm having this depression. I seem to be having it because of it's happening a lot. I'm not sure why, but it's happening five times a day, or it's feeling, or it's happening once a week. Oh, if it is once a week, what am I having the same behaviours? Why am I getting that? Why am I doing that withdrawing? How often am I withdrawing? What other things am I doing? Why do I think I'm doing that? So you work through each of those signals and try and get some more. Don't stay too long on those two steps and then you write. Now, you don't journal, you write, you dump, you literally dump what you've gathered awareness of and what you have reflected on. Cause the first step was to gather awareness. The second step was to do this reflection thing. And then you dump it down on and literally in

• 39:16Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  mind, I'm just write it all over the page. I've developed a system called the meta cog. And for kids, it's the bubble cog. And it's basically writing in a way that looks like a tree. So it's starting from the middle and it's working around in circles and branches and colours and arrows and everything's connected. Everything's either on a line, in a bubble. If you don't like doing that, just write any old way. But try to write dimensionally. Don't do it in lines. Try and just put it all over the page. Cause it brings in, forces the two sides of the brain to work together. Creates a very strong connection between the conscious and the subconscious through the bridge of the subconscious. Yeah. And it starts diving deep. I mean, it's like, I can tell you now that when I worked with patients that who had symptoms of schizophrenia, this is

• 39:59Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  an extreme example, but just to show you how all this works, we would have them just basically meta cog out what all these steps I'm going through. And they would have one whole personality on the side and they'd be continuing the same conversation in another hall. So you'd see the shift and then we could show them, hey, look what's going on. And from there, we could unpack and find roots and things like that. So it's phenomenal in getting insight. Now, you spoke about introspection earlier on. Introspection, insight, it means diving into the depths of the non-conscious. That's the most intelligent part of us.

• 40:26Ed Mylett?

  So is writing part of step two or is that step?

• 40:28Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Step three. So writing is step three. Sorry. Gather awareness, step one. Reflect, step two. Writing, step three. You're bringing order out of chaos. You're getting, those three steps are taking you deeper, deeper, deeper. Getting, increasing your introspection insight, pulling up things that are associated. Now that is things all over the page, a lot of it won't make sense. Things may shock you that come out. Day one, not really, but as you progress through the days, more and more will come up. And like, for example, around day seven, people start saying, oh, I never saw this connection. And day fourteen, I like insight, insight into, oh, that's associated with that. I didn't see that. This is why I'm doing this. So there's tremendous growth if you don't force it, you just go through the cycle.

• 41:09Ed Mylett?

  I want to interrupt you, but I want to ask you.

• 41:10Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Go ahead.

• 41:10Ed Mylett?

  Do you think during that awareness and the writing and that you are uncovering some of the things that may trigger you as well?

• 41:16Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Totally. So it's step four. Excellent question. Which step four is what, looking at what you've gathered, awareness reflected on and written. You look, what are my triggers? What are the patterns? This has happened, what can I do? So step four is moving towards reconceptualization, reconstruction, healing, putting food on the, plant food on the roots to heal them. It's leading to that acceptance. You're not going to know why someone raped a child, why someone did this. That's their story, but that's your story. So you need to find out, I'm not crazy, I don't have a broken brain, I'm not genetically flawed, I don't have a mental illness. I'm showing up like this because of what happened to me. I can't answer why. I have to get to a certain level of acceptance, but at least I know why. It's not me, it's because of. And that helps you heal and move forward. So it's very progressive.

• 42:01Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  It's not walking in circles round and around and around. You know, this is where you can bring in things like this all psychodynamic theory and ACT. There's a lot of different therapy techniques that people can bring in experiences from EMDR and into all these, because this is a system. Yeah, into these spaces.

• 42:17Ed Mylett?

  What's the fifth step?

• 42:18Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  The fifth step is an action, active reach. So you're going to, from the triggers and, and things like that, you want to move towards an antidote for today, an action for today. So what can I do today to keep me in a safe space? I've done the work for today. I'm not going to fall back into working on this anyway. I've got to get going through the day. And also your brain and mind need a rest. They get tired. So it's an action, it's like a visualization, a statement, a combination, a little prayer, an affirmation. So this is where you would fit an affirmation or a CBT type technique, like maybe a little visualization exercise or a. And so it's something that you do and say, maybe something as simple as. I can do this, I don't know how. And then visualize a rainbow. I mean, it could be something as simple as that to an actual little technique, or it could be a breathing technique.

• 43:02Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So it's an action that keeps you going through the day, which helps you focus on the fact that you are moving towards healing. So you're removing energy from this thing because this process has brought this from the non-conscious to the conscious, and it's weakened these branches. In the non-conscious, it's strong and driving. When the non-conscious and conscious are working together, then this is weakened, the protein branches, the chemicals. So I can start restructuring and reorganizing.

• 43:28Ed Mylett?

  See, what I'm, I gotta tell you what I'm thinking when you're doing this. Because this applies to two different people, so everybody stay in here, okay? So those are the five steps to sort of begin to rewire yourself or change your brain. The other part of me listening to this is if you're thinking, I really don't have a lot of these issues of anxiety or worry, depression. I also think that's the formula to create a change. Like, if I had a goal and ambition, I'd become aware of what I wanted, right?

• 43:52Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Totally.

• 43:52Ed Mylett?

  I'd have all these reflections about it. I would then write about it. So, and I like the idea of it not being linear like a book, but actually all over the place. So there'd be like, that's almost like a dream, personal vision board or dream board that you're doing. Then I'd think about what were the triggers I need to create to generate this state? Could be snapping my fingers, it could be seeing something, it could be walking into my office, it could be getting into my car, it could be a particular person. So I'd use that trigger to then create that state. And then obviously, the fifth would be, what's an action that I can take towards this step?

• 44:22Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  You've got us.

• 44:22Ed Mylett?

  So that, that cycle can be used to uncover trauma, you know, reverse trauma, create brain health, but can also be a creative process in order to change your life.

• 44:32Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So you are brilliant because that's exactly where I started my research, thirty-eight years ago, with people with traumatic brain injuries and learning disabilities and people that just wanted to improve their life. They just wanted, and it's called brain building. So it's the neuro cycle, and that was the first iteration of this thing, was to develop brain building. So it was helping kids learn, so getting data in. As opposed to deconstructing, it was constructing.

• 44:52Ed Mylett?

  Sure.

• 44:53Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So it's taking from the knowledge in school to learn for an exam. Or what is the goal in your vision? So that's the brain building aspect of the neuro cycle.

• 45:00Ed Mylett?

  This is huge right here. I gotta tell you something because everyone always wants to create change. They're like, all right, do I get a vision board out? Like, do I? So this is a five-step process.

• 45:09Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  It actually does it.

• 45:09Ed Mylett?

  To actually do it and to do it reinforcingly. And by the way, in sixty-three days.

• 45:13Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Exactly.

• 45:14Ed Mylett?

  You're a different human being.

• 45:15Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Totally different.

• 45:15Ed Mylett?

  I do a thing, you're talking about visualization techniques. I should share this with you and then maybe you can speak to why it might work. So everyone asks me, I don't visualize very well. Yes, you do. You just need to get quiet and it's a muscle you build. You know, when you decide to start visualizing your life, it is difficult. But one thing I've done is I've created, I teach it to a lot of my athletes is I use what I call like a highlight reel technique. So what I actually start with is I start, I've never said this on the show because it's part of my private work, but I want you to speak to it. I actually start by visualizing memories from my life that are highlights. So it could be, for example, you know, the birth of my son, the birth of my daughter, a home run I hit in baseball, an award I got, a sale that I closed that was important.

• 45:57Ed Mylett?

  These are things my brain are already familiar with, to your point earlier. It's already been wired. I've already repeated the emotion. It's already in there. And so I see those things and those are easy for me to recall because they're familiar. And then I move to what I want. So my brain, I think, begins to think they're one big highlight reel. Is there any data to prove that that's true? Meaning, I'm already visualizing what I've already, something I want. I've seen an achievement. I've seen an achievement. And then I see the one that I want to achieve. And for me, my brain more easily sees the future when I start with things that I'm already familiar with in my past. Because I think we do that in reverse. So if we've had a traumatic, someone's hurt us in our life.

• 46:39Ed Mylett?

  We see this, we repeat it over and over, and then we then regenerate it in our real life with the next relationship. And that's why people end up dating the same person over and over again in a different body.

• 46:48Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Exactly.

• 46:49Ed Mylett?

  Right.

• 46:49Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Exactly. Okay, so I'm jumping out of my chair with excitement because you've said exactly the correct thing. So what you've just described, remember I said a moment ago, I said, spoke about how I'll recall this conversation. It's a great conversation and I'm building. That's what we're talking about here. So you are recalling these. You're recalling those and you're using those to unmask your natural resilience.

• 47:09Ed Mylett?

  Yes, that's exactly right.

• 47:11Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So I actually call these insurance policies. So they literally, so when I work with a person to actually be able to build their brain, we're building an insurance policy. So you should be spending time on doing exactly that. So as you do that, you activate a whole different way that your energy flows across the two sides of your brain. You go into the highest level of intelligence, you unmask resilience, you increase your wisdom, you tune into the depths of your unconscious where intelligence, pretty much your intelligence resides. Because your conscious is basically a workhorse and it's guided by your unconscious. So what we've got to see is what is dominant in the unconscious. Now, your unconscious is a gentle lady, gentleman. And it's basically always looking for the things that are blocking this growing and keeping you stuck in those.

• 47:56Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So it's on your side. But you have to tune in to what's coming up. So when you describe, when you want to do something difficult, you first think of something good. What you've done is you've listened to wisdom from your unconscious, which is that process. You've then called those up. You've activated your resilience. You've put yourself in a highly intelligent, wise state. Now you're in a state that's more able to cope with it. So when I work with a patient, for example, I would never start with that. I would say, okay, let's talk about, you know, your favorite moments. Or you'll tell me a story about, tell me a great movie.

• 48:28Ed Mylett?

  Yes.

• 48:28Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  You know, let's talk about a great book, anything. And then you would focus on that. When they were in that state, I knew that I had got their mind-brain connection, their psychoneurology.

• 48:35Ed Mylett?

  I like, I feel like thinking about the things that have been positive in my life or experiences creates a neurochemistry to which I can create out of.

• 48:43Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  That's exactly what you do.

• 48:44Ed Mylett?

  Right.

• 48:44Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Yes, you have. You've changed all the flow. You've, these change, they increase gamma, which is, which is a way that you want to flow.

• 48:52Ed Mylett?

  Okay.

• 48:53Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And when your eyes are open, you want like this, what we call low gamma across the whole brain.

• 48:59Ed Mylett?

  Okay.

• 48:59Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And then there's certain other patterns. I don't want to go into the details. And that's got to go into have a certain beta pattern and so on. Those energy waves, when they are flowing in that state, they activate the different parts of the brain to then be on high alert to respond and do what they designed to do. Which then impacts your neurochemistry, then your endocrine system, your cardio. Everything then comes together and you are in this prime state. Your HPA axis is now on high alert and you now are in the ideal state for solution finding.

• 49:26Ed Mylett?

  This is so good. You guys, this is why I do the show right here. So let me just give you this again. Step one, gather awareness. Step two, reflect. Step three, write, play, draw. Step four, recheck. Step five, active reach, which is basically what we've been describing here. I specifically invited Dr. Amy Shah to be here today. So, welcome to the show.

• 49:44Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 49:46Ed Mylett?

  What is the main solution if I'm, because it's a, it's a science that's sort of like, you can't always measure all of it, right? So I'm, maybe I'm bloated, or I'm inflamed, or I'm fatigued, or my emotions aren't in check. That sounds like it could be different bacteria for different things, right? They all have a different name on them.

• 50:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:04Ed Mylett?

  So what's this, is there like a packaged solution? Like, do you just, do you take probiotics? Like, what do you do if it's, if it's an emotional thing or a physical thing?

• 50:13Speaker 04

  Well, the hundred billion dollar, you know, industry of medications and probiotics will tell you it's probiotics, but really, we don't, we don't have a probiotic solution yet. In fact, some of the probiotic solutions that they've looked into actually don't work as good as dietary changes. Makes sense, right? When you're eating the bacteria, like through fermented foods, or which I'll talk about, then you're actually keeping it in your gut. Whereas if you're throwing a probiotic in, it's almost like throwing seeds out of an airplane at 10,000 feet. Like, you hope that something sticks, but you're just kind of throwing it and-

• 50:50Ed Mylett?

  That's what I would think.

• 50:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, some of it's flying in the wind, and that's what probiotics are. And right now, we still don't have a one-shot solution to fixing that gut. One of the things that are counterintuitive, besides diet, is this concept of circadian rhythms, the sun. That piece is super easy. It can improve your brain health in ways that, you know, you subjectively know. When you go out and get some sunshine in the morning, first thing, it resets your entire body, your brain, your gut bacteria, and, you know, every cell in your body has a clock that needs to see that sun. And even if it's a cloudy day, people message me all the time on Instagram, "Oh, but I live in a cloudy, overcast place."

• 51:35Speaker 04

  Doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. It doesn't have to be bright, it can be overcast, gray, raining, whatever it is. But that natural light is very different from the artificial light that we get indoors. And if you are indoors all the time, which, again, we were, you will break the clocks, you will damage the clocks, you will damage the gut bacterial clocks, and you will end up with higher rates of obesity and diabetes and high- Cholesterol and all of the things that we don't want that we're trying to battle. It's actually going way up by not paying attention to this.

• 52:10Ed Mylett?

  Okay, you're awesome. So, so let's say, so those of you that work in an office building all day long, you need to hear what she just said. Those of you that work in cities really need to hear what she just said. But I want to understand this a little bit deeper. I know that we have circadian rhythms. Are you saying the bacteria itself has its own circadian rhythm?

• 52:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:29Ed Mylett?

  Come on.

• 52:30Speaker 04

  Isn't that crazy?

• 52:31Ed Mylett?

  The bacteria itself does.

• 52:32Speaker 04

  They, they, these bacteria, okay, by the way, we have 100 trillion and their genes outnumber the stars in the universe. Okay, they have personalities, they have food preferences, and they need sun and dark just as much as we do.

• 52:52Ed Mylett?

  Oh, my goodness. What's the foods then?

• 52:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, they, they're starving to death, actually, because in 97% of Americans, we're not eating enough of what it eats as its primary food, which is fiber.

• 53:05Ed Mylett?

  Fiber.

• 53:06Speaker 04

  Fiber is stripped away to give you white sugar, to give you refined flour, to give you all the conveniences of today. So when you think about it that way, it makes so much sense that diseases are going up, anxiety is going up, fatigue is going up, depression is going up. Look at our food supply. Look at how much processed food we're eating, fiberless food. And now it's gotten to the point where 97% of Americans are not getting even the minimum amount of fiber that you need to keep those bacteria alive.

• 53:39Ed Mylett?

  So should we be eating more celery or should we like take a fiber supplement?

• 53:44Speaker 04

  Whenever I say fiber, people are like, what brand do you recommend? No, I'm not talking about a brand. It's literally free. I mean, or low cost. You eat the food. So when you're eating a broccoli, it has fiber in it, right? But when you're eating it white table sugar, it does not have any fiber. It's removed. So the sugarcane that it came from had tons of fiber. Have you ever had raw sugarcane? It's like the most fibrous thing you could ever eat, right? You have to chew it and there's a ton of fiber. But what we wanted to do is make it easy, you know, convenient. And so we stripped it all away. Same thing with wheat, you know, you take real wheat and we there it's very fibrous.

• 54:24Ed Mylett?

  Yes.

• 54:24Speaker 04

  So we basically took real food, stripped off the fiber. And that's what we're eating as food like substances, which is not feeding that bacteria. And not only is that bacteria dying, it's growing the wrong kinds of bacteria. That's sending inflammation signals to the brain. That's making us depressed. That's making us sick. Um, so it's just insane how this knowledge can little like smart entrepreneurs who's listening to this might say, oh, well, why the heck are we marketing this to all these health conscious people? Why, why don't we start making foods that have, you know, prebiotic fiber, which is the food for the gut bacteria? What about real fermented foods in the diet?

• 55:06Speaker 04

  They just published a study that showed that six fermented foods a day, which is like unheard of for most people. And I'll tell you what fermented food is. That was the amount of food that it would take to really grow and flourish that gut bacteria. And six fermented foods is like um sauerkraut, kimchi, uh kombucha. Uh, you can get probiotic, you know, yogurt, cottage cheese. You can even get a probiotic cheese, which is like Gouda. And you can eat uh pickle, anything that has um live bacteria. Is actually so good for the gut, even better than just eating fiber is adding those foods.

• 55:48Speaker 04

  And not notice, I didn't say any brands, any pills, anything you have to buy. It's literally the food that you eat.

• 55:54Ed Mylett?

  Hmm. How long's it take to fix? Do we know?

• 55:56Speaker 04

  Well, there's it it can change in as little as three days. So they took a group of people who were on a Western, very unhealthy diet, which is kind of extreme. And they changed them to completely healthy, plant focused, whole foods diet. And they saw in three days of market change in their gut microbiome.

• 56:19Ed Mylett?

  Okay. Is I feel like there's we're going so fast. Yeah. Right. Cause like I just have all this stuff I want to know for my own health and for the Yeah. that are listening to this. My guest today is Dr. Andrew Huberman, and he's a neuroscientist. His lab is at Stanford. Today's gonna be one of the more interesting shows for me that we've ever done before because I'm fascinated with this man's work. One of the things I've learned from your work is this concept that you said earlier, but I it was in the middle of so many gems is that the brain would like to preserve energy and I'll use it, say it my way and move to default reflexive mode. So as many things as it can process and just default to reflexive

• 57:00Ed Mylett?

  mode rather than effort mode with critical thinking and adjustment, it will do. So your brain is constantly trying to find ways and situations and circumstances you're in to default to what you do reflexively. Okay. So would that not mean then, Andrew, that those things you do reflectively called habits and rituals better serve you or you'll default continuously to the reflexive mode of drinking or laziness or the video game or Instagram? That's a reflective default mode. Some people for stress, they encounter stress, the brain reflects to a default reflexive mode of whatever they do to cope with that stress. True?

• 57:37Speaker 05

  Absolutely. You know, I think I'm not alone in the noticing that occasionally I pick up my phone and I log into an app and I didn't make the conscious decision to do it. I just do it reflexively. I might even go into a subwindow within that app. And the reason is that the brain and the nervous system are constantly seeking rewards and novelty. And if we're not deliberate about how we're doing that, we will do it entirely reflexively. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. I enjoy social media, teach neuroscience on Instagram. I enjoy doing that and I enjoy the feedback of most of it. Um, you know, I'm here.

• 58:19Speaker 05

  Right. So, but I think the brain and nervous system wants to make things reflexive and habits are very powerful because they are, they set us on trajectories. Now, some people

• 58:31Speaker 05

  They are uncomfortable with the fact that effort is the first gate that you have to go through in order to build this pathway that involves norepinephrine and adrenaline and epinephrine. And I, sometimes people will jump on me about using norepinephrine and epinephrine interchangeably. I know that they're not the same thing, but today, we're just gonna broadly describe them as systems in the brain and body, not get too down in the weeds. But the idea is, you've got effort, you can associate that with adrenaline, epinephrine. You've got dopamine, which is your internal reward system, and it can be externally rewarded. So this is very important. There are intrinsic rewards and extrinsic rewards. There's a beautiful study that was done at Bing Nursery School at Stanford.

• 59:13Speaker 05

  I had nothing to do with this study in the mid 70s, where they took kids that liked to draw, and they then rewarded some of those kids with just a little star, like kids like, you know, the shiny star makes them special, for drawing. Then they took away the star, next day or the next day, and the kids that liked drawing just for the intrinsic pleasure of it, they drew less. So that, so these reward systems can attach to external things or internal things. I have a good buddy, he's, he's friends and co-founders of this company, Made For, that you talked to Blake Mycoskie about. His name is Pat Nase, he's a former Navy SEAL. And he and I were giving a talk once to a bunch of people, and we were talking about

• 59:56Speaker 05

  reward processes in the brain, and how SEALs do it, and what neuroscience thinks. And someone asked us a really good question, and they said, "How do I continue to tap into this dopamine system?" And our answer was, be very careful with extrinsic rewards. Make sure that your dopamine system is attached more to the effort process than it ever is to any external reward. And it's because of a very important principle of dopamine rewards. It's what neuroscientists call dopamine reward prediction error.

• 1:00:25Speaker 05

  It is the reward prediction error is the reason why people that work, work, work, work, work in pursuit of a goal and then reach that goal, become miserable and don't know what to do with themselves. Reward prediction error says you always need the dopamine at the final stage to exceed all the little bits of dopamine you got en route to that reward, or you will actually be disappointed. You'll experience a sort of postpartum depression of sorts. So, the key is, learn to attach reward to the effort process. You know, I'm not David Goggins psychologist, but I do know David and he's come out to my lab before. We've had some conversations. I don't know what his process is, except as he's described

• 1:01:08Speaker 05

  it. But, I have the sense, based on what I know about neuroscience and knowing a little bit about his story and having read his book, that he's learned to attach some sort of internal reward mechanism to the pursuit and friction process. It's not about feeling good about some external milestone. It's about learning how to tap into this, this engine that we have. And I actually do believe that, in knowing some people from the special operations community, that this is actually, one of the things that they are selected for, is not just grit or resilience. It's actually this ability to reward oneself internally

• 1:01:48Speaker 05

  in their mind, as a way to buffer the effort process. It gives them more gas, more of an engine. And it's not just special operations. People that make it through cancer treatment. People that raise a special needs child, or make it through a tough stage of, you know, economics in their life. Many people are probably in that situation right now. It's about learning how to take that strain, the feeling that you're being something, or some force, or some life force is trying to push you back on your heels, and learning how to use self-reward, not delusional thinking, but self-reward, as a means to get more energy to continue to plow forward. It's a, it's a real thing.

• 1:02:24Ed Mylett?

  Wow, so good. By the way, it's interesting you say that. When I interviewed David, we've become real good friends. We've done a lot of things together since that. He said something when I interviewed him that's along those lines, and it surprised me. I sort of stared at him for a minute. We were talking about the, the endurance races that he does. And he goes, "And I don't care if I win."

• 1:02:42Ed Mylett?

  I just stared at him. He goes, "I'm more concerned with the fact that I'm making the effort and that I finish." And I thought, "Wow, that's exactly along the lines of one of the..." It was actually the thing that stood out to me when we were having that conversation.

• 1:02:53Speaker 05

  That's it in a nutshell. Yeah.

• 1:02:56Ed Mylett?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:56Speaker 05

  That's the real growth mindset. You know, a lot of people, hashtag growth mindset is one of the most popular hashtags in social media, but most people don't actually know what it means. And then again, this is Carol Dweck's discovery, not mine. It was discovered in a group of kids that were doing math problems or other kinds of puzzles that they knew they couldn't get right, but they enjoyed doing them and they perform exceedingly well on lots of sorts of tests of that sort, when there is the right answer, of course. And so what they do is they've somehow, they're wired for effort. They're wired for the puzzle, not for the solution. And when I say puzzle, I don't mean the noun puzzle. I mean the verb

• 1:03:36Speaker 05

  for being puzzled. It for them feels good. And so we need to think, if we're talking about the nervous system and we want to make it actionable for high performance, whether or not it's in business or sport or otherwise, we want to think in terms of processes, not events, and verbs, not nouns. So growth mindset as a verb, as an action item, you know, reward as a verb, not just as a, "Oh, you're gonna just pat yourself on the back." Like it's, no, it's what you internalize. It's a process. That's how the neural circuits that underlie reward get stronger. And the beauty of the brain is that you have this thing of neuroplasticity, which is its ability to change itself throughout the whole lifespan. And the more you practice

• 1:04:19Speaker 05

  this, the better you get at it. And it does not mean you're walking around talking delusionally about how great life is when everything is terrible. It means you might even be very stoic. You might be, hopefully you're very rational, but you have the energy to continue to push forward. Whereas other people are gonna be dropping out because everybody shows up gritty and resilient and they watch their inspirational, aspirational story. One of the big motivations for me being here today and in general of my lab is to try and make these concepts from psychology and personal development and high achievement to make them what we call operational, meaning give them definitions that people can grab onto and apply and not just have to watch, you know, 50, you know, everyone loves the Rocky

• 1:05:03Speaker 05

  movie. I mean, it's super, it makes you feel really good. It makes you feel like anything's possible, but you don't always have access to that.

• 1:05:09Ed Mylett?

  By the way, it's amazing that you just said that because I was reflecting, brother, I love when energy's prevalent even on Zoom. While you were talking, I was thinking about David and I talking again. We're both, as kids, these crazy Rocky fans. We both watched Rocky one and two, literally thousands of times. And what we were both struck by in the movie is exactly what you're describing. It wasn't Rocky winning. It's this time where Apollo Creed knocks him down. He puts his arms up and he thinks he's won the fight. I get emotional even saying it. And it's a movie. And so is a buddy of mine, and I know he's an actor, you know? And you turn back and Apollo Creed looks at Rocky and he starts to get back up again. And Creed's just like, what? And the inspirational aspect of that, Rocky wasn't winning, was the effort deposit,

• 1:05:54Ed Mylett?

  was the pursuit, right? And so, guys, if you've ever heard about this before, like, this is scientific proof that you've got to be giving yourself the reward for the effort deposit. My guest here today is an expert on optimum brain performance, on learning, on learning quickly, and on maxing out your capacity to think and perform in your life. My guest today is the great Jim Quick. Jim, thank you.

• 1:06:18Speaker 06

  Ed, thank you so much. I've been looking forward to this so much.

• 1:06:21Ed Mylett?

  Me too, brother. Let's just go back just a little bit, because I want to give people context, because I really believe life happens for us, not to us. And it's the meaning in our life of the events that happen to us. Not the event, but the meaning we take from it. And so you've become this world-renowned expert. You've worked with the Dalai Lama, Richard Branson, right? Some of the highest-profile celebrities in the world, most successful business people. But it's ironic that that was founded out of a boy with a broken brain, right? And that was because you had fallen and hurt your head, is that right? Like a five-year-old? Tell us that story real quick.

• 1:06:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, you know, it's funny, I just posted this on Instagram today. I said, difficult times could define us, they could diminish us, or they could develop us. You decide. Because ultimately, we do decide. And, um, yeah, when I, I know, I'm such a big fan of yours.

• 1:07:08Ed Mylett?

  Thank you.

• 1:07:09Speaker 06

  And follow up your work. And, uh, and first of all, before we get started, I appreciate everyone who's watching this. And what I love is you are the person you are on and off camera.

• 1:07:17Ed Mylett?

  Oh, thank you.

• 1:07:18Speaker 06

  And that, that means... A lot to me, you know, your humility because you're so accomplished. And so the reason why I'm excited about this is because I think this message we have to talk to people about is so important because your brain controls everything.

• 1:07:30Ed Mylett?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:31Speaker 06

  Right. When I see people see me on stage, they'll see me have a hundred people stand up and I'll memorize all their names as they introduce themselves or a hundred words or a hundred numbers that they give me forwards and backwards.

• 1:07:41Ed Mylett?

  I've seen this man have a hundred people give him two numbers out of sequence and he'll repeat back a hundred people's multiple numbers like this.

• 1:07:48Speaker 06

  And here's the thing, I always tell people, I don't do this to impress you. I do this to express to you what's really possible. Because the truth is, every single person that's listening and watching this could do that and a lot more.

• 1:07:59Ed Mylett?

  Oh my gosh.

• 1:07:59Speaker 06

  The thing is, we weren't taught, you know, if anything, we were taught a lie that somehow our our capabilities, our potential, our memory, for instance, our learning abilities, our intelligence is somehow fixed, like our shoe size. And it's absolutely not true. We've discovered more about the human brain in the past 20 years than the previous 2,000 years combined. And what we found is we've grossly underestimated our own potential, our own capabilities. And that's the thing, it's just because we weren't taught. And I really think the nature of the work that you do, that I do, that our community is really backing, is about transcending. It's about ending the trance. Transcend, end the trance, ending this mass hypnosis in media and marketing that's telling us that we're broken.

• 1:08:41Ed Mylett?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:41Speaker 06

  That we need to be fixed, that we're not enough. And I feel like that is what holds us back. You know, this disillusion, if you will.

• 1:08:50Ed Mylett?

  That's remarkable. Did you feel that way as a little guy?

• 1:08:52Speaker 06

  You know, when I was five years old, as you mentioned, I had this accident, head trauma, brain injury, traumatic brain injury. After that, my, my parents said I was never the same, you know, I became extremely shy, introverted. I had learning difficulties, I was labeled, and a label is tough, right? You know, when you're put in special classes, I couldn't understand things. My, my teachers would repeat themselves four or five times and I would pretend to understand.

• 1:09:15Ed Mylett?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:15Speaker 06

  Like sometimes we do as an adult, you know, we have this imposter syndrome. We always wanna, we wanna look good. We don't wanna ever make a mistake, which I feel like also holds us back.

• 1:09:23Ed Mylett?

  In this space, the things you teach can affect someone's life like this, and that's what I love. So can we talk about some of those things?

• 1:09:31Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 1:09:32Ed Mylett?

  I'm just fascinated, like, look at me, right? We only have an hour. I wish we had 17.

• 1:09:38Ed Mylett?

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• 1:10:23Ed Mylett?

  the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to quince.com/ed for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com/ed. So you know I've been trying to take my health and my morning routine to the next level, and I used to do a whole bunch of different stuff, tons of different supplements, and then I found All-in-One in a drink with IM8. IM8 is the way to simplify your supplement routine, finally, once and for all. 16 supplements replaced 90 ingredients across nine major organ systems in one drink. You can have all these supplements for $2.61 a day. I've changed my mornings. The whole IM8 routine has changed my mornings. I feel great, and

• 1:11:07Ed Mylett?

  I bring energy to the entire day. Go to im8health.com/ed10 right now, or click the link in the description and use code ED10 for a free welcome kit, five free travel sachets, plus 10% off your order. That's code ED10 at im8health.com/ed10. Code ED10 at im8health.com/ed10. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. That was a great conversation and if you want to hear the full interview, be sure to follow the Ed Mylett Show on Apple and Spotify. Links are in the show notes. You'll never miss an episode that way.

• 1:11:48Ed Mylett?

  What an honor it is to be with this gentleman here today and to share him with all of you. Most of you are probably familiar from him for the first time from The Secret. He's one of the stars, if not the star of The Secret. So I have John Assaraf here with me today. John, thanks for being here, brother.

• 1:12:02Speaker 07

  Ed, it's so good to be here and thank you for giving me the honor to be here with you. So I'll start with the story first and then I'll share beliefs and then what to do. So we have some practical things that you can start doing today. So back in 1987, when I bought the franchising rights for RE/MAX of Indiana, I had no idea how to build a company. I was 26 years old. But I had another mentor who I invested $75,000 to become his partner, to have the opportunity to learn from this man who at the time was probably $100 million. And so I was very, very keen on learning and I didn't know how to build a business. I didn't know anything other than how to sell real estate.

• 1:12:46Speaker 07

  And I set a goal to generate $1 billion a year in sales. And I set the goal for five years in the future, not knowing... A billion dollar goal is like, mind boggling big for me. And there was an interview, the second week I was in Indianapolis, I moved from Toronto to Indianapolis for this opportunity. And I was interviewed by the Indianapolis Business Journal and I said in the interview, I had a goal for $1 billion and the reporter said, "Are you aware that there's two companies that have been in the state of Indiana for 80 years, one, 100 years the other one, and they haven't hit $1 billion in real estate sales in all of these years?" And I said, "Yeah, I know. It's Graves and Tucker and you can let them know that I'll be the first."

• 1:13:32Speaker 07

  And as I said that, I almost felt like I put my foot right in my mouth because I didn't know how I was gonna do it.

• 1:13:37Ed Mylett?

  Right.

• 1:13:38Speaker 07

  Long story short, five years later, we sold enough franchise, recruited enough agents. We did 1.2 billion dollars and we were, we were stuck, which is a great place to be stuck. And I was asking myself, how is it possible that I'm training these agents with strategies, with tactics, with selling skills, marketing skills? We were like the gurus of here's the books, here's the cassettes, here's the trainers, here's like out of the deep end. And the agents who, for example, would make 30,000 dollars a year, kept making 30,000 a year. The agents who made 50, kept making 50. The agents who made 100, kept making 100. And so I realized that they weren't missing the skills or the knowledge. There was something else at play.

• 1:14:23Speaker 07

  And what helped me from the age of 19 to 27, 28, 30, was every single day, and I still do it today, and I'll share this with, with you in just a little bit. Every single day, I was priming my brain with the beliefs and the self-image required to achieve the goals that I wanted. So I got 75 agents together who agreed to pay 3,000 dollars each to be part of an inner game training. Forget the outer game, the inner game training. We worked on affirmations, visualization, mindfulness, meditation, uh, listening to our affirmations on our vision, on our cassette recorders. We had little cassettes we put in our cars.

• 1:15:05Speaker 07

  And so I had them work on their self-image and self-worth and self-esteem, and to develop the beliefs that we were gonna imprint or impregnate into their subconscious mind by listening to these audios every single day, twice a day, and while they were driving. And those seventy-five agents, over six months, increased sales by one hundred million dollars.

• 1:15:29Ed Mylett?

  My gosh.

• 1:15:30Speaker 07

  We didn't teach them one thing about selling more.

• 1:15:32Ed Mylett?

  Wow.

• 1:15:32Speaker 07

  We taught them about changing their identity and their belief structure, so that it matched the goals they wanted to achieve. And then I said, "Holy shit, this works even for other people, not just me." So we started to teach that to all of our agents. And we created these cassettes with these recordings on them of the beliefs that we needed them to believe, the self-image that they deserved, that they were good enough, they were smart enough. And we went from one point two billion to four and a half billion a year.

• 1:16:01Ed Mylett?

  Wow.

• 1:16:02Speaker 07

  Within four years.

• 1:16:03Ed Mylett?

  Wow. And that's my beliefs. And so, guys, that's a ballistic-

• 1:16:07Speaker 07

  A little bit of beliefs and believing in a new self-image and identity and a new story.

• 1:16:12Ed Mylett?

  Gosh, so good. Are you gonna tell us about beliefs, what they are?

• 1:16:17Speaker 07

  So if you think of, yeah, so, so when you were born, were you born with any beliefs?

• 1:16:21Ed Mylett?

  No.

• 1:16:22Speaker 07

  Were you born with any habits?

• 1:16:23Ed Mylett?

  No.

• 1:16:24Speaker 07

  Were you born with any fears?

• 1:16:26Ed Mylett?

  No.

• 1:16:27Speaker 07

  No. So, from a neuroscience and neuropsychology perspective, a belief is nothing more than this. Imagine that you're born and your brain's made up of a hundred billion marbles. And every time you have an experience, or somebody says something to you, or you read something, or you watch something, these marbles make these connections. And the connections that are reinforced go from conscious connections to subconscious connections. And once these subconscious connections are made and reinforced, they run the show ninety-eight percent of the time. So a belief is nothing more than a reinforced pattern in the brain. And our conscious brain can choose what we want when we're in that part of our brain, but our subconscious mind can't choose.

• 1:17:11Speaker 07

  It's programmed from the age of zero to three in the imprinting years, three to about seven or eight, the modeling years, and then eight on, it's the experiential years. And so if you have these powerful beliefs that you're good enough, you're smart enough, you're worthy to achieve the goals that you have, if you have these powerful beliefs, you are able to achieve any amount of income you choose, no matter what the amount is, you just need to learn how. So if you have these empowering beliefs, you have brain coherence between conscious and subconscious. What if you said, "Okay, I wanna make, let's just say, a hundred thousand dollars a year, or a million, it doesn't make a difference." And I asked you- What do you need to believe about yourself to achieve it?

• 1:17:55Speaker 07

  So I need to believe I'm smart enough. Good. Write down, "I am smart enough." What else do you need to believe? I need to believe that I am worthy. I need to believe that I deserve this. I need to believe that it's possible. I need to believe... You write down five or six or seven beliefs. They're just words on a sheet of paper. Now, let me stop for just a moment. I'm gonna tell a story and come back to this. I want you to imagine that somebody tapped you on the shoulder sometime today and say, "Hey, I work with Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks in Hollywood, and we have this new script, okay? That if you get really good at this script, where you could read it in front of a camera without the script, we'll pay you 10 million bucks." Now, I want you to imagine you've never seen the script. You don't know how to act.

• 1:18:40Speaker 07

  But they said to you, "We're gonna give you an acting coach. We're gonna give you everything you need to memorize the script. We're gonna give you everything you need to act it perfectly." What would you do to take that script that's on a piece of paper that you've never seen before? What would you do to take that script to make it yours? For you to own it? And the answer is you'd probably read it like, what, once? Would you read it maybe 100 times, 200 times, 500 times? You think you might role-play with somebody while you're holding the script in your hand? Do you think you might research the role? Do you think you might take a camera and practice it? And do you think that if you practice it one time, 50 times, 100 times, 500 times, you could finally put the script down? And you can get in front of the camera and go, "Boom, here is the script."

• 1:19:25Speaker 07

  Do you think you could do that? Well, guess what? A script that's on a piece of paper that you don't believe with practice, you start to believe. So what happens if you take a belief system and you start to imprint it into your subconscious mind? Initially, through conscious repetition. But there are ways to access the subconscious mind that we know today that are faster and easier than just doing it consciously. And so you take a vision of you achieving your goals and dreams. You take the beliefs you need. You learn how to manage your emotions a little bit better. And then you develop the habits, which again are nothing more than neural patterns in the brain that have been reinforced. And when you learn how to deactivate the destructive ones and activate constructive ones...

• 1:20:10Speaker 07

  Through spaced repetition and reinforcement, now you are resetting your default way of being.

• 1:20:16Ed Mylett?

  Oh.

• 1:20:17Speaker 07

  So a belief is nothing more than a reinforced pattern that if you learn how to deactivate it and create a new one, it's like a software upgrade for your brain.

• 1:20:29Ed Mylett?

  Wow. So guys, what he didn't say, so good, John. Thank you. Guys, this is stuff that you pay thousands of dollars for, but you, by the way, can get in his book and you get here because I know him for free.

• 1:20:41Ed Mylett?

  But guys, what he didn't say is beliefs are necessarily true.

• 1:20:44Speaker 07

  No.

• 1:20:45Ed Mylett?

  They don't give you any truth. And this is important. You know, I've told you many times, everybody, that your thoughts aren't necessarily true. Your beliefs are not necessarily true. They're patterns reinforced over time. And so if you could create this new script that's reinforcing these patterns over time, that's a conscious way of doing it. Give us one key. So we know now there's subconscious ways to do it that are faster and more powerful. Give us one that is a new hack to do this.

• 1:21:10Speaker 07

  So one that everybody's heard of and very few people do unless you're a professional athlete, astronaut, or Navy SEAL is visualization.

• 1:21:18Ed Mylett?

  Yes, thank you.

• 1:21:19Speaker 07

  Simple, simple. I know you had Phil Mickelson on in the past and I watched him. And if you think about visualization is simulation. Now here is the difference.

• 1:21:29Ed Mylett?

  Whoa, that's good. Okay, go ahead.

• 1:21:32Speaker 07

  So visualization is simulation. So when we close our eyes or even if our eyes are open and we start to use our Einstein brain, the imagination, we now have just activated one of the biggest centers of our brain, the occipital lobe that's connected to the motor cortex. It's connected to the motivational circle, the nucleus celtum that releases that dopamine that makes you feel good, that makes you want to take action. So if you visualize yourself achieving the goal, if you visualize yourself behaving in ways that match the new belief, if you even visualize the words or you take the words on a sheet of paper and you read them, run your right finger across it,

• 1:22:16Speaker 07

  run your left finger across it, close your eyes, see it and feel it. Your brain is creating a mental movie with the words. And as it creates a mental movie with the words, that's happening in your subconscious mind.

• 1:22:30Speaker 07

  And when you give the subconscious these instructions, a couple of things happen because of the way the brain hierarchy works. Number one is survival, but then number two is safety, and then number three is energy conservation. Now, when you do something 20, 30, 40, 50 times, it takes about 66 days to 365 days of repetition to override an old habitual circuit. Not 10 days, not 21 days, 66 to 365. So if you visualize yourself achieving the goal, feeling the success that you want to feel, seeing the belief on the screen of your mind, you are actually creating a neural

• 1:23:11Speaker 07

  network through the science of neuroplasticity, and the networks that you reinforce become the most dominant networks. And since your brain wants to conserve energy, if you do this on a consistent basis, your brain says, "Okay, you're doing this so often, let me just make this automatic, let me set aside the old beliefs, let me replace it with the new beliefs," and now you've deliberately and consciously evolved yourself.

• 1:23:35Ed Mylett?

  My gosh, so guys, it's patterns. John, thank you. John used a word earlier which was coherence, and it can fly by. But when you've done this hard work, and I say fun work, by the way, on your subconscious brain, on your subconscious mind, what happens is now when you set that ambitious goal, there's a coherence between what's lying underneath you and what's on the surface. And that's why you know people, you all have someone you know, that when they point their mind at something, it's almost like a weapon. When they point themselves at a dream, they draw it towards them. Part of that's energy, part of that's vibration, but a big part of that is coherence in your brain. And so you've got to do this difficult work that you might think is difficult, which, by the way, is fun, is easy, and it's really just a matter of patterns and taking control

• 1:24:19Ed Mylett?

  of your life, taking control of the things you do. You can literally, everybody, change your life. You can change the external parts of your life by changing the internal or the inner sizes that he teaches, part of your life. That's why I do this show, is what we're talking about.

• 1:24:38Speaker 07

  Can I just piggyback on something?

• 1:24:40Ed Mylett?

  Please.

• 1:24:41Speaker 07

  Since you picked up on the word coherence, and you mentioned the law of attraction earlier. For the people who think that the law of attraction is, you know, think, believe, and you'll achieve, first, I'm gonna tell you that's bullshit. So, let's call it-

• 1:24:56Ed Mylett?

  I love this man. I love it.

• 1:24:58Speaker 07

  Bullshit. But I want you to think of your brain just a little bit differently, and think of it this way: let's say you love rock and roll. And let's say rock and roll's on station 95.5. If you're on station 92.1, that might be classical. If you're on station 98.7, that might be punk rock. But at 92.5, that's rock and roll. So, imagine coherence just means locking your electromagnetic spectrum of your brain. Lock it and load it on exactly what you want. So, what's the vision? What's the goal? What are the beliefs? What are the emotions that create coherence? So, you're locked and loaded to the frequency of the universe that is matching that goal.

• 1:25:43Speaker 07

  Part one. Part two is when you get locked and loaded, you've actually activated the Einstein brain, connected to the motor cortex, connected to the dopamine release in your body. And when that happens, okay, now you're in coherence. But there's another part that happens in this Einstein part of the brain. That's actually what the latest neuroscientists, psychologists are thinking is connected to this GPS part of our brain, to the frequency of where all of the tools, resources, people are that resonate with that frequency. So, we've been evolving for, what, two and a half million years, this Homo erectus to

• 1:26:25Speaker 07

  now 108 billion humans on Earth, with a brain that's been changing and growing. And my belief is we're just scratching the proverbial surface. When we talk about, you know, little quantum mechanics or quantum phase with entanglement, how we're all connected, we're all tuning in to the frequencies that are us and within us and all around us. Now, when we learn to use our brain better, it's just mind-boggling how we can achieve goals and dreams that we thought were impossible to achieve before. This is the fun part now.

• 1:26:58Ed Mylett?

  That to me, this is the fun part. And by the way, when you see two people that are vibrating at frequency like this, you get an interview like what you're experiencing right now, everybody. Like, we both have done lots of interviews, and we know when we're in the midst of a great one. And everyone, I just want to be clear, please follow John, please. And if you're listening to the show or watching it, share my show. My gosh, people need to know this. You know someone you care about or believe in or love that should be hearing these things. Couple more tips, and then I want to talk about something pretty serious at the end, if you don't mind. Because you're just such a treasure. But one of the ways that you can do some of this work, many of you know about vision boards, and we can have a competent person talk about it. John, I can maybe touch on that a little bit. But John goes even deeper into these accomplished boards, I think you call them. And he's got a crap board, which

• 1:27:42Ed Mylett?

  I've never flipping heard of in my life. And again, guys, you're just not going to get this anywhere else. I am so grateful that this man sitting across from me is here today for a lot of reasons. Number one, he's changed so many lives in my lifetime, and I grew up listening to him on Love Line. And so I'm really grateful to have Dr. Drew sitting in this seat finally across from me today.

• 1:28:02Speaker 08

  Finally, indeed, it's such a privilege. We have mutual friends, we kind of live near each other in weird ways. It's all odd, but I'm so glad I'm here.

• 1:28:10Ed Mylett?

  It is odd. I want to talk about heart, brain, what I call coherence, or whatever. And you said you wanted to talk about that a little bit today. So, one of the, I said earlier that I've done a lot of work. Some of that work has been therapy, reading, having friends like you in my life, that I taught, literally, I've just become more self-aware. And a lot of times, just my awareness of some of my behavior patterns, it's lost some of its power over me.

• 1:28:31Speaker 08

  A hundred percent. That's why, that's why there's a whole category in treatment, frankly, called psychoeducation.

• 1:28:37Ed Mylett?

  Okay.

• 1:28:37Speaker 08

  And interesting, in my, early in my therapy, I had to understand what was happening before I felt comfortable going in. So I read a ton of stuff before the therapist was like, why do you, why do you, I just, I need to understand. I just need to.

• 1:28:50Ed Mylett?

  Well, for me, it was, it wasn't just that. It was like, I've produced an externally really Pretty good life.

• 1:28:56Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:28:57Ed Mylett?

  And I was afraid, if I'm being candid, that if I changed some of these patterns that I had in my life, that although maybe I had a little bit more zen and peace, but I'd lose my edge, I'd lose my success.

• 1:29:06Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:29:06Ed Mylett?

  By the way, I think my audience listening resonates with what I just said deeply.

• 1:29:10Speaker 08

  Well, but here's the thing about treatment and, and healing. You have to be one of the, your brain hates change. Our brain fight changes, just the way we hate, we don't want our arm cut off. We don't want our, we don't want to change fundamentally who, who our brain thinks we are. But you have to be prepared to become whoever you're supposed to be.

• 1:29:30Speaker 08

  And, and that is a really hard thing for people to do. I, I went through it myself. It's, it's, you have to kind of let go and let things happen and your brain fights you. And that's kind of why when I recommend professionals get involved, that's, that's their skillset is working around and through those resistances.

• 1:29:48Ed Mylett?

  That's one of the most important things someone said, because what I ended up finding out, because this is like an achiever audience overall, right? I ended up finding out that in fact, I externally produced way more abundance in my life when I had patterns that served me in my life and I gave myself the gift of a little bit more equanimity and peace in my life. One of the things I did also work on though, was what I, I'd like you to elaborate on because you'd be better at it than me, but I've worked on small things all the way to like my breathing.

• 1:30:20Speaker 08

  Oh, sure.

• 1:30:20Ed Mylett?

  To, you know, alter my HRV rate so that I've got a little bit more heart and brain coherence, which most people don't know about, so just riff on that.

• 1:30:27Speaker 08

  Well, I just, there's a guy named Stephen Porjes. Okay. If you want to read about the neurobiology of attachment and regulation, Alan Shor is your guy and Peter Fonagy, who really has worked out this socio emotional exchange system, which is something that's evolutionarily built into not just who our, our bodies, but actually into our development. And so there's, I'm going to have trouble explaining this in a way that's cohesive, but I'm going to try. The, the brain, the base of the brain, the brain stem, the cranial nerves, and the autonomic and parasympathetic nervous systems all developed together and are embedded in.

• 1:31:11Speaker 08

  The face, the ear, the vocal cords through something called the brachial pouches, which is these things that develop into our face and neck and whatever, and the sympathetic outflow to our heart and gut. Okay, and it turns out it's obviously the face and our voice and our ear is how we exchange emotionality. We are exquisitely sensitive to what's going on in other people's faces. And what goes on in our faces can have micro, micro changes that the other person, maybe not on a conscious level, is able to read and receive as information about the other person's emotional states. So this, this, we ultimately learn to regulate our emotions through being in and around other people. Our identity comes from being in and around other people.

• 1:31:56Speaker 08

  We, you know, we have, I said, the brain is embedded in the body, but the brain body is embedded in a social system. And how it manifests, you met, you mentioned earlier about, you know, trends and things and how they affect people. They do. I'm interested in that. I'm not an expert in that, but I read a lot about that stuff these days. History is one of my weak spots. I've read a ton about it, trying to make sense of it all. The socioemotional exchange system is also connected through various nuclei in the brainstem to the, the, you know, vagus nerve. Yes. The gut and then the sympathetic outflow. Something like 70 or 80% of the vagus is an inflow to the brain. When I went to medical school, we were taught, well, the vagus is this system that, you

• 1:32:40Speaker 08

  know, decreases your, you know, maybe changes your acid secretion, your stomach and slows your heart down. Right. No, 70% of it is getting information from your body and taking it back to the brain. To the brain. Goes that way. It's crazy. Goes that way. And it's, and it's deeply embedded in this socioemotional exchange system. And he has all this data about how heart rates change and breathing change with our emotional states. It's from infancy, from infancy. Infancy. What have you done in that world for yourself? Do you do? I like the breathing stuff. I try to do that. I'm not a religious. My thing has been the, the psychotherapeutic process. I'm not quite sure where I'm going with this, but as it pertains to breathing and heart rate and facial expressions and stuff. I know when I'm around great therapists that are highly attuned to their patients,

• 1:33:25Speaker 08

  because when I see them work or I interact with them, I notice I start breathing with them, too. Interesting. My, literally, my heart rate and breathing starts syncing up with that other person. Yeah. And, and I, and I, and when I become aware of, I've actually been with this one woman who I've become close with who treats, treats sex addiction, actually, I saw her in a video working with a patient, and I noticed it was happening to me, and I went, oh, this woman has got. No way. This woman's got powers. And so I got to know her, and lo and behold, you know, she really is an exquisite therapist. And they can just be fully present and attuned to that person on not just a attentive, attentional level, but your, the whole body is an instrument.

• 1:34:06Speaker 08

  And if you've ever been in a therapeutic process where your body is present like that, it's weird. Not, I've, I've been the subject of it as a patient, and I've helped other people by being the antenna. And you experience things and smell things and hear things that are not yours. And you know it because you've never experienced these things before. And, and they're really the, I'll, I'll tell you a story in a second about one, my favorite story with this, I tell it all the time. But the real art in, in the therapeutic process is not just receiving, listening with your whole body, I call that, but knowing when to bring it in the room. In other words, when to go, you know, I'm having an experience. And I'll tell you a story about that. I, I had this guy that was severely traumatized.

• 1:34:51Speaker 08

  And usually it's traumatized parts of the self that are needing attention that aren't, the patient isn't even aware, isn't there in the room with that patient at the time. It's sort of a walled off part of themselves that's screaming for some kind of attention. And, uh, Wow. this guy was coming in, and as he would sit down every day, I started hearing the opening riff in Mad Men.

• 1:35:16Speaker 08

  I was like, Where is that coming from? Like, I don't hear that normally. And I thought, well, isn't that interesting? And damn it, every time he would start, he walked in the room. Well, then it got weirder. Then, as we were working together, it wasn't that long, there were a few visits. I started feeling like I was that shadowy character falling through the buildings, right?

• 1:35:37Ed Mylett?

  Yes.

• 1:35:38Speaker 08

  So I had that feeling and I was like, whoa, this is interesting. But I didn't bring it up with the patient because he was talking about horrible trauma and all these horrible things that happened to him. And then about halfway through one of these visits later, music kicked in, I'm falling, and all of a sudden I experienced myself as a baby falling through these buildings. As I talk about it now, it constricts my chest. It was an overwhelming experience. I couldn't, I couldn't stay with it. It was like, it just took my breath away. It's like this incredibly traumatic feeling. And, and I thought, I have to bring it into the, I have to, I have to bring it up.

• 1:36:15Ed Mylett?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:15Speaker 08

  And I said, listen, I actually interrupted him. He was telling another traumatic story. I said, look, I'm having an experience and I'm wondering if this is meaningful to you. And I told him what I've been experiencing. He became furious, stormed out of the room, you and your psychobabble. How dare you? You think you know what you're talking about? And just ran out of the room.

• 1:36:34Ed Mylett?

  Whoa.

• 1:36:35Speaker 08

  And I thought, hmm, maybe that wasn't the right time to bring that in. Comes back in the next day and he sits down calmly and says, how did you know? He goes, how did you know? All I hear is the baby, the baby, the baby screaming in my head. I, it's going all the time. I, and, and it was, and because of the depth of that attunement, he and I were, he trusted me. And then, by the way, if you've been traumatized, trust is a big deal. He, we were able to kind of work together for a while and I, and I always see that.

• 1:37:01Ed Mylett?

  Wow.

• 1:37:02Speaker 08

  Yeah. And so I would get people in, in working with people with trauma and addiction and stuff. I'm always getting them at the front end, at the beginning of their treatment. And I really always conceived of my role, my one other than get them through the medical stuff, to teach them that you could be fully appreciated. I can fully experience you. And you can trust that. You can stay close to another person and they don't abuse, they don't, it's nothing. You just be, they'll be there for you.

• 1:37:28Ed Mylett?

  Wow.

• 1:37:28Speaker 08

  Makes me emotional just thinking about it.

• 1:37:30Ed Mylett?

  Yeah, it makes me emotional.

• 1:37:31Speaker 08

  Yeah, and.

• 1:37:32Ed Mylett?

  The part of it that makes me emotional is that to understand. How connected humans can actually be together.

• 1:37:39Speaker 08

  It's unbelievable. It's unbelievable, right?

• 1:37:41Ed Mylett?

  Right.

• 1:37:41Speaker 08

  And so when you ask can, can, and that's in, you know, it's weird is right. It's almost psychic-y kind of stuff. And every therapist who does this kind of work has had these experiences where you feel a pain somewhere that's not yours, or you hear music, or you see something. And, um, but of course, then we experience, we affect each other on a, on a, on a macro scale too, right?

• 1:38:01Ed Mylett?

  Right.

• 1:38:01Speaker 08

  I, I don't understand why there are these huge moo trends, you know, why it happens. I'm trying to understand that.

• 1:38:06Ed Mylett?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:07Speaker 08

  And it feels to me like it's sort of French Revolution type trend, you know, like where they're people are bringing out guillotines and things.

• 1:38:15Ed Mylett?

  Same here.