Top Neuroscientist: How To Heal Your Brain & Your Body With Your MIND (Get To The Root Cause of Anxiety)

Leave an Amazon Rating or Review for my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! The most dangerous trend in mental health today isn't anxiety itself—it's how we've been taught to think about it. Dr. Caroline Leaf, a leading neuroscientist and author of "Help in a Hurry," reveals why 100% of people experience anxiety and how the current medical model of labeling and diagnosing mental health "disorders" creates more harm than healing. Through groundbreaking research spanning 40 years, she shares her most vulnerable discovery: we are 99% mind and 1% brain, making every thought we think a physical force that either builds or destroys our cellular health. The conversation takes a powerful turn when she explains her 63-day healing protocol that has helped thousands rewire toxic thought patterns, proving that what we've been told about mental health has been fundamentally backwards—and how anyone struggling with overwhelm, anxiety, or stress today holds the power to transform their mind and heal their body. Pre order Dr. Leaf’s new book ​​Help in a Hurry: Simple Tips for Finding Peace When You're Overwhelmed, Anxious, or StressedDr. Leaf’s book Switch on Your Brain: The Key to Peak Happiness, Thinking, and HealthDr. Leaf’s book Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic ThinkingDr. Leaf on InstagramThe Doctor Leaf Show on YouTubeIn this episode you will learn:Why anxiety is your brain's warning system, not a disease, and how to read its signals correctlyThe shocking truth about self-diagnosis culture and why labeling yourself creates the exact problems you're trying to solveHow your thoughts become physical networks in your brain and body within secondsWhy 35-98% of all physical illnesses originate from toxic thinking patternsThe exact 63-day process neuroscientists use to rewire trauma and heal emotional woundsFor more information go to https://www.lewishowes.com/1785For more Greatness text PODCAST to +1 (614) 350-3960More SOG episodes we think you’ll love:Dr. Rangan Chatterjee – greatness.lnk.to/1716SCDr. Joe Dispenza – greatness.lnk.to/1702SCTJ Power – greatness.lnk.to/1741SC Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

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

• 0:00Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  The self-diagnosing on TikTok and all of social media is really dangerous. It's people saying, well, I've got that, but it's not something that you can have. If you haven't caught a virus, you haven't got a thing.

• 0:11Lewis Howes?

  So if we say, I am ADHD, then we're essentially embodying that.

• 0:16Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Exactly.

• 0:17Lewis Howes?

  Experience, right?

• 0:18Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Exactly.

• 0:19Speaker 02

  Dr. Caroline Lee, cognitive neuroscientist.

• 0:22Speaker 03

  Since the 1980s, she's been researching the mind-brain connection.

• 0:25Speaker 02

  She's going to help you change the way you think and change the way you live. Dr. Caroline Lee.

• 0:30Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  The mind is the most powerful thing. We are 99% mind and 1% brain and body. So whatever we do with our mind, we'll wire in a network. Everything that we experience that's unexpected puts us into a level of anxiety. Anxiety is good in that it puts our body into healthy stress. When we really embrace it and face it, we then dive into the depths of our wisdom.

• 0:52Lewis Howes?

  What is the root cause of anxiety? And why do you feel like it has amplified so much in the recent years?

• 0:58Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So there's two ways to look at this. One is.

• 1:04Lewis Howes?

  Welcome back, everyone, to the School of Greatness. Very excited about our guest. We have the inspiring Dr. Caroline Leaf back in the house. Thank you so much for being back on. It's been, I think, over a year or two since you've been on. But the last couple of times you were on, people loved it. And we wanted to have you back on for this new book that you have, which is called Help in a Hurry. Simple tips for finding peace when you're overwhelmed, anxious, or stressed. And I want to speak about this, but there was a stat that I saw that I want to share with you and get your thoughts on. And this stat is from the National Alliance on Mental Illness. It said, "Anxiety disorders are the most common mental health concern in the United States. Over 40 million adults in the U.S., close to 19.1%, have an anxiety disorder.

• 1:49Lewis Howes?

  Meanwhile, approximately 7% of children aged 3 to 17 experience issues with anxiety each year. Most people develop symptoms before the age of 21." This is from the National Alliance on Mental Illness. And I'm curious, your book, I think, has come at the exact right time needed because so many people in the world are dealing with stress, overwhelm, and anxiety, and they don't know what the root cause of it is. So I'm curious, from a neuroscience standpoint, what is the root cause of anxiety? And why do you feel like it has amplified so much in the recent years?

• 2:24Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Excellent question. Lewis, first of all, thank you for having me back on. It's always so great to be with you and we always have such great talks and chats and conversations. So, thank you.

• 2:32Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 2:33Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And I love your new studio, by the way.

• 2:34Lewis Howes?

  Thank you.

• 2:35Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  It's amazing. Yeah, this is, just reading those stats makes you feel anxious.

• 2:40Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 2:41Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And so, there's, there's two ways to look at this. The one is, what are they actually saying? Because actually, a hundred percent of people battle with anxiety. So, it's actually bigger than what we see the stat.

• 2:52Lewis Howes?

  A hundred percent of people.

• 2:53Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Everyone battles with anxiety because anxiety is a very, very normal emotion. It's a warning signal telling us that something needs to, you've got to pay attention to something in our life. And where it becomes a problem is when we don't deal with it, when we don't manage it. And what's often happening in our current, the past forty years, the focus on dealing with mental health issues has been very much one of, let's identify the biological cause. Let's find the neurobiological cause. Where is it in the brain? Something's causing it in the brain. There's something in you that's wrong that's causing anxiety. And that's been a huge focus of, of research.

• 3:35Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And that's been, it's called neuro-reductionism, where everything's focused around the brain. Now, that in itself doesn't quite ring true and scientifically, it's been pretty much disproved. But it's the going philosophy. And it results in these kinds of stats that we see. Because what we need to do as humans is, anxiety is part of being human. It's part, it's a normal response to adverse circumstances. Obviously, of varying degrees and different stages of our life and all that kind of thing. And dealing with change and all, just being a human. And so, when we manage it and see it as something that's giving us information and recognize when it's becoming disruptive and how to, and dealing with that, then it actually isn't such a problem.

• 4:19Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  But when we are told that it's a brain disease and you need a medication and you've got a disorder, you wire in a perception into people that becomes how they see themselves. And you feel kind of hopeless. So, when you think, oh, well, I've got a brain disease, there's something wrong with me. There's something broken in me. That makes things worse. Initially, giving it a label or a name or saying you have a disorder makes people feel comfortable. Because ah, that's why I feel like this. There's a reason. And that's really nice. But then it's a gift that doesn't have anything inside of it. You open it up and think, now what? Actually, and it backfires. And that's what we're seeing. That's why we see those that when you suppress and don't deal, it will then turn into something big.

• 5:02Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And anxiety then shifts from being uh normal into something that becomes distorted.

• 5:07Lewis Howes?

  I've heard a lot of people lately have been self diagnosing with some type of mental disorder.

• 5:12Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Yeah.

• 5:13Lewis Howes?

  Either self diagnosing or looking for something wrong within them by going to a therapist and say, tell me what's going wrong with me. And then sometimes they might be labeled as being ADHD or having something going on. Is there any value in self diagnosis? Or is that more harmful than valuable? Putting a label on, I am uh an anxious person. I have ADHD. I have some mental health disorder. Is there power in that?

• 5:40Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  There's way too much power in that and it's very dangerous. And the research shows throughout the psycho neurobiological research, which is psycho neurobiological mind, brain, body research, which is the field that I'm in, which is uh is part of neuroscience, shows that the mind is the most powerful thing. It's we are ninety nine percent mind and one percent brain and body. So whatever we do with our mind will wire in a network. So if we look at all the TikTok, social media, self diagnosis, it's people, on the one hand, it's people trying to make sense out of what's going on in their life. Because life is so big and complicated and there's just so much that goes with it and it's so fast and it's

• 6:23Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  and we didn't talk about it in my parents' generation and now we talk about it. But now we talk, we've swung from not talking to talking about it.

• 6:31Lewis Howes?

  Over talking about it.

• 6:32Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Over talking or putting it into the same model as a medical model. So for example, if you have diabetes or if you have cardiovascular disease or an immune disorder, there's a way of testing. Identifying a biological cause and then giving some kind of treatment that that is aimed at doing that. When it comes to mental health, when it comes to life, we need to look at it differently. So the self diagnosing on TikTok and you know, all of all social media is really dangerous.

• 7:02Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 7:03Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  It's it's it's leading to people talking, but it's people saying, well, I've got that, but it's not something that you can have. You haven't caught a virus, you haven't got a thing, you're having a reaction to a life, whatever's going on in your life at that moment. So reducing it to a label narrows it down, limits you and kind of locks you into a pattern.

• 7:24Lewis Howes?

  That's interesting because words really matter when we label ourselves. So if we say, I am ADHD. Then we're essentially embodying that.

• 7:32Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Exactly.

• 7:33Lewis Howes?

  Experience versus I'm experiencing ADHD symptoms, I'm experiencing extreme overwhelm, anxiety. Um, you know, toxic thoughts or intrusive thoughts that are harmful, I'm experiencing versus this is what I am, right?

• 7:49Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Exactly. When you take on that persona, your brain simply does what your mind tells it to do. Your brain is a host, your body is a host, it's a host to what? Your mind. Your mind is where you are, your intelligence, your ability to love, your ability to have perceptions, to experience life, to appreciate a sunset, to have a conversation. To follow your dreams, that is your mind. But not only is your mind this psychological thing. It's also running your brain and your body. So it's controlling your heart rate, it's controlling your brain, it's controlling your genes, your neurophysiology, your biochemistry.

• 8:27Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So it's doing a lot of stuff. When you're dead, your brain just disintegrates, your body disintegrates, but your mind, whatever belief system we have, it's got this eternal component. So therefore, whatever we say with our mind, how we perceive, how we look at things, that is going to influence what it looks like in the brain. Because whatever we think about becomes, it's electromagnetic forces we generate. That then changes structures in the brain and the body, and then the brain and the body just follow the bidding of the mind. So if I'm telling myself, oh, my gosh, I've got those symptoms. TikTok and Swan says this and I've got that, I've got that, I've got that. You then merge because your mind now tells your brain and your brain just simply merges with what your mind tells it to do. So if you offer whatever you think about the most is growing.

• 9:11Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So if I'm listening to that all day long, ADHD, I've got that symptom, I've got autism, I've got this, I've got this, I've got this. That merge, you merge with your environment, you wire that in and then you start believing it. Now it's contrary to who you are. It's contrary to the wisdom that's in what we call the non-conscious mind. So it creates conflict and that in itself creates anxiety, which is why we see anxiety being this distorted version of anxiety. The anxiety no longer is working for us, it's working against us. So it kind of shifts the process.

• 9:42Lewis Howes?

  So what would you say then is the root cause of anxiety for most people?

• 9:46Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  The root cause of anxiety is a signal. It's an emotional signal and it's telling you that there is a something going on in your life that you need to pay attention to. So it's going to have a multiplicity of different sources. So it could be a child at school and they've been bullied. It could be starting a new business, it could be in a relationship. Everything that we experience that's unexpected puts us into a level of anxiety. Anxiety is good in that it puts our body into healthy stress and healthy stress sharpens all of our wits. We tap into the, when we really embrace it and face it, we then dive into the depths of our wisdom. And that's in the non-conscious mind and that's, we can talk about the levels of minds, it makes more sense in a moment.

• 10:29Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So the cause of anxiety in people is facing the unexpected of, life's full of all these unexpected things that happen and you can't predict them. So we have anxiety as a coping mechanism to help us to get into a high alert state with all our neurophysiology then operating for us. And then we can move forward if we manage it, if we know what we're feeling. But if we're told, oh, that's bad and we're getting all this constant media information, which we had for the last forty, fifty years, that anxiety is bad, it's not bad. It only becomes bad if you distort it. So.

• 11:04Lewis Howes?

  What does that mean? Like you ruminate on it, you think about it.

• 11:06Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Ruminate, think that, oh, I'm feeling this in me, there's something wrong. Instead of saying, I'm feeling this in me, what is going on? As opposed to what is wrong? So if I think what is wrong and I know, oh, at the back of my mind, what's one of those labels? Oh, I've got an anxiety disorder, I've got something wrong with my brain. And I merge with that thinking, that's, that will create anxiety, then I can't think. Then whatever I'm dealing with in life becomes very confusing because I'm not clearly, I'm not thinking clearly. I'm thinking in a loop that is stuck between the conscious mind, which is really limited. And the brain just doing its bidding. And I get stuck in this loop instead of going deep and finding the wisdom. And that makes our anxiety increase because we don't have clarity of vision.

• 11:50Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So if I think it's a problem, I lose my vision. And then I, then, then it becomes, and that's really the root cause is we think something's a problem and it could be, but we, we can find the answer. But if we get stuck in that loop, we get all confused and chaotic and then the anxiety builds and then, then it starts distorting. So then the anxiety flips and then everything in your body, all the stress response which goes with anxiety, which is supposed to make you alert, now makes you confused. So too much of the good, too much of the good stuff. All the chemicals, like we hear cortisol, for example, is the stress chemical. You hear, you know, that's as though it's bad. Without cortisol, you can't survive. It's when cortisol is in the wrong amounts. So when I think anxiety is bad for me, when I think this feeling is something wrong with me,

• 12:34Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  I then flip the coin on that cortisol and all the other, it never operates alone, operates with all the other chemicals. And it throws it, all that into disruption. And then it throws the energy balance in the brain and so on. And so that then makes us feel terrible and that's what creates the anxiety. That's the root. And then you need to get beyond that to solve the problem because we can solve our problems. Within, obviously with help, sometimes without help, but we can do a lot on our own.

• 12:59Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 12:59Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And I'm not saying we should do everything alone, we should always reach out for help. Does that make sense?

• 13:03Lewis Howes?

  Of course, yeah. And when, when people self diagnose that they have a mental disorder or mental problem, you're saying that's very dangerous. But what about, but what about if we go to a mental health specialist, a therapist, a doctor? And they give a diagnosis that we're ADHD or whatever it might be. Is that helpful or hurtful? And what should we do next after being diagnosed with a mental health disorder?

• 13:28Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So that's really a good question. It's excellent question. It'll make it worse. Because the thing that what we've seen from the research, and there's quite a few of our scientists that are trying to counter this narrative. And the narrative is that get your label, get your diagnosis, get your medication. And it feels like you're solving a problem. Because that's what you do if you have diabetes. Or if you have, you know, something wrong with you, go sort it out. And I'm all for sorting things out. But you don't need a label to sort out a life issue. Do you need a label if it's cardiovascular disease or something? Because we've got, that's, that's dealing with physical symptoms. But when we deal with stuff that's happening in the mind, that does affect your physiology, which I've mentioned already.

• 14:10Lewis Howes?

  It could be an invisible disease, right? Or an invisible symptom?

• 14:13Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Well, that's the thing. It feels invisible. That's because we don't understand the mind. But it's as, we've got this thing that if I feel it physically, it's more important than what I can't feel physically. But we've got to shift our perspective on what do we feel physically? If you feel anxious, you feel terrible. If you feel depressed, you feel terrible. If you feel guilty or jealous, you don't feel great at all, or whatever it may be. If you feel any kind of overwhelmed, you don't feel good. So your, your mind, your experience, that's stronger than, that hits you first before the actual physical sensation inside your brain and your body. But we've got so consumed with the physical that we want to label it and lock it in. So getting, getting a diagnosis from a professional is, and some people may not want to hear

• 14:57Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  this, but it'll make it worse. Because you've now got a professional sample. Then, I mean, the professional said it. So therefore, so we rather.

• 15:05Lewis Howes?

  It's making it more real. It's making it more embodied inside of you.

• 15:08Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Exactly.

• 15:09Lewis Howes?

  But aren't there a lot of people that, you know, say, oh, you know, I got diagnosed and now I feel better knowing what it is? Because I was just going crazy, not sure what was happening to me, or why I was feeling stressed, or overwhelmed, or anxious. Now this medical professional has labeled what it is and diagnosed me as having this mental condition. And I feel better now knowing, but do you think, are you just saying maybe temporarily it could help people feel better?

• 15:36Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Yeah, it's temporary and that's what the research shows.

• 15:38Lewis Howes?

  But then you're living with this, I am this condition forever until you reverse it or change it or see it differently.

• 15:45Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Exactly. Well, a lot of the mental health professionals are trained in the fact that the brain can change, yes, but once you've got that this is a mental illness that you have for the rest of your life. So very often you are told that you have this disease and just the word disease and the word diagnose implies that there is a proven underlying biological or neurobiological cause. So when we use, it's the language that's been used. So when we say you've got cardiovascular disease, we can actually track it back to the heart. We can do the testing. When it comes to, I feel anxious, Lewis, you can feel anxious about something and I can feel anxious about something. Does it mean we both have a mental disease?

• 16:26Lewis Howes?

  No.

• 16:27Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  No, it doesn't mean we have a disease. It means if I listen to your story, there's going to be a lot of stuff. If you listen to mine, there's going to be a lot of stuff and there's going to be different levels and it's so complicated and so complex. But the word diagnosis is the meaning of diagnosis means that there is a confirmed scientific neurobiological cause. So when we use the word diagnosis, it feels so science-y.

• 16:49Lewis Howes?

  It needs to stay.

• 16:50Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  But there isn't. In mental, in mental health research, we, not to this day, is all the billions spent on the genetics, the studying the brains, studying have they found an actual chemical imbalance, neurobiological change. Even the research on ADHD, when they pull those three studies apart, there's research is coming out recently, there's been articles all over the, over Apple News and Newsweek and everything about, hey, we've got to stop talking about ADHD as though it's an it. And thirty years ago, Mark, forty years ago, Mark Professus was saying, in forty years' time, we're going to have this issue. So we've got to be careful of the word diagnose. What's better, I'm awful going to a mental health professional, but the language used is so important. So instead of saying, hey,

• 17:32Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Lewis, you've got an anxiety disease or disorder, there's something wrong with your brain, you're going to have to live with this the rest of your life. That's like a death sentence. I mean, it's awful. Rather say, okay, you are feeling anxious now, let's talk about, you know, let's, that's a behavioral, that's an emotional signal. There's four main signals that we manifest with daily. All day long in different aspects and the one is our emotions. And then the emotions where the next signal is where do you feel those emotions in your body? The next signal is how's this affecting your behaviours? And the next signal is perspective, how's this shifting your perspective? So it would be better for me to say to you, okay, you you you're feeling anxious.

• 18:14Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Let's talk about now what's going on in your life, logical, okay? Now let's talk about specifically, what are your feelings at this moment? In this time, right now, at this moment, where you're feeling it in your body? Where are you, how's this affecting your behaviours? What is this doing with your perspectives? Okay, now let's reflect on that. And when, think of reflection. Look in, if you look in a mirror, you get a reflection. If you shine a light through a prism, it'll come out as a rainbow. Reflect means I'm now going to start looking for the depth behind this. So I'm not just, I'm going to find what is this attached to? Because if I just say anxious, anxious, sore tummy, lousy life for perspective and I'm irritable. Those are my four signals. That is a bunch of descriptions. It's not a disease.

• 19:00Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  It's, we've got to be careful of tautologies. It's telling us, it's, those are descriptions of something. It's information, exactly. So what is it attached to? Let's find what it's attached to. So now we've got to start digging. What is the thought that it's attached to? And a thought is an experience made up of memories. So there's obviously a thought, there's something going on, there's something's happened. And your non-conscious mind, which is your deepest level of your mind, which is your wisdom. It's infinitely huge and present, past and future all mixed at once. It's, it's, it's, it's so fast, it's faster than four hundred billion actions per second, operates twenty four seven. It's where everything that we need is stored and we need to tap into that more. You can talk about it as your spirit level, your, whatever you want. Scientifically, we talk about it as the unconscious.

• 19:45Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  That will, if you start going, looking at how you're showing up with your signals, you can start tapping into the thought that it's attached to. And when you find the thought, you can then start tracking a thought down. And thoughts look like trees. I mean, I've got some trees over here and we know that trees have roots. We can start looking, this will generate these signals, the emotions, the bodily sensations, the perspectives, the behaviours. We can then take those signals and we can say, okay, let's see what thought this is attached to. We can reflect and start seeing the who, the what, the when, the where, the why, the how. Then we can start digging deep and say, okay, well, let's see what else comes up with this. Mindstorm this thing. Write it down, get it out. Then you can say, okay, well, this is the data. Now we've got the data. Let's see, what can we do about this? What's realistic, curious questions, reconceptualise?

• 20:30Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Then we say, okay, what can we do now, today, to get you through today? And as you do that process, that's a formula for how. That's the, based on forty years of research, of the formula of how stuff gets from the outside into us, into our networks. So we reverse engineer that by going from how we show up and reverse engineering back to the thought and finding the root and then reconceptualising. So you deconstruct that thought, you deconstruct. So you've now gone from, oh, I'm anxious. And instead of saying, yes, you've got a disease of anxiety, which, well, now what? You've gone, you've taken that out the equation and you've said, okay, you're anxious. Let's do this work. Let's find out what's going on. Let's see what we can do. Let's empower you to now use this anxiety as information

• 21:12Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  and find out where the source is and how can we reconceptualise? How can we reconstruct? That requires work. It's not a quick fix. It requires time, it requires effort. And I've done the research on the timing and whatever and how long it takes. But that's something we can do.

• 21:31Lewis Howes?

  So interesting because I don't think I ever heard of ADHD until like eight years ago. It was always ADD. Like growing up, it was like this kid has ADD or has ADD symptoms or whatever. And it feels like there's new terminology or new diagnoses every few years of what someone has or something new that they create, you know, whatever it is.

• 21:51Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  They create literally with questionnaires.

• 21:53Lewis Howes?

  And it seems like, it seems like we weren't born with ADD or ADHD or anxiety disorder. We weren't born this way. But we also can't pinpoint the exact moment that this person now has this diagnosis. Like, can you say the exact moment that the mind, the brain, the body, all of a sudden, now you're ADHD?

• 22:15Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  No.

• 22:16Lewis Howes?

  Now you're, you're ADD. Now you have some anxiety disorder, whatever it is. Like, is there a moment we can pinpoint?

• 22:22Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  No, you can't.

• 22:22Lewis Howes?

  We can't. And so it's like,

• 22:24Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  No.

• 22:25Lewis Howes?

  And so if we're diagnosing people with something, we should be able to undiagnose through a process of treating

• 22:31Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Exactly.

• 22:32Lewis Howes?

  and healing the mind, right?

• 22:33Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Exactly.

• 22:34Lewis Howes?

  You said, we are 99% mind, 1% brain and body. And it sounds to me like if our thinking and the way we think and how we perceive our thinking and how we feel about our thinking and how we behave about our thinking influences us into having a mental disorder, then we can also train the mind to influence us to healing our body, healing our brain as well.

• 23:01Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Totally. You've got it. You've got it. Because your mind is the driving force. It's, if you think of electromagnetics, that's what runs this whole studio. It runs, it runs the world. Electromagnetics is, we understand that in terms of technology. It's also your mind. We all have a, literally have a field around us. And this is hardcore physics. This is not woo-woo stuff. This is hardcore science.

• 23:22Lewis Howes?

  So what, what can you explain what the mind is versus the mind and the brain?

• 23:26Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So, so here I've got a, I've got a brain. It's not a real one. I mean, I should bring a real one in a bottle, shouldn't I? Okay, so here's the little model of the brain. And I think I had this one here before when we, when we did our interview. But essentially, this is a

• 23:40Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Three pound organ, that is, three and a half pound organ, that is about the size of your two fists, not quite as big as this, and it's very complicated and, and complex, which it should be. But it's still a physical substance, so it's purely a host. Because when someone dies, when their heart stops, within twenty seconds, your brain flatlines and your organs shut down and your cells stop, stop functioning. But we're alive now and we have got an ability to make over eight hundred thousand two million cells every second. Well, you sit looking at me, we are making eight hundred two million cells every second. And the quality of those cells, so we, being alive, or making cells.

• 24:21Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  I mean, that impact alone, if people just process that we are making physical substance by being alive. Now, the quality of our interaction, the quality of how we look at life, influences the quality of those cells. Though we have thirty seven to a hundred trillion cells in our brain and our body, those cells make our organs, which make our systems, which make our body, of which the brain is one. So every moment of every day, we are kind of redesigning our body. So that mind is doing that. Mind is this big word that we use, and it's a thousand, a word that's thousands of years old, that was used by ancient wisdoms and mystics and spiritual teachers. And, and then it kind of evolved into spirit, soul, consciousness and, you know,

• 25:05Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  but it's this, it's this mysterious thing that's actually not at all mysterious. In neuroscience, it's often called the hard question of science. I always think that's totally wrong. I always say it's the easiest question of science. Because, yes, we can cut up a brain and, yes, we can look at the heart and, yes, you and I here physically. That's easy to see. It's just as easy to see you, Lewis, and I'm Caroline, and we're having a conversation and we're talking. And you have a life and you have a wife and you have, I have a husband and four kids. And that's mind, that, the experiences of, of, that's so obvious. The fact that we can get upset and happy and sad and that's mind. And how, when we feel happy and sad, that force of how we process it, how we react to situations,

• 25:49Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  how we, someone gets in, in your face in a meeting and you want to punch them in the face or you... You find yourself people pleasing, or you find yourself faced with a crisis and you're dealing with, that's mind, how you, your personality, your intelligence, how you love, how you, that is that mind aspect, and it's a driving force. When we do a Q E G, for example, in our research, we are seeing that force going through the brain. So for example, we will, when we pick up, when we do a Q E G, yes, it's brainwaves, but those brainwaves are energy that are coming from the mind. So first, the mind is processing life and into like little clouds. If you think of a circle around me, imagine a circle around me and a circle around you.

• 26:31Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  That's our mind field, however big it is, it's sort of in this region, and it goes through you. Every, like our conversation now is first being processed by the mind into like little clouds, and like droplets of water form a cloud. Every bit of detail that's coming out is forming into a cloud. That mind processes that first, and then it makes a copy of that and puts it into the brain as a neural network made of proteins and chemicals. And then that also, also the mind and brain together put that into the rest of the body. So memory is stored in clouds throughout your brain and your body. And you've, so you've got a worldwide web. We literally have a worldwide web between the cloud, the copies of the clouds as networks, and then net in our brain, and then not networks in our body. And so there's this whole network.

• 27:15Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So whatever I'm doing with my mind is gonna manifest in the host, the brain and the body are the host.

• 27:22Lewis Howes?

  So when I think something, if I imagine the mind is a cloud around me, right? Happy cloud, hopefully, you know?

• 27:28Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Big, big area with lots of clouds.

• 27:30Lewis Howes?

  Okay, big area with lots of clouds.

• 27:32Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  This revolving, moving, dynamic thing.

• 27:35Lewis Howes?

  And each little cloud within this big area are what? Thoughts, memories, moments?

• 27:40Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Yes, it's experiences, you could sum everything, all of that stuff is details of the experience. All the memories are the details, so it's an experience made up of details.

• 27:50Lewis Howes?

  Is that your personality then, or is that?

• 27:52Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Your personality is your perception of it. But the experience, like this interview, is an experience. Every word are the, the details of the experience. So we're forming a thought of this interview, and people that are watching are forming a thought, and all our words are the memories. So think of the thought being an experience, and think of the details of the experience being the memories. Thoughts are made of memories, experiences are made of details. The experience is the thought.

• 28:18Lewis Howes?

  And all those thoughts and memories that are within this kind of? Sphere around us, within us, through us,

• 28:28Lewis Howes?

  influences the host, which is the brain and the body.

• 28:30Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Yeah.

• 28:31Lewis Howes?

  Because the emotions are stored within the body as well. And the thoughts influence the emotion, but the thought also influences the brain, which is creating the feeling of the emotion as well. It's the interpretation, right?

• 28:42Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  It's the interpretation, it's the host.

• 28:44Lewis Howes?

  So if our mind is anxious, stressed, overwhelmed, then that electromagnetic field is influencing the brain and signaling the body to feel something.

• 28:55Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Exactly, it gets, makes a copy. So whatever you think of it, like step one, step two, step three. So step one, the experience comes in into your mind and it's all this mind electromagnetic field cloud forms. That's the experience. And maybe it's a big ugly experience, so it's a rain cloud. And with lightning going through it, a storm cloud. And then it's a beautiful experience, so it's a beautiful fluffy pink and white cloud, whatever. So you've got those two experiences. Immediately, and it happens fast, this is happening at 400 billion actions per second. So it's, and faster.

• 29:25Lewis Howes?

  It's like instant.

• 29:26Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So a copy is made, so your mind processes it and then makes a copy, puts it into the brain and the brain responds neurochemically, electric, electromagnetic, on a quantum level genetically and builds that. So as energy hits physical, a network is formed. And that network looks like these trees, basically.

• 29:46Lewis Howes?

  The tree is what?

• 29:47Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  The trees would be a thought.

• 29:49Lewis Howes?

  Okay, so explain a thought again. What is a thought? If you can hold it up so they can see it.

• 29:52Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Okay, so, so basically, the, the, the thought is the, is other memories. And memories are the details. So people are building a thought of this interview about whatever. They've called it mental health or whatever. And so that's the name of the thought. Everything we say is building onto these trees over here.

• 30:12Lewis Howes?

  One thought?

• 30:13Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Yes, one thought, because we're saying a lot of stuff. By the end of this conversation, we would have probably spoken about 4,000 details.

• 30:19Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 30:20Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So let's say that this tree here is the, is the thought that's forming. The branches are all the memories. So a thought is an experience. Those are the, those are the synonyms. A thought synonym would be, would be an experience.

• 30:35Lewis Howes?

  Experience, a memory, a moment, something you're thinking about?

• 30:37Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  The experience is the, is the thought. The memories are the details.

• 30:41Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 30:41Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So think of an experience as the thing. And then what is the thing involving? It's a conversation, you're gonna go and do. Handball, that's a thought and as you, every experience, every little bit of, that's the thought. But every bit of practice and all this, everything around that experience are the details building into that thought.

• 31:02Lewis Howes?

  How many thoughts do we have a day on average?

• 31:04Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Well, they, anything from eight, we are aware of anything from eight thousand to fifty thousand thoughts in a day.

• 31:10Lewis Howes?

  Here it is.

• 31:11Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Yes, but we have trillions of thoughts because these thoughts, every single experience that you have, from the moment you wake up till the moment you go to sleep. Every experience is building into a thought. And that goes in your clouds, in your mind, as a cloud, and then copies are made into your brain, copy made into your body. Looks like a tree in your brain and like a hedge in every cell of your body, every cell of your body. With a different perception and it's a whole network, it's a worldwide web.

• 31:36Lewis Howes?

  So is a thought, is a thought that we have, you know, does that create a copy in our brain and then does that imprint in every cell?

• 31:44Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Yes.

• 31:45Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 31:46Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Yeah.

• 31:46Lewis Howes?

  You gotta be really careful what you think about.

• 31:48Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Exactly. This is, this is the part, and that's what the mind is doing. That's why we, we quote statistics as scientists of like thirty-five to seventy, thirty-five to ninety-eight percent of physical illnesses come from our thought life. I think it's even more, I'd say it's a hundred percent from my experience.

• 32:06Lewis Howes?

  Comes from our thinking.

• 32:07Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Only five percent are basically genetic that are handed down. So we, and this is not to blame on anyone because illness, there's also viruses and things that we catch and that kind of thing that go around and that can go in us, but.

• 32:18Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, physical harm that happens or we get hit by a bus or whatever, yeah, stuff happens.

• 32:23Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Exactly.

• 32:24Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 32:24Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  But we wear our body down. It's not a thing of, I think, a toxic thought. Here's a toxic tree. So that's a toxic one and now I'm sick or dead. It's cumulative over time. We, what we do with, and this is why, this is what we need to manage, because these things are contradictory to.

• 32:41Lewis Howes?

  So this is a toxic thought. What is, what is a toxic thought versus a positive thought?

• 32:45Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So our conversation now, we're learning good stuff.

• 32:47Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 32:48Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So this is, that would be a healthy thought. The source of this conversation is you and me talking. And then people listening to us, the root would be what we're saying. And then their interpretation, because we have each of our own unique interpretation, would grow into the branches. So how you process them. So this is now a good con, now let's say that you have a fight with someone. And it's a consistent fight, you maybe have someone in your family that you have a problem with and there's consistent problems with that. That's that's going to be the source, you know, the relationship. And then that manifests as the thought, the experience starts. So the experience starts as a root, like a tree grows. So it starts, the roots like the cloud. And then all the details, the cloud grows into the perception of it. So there's the source and then it grows into the manifestation.

• 33:34Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And then this whole thing together produces how you show up. So this drives how you function. So the toxic thought is the distorted version. It's the arguing, it's the fighting, it's the whatever the abuses, whatever all the from big stuff to small stuff. And then that, as it's, as this, as this source starts, you then process it. That's the tree trunk and into, into a network. And then this combination then manifests in those signals that I spoke about. So this would be negative and this would be healthy.

• 34:02Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, okay.

• 34:03Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And we can just, you can change them. You don't have to, you can't pull this out. Once you've had an experience, it's there forever, but you can change what it looks like.

• 34:12Lewis Howes?

  Hmm, how do you change what a negative thought looks like? Or negative experience or memory?

• 34:20Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Okay, so this will produce a lot of anxiety. This is, these, these are dealt with. So when we talk about the anxiety question in the beginning, this will generate anxiety, depression, all those emotions. Because what your, what your non-conscious mind, which is the biggest part of you, your wisdom, et cetera, is finding these and putting them into your conscious mind with signals and saying, hey, pay attention. So when you feel anxiety, as we said earlier on, it's information saying, hey, pay attention to this. So the first thing is we've got to train ourselves to pay attention to our signals. So people don't like those. They want to, they don't want these things, so they want to get rid of those. So the first thing is you've got to look that anxiety in the face. You've got to look at discomfort. You've got to, when you sweat or you vomit, whatever, it's getting the stuff out.

• 35:04Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 35:05Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  It's hard, but we've got to be, develop the ability to be okay with facing the, the, the hard stuff. And so we mustn't run away from those signals. We need to face them full on. And that's where we may need the help of a therapist. And I'm all for that, all for the support that we need and, and, you know, to just get perspective and that kind of thing. So the first thing is to see that that's not bad. If you see anxiety and depression and those things as a disease, you're not going to do, you don't, you don't know what to do with it. But if you see that as, oh, okay, this is telling me something. I'm gonna face it. I hate this. I'm crying. It's terrible. But I'm gonna face this. I feel anxious. What else do I feel? Where do I feel it in my body? How's it affecting my behaviours at this time? How's it disrupting how I function?

• 35:50Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  How's it disrupting how I'm looking at life in this moment? When I stop and take the time to do that, then I pull this up. And then it becomes weakened. So if I shake it around, like it's weakened. If I push it down with a medication, or I'm not gonna deal with this.

• 36:05Lewis Howes?

  Numb myself, or distractions.

• 36:07Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Distraction, or just think I'm gonna just quote positive affirmations. I'm just gonna swap it for a positive thought. This is still there, brewing, cooking, boiling, pressure cooker. It's gonna explode in your life in other areas. It's also not just this in your brain. It's throughout your body in every cell. It's also in those clouds of your mind. So you've got this world wide web network that's just pulsing and pulsing, and it gets bigger and bigger. That wears your, every cell of your body down. Remember I said we're making eight hundred thousand to a million new cells every second? Okay, so if I'm, if I'm really stuck in this combination of thoughts in this gen, like I'm just focusing on this, I'm generating that kind of energy.

• 36:52Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  That kind of energy is what's making my cells, because energy is what makes a cell replicate itself and build and new ones. So that's not gonna be good quality cell. So eventually, over time, the quality of my cells, which means my organs, which means my systems, which means my physical health, is going to be affected. Then I'm more vulnerable to whatever virus is going around, to whatever genetic weaknesses come through your families, which we all have it in our bloodline. So I'm vulnerable to this, this, this. So we start manifesting with physical illnesses.

• 37:21Lewis Howes?

  That's when we don't address the toxic or negative thoughts.

• 37:24Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Exactly, when we don't manage our minds across the board. We have to teach, you've got to teach kids. I mean, we've, in my practice, I teach kids as young, I don't practice anymore, but as young as two years of age, you can teach this. Because children, as one from about the age of two, they're starting to recognise that I'm sad, or I'm happy, or... You know, that one's not being nice and this one, it's sometimes, or earlier as well, they can see it earlier, they can already, but it's at two they start processing. So this is something, this mind management is a life skill. It's the ability to embrace that sadness and to say it's okay to be sad, it's okay to not be okay. It's okay that I don't feel happy ni- all day long, it's happiness movement pushing it.

• 38:05Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  We've got to be very careful of that because ninety-five percent of our day, we don't feel high, excited and happy. We feel just going through life.

• 38:13Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 38:14Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And it's okay to not be okay. We've got to teach our, we've got to reteach ourselves. In this current age, zeitgeist has been one of, as soon as you feel anxiety, you've got a disease, suppress it. As soon as you feel this, your child's this, they've got this, they've got ADD, they've got ADD, they've got something. We're trying to make a label of, we're trying to say this is a thing that you can't control, that takes all the power out of you. You, words have power, but they don't have to control you.

• 38:41Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 38:41Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Thoughts have power, but they don't have to control you. They have so much power, but they do not have to control you. So if you can recognize and learn to read the signals from as young as possible, all day long, from the little to the big stuff. You can then get into a lifestyle where you're managing it constantly.

• 38:59Lewis Howes?

  This is interesting because a lot of what you're saying, I think people need to hear. And one of the things was, it's okay to not be okay.

• 39:06Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Yeah.

• 39:07Lewis Howes?

  Uh, the challenge is when we spiritually bypass and we stuff things and we just say, I want to be positive. Even though I haven't addressed these things that are hurting me, I'm going to rise above it. What I'm hearing you say and interpreting is it's okay to not be okay. But you have to address and face these things eventually, otherwise they're just going to keep staying there. They're going to weaken your immune system, they're going to weaken your mind, they're going to weaken your body. They're going to have you interpret life in a stressful way as opposed to, I'm not okay right now, let me feel what I'm feeling, let me process, let me, let me take action on addressing it. And finding a way to interpret something new or mend something from the past or heal or.

• 39:51Lewis Howes?

  Tell myself a different story, but really addressing the hurt or the pain. Do we have to forgive ourselves or forgive others in order to heal a memory that is hurting us? Or a thought that is hurting us? Or what is that process, would you say?

• 40:09Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  That's such a great question. And it's one of those questions, because forgiveness gets goes up and down. And like, don't forgive, do forgive. It's got one of those, you know, it's really like a, almost like a bipolar concept, you know, it's up and down. Basically, from a scientific perspective, which I think it's always the easiest way to understand perspective. There's a principle called entanglement. And that's, you can, we can see each other physically. I'm going to make this as simple as I can. But we, and we break down into cell, org, systems, organs, cells. And then cells break down into smaller parts. And eventually we get down to just levels of energy. And this is nothing weird. This is Einstein, this is science, this is. So we've got, we're on, we, we work in these different layers. Like we've got three different levels of mind. We have these different physical components.

• 40:53Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And when, once we get to the energy level, um, which is at our core, and each of our own unique energy, which is this energy field, basically, this mind thing, which is what, who you really are. That man, that, that uses the physical body and brain as a host. When you get down to that level, you've, that, that part of you operates as a wave and as a particle. Okay, so there's a relationship that's set up. So when you have a, have a, have an experience, um, let's say that you're very self critical or something. And you find that there's, in the critic, and it's generally very hostile. There's, um, there's, you criticizing yourself about something which leads to shame or whatever. So there's this, there's something you're saying to yourself, or there's a bunch of words that you're saying to yourself.

• 41:37Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And if you, if you, that's not just nothing. That's a thought that has grown as a cloud and that has wired as a network and is in every cell of your body. And it's, um, it's a self critical, I'm not good enough. I am this, I am that, I'm breaking everything. And you think about it all the time, so it's growing and whatever. So now you've created an entanglement in the network. That's this big hurricane mess. And so it's now a man, and then it starts becoming this pervasive viral kind of thing. It starts affecting other things. And the forgive, the unforgiveness.

• 42:13Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Locks you in.

• 42:14Lewis Howes?

  Oh.

• 42:14Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Entanglements like locked in, in a negative sense. So what you wanna do is unlock. So by saying, hey, you know what? I acknowledge that this is a technique. This is one of the techniques in Help and Hurry for self criticism. And it'll explain this forgiveness thing very nicely. In that moment, when you feel that self criticism. Is this okay if I use this example?

• 42:33Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 42:34Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  To answer your question. Um, imagine that it is, there's a theater, you're in a theater. And there's a, the curtain opens and there's a little ant on the stage. It's kind of one of those red ants, those horrible things that can make you bite you.

• 42:47Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 42:48Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  That's you self criticizing. That's the self criticism. So you distance yourself and you're watching a desserts in a theater. This is a technique you can use that works really well. It leads to the forgiveness thing. And you, and you're watching this and you're watching this ant saying all these things, which are the things you've been saying about yourself.

• 43:03Lewis Howes?

  The ant is speaking on the theater.

• 43:04Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  The ant is speaking. It's like this little play that's in action. And you're watching this, you know, you're safe in your, in the theater seat. You're not there on the stage. The ant's doing the stuff, but that's your self critical talk. And as it's coming out, you start seeing, hmm, is this really? And you start questioning, is this really true? Do you agree with these things? You know, like when you watch, I'm enjoying this, I'm not enjoying this. Do I agree? Isn't that a bit harsh? So you start kind of being curious about those situations and it's, it's all those comments. And then you start seeing, okay, well, um, you know what? That's, that is me, but you know what? I think I can, I can see the reason why I did that. And I can see why I'm saying that about myself. And is it really, I actually think that I need to forgive myself. I need to start disentangling. And as you start watching that little thing, you can start forgiving yourself.

• 43:49Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Because self criticism is you've been tangled and created and not where you, where you blame yourself and you just can't forgive yourself. I shouldn't have done that. I am so bad. I'm this. Now you go, hmm, was I that bad? You know, there was, yes, maybe I was, but you know what? That's okay. That's not who I am, that's who I became. And you start having this conversation with the ant and the ant eventually becomes a tiny little black ant and then so small you can hardly see it. But you've had this conversation, you've worked on a process of forgiveness. You've started a process of disentanglement. Now you can do that in the moment to stop the criticism. It involves the, the self criticism in the moment. It involves a process of forgiveness. But then you're gonna have to spend at least sixty three days

• 44:31Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  working through a formula that re, to rewire. Because if you're constantly self criticizing and that is a pattern, you can keep doing the ant on the stage. But until you've actually now, you know, at some point, the ant on the stage is just the initial help in a hurry. You now need to go and say, okay, well, this red ant that keeps popping up. And yes, I can shrink it to the little black ant and close the curtains and all that stuff and forgive myself, but it's risen up again. Until you've rewired the network, you're going to keep on doing that again. And forgiveness is a very big part of it. I know that's a long answer, but.

• 45:04Lewis Howes?

  No, that's really, that's really helpful because creating the awareness is the first step, but in order to truly heal and create a new identity, it sounds like we need to rewire the processing.

• 45:14Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Exactly.

• 45:15Lewis Howes?

  And disentangle years or decades of a wiring that we've been doing. And you can't expect one moment of awareness to rewire the whole system in your body, your nervous system, your brain, your mind. So you're saying it takes sixty-three days in order to rewire from really creating that healing process and allowing yourself to forgive either yourself or someone else or whatever it might be and feeling your body emotionally safe. What do those sixty-three days look like for rewiring your mind or your brain to heal or forgive?

• 45:49Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Such a great question. Very quickly, that forgiveness thing, that same principle operates. I spoke about self forgiveness, forgiving others too. You don't have to, people always battle with forgiveness in terms of forgiving others. I mean, right now, I'm sure everyone who's listening and watching can think of something that they think, I just cannot forgive. I mean, I can think of something right now, but I know that if, until you've actually forgiven, you're entangled. So here we've spoken about entangling myself.

• 46:16Lewis Howes?

  Because they have that, that emotional charge that has power over you. If you're saying, I'm not going to forgive what this person did, then that thought, that power is entangled in your body.

• 46:25Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And it's real, Lewis, that's the thing. That, that whatever that you couldn't forgive is in that person too. So therefore, because of the way physics works, that particle of, that there's the relationship, there's, there's actual particles, that's, it's, these things are atoms, these, I mean, these are particles, these are real things. I'm trying to explain the most simple way I can. So it's, yes, you can't maybe see it, but it's as real as this chair.

• 46:51Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 46:51Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And it's in that person and you connect it. So therefore, you, you can never, until you forgive, you're not forgiving the action, what they've done. Whatever it is that you're thinking of right now in your head, or I'm thinking of, that is maybe unforgivable. You're not forgiving that action. You're not condoning that. But what you're doing is disentangling. You're cutting the ties that no longer, that you don't want that energy. You don't want that negative energy in you. Because that negative energy is that graying cloud that's going to influence.

• 47:19Lewis Howes?

  Gosh, so true.

• 47:20Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  It's so, yeah, so that's why we want you to dis- you want to disentangle. And that's what we're doing a lot of.

• 47:25Lewis Howes?

  So what does a sixty-three day process look like then for allowing your body and mind and brain to rewire for more peace and healing?

• 47:39Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So it's a healing journey. And what we just actually, because I run clinical trials, as I'm sure you know, and we just finished a big study over a two-year period. And what we were looking at is the actual healing journey of the sixty-three days. So just in advance, why such a specific number? So what we see from the research is that somewhere between fifty-five, sixty-five days, somewhere in that region, we see big shifts happening. So there's shifts happening all the way along, but there's like this massive aha, oh, now I can move to the next level, kind of thing that happens around those stages, first thing. Second thing is that, let's say it's something massive like a sexual abuse or whatever.

• 48:16Lewis Howes?

  Big time.

• 48:17Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Yeah, you're going to need multiple cycles. So I've had some patients who were sexually traumatized and they've taken two years. If you take sixty-three days and do the math, it's about six cycles a year. And then it's the rest of your life. So you're not ever fixed. We're always in a process of growing. And we're gathering more and more data. And just on that note of data, and I'm going to go into the healing journey, one of the big things, like an overarching kind of principle of forgiveness and healing journeys, is the things that have happened to us, that have caused shame or guilt or whatever, we often take that data and we use it as a battering ram against ourselves. Meanwhile, what we must do is take that, those things that have happened and see it as data that can help us move forward.

• 49:00Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Okay, so the healing journey and sixty-three days is, and the whole concept of moving forward.

• 49:08Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Is that it takes time to heal, which we, and I wanted to see how long, what happens at each stage. So we've kind of broken it down almost to the, literally to the day of what you can expect more or less on each stage of the journey. And it's very up and down. Like, for example, the first four to seven, between the first week, around about the first seven days of deciding to make any change in your life. We've generally been very motivated because we realize there's an awareness, I want to do this.

• 49:36Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, but then it gets hard.

• 49:37Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Then it gets hard.

• 49:38Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 49:38Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And then it dips.

• 49:39Lewis Howes?

  It's hard.

• 49:39Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And then if you push through, there'll be a fourteen day, now, there's various different benchmarks. When you get to day, the first twenty one days is around about twenty one to twenty eight days. There's a lot of facing the issue, a lot of pain, a lot of grieving, a lot of sadness, a lot of anxiety, often increased depression. We're often found with our patients in this clinical trial that people felt worse at day twenty one.

• 50:01Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 50:02Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  But it's a different worse, it's a better worse. Is there such a thing as a better worse? Absolutely. A better worse.

• 50:07Lewis Howes?

  It's a purging almost.

• 50:08Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  It's a purging.

• 50:09Lewis Howes?

  It's allowing like an, almost an ego death, letting go of an old identity which you've held on to for so long. And even though that painful old identity didn't work for you, it's familiar.

• 50:20Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Exactly.

• 50:21Lewis Howes?

  And you're comfortable.

• 50:21Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  It was a coping mechanism.

• 50:22Lewis Howes?

  You're comfortable with the familiar, even if it's painful and it's killing you.

• 50:26Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Exactly, that's exactly it. And, and facing also, when you face it head on, we want to push things away. When you look at that, you're going to grieve. You're going to, I've had some patients saying to me things like, I'm more depressed now, but it's a different depression. I'm more anxious now, but it's different. It's healthy. I know why I'm sad.

• 50:43Lewis Howes?

  What I used to do is like, man, how did I allow twenty, twenty five years of me to go on like this? And it was more like, now that I'm aware, I'm beating myself up for even allowing myself to live like that.

• 50:54Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So you made that worse as well.

• 50:55Lewis Howes?

  So you're kind of like, yeah, you're trying to process and heal, but then you're, what an idiot I was. What was I thinking? Why did I stay in that relationship for this many extra years? Why did I do this thing? Why did I, all these things, it's like, you go through a journey of the ups and downs.

• 51:08Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Absolutely. So you just, what you just described, what I was saying earlier on, is you use that data as a battering ram.

• 51:14Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, you're like, I was an idiot, what was I thinking? Yeah.

• 51:17Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And then, and that's because of us being so absorbed into that, I'm it, you weren't it. What happened in that relationship wasn't who you were, it was what you were going through in that time.

• 51:27Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 51:28Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So it's not, so what I'd always, what I always say is that whatever, however we're showing up, that's not who we are. Because at core who we are, we're wired for love, we're amazing, we're brilliant, we're wonderful, we have such power and such bea- beauty in being a human. It's not who we are, it's who we've become because of. Look for the because of, that's why the label doesn't look for the because of. The because of is where the joy is, the because of is the ant on the stage turning into a beautiful whatever at the end of the day, you know, that.

• 51:57Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 51:57Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  It's, it's the because of that people to find and that takes time and, and what I have found from the research is that in my clinical experience and just my own life and just is that when you recognize that, okay, there's an up, there's a down, if I know that, for example, day twenty eight, I'm going to, day twenty one, I'm going to think, I've got this, if you stop there, at day twenty eight, there's a massive dip that will happen and if you, then you can get stuck and think, oh, I'm never going to get anywhere and people get stuck. Day thirty six is another day where it's very interesting, I mean, there's many, I'm just picking out a couple. Day thirty six is, between day thirty six and forty two of the, of that sixty three days, there's a massive growth that happens.

• 52:36Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  When you face pain and you look it in the face and you start seeing the source and you start deconstructing and reconstructing and recognizing, you know, whatever. You hit this peak where you feel tremendous grief

• 52:48Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 52:49Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  for the time lost, kind of, and

• 52:51Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 52:51Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  that's where we can do the batting ram.

• 52:53Lewis Howes?

  All those years, I wasted my life, I can't believe I invested this, ah, what was I thinking, all that.

• 52:59Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  That's, and, and that's where people fall off the bus too. So that's where you want to catch that and, and you'll follow, we'll follow with a real big dip. I've actually got a whole drawing, we can actually show this on the screen. And a whole drawings, it's simple and it, there's a massive dip in between day thirty six and forty two where you, but if you know it's coming, if you know what they, and this is why I did this research, that I can actually show you what's, what to expect. So when it happens, you're not caught by surprise and give up. So, okay, I'm going to get through this, this is part of my healing journey. I'm got, I have more insight. When you have more insight, now that data, what am I going to use that data for? Batting ram or progression forward?

• 53:36Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 53:36Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And then you, then you, then we see that massive climb from day fifty five to sixty three and then there's this, huh, I know now what I need to work on next and so you continue that cycle.

• 53:47Lewis Howes?

  I have a brand new book called Make Money Easy. And if you're looking to create more financial freedom in your life, you want abundance in your life, and you want to stop making money hard in your life, but you want to make it easier, you want to make it flow, you want to feel abundant, then make sure to go to makemoneymeasibook.com right now and get yourself a copy. I really think this is going to help you transform your relationship with money this moment, moving forward. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links.

• 54:28Lewis Howes?

  And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad-free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as well. Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review. I really love hearing feedback from you and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward. And I want to remind you, if no one has told you lately, that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.