Do you struggle with repetitive or intrusive thoughts? What about depression and anxiety? Maybe no one has “diagnosed” you with a mental health disorder, but you find yourself constantly living in the past or negative thought patterns.
First of all — if this is you, there is hope! Your brain isn’t broken — it’s just stuck in a loop. And second of all, you’re not alone. Almost all of us will find ourselves stuck in negative thinking or behaviors at some point in our lives.
The truth is, we’re creatures of habit. When we have the same thought over and over again, it becomes a pattern. Think of it like this — imagine every thought makes a little trench in your mind. When you have the same thought over and over again, that same trench gets bigger and deeper. Suddenly, that little trench has become the central highway your thoughts operate on! Whenever your mind starts wandering, it automatically returns to that thought pattern because it’s familiar and accessible.
But here’s the good news — we can fill in those trenches and create new ones that are positive! It takes consistent and mindful practice, but it is more than possible for all of us.
My guest for today offers an alternative way to handle mental conditions that have affected the lives of many. She is a communication pathologist and cognitive neuroscientist specializing in cognitive and metacognitive neuropsychology. She’s a strong believer that the brain can change with any directed input. I’m so glad to have Dr. Caroline Leaf with us in this episode!
In this interview, Dr. Caroline and I dove deep into the topic of how mismanagement of mental health and not mental health issues is on the rise. She also shared her five-step neuro cycle process that will surely change your life. Lastly, we also focused on how you can protect your mental health particularly if you’ve undergone painful and traumatic experiences in your life. I was blown away at everything I learned about the mind-brain connection, neuroscience, and other topics related to mental health.
This episode is close to my heart — I truly found inspiration and wisdom from listening to Dr. Caroline. If you’re someone who also has experienced (or are experiencing) painful and traumatic experiences in your life, then this episode is for you. I’m so excited to share the valuable learnings that I got from Dr. Caroline, so let’s begin!
Who Is Dr. Caroline Leaf?
Dr. Caroline Leaf is a communication pathologist and cognitive neuroscientist with a Masters and Ph.D. in Communication Pathology and a BSc Logopaedics, specializing in cognitive and metacognitive neuropsychology. Since the early 1980s, she has researched the mind-brain connection, the nature of mental health, and the formation of memory. She was one of the first in her field to study how the brain can change (neuroplasticity) with directed mind input.
During her years in clinical practice and her work with thousands of underprivileged teachers and students in South Africa and the USA, she developed her theory called the Geodesic Information Processing Theory of how we think, build memory, and learn. Using its principles, she came up with tools and processes that have transformed the lives of individuals with Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), learning disabilities (ADD, ADHD), autism, dementia, and mental ill-health issues, like anxiety and depression. She has helped hundreds of thousands of students and adults learn how to use their minds to detox and grow their brains to succeed in every area of their lives, including family life, university, and the workplace.
Dr. Caroline is also the bestselling author of Switch on Your Brain, Think Learn Succeed, Think and Eat Yourself Smart, and many more works. She teaches at academic, medical, and neuroscience conferences, churches, and to various audiences around the world. Dr. Caroline is also involved in the global ECHO movement, which trains physicians worldwide on the mind-brain-body connection, mental health, and how to avoid physician burnout.
Dr. Caroline is currently conducting clinical trials using the five-step program she developed while in private practice to further demonstrate the effectiveness of mind-directed techniques to help relieve mental ill-health problems such as anxiety, depression, and intrusive thoughts. The primary aim of these trials is to make mental health care more affordable, applicable, and accessible worldwide and to reduce the stigma around mental health.
It was truly an honor to have her on The School of Greatness podcast to share her knowledge with all of us!
The Real Problem: Mental Health or Mental Health Mismanagement?
It seems like when people hear the words “anxiety,” “depression,” “anger,” or “stress,” there’s an obsession not only by medical experts but also by everyone to label them as mental diseases and immediately advise to get medications. Dr. Caroline explained that contrary to popular opinion, these emotional states are just our body’s way of responding to painful experiences.
“Despair, anger, depression, anxiety. These are all completely normal responses. They’re very helpful. They are helpful messengers and warning signals as opposed to being scary illnesses. They are not neuropsychiatric brain diseases.” – Dr. Caroline Leaf
This is different from what we’ve been taught all along. Most of the time, these conditions are not illnesses, not diseases, and are not simple chemical imbalances in our brain. They are signals of an underlying cause, which should be the true focus of what doctors are trying to manage through medications.
“Mental health is not on the rise, what’s on the rise are the cases of its mismanagement. There has been an increase in the number of people dying from despair. This is a lifestyle disease, which means that it’s mind-driven. It could be preventable. What we’re currently doing, however, is we’re diagnosing it, labeling, and treating it with medications.” – Dr. Caroline Leaf
To hear a neuroscientist talk about these conditions related to mental health is fascinating! What she’s saying is not just challenging us but the whole mental health community to reflect on its current ways of handling mental diseases.
“Chemical imbalance is not the cause of anxiety, depression, and all these other scary ways our mind responds to life’s traumas and challenges. What needs to be done is to shift our focus on the way to handle it. It’s important to focus on the story and the person’s experience. Acknowledge that the person might be going through something, which is the reason they’re acting this way. So it’s important that taking in all these medicines is not the only way that we can handle them.” – Dr. Caroline Leaf
Interesting, right? But it’s only the beginning. Dr. Caroline shared so much more of what neuroscience has to say when it comes to mastering our thoughts and ultimately our lives as well.
NeuroCycle: An Alternative Way to Healing
Whenever faced with our darkest secrets or life’s daily difficulties, some of us might respond by denying that they exist, some of us cry ourselves to sleep, while others of us turn to distractions to get rid of the pain even temporarily. However, Dr. Caroline believes that these quick solutions won’t work. The mind is complicated, and in order to properly heal, there should be a specific way of dealing with all these negative emotions. In her decades of research and study, Dr. Caroline was able to come up with the concept of the NeuroCycle.
NeuroCycle is an alternative way to manage our mind’s response to traumatic memories or painful experiences. She believes that the power of the NeuroCycle lies in our ability to get our minds under control. To understand more about how it works, Dr. Caroline emphasized these points.
“In a tremendously acute traumatic state, you have the options of going into two zones. The first is the mental mess that you’re in, wherein you are the pilot. … However, you also have the zone of the co-pilot, which is also you. The only difference is that your co-pilot can see from a more objective point of view. It has its wisdom because inside each of us [are] our survival instincts.” – Dr. Caroline Leaf
What Dr. Caroline is saying is that the co-pilot state is necessary for us to prepare ourselves for the NeuroCycle process. Once we hand the control over to our mind’s co-pilot, then we can proceed to the five-step process below.
