This Is an Unprecedented Moment. Dr. Caroline Leaf Shows Us How To Manage Our Minds as We Navigate These Hard Times

From depression and anxiety to toxic thoughts and habits, so many of us are experiencing what Dr. Caroline Leaf calls "a mental mess." Additionally, our children are facing the same issues. And our intense, chaotic, wild world is exacerbating all of this.

But there is light—and Dr. Leaf is shedding it. In her newest book, How to Help Your Child Clean Up Their Mental Mess: A Guide to Building Resilience and Managing Mental Health, the renowned cognitive neuroscientist reveals accessible, actionable tips to develop mental resilience. Her five-step process, which she outlines below, is a way to replace toxic thoughts and create new neural pathways for adults and children.

Dr. Leaf's work is as critical as it is fascinating, as it reveals clarifying information about how the mind works. As she tells The Sunday Paper, there is massive hope regarding mental health today.

A CONVERSATION WITH DR. CAROLINE LEAF

You write at the beginning of your book, "We don't have a mental health crisis; we have a mind management crisis." What do you mean by this?

Everyone's talking about the mental health crisis. It is real, but it's a symptom of a much larger crisis: mind management. For the past 40 years, there's been a tremendous focus on the brain and the physical aspects of our humanity. We've advanced so much in our knowledge of the brain, which is great. But the bad news is we've subsumed the mind and the brain into one concept. This is unfortunate because the mind is not the brain. The mind literally operates the brain, which is a physical substance. The mind is our aliveness and our ability to be a human. The mind takes every experience, puts it into the brain, and uses the brain and body to respond. That's how we build these networks that drive our functioning. This conversation, for example, is being processed by the mind on the neurophysiological level, which is electromagnetic and gravitational fields and auditory sound waves. On a psychological level, the mind is how we understand each other and can have this back and forth. Then, all this information goes into the brain, and the brain responds on a neurochemical, electrical, and genetic level. So, there are psychological and physiological components to the mind, which together become energy in the brain; therefore, the brain and body respond to the mind. This relationship is called psychoneurobiology. Everything we experience is built into this triple network, which becomes our "drivers," habits of how we show up in life and drive how we function.

Considering this, it's important to think of what we and our children are exposed to today; from technology and social media to the speed of information, these experiences of these environments are affecting how we function. All of this is being wired into our networks and is driving us and our children. Because the mind puts everything into the brain and the body, the brain and the body get impacted. This way in which the mind changes the brain is called neuroplasticity: our experiences are wired into the brain as protein, chemical structural changes—so this is all very real stuff happening. And if we don't manage how our mind processes life experiences into these networks, we will have a mental health crisis.

How does this impact us physically?

We are being exposed to information all day long. When we have toxic experiences, these build into these toxic thought trees in our brain. These chemicals and protein structures activate the immune system and every other system in the body to say, 'Hey, something's going on.' These toxic thoughts impact our bodies and increase our vulnerability. So, we start seeing a lot of physical issues manifesting alongside mental issues.

You mentioned the modern-day stressors we face, from social media to technology. How are these particularly intense today?

Every generation has faced challenges. Up until about 40 years ago, we were good at talking about how these experiences affect us. There was an understanding that, Oh, something is happening to this person; they're going through something, be it abuse, their environment, whatever was happening. There was a more holistic way of talking about this and helping a person with day-to-day stuff, stresses, and bad habits.

Today, our mental health crisis has increased because mind management has decreased. It amazes me that the general public isn't more aware of the implications. There have been so many studies showing that if we don't focus on helping a person understand what's going on in their mind in relation to their environment and how they're processing it, it will weaken the body, and there will be an increase in lifestyle diseases and mental health challenges. Focus on the mind has been put aside over the past 40 years in favor of a more biomedical approach. Instead of looking at the whole person and their life and community, it looks at, for example, depression as a symptom to be eliminated instead of information to be embraced. This more biomedical approach tells people something is wrong with their brain instead of looking at the entire person and their environment and how they manage their mind to process all of this. This is confusing for parents and basically pathologizes childhood and medicalizes misery.

Why have we come to miss the mark when caring for our minds?

There has been an overemphasis on what can be physically measured. Look at the biohacking movement, which predominantly emphasizes physical things to do and take. Take sleep, for example. We all know how important sleep is. However, the emphasis is on things to do and not do and things to take. These are helpful but only form a tiny percentage of the big picture. The real reason may be that a person is not sleeping because their mind is challenged by what they're going through, and they aren't processing it. We must address the mind first because the mind is 90 to 99 percent of who we are.

Let's dig into how we care for our minds. You have created a five-step process called the "Neurocycle" that we can follow, which you say is how we manage our minds as a life skill. This is for everyone. Adults can even use this to help their children. Please walk us through this.

Before you begin, shift your perception of who you are: You are not a brain. You are not a body. You have a brain, and you have a body. But you are your mind. When you start managing your mind, you begin directing the changes in your brain toward where you want to go, and therefore, you are directing the brain's neuroplasticity and changing your body over time. That has a cumulative effect. You are empowered to drive your life.

Additionally, life will be messy for every human alive, which is okay. Let's manage the mess correctly. Let's not diagnose the mess as a symptom of a brain disease, which is unscientific and unproductive. Rather, let's describe and discuss these things that we've seen as a set of signals. This is about seeing how you are showing up and how your child is showing up.

Here's how you do a Neurocycle:

Step one is to gather awareness of the four emotional warning signals.

1. Gather awareness of your emotions, which is signal number one. There is so much to talk about when it comes to emotions. Thinking you can just talk about your feelings or ask your child to consciously and mindfully talk about feelings won't work. You must describe them, discuss them, and analyze them.

2. Next, you connect your emotions to where they are experiencing these in the body. This is the second signal. Let's say you are feeling depression, and you feel this showing up as a heaviness or ache in your heart. Look at where they show up in your or your child's body.

3. Now, think about how this influences your behaviors, which is the third signal. What are you saying? Or what is your child saying? What are you doing? Maybe you're withdrawn, or you're speaking in a flat tone. See how you're behaving in your life.

4. See how those behaviors shift your perspective or attitude or your child's perspective or attitude. You may feel that life sucks. Or your child may think that.

When you go through these four signals, you activate your whole psycho-neurobiological network, the mind-body connection. Because your mind is driving everything, activating these signals creates a state of consciousness that taps into the deepest part of you called the nonconscious, through opening the doorway of the subconscious and beginning to shift the neuroplasticity of these toxic thoughts and habits and start to be in the driver's seat.

Step two is to reflect.

Take the time to reflect on these four signals you have gathered awareness of by looking deeper at the echo, what, when, where, and why of these four signals. You are looking for, in yourself, or your child, the root cause of this depression or feeling that life sucks or is overwhelming. It's a deconstructing process that allows us to see: Why am I, or why is my child showing up like that?

Then, step three is to write it down.

Get a blank piece of paper and do a mind dump. In the middle of the page, write down whatever description of what you were worried about or your child is worried about—name the thought. It could be something as simple as my child's not feeling creative anymore. A simple doodle is to draw a circle with four lines coming out of it. On one line, write the heading "emotions"; on another, your "bodily sensations"; on a third, your "behaviors"; and on the fourth, your "perspectives". Then add whatever else bubbles up. Some of it won't make sense, but this exercise deepens the connection between the conscious and nonconscious, activating the left and right sides of the brain, creating an intense alignment in the psychoneurological networks, and helping you be empowered to manage your mind.

Step four is to recheck.

The fourth step then is to recheck all of this and reconceptualize. You can look at all this and start seeing patterns in your life or your child's. You can see what has been happening and what you can begin to do about it. It is a process of re-conceptualization. Now, you won't solve this in one go. This is day by day; you do this over a period of time.

Then do step five, the active reach.

This means you take some small action. So, if your child is showing these four signals and you see a pattern of something happening at school. Perhaps you'll take that evidence and discuss the issue with a teacher.

Then, the next day, you go through that five-step neurocycle again. You repeat this for 63 days, the time it takes to rewire thought patterns in our networks.

How long have you been pulling the threads on this research?

This is based on nearly 40 years of scientific research and theory, clinical trials, and publishing in scientific journals. We have a big study running currently, looking deeper into the patterns of change as we build new habits into our networks. So, the neurocycle is the scientific process of getting awareness of the four signals, reflecting on the four signals, writing down everything those two steps have generated, reconceptualizing, and then creating active reach.

You say this process takes time. How long should we follow these neurocycle steps? Is there any quick relief?

You can do this daily over 63 days for anything from five to 45 minutes, depending on what you're trying to solve. It will be closer to 45 minutes if it's a significant trauma or an established pattern. If it's something smaller you're trying to solve, it will be closer to five minutes. And we have this all clearly laid out in the app and the book, so you can pick it up daily and build on it in time.

As you're doing that neurocycle, all this neurophysiology is changing. By the time you get to the fourth and fifth steps, you are fixing up the damaged brain roots and correcting them. As mentioned, it takes about 63 days, about nine weeks, to fix a network. But let's say something pops up in the moment like someone irritates you or your child has an argument. It's not going to take nine weeks to fix that. You can do a neurocycle in 30 seconds to get your mind back in the right space.

What is giving you hope in your work?

Finally, people are shifting and becoming extremely aware that we can't just Band-Aid this away. We are not fixing the problem. There are tools in the toolbox, but they're not solving and fixing the problem—we need to focus on our minds as a priority first. The research that my team and I are doing is very hopeful, and the exciting results empower people to understand and manage anxiety and depression, and all mental health challenges sustainably.

I want people to realize that you can't change what happened to you, but you can change what it looks like inside of you and how it plays out in the future.

Dr. Caroline Leaf is a communication pathologist, audiologist, clinical and cognitive neuroscientist with a Masters and PhD in Communication Pathology and a BSc Logopaedics, specializing in cognitive and metacognitive neuropsychology. Learn more at drleaf.com.