5 Shockingly Simple Steps to Transform Your Child’s Mental Health

So the big picture is, how am I showing up? In other words, how, what, what are my emotions in this moment? How am I showing up in life in this moment with my emotions, what I'm saying and doing, how I'm looking at life, and how my body is functioning? Is this a pattern? Is this just a one-off, or is there, are there patterns in my life? So we've got to stand back and observe the patterns in our life. We also can observe the day, the reactions, like if we suddenly found ourselves being very reactive to certain situations, we need to be observant of those. We We need to see how we're handling the day-to-day struggles, how we're handling the kinds of habits we've built, and then also potentially deep-seated patterns which are indicative of some level of trauma that's occurred at some point in your life.

Hey everyone, Dr. Josh Axe here. Welcome to the Growth Lab Podcast. I am thrilled to welcome Dr. Caroline Leith, a pioneering neuroscientist who has dedicated her career to understanding the mind-brain connection And Dr. Caroline and I go way back. In fact, about 10 to 12 years ago, we did a speaking tour together called the Mind Body Spirit Tour, where her, myself, and Jordan Rubin went to some different events and venues and spoke about really the mind-body connection and how to heal that connection. I've been so blown away by her work. You know, she's a PhD in communication pathology, and she's really worked and spent her career learning how to change the brain and use neuroplasticity in order to help us become the best us. And I also am excited to talk to her today about mental health because this is such a big topic for us and our kids, and so many people have questions about mental health today and how we can not only be physically fit but mentally fit. Uh, Dr. Caroline, thanks so much for coming on the show today.

Oh, Josh, it's so great to be with you again and to chat again. And yeah, we go, we go back a long way. We've really Done a lot of work over the years. So it's exciting to be joining you on your podcast. Thank you.

Yeah, well, I know you've been blowing up. I was just telling you before we jumped on, I've been so impressed to see you on so many different podcasts, getting the word out about your new book. And I wanna kind of start off right there talking about the mental health crisis today, because, you know, when I first opened up my functional medicine clinic many years ago, you know, the biggest cases I saw were related to hypothyroidism and autoimmune disease and, chronic pain and those sorts of issues. And it used to be anytime I looked at the fastest growing health problems, it was cancer and diabetes and obesity. Well, today when you look up the statistics of the fastest growing health issues, they're related to mental health issues, often depression, anxiety, isolation, extreme guilt, sadness. Talk to me today about why this is such a fast growing issue.

That's a really great place to start, Josh. The, the mental health crisis that we see globally across from literally from 2 and 3-year-olds, 4-year-olds, and that sounds crazy to say such a young age all the way through to whatever age adults, um, and, and so on is a symptom of a much larger problem. We talk about the mental health crisis, but that, that is a symptom of a larger problem. And that larger problem is mind management. We have entered an era over the past 40 years where we focus so much on the physical that forgotten a lot about— well, we've literally put the mind aside and the mind and brain have been almost either put aside the mind, the, the component, or otherwise we can look at it as the mind has been subsumed into the physical brain. And that concept has then led us to look at humans in a very mechanistic way. And if someone is showing a symptom of sadness or a symptom of depression or a symptom of anxiety, they're seeing that as a symptom of a disease. Instead of seeing that as a completely different kind of thing that we're dealing with. So the whole concept of humans and being in life and being affected by life and the impact of life on us in varying degrees has been basically subsumed or reduced down to a symptom of an illness. And that is one of the biggest mistakes that we have made in the last 5— 50— almost, yeah, almost 50 years. Started around 50 years ago but really accelerated from the mid-'90s with the advent of brain technology where we could see inside the brain. So instead that's brought tremendous knowledge, but with it has brought a tremendous price that we've paid. And that price is this huge problem now of mental health, which is a symptom of not managing our mind. And I know it's a big concept out there, and I know you've got lots of questions around that, so I can dive a little deeper if you'd like.

Yeah, you know, one of the areas that I have concerns that I think is so important, and I know this as being a, uh, somebody who's a person of faith, is our identity is really important. And we'll read reports today, we'll see this in the news and media today, about terms around identity confusion, and that could be around sex or gender. It could be around a number of things today. Talk to us about what is identity and what role does that play in mental health?

Identity is massive because when we, when we reduce a person's experience, let's say that they have gone through some level of abuse or maybe it's just they've been on social media too much and they've basically wired in a whole way of thinking in their brain that's influenced how they see themselves. That is attacking a core element of who you are. So every experience we have is being wired into the psychoneurobiological network, the mind-brain-body network, and whatever we're wiring into our network through conscious and non-conscious exposure, we are— it's affecting how we as a human function. So that is one aspect of identity being affected. The other aspect of identity being affected is when we— when a person is battling with life and the depression, sadness, anxiety gets labeled as a symptom like I've just described, we remove the person's story and we reduce their massive complex, uniqueness down to a label, and labels lock us in. So what's happened, Josh, is that the biomedical model, which is great for medical issues like physical problems with the brain and the body, is not a good model to apply when it comes to life, life experiences, because you can't just take a symptom of depression as being a sort of the end of the story that, oh, you have depression because you have a supposed chemical imbalance. That is why you have these symptoms of depression because— and it's this whole circular reasoning— you have depression because you have a chemical imbalance, you have a chemical imbalance because you have depression. Neither of those are actually scientific, but that's the languaging that is used today. You take away that person's story, you take away their identity, you invalidate who they are as a person, you lock them into a label. So instead of diagnosing based on symptoms in a very, very non-scientific way, which is what's happening, which people are basically diagnosing instead of describing. So if we take the description of a human's experience away and we simply just diagnose it and label it, we remove the person's— we affect the person's identity, how they see themselves, their experiences. It's invalidating. And that's massive in this whole concept that I mentioned in the first part, in the first question, of mind management. How we see ourselves, how we're managing our mind, which includes identity, is massively affected by the labels that literally lock us in.

Yeah, you know, I remember years ago, Dr. Caroline, and you've experienced this even more than I have, and I'm certain of this, but I remember having patients come in. I'll give you an example. I had one woman who had fibromyalgia, and it was like almost her entire identity was wrapped up in fibromyalgia. And so talk to us about how does somebody start to break free? Let's, you know, and, and I want to give you an example of this too. Like, when I was growing up, I was told I wasn't— I had ADHD. And I actually kind of thought, well, I have ADHD, that means I'm not smart. And so I know this is something I, I even grew up with. I've known, you know, hundreds of people who— and pretty much everybody may have this issue somewhere. But talk to me about how does somebody break free and start to rewire their brain and create a new identity?

That's, that's a really great question. So basically, um, in the field that I move, the research that I do, we still currently do a lot of clinical trials. We've got a massive study running at the moment. I publish in scientific journals in the field of psycho- psychoneurobiology. Psycho meaning mind, neuro meaning brain, biology meaning the biology of the— basically the brain and the body. Now that network is what life goes into via the mind. So our mind is part of this network, but our mind is also how we process life into the network. And everything, every experience from that moment you open your eyes till the moment you go to sleep at night, from birth through death, you are taking life's experiences with your mind and processing them into this network in 3 places: in the mind, where which is around and all through our body, which is basically our life force. Mind is our life force, our ability to be alive, to think, to feel, to choose, and for our heart to pump and our brain to work. That is what the mind is doing. The mind is driving life. The mind drives life. The mind takes life experiences and puts that into the network. In the mind fields of the— you have electromagnetic light field, light waves, you have auditory sound waves, you have gravitational fields, you have all these physics concepts those all encapsulate the physics side of mind, and it's kind of like these waves of energy that flow through. Now we can pick that up with an EEG, with an EKG, with sonograms, so we can pick up that life force with all this technology, which is really interesting. We can also see the result of this life force in just being alive. So the fact that you and I can have a conversation is our energy basically showing up in who we are as a person. So that experience goes into this, is captured by the mind, put into the mind waves, these gravitational fields, also into the brain as changes, as basic proteins that group together to form networks that look like trees, and then also into the body. And this is really something I know you're very familiar with. There are little proteins inside the cells, and those proteins are like little beads that are all strung together, and they wind up into these little microtubules, like little beaded carpet rolled up, if you can visualize that, which is a nice way of doing it, understanding explaining it. So memories, which are our experiences, which cluster together, go into the mind as waves, the energy waves, into the brain as these protein tree-like structures, and into the body, every cell of the body, as these rolled-up little carpets that then drive the way that the DNA functions. Now, the reason I'm giving you all of that is that life is embodied, mind is embodied, and if we have an experience that is healthy, like this conversation is really good information that's coming in that's going to build healthy wire in a healthy network, and that's then going to drive— we'll take this, hopefully take this information, and that then drives how we show up, how we apply this in our life in various ways. But it could also be a toxic experience. So it could be maybe an argument that someone's having with their boss at work, or it could be a child being bullied at school, or it could be just like— we have so many problems with social media currently. Social— it's not that social media is bad, it's how it's being managed is the problem. So if a child or an adult is spending hours looking at someone's body image thinking, well, unless I look like that, I have I have no value. And that's wiring— that what they are exposing to is wiring into this triple network. And then that combines in how we show up, in how we feel, in how we behave, what we say and what we do, how we look at life, our perspectives, and also how physically our body functions. And if this is a toxic experience, that network is toxic. It's going to show up in a toxic way. And if it's continued, it then affects our identity. So what we have to do, and who we are as a human, what we need to do is train ourselves, give ourselves the mental skills that we have, but we've got to develop them and you can teach this to children as young as 2 and 3. And I know your child is now, how old is your child now?

She's 3.

3, that's what I thought, she's 3. So she's perfect to start this. It's an ideal age to start teaching them the mental skills to cope with life. And then you can, you know, throughout the rest of our life we learn these skills. But essentially what we need to do, it's quite simple, is we need to train ourselves and our children how to look at how we are showing up. And I'll explain exactly how to do that. If you, and as you, let me give you the big picture and then we can dive into a little detail. So the big picture is, how am I showing up? In other words, how, what are my emotions in this moment? How am I showing up in life in this moment with my emotions, what I'm saying and doing, how I'm looking at life and how my body is functioning? Is this a pattern? Is this just a one-off or is there, are there patterns in my life? So we've got to stand back and observe the patterns in our life. We also can observe the day-to-day reactions, like if we suddenly found ourselves being very reactive to certain situations, we need to be observant of those. We need to see how we're handling the day-to-day struggles, how we're handling the kinds of habits we've built, and then also potentially deep-seated patterns which are indicative of some level of trauma that's occurred at some point in your life. So the beginning point of rewiring these psychoneurobiological networks, which are the drivers, those gravitational fields, those trees, and those rolled up little protein carpets, those are collectively showing up in our life. And what we want to do is look at the signals that they generate, and then once you can recognize the signals, which is really easy, it's not that difficult, you can then— you then— the signals will then take you directly to the thought that they come from, because all signals are attached to a base, and that base is a thought, and a thought is a network of memories in those 3 different areas in the brain. So you wanna get to the thought and then you wanna deconstruct and reconstruct the thought.

I love it. That's so good. And so let's dive into deconstructing and reconstructing the thought, cuz I wanted to get, yeah, I, I did wanna mention here, the memories are so important. You know, I, one of the things I've talked about, uh, fairly recently is I went through a process with myself and I'll call it a memory transplant. Where I had a teacher tell me that I wasn't smart. I then later on had a teacher tell me I was smart and a great writer. And I literally kind of had this, oh, this memory— now this isn't true what she said. Um, what, what this, what this teacher said, this is true. And I decided to focus in and remember and focus in on this memory rather than the other memory. So talk to us about— and I think about this like a diseased organ. If you think about it as, hey, if somebody needs a heart transplant They need one that's not toxic, one that's functioning well. Hey, let's go ahead and do a new heart. Well, let's get a new memory in there or a new way of thinking. Or sometimes maybe it's not a new memory, maybe it's a new way of perceiving it, right? A new, a new, a different viewpoint.

Exactly. Well, let's take your example and then link it to what the, the, the way I was describing the different, the way networks form. So you had, you, you opened up early on saying that you were labeled as ADHD. So that's another, another whole hours-long discussion, but in essence ADHD isn't a disease. The science that says that something different in your brain causing it isn't actually— it's being disproved. What we see is ADHD is a very real behavior. It's a set of behaviors. It's one of— and behaviors are one of four signals of how we show up. So we can show up with being very frustrated and really battling to concentrate and pay attention and sit still in the classroom and, you know, pay attention long enough to be able to learn bits of information and this, then that can affect our perspective that they say that, like you said, you thought that you weren't smart and that can affect your body. I'm sure that, you know, thinking of school gave you gut ache or whatever. So there's, we can, that's just an example. Now that memory of that teacher who spoke that over your life and kind of labeled you and whoever diagnosed and labeled you, that locked you into a certain thing and that's a toxic memory. So that would have gone in your mind part of the network as a very jagged wave, not a nice sine wave, but a jagged wave, something that was disruptive, that made you feel an unease because that was, that's been pouring through your entire body. In your, in your brain, it would have looked like a cluster of trees, thoughts that, like a tree that's not a healthy looking tree, potentially one that's like branches are broken and it's kind of ugly and that kind of thing. And the tree is made up of roots and branches and as is the wave made up of lots of waves, those are the memories. So memories make a thought. So memories are the details. So each word that was said to you by the teacher and potentially by other teachers and by potentially the other kids and by potentially what you heard a doctor or a parent or whatever, unintentionally, no, no, not realizing they were, you know, trying to help you, but you would have clustered all of that, those memories, the details into those thoughts and it would have been a toxic-looking tree in your body, it would have been those proteins, but instead of it all wound up nicely, it would have started pulling apart. And so now we've got a network that's vulnerable, and we know from the research— you know this very well as well— that chronic unmanaged stress leads to— increases vulnerability to disease and the lifestyle diseases that people— so many people are dying of so young these days that are preventable. And that's the area that you— your world that you live in, to try and help people manage these preventable lifestyle diseases. But our mind plays— is the a priori or the fundamental in this process because how we see ourselves shifts. Now you made a very interesting comment of how another teacher in your life spoke a different story. So you had a different network in your brain, different looking tree, a much healthier looking tree of, oh, actually maybe you are battling, but you know what, you're really intelligent, Josh, and all the words that she said and all the sort of spin-off from that. And that would have looked like a healthy wave in your mind, and it would look like a rolled-up carpet. So now you've got two competing networks inside of you which can create— now depending on your exposure, the nurturing, the education, what people said to you, and you as a person, how you decided to handle that, you obviously did because you're very well educated and you've got to the point, but still as a man of, in your, what, late 30s, early 40s, you still are looking back And this is still something, it's a memory that you brought, a set of memories that you brought up, so definitely made a massive impact on you lifelong. And this is why we want to teach our children from young to be able to recognize that, give them the mental skills that when they're exposed to things that make them feel this confusion in the mind-brain-body network, how to process and read those signals and how to have the words to connect, to connect with the adults in their lives. To be able to try to understand the experiences that they're going through, to get some level of truth in order to preserve identity. Does that make sense?

It does make sense. And, and this is something that they don't teach in school. This is— now I think they should, you know, bring in your coursework and others. I think is so important because, you know, right now it's all about IQ. It's not about EQ, right? Having this level of emotional intelligence. One aspect of emotional intelligence is self-awareness and others awareness. And so How do people start to foster and how do we teach our kids to start to foster a greater level of self-awareness? And then what do people do with that, that awareness?

Okay, excellent. So it's kind of like flying a plane. Not that I'm saying everyone's gonna learn to fly a plane, but I'm using that example cuz my husband's actually getting his pilot's license at the moment, just a private, just for fun. He wants to learn how to fly. It's been his bucket list. So it's very much a part of our life, but it's a great way of understanding this process. Okay, so let's think of it. If you— quick analogy, then we can unpack it. So if we think when we're at the airport before they fly, any pilot flies, they're going to do a lot of preparation. The pilot, the co-pilot, the engineer, the tower— there's a tremendous amount of preparation. That is the equivalent in when it comes to the mind stuff and the body stuff and the brain stuff. That is the equivalent of what I call brain preparation, and those incorporate things like what everyone's familiar with. Breathing and meditation, and it could be prayer, it could be visualization, all those things, mindfulness, those things that create a general awareness that calm you down. So it could be things as simple as breathing in for 3 counts and out for 7. It could be something like think of 5 things you can see, 4 things you can smell, 3 things you can taste, that kind of thing. So it's those kind of decompression preparation activities that align the psychoneurobiological network and help to prepare the neurophysiology for change, for doing this deconstruction, reconstruction, reconceptualization process, which is what you did with the ADHD. You had these two competing viewpoints and you, as you said yourself, your words were, you had to change your memories. So they were competing and it's obviously been something that's hanging over your life like almost like a black cloud and you've, as an adult, you've made the decision to focus on the truth because the evidence in your life is there. So you're able to do that now. Okay, so basically we've got to prepare our brain. So the equivalent of brain— of that is the breathing. Then once— and the visualization and those things. Now once the pilot has done all of that, then the pilot gets ready for takeoff and takeoff happens. That is a very structured, very organized, very deliberate, very planned and guided process, not a random process. So that equivalent in terms of managing our mind is gathering awareness. And notice the word gathering. So from general awareness, which happens with your brain preparation, you're going to gathering awareness, okay? So this is now, now I'm aware of my bodily sensations, emotions, breathwork, um, I'm calmed down, etc. Now I need to focus in on this moment, how I'm functioning in this moment. So I'm going to gather awareness of 4 signals: the emotions, which I mentioned earlier on, our behaviors, what you're saying and doing, your perspective, and your bodily sensations.— so it's literally identifying 4 little sentences and then from there, once you— that is the equivalent of taking off. Now, if you just prepare and don't do anything else, the plane will never take off. You don't progress in your life. This is what we're seeing with the research, Josh, is that there's so much mindfulness, breathing, meditation, which is really great, but it's become a band-aid because it doesn't progress people forward. It's keeping people in that place, okay, I feel bad, let me do it, but they're not progressing. Forward. It also can create a situation of— and you, you said these words a few moments ago— you're now aware, what do I do with what I'm aware of? So what the research on awareness and mindfulness and mindfulness CBT and all these things is showing is that, hey, if you just make a patient or a person aware of something but you don't give them a management process, they're going to crash. It's the same thing as the pilot. If that pilot knows how to take off but not how to fly, that plane will crash. So you have to be able to know how to fly. So once you've gathered awareness, you then need to go through a process of deep reflection. Now reflection is very deep. It is like shining a white light through a prism and there's a rainbow on the other side. There's depth to it. There's this why process of why do I have those emotions? Do I have more emotions? What are they linked to? How are those emotions linked to my behaviors? What other behaviors? Is there a pattern? Who, what, when, where, why? And then that's coming up in my body. How are those emotions and behaviors manifesting in my body and in the perspective I have towards life? So it's questioning that, being curious in, and that's part of flying the plane. But if you stop there, you'll also crash because now you've got all this, why now, what do I do? So now we have to go into a process of, let's now go and find all the associated memories. Let's get down to the root of the tree. Gathered the branches, but now where did it start? What's the source? What's the origin? And now you've got to go deep, and this is where you go into the second phase of flying, which is called the write or visualization or enactment stage, where you capture the information not in a journal in a line. You can do that later, but at this point you want to just do a brain-mind-body dump onto paper where you just write down, preferably all over the paper, preferably not in lines, preferably in little bubbles and shapes and arrows and drawings, and that drags and that forces the two sides of the brain to work together. Then opens up tremendous insight and helps you to see into the unconscious mind. So it's like going down to the root of the tree. Then you're still flying. If you stop there, you still haven't gone far enough. You could also crash. So you have to— there's another phase of flying, and that next phase of flying is to recheck. And that is, okay, so now I've got all the stuff, I've gathered awareness, I've reflected, and I've written all this— these gathering and reflections down, and I've got all this stuff popping up out of nowhere. What does this mean? What are the patterns, triggers, the antidotes? This has happened, what can I do? What is the— and the reconceptualization starts to happen, which is— so at this point we've been deconstructing down to the root system where we can see, okay, I'm doing this because of— I'm showing up like this, these, there's the pattern, there's the link, there's the association. You're starting to see that, okay, this is what's happened, now what can I do about it? A lot of acceptance happens at this point where you can't— that person who's bullying you, you can't stop them bullying you. You have to learn how to protect yourself because how they showing up is because of their issues. And that person who hurt you, you're never going to understand why they did unless you maybe do have a chance to connect with them and communicate, but most of the time that won't happen. So in other words, this is life. Life is filled with these struggles. This is why I'm showing up. It's not something wrong with me. I don't have a diseased brain or a chemical imbalance. I'm just a human in life experiencing an adverse circumstance. Therefore, This is, this is what it is. There's a reason. And that restores your identity that we spoke about and so on. Then you, that's the flying. Then you've got to land the plane. If you don't land the plane, all of that work you've done till now can crash. And that's what I call the active reach. And that is, okay, what am I going to physically do now? What am I going to say? What's my statement? What's my action that is going to complete the cycle? And so that's basically what I've just described, Josh, is how you deconstruct and reconstruct through a process that I developed over 38 years ago that has had 38 years of research. I still do research on it. We've got a huge study running at the moment. We've just published, we've got 7 papers, 6 papers published this year, being published this year alone, submitted and published on this concept. I have an app with all this stuff. So in other words, this is not just something I've sucked out of thin air. It's not a new therapy technique. It is a system on how you you can find what's driving you. Use whatever techniques you want, CBT, ACT, whatever you want. But if you put it into that system, you're then gonna fly the plane and land it without, otherwise you're just gonna keep crashing. And that's what's happening with people.

Dr. Caroline, walk me through it one more time. Sort of the high-level bullet points of this, this self-awareness and then creating the solution to take off and land the plane.

Absolutely. Absolutely. So the 5 steps are together with— first of all, you prepare the brain. That's not a step, that's a preparation, brain prep. That's breathing, meditation, etc. Then you're going to gather awareness, then you're going to reflect, then you're going to write, act, visualize, because sometimes maybe you're driving in the car and you can't, don't have a piece of paper, a young child can't get right, so you'd visualize or enact. And then you recheck and then you active reach. So it's a system that your mind-brain-body network goes through as it engages with information. So how does information, how does this conversation get from our mouth into the viewers' and listeners' heads? Through this 5-step process. So what I've done is I've made a scientific process that we're going through at very fast speeds. I've made it very conscious and deliberate, and by you consciously and deliberately applying that system and then using, taking the basic guidance of of how each step works and then putting your own, what works for you within that, then you basically are driving, rewiring, you're deconstructing and reconstructing a network. So whatever's happened to you doesn't go away. Nothing goes away. Once it's happened, it's there forever, but you can change what it looks like. You can roll up the carpet again in the body. You can change the tree from an unhealthy, by cleaning up the roots, to a healthy tree where the branch that that's toxic will then shrink to a point where you remember, but it's no longer controlling you. You can change the gravitational fields in your mind. That's the work that we do and that takes time. And that's the other key thing, Josh. We live in a world as we know that everyone— I feel bad, give me a pill, make the pain go away. And that is not— when it comes to the body, it works more effectively. When it comes to the mind, that does not work. There isn't a pill that will take it away. Yes, maybe an antidepressant, which is not really an antidepressant. It's just numbing the brain. Maybe we'll numb the brain for a period of time, but it's not fixing the problem. We have to feel the pain. We have to go through the process. The hard work is the good work, and it takes time. Time thing we should talk about as well, because that's very relevant.

Yeah, I want to talk about that next. I want to walk through though, so everybody can really grasp, because what you're saying here, I think, is so— it's so transformative. And I've read your books over the years, several of them, I've applied this to my own life, so I want to walk everybody through this and tell me if I miss something here. But one of the first steps is bringing to awareness the feeling you have and the memory you have. So again, for myself, I might have been told I wasn't worthy, I wasn't good enough, I wasn't smart, tied to something like ADHD. So I bring that to awareness. I, I kind of re-walk through that memory, and I realize this is something that's really impacting my life. And so there's a level of awareness around it. And then one of the next steps there is having— realizing how it's affecting me and, and all of the, uh, sort of going through, hey, is this true or is it not true? How's it impacting my life in a, in a negative way? And really realizing, oh, this is, this is toxic, this is an issue. And one of the next steps from there is spending some time, you know, thinking through it, but also maybe writing it down, doing a kind of a mind map. Get out a piece of paper, get a computer, don't write it linear in a linear fashion. Kind of just throw it all over paper and write down, you know what, this makes me feel like I'm not worthy. This teacher, um, you know, did this to a lot of students. She was very negative in that way. Another teacher told me I actually am smart. You know what, I realized that I just wasn't trying, right? So I'm kind of throwing all these ideas and thoughts on, on paper, and, and then from there I'm going to, um, take sort of maybe the limiting belief or this toxic belief and recognize, okay, this is toxic and it's actually not true. It's not my true identity, who I am, this ADHD, or I'm not smart. The reality is I'm actually very good at— I'm not good at math, I'm good at science, I'm good at writing, I'm good at this. God's given me these skills here and I'm going to focus on these things. And how am I going to deal with this? Well, maybe I'm going to go back and tell my teacher at some point, hey, I want to let you know that You said these things to me. I wanna let you know it did hurt me, but also wanna let you know it actually served, you know, my life. And, and I wanna encourage you to start teaching about a growth mindset and not a fixed mindset or something like that. You know, or maybe, maybe don't approach them, but you realize I'm gonna make sure that I don't do this to others cuz maybe I did this to somebody and was hurtful and I'm gonna make sure I teach a growth mindset. I'm an encourager. I'm gonna challenge people in a good way. So, I probably missed some things or messed it up a little bit. My point is, is like, that's sort of the— it's hard work. It is. You have to think. You got to confront hard memories. But you have to go through the process if, if somebody wants to experience a breakthrough.

Beautifully done, Josh. Well done. That was really excellent. So I'm just going to refine it a little bit and add a bit of detail. Let's go to the top there where you gathered awareness. So you, first of all, that you gathered awareness of the thought of ADHD. So think of the thought and then the detail memories. So in one thought you could have hundreds if not thousands of memories because memories are the data points— what was said, what was implied, what you experienced, the conversations, all the detail— those are in the roots. So the root part of— if you think of a tree, the root part is the source. So the word ADHD thrown out or the very first statement that was made by a teacher however many years ago would have been the seed planted in the ground and then every word after that experience was growing all the roots and in that process, through your unique identity, the tree trunk, you're being like how you uniquely thought, felt, and chose around those concepts, and that grew the branches. So in the gather awareness, what you are doing is you are basically getting, as you said, you are getting awareness of that label made me feel X, Y, and Z. It actually made me also respond. I had certain behaviors. I'm just refining. So you described you described the feelings of frustration and so on, you described that it made you feel like you were useless, that you were, or you weren't good enough, or whatever. That also affected your perspective on life, that am I, I'm just not one of the smart people, can I do anything kind of thing, I'm just making stuff up. Maybe in your body, I don't know what sensations you had in your body, but you would have, there could have been tension in your body, potentially over time there may have been some ailments that had begun, that were starting because of vulnerability to disease, So, these are just the 4 areas. So, as you gather awareness, you want to be quite specific about those 4 different signals and be very deliberate and intentional, very organized. The mind-brain-body network, the psychoneurobiological network, is very organized and very detailed. Then that, as you quite correctly said, the next step is the reflect, where it's the why, getting curious. How did this make me feel? Where, what was this coming from? What did they say that, what are the details of those memories? So, you're looking at the branches, you're getting some details. More detail there around those 4 areas, the 4 signals and how they're interconnected and, and looking at more detail of how they showed up in your life and then you're capturing all of that and the system is correct, you use mind mapping but it's actually more, it's called the MetaCog, MetaCog and the MetaCog is a much more, a much bigger expansive way with less rules of how you can actually just empty your mind, brain, body network and when you do that things will come up that you didn't— don't seem related in the moment, but there's some relation because we have all these thoughts. Like, think of the trees, how they're under the ground. There's a lot of crossing over of roots under the ground. There's a lot of connection. If you think of a whole lot of forest of trees, and if you had to go into the ground, all of them are kind of growing over each other. So there's connection. In other words, as you bring up the memories in that thought, you're going to reactivate connected memories in some way and how this has impacted other areas of your life. And then as you quite correctly said, the action would be maybe to go discuss this with the teacher or maybe to apply it in your life as— sorry, the recheck was, sorry, you're looking at everything you've written, sorry. You're going to look at all this detail and start seeing if you can make some sense of the patterns and how it happened and how it impacted you and what was truth, what was not truth, the two different versions. And then the action, what should I do? Should I discuss it? Should I actually make sure I don't do it to someone else? So now that wouldn't have happened in one neurocycle. That would have happened over time. And so this is the big thing. When we're dealing with something that has locked us in, like a label like ADHD, and I have a whole chapter in this, in the new book on how to help your child and clean up their mental mess on labeling and these kinds of things, ADHD and the truth behind it and how to understand it, what words to use to help you understand it with your child and so on. But that if we think about the timing, what I've shown in my research is that, and this is, there's not as much research out there on how long it takes to rewire the network. In other words, to break down a toxic pattern and rebuild a healthy new pattern into a habit. There's limited work, that's why I've done a lot of research in this area. There's probably a handful of scientists that have done work in this area, which is crazy because we all talk about habits. One of the top best-selling books for years and years is James Clear, Atomic Habits. It's not even very scientific, but it just shows you how people are so aware things take time. So I've decided to do a lot of intensive work on how long does it take, and the research shows across myself and colleagues and people in the field that to rewire a network and to build a new habit that you can actually use in your life in a useful way, that you're no longer held back by that label of that, what that teacher put on you but have progressed forward, that would have taken at least somewhere between 59 and 66 days per cycle. You probably did multiple cycles. The mere fact that you've brought it up, it shows, and you may not have known you were doing those cycles. So it's around about 9 weeks. So any kind of rehabilitation, something like addiction, and that's on the extreme end, to any kind of pattern that you've developed from bad habits you've developed from social media or eating habits or exercise, whatever that we don't do or do, overdo it, or, you know, all the different ways that we can distort things, those aren't going to go away in 21 days or one neurocycle. It's going to take planned and guided flying that plane and landing it daily for cycles of 63 days. And the phases that I've worked out in the research, and we've clinically and applied this clinically and applied in the research, is it's two-phased. First phase is 21 days. Around about, and there you spend 15 to 45 minutes. The second phase is around 42 days, and that you spend about 5 minutes a day. So the second phase is shorter, and, and, but it's a stabilization phase, and it's where people tend to fall down. People get really into the deconstruction, reconstruction, this is what it is, this is where I'm going to be, this is, this is how I want to be, and then they don't stabilize. So you've regrown the tree, but it's small. It doesn't doesn't have enough energy yet and you've still got the old pattern that's now shrunk but it's the tree, it's one tree, but you don't build another tree, but you've basically through this process of neurocycling daily, at around about 3 weeks, the tree's got 2 equal parts. The one part's the toxic part, the other part's the truth and the roots also are half and half. So at any point if I stop now, I could revert back and that's what happens so often in people working been on stuff themselves or even in therapy or coaching or counseling, and you've seen this in your work trying to get people to change behaviors. So we can't change a behavior unless you've changed the mind behind the behavior. We've got to change the network. The behavior is just one of four signals. So we keep talking about behavior change. We need to talk about how a person shows up. So therefore we need to get that— it mustn't be equal. We can't have equal part toxic and healthy. We have to shrink the toxic down to a point where it's just a teeny little branch and we have to grow the healthy. So, and that's what the second phase of 5 minutes a day of neurocycling will do, is grow— shrink the small part and grow the big part so it stabilizes. And then that you can have big stuff, you know, think of a scale of 1 to 10. 1, 2, and 3 on that scale are the day-to-day struggles, maybe a minor irritation with a loved one or irritating traffic or an irritating email or just feeling awful, you know, the day-to-day issues that we can get under control, they don't totally throw us off. The 4, 5, 6s and 7 are the habits that we've got into. The social media habits that have changed, sort of changing our identity, which is on the 7 side of the 4, 5, 6 and 7. The bad eating habits, the bad exercise habits, the just being reactive and getting irritated about little things bad patterns that we've developed that tend to be quite disruptive, and if we don't manage them, will affect our mental health. Then the 8s, 9s, and 10s, those are the traumas. Traumas are things that have happened to us that we have no control over. The other ones, 1s through 7s, those are things we've kind of done and reacted to and so on. So that, you know, things that we've been involved in creating in our own lives. With the 8s, 9s, 1s and 10s are your trauma, your physical, your traumas like physical abuse, sexual abuse, war, racism, you know, religious trauma is a big one in that side as well. There's a lot of, a lot of stuff that's happened to you and those create the deepest wounds, the strongest trees, the deepest roots. So they, they're not going to go away in one neurocycle. So I've had some patients, for example, and clients and people that just know my work that don't work with me personally, they've through multiple cycles of 63 days. So that's, you know, that's just to give you an idea of the time frame. And this may all sound very overwhelming. How do you teach this to kids? So I have explained very simplistically how you can bring this down to a very simple level for children as young as 3, as young as 2 and 3 years of age. You can start teaching these skills in a very, very simple way.

I love this. Well, I want to encourage everybody to check out your book. I have a lot more questions, so we're going to keep going, but I wanna encourage everybody, check out Dr. Caroline's new book, How to Help Your Childs— you see there, uh, Clean Up Their Mental Mess. And this book, you can find it in bookstores nationwide. It's on amazon.com, so you could go on there and check it out. But I've read several of Dr. Caroline's books, and this one is so good because it's hitting on something that's one of the greatest needs in the world today. You know, Dr. Caroline, I was reading a study here recently, and, um, well, this is, this is more of a, a, a survey. But yeah, they, um, they went and found the number one search term by Gen Z right now on Spotify is the word sad. So they're going up to look, listen to sad music, they're trying to look at sad songs. But also one of the biggest key terms that's continuing to grow is Generation Z and some millennials, they tend to be— they're just very sad. They feel lonely, they feel isolated. Can you walk me through— and there's probably some parents listening to this and they're like, yeah, I noticed my kids, they're not carefree and happy and exuberant as maybe I was as a kid or the kids I was around growing up. And not to say that, hey, all of us don't get sad at some point, but this has become more and more of an issue. Can you talk to me? Why do you believe today's kids are more sad than maybe previous generations? And what are, what are some things parents can do about it?

That's such a good question. They, in fact, they do a global survey every couple couple of years, it's like this massive survey that's done and they look to look at, um, the world's mental health in general and they compare different nations and things and they look at adults and children and generally children are— adults are sadder than children, but in the last couple of years, children, it's flipped where children are sadder than adults, which is very interesting. It is quite something. A lot of it's got to do, and I'm not blaming social media, please, I want to stress this because social media has been made out to to be the big bad enemy. We've got to be very careful because we are in an age of technology. AI is real. Social media is part of our life. Internet's part of our life, and it's a very good tool if it's managed properly. What has happened is that we're not teaching our children, which comes right full circle back, and adults, ourselves as well, back to the concept of mind management. How am I managing my mind in the moment? Am I able to, when I've been scrolling through social media or searching on Spotify for the word sad and listen to hours of sad music and read, scroll through, or listen to TikToks on how sad people are, and I've spent maybe 6 or 7 hours doing that, maybe, or 3 hours, 10 days a week for 9 weeks, you've wired in a very sad network that's driving you. It's a consuming network that's driving you. Now that's a deliberate and intentional move that you've made, but that network, the stronger it gets, it becomes almost like blinding. Like, look, I'm putting my hands across my face. It blocks your ability to see other stuff, and we— that's the messiness of what can happen when we are consuming and not managing what we are looking at, what we're exposed to, and the impact that it's having on us. So to crack that to start pulling that away so you can start seeing starts with creating this ability to be aware of the signals. Asking the— helping our children and ourselves ask the questions that, hey, I've— how many hours have I spent looking for that sad thing on Spotify? How many sad things have I listened to? How many hours? That is— how many days? How many weeks? That has created a network. That network is really huge, big network, and that's driving me. How is it making me feel? My body, my perspective, you know, why, how's it affecting my behaviors, how and where's it going through the neurocycle. When you do that, you can then become evaluative because we are instinctively as humans, we are brilliant. We have a wise mind at our core and when we tap into that, we can— and you'll see it with your little girl who's 3, the wisdom that pops out of their mouth sometimes and the insight sometimes blows your mind. I'm sure, Josh, that You know, you'll say something or you might be a bit sad and they'll come up to you and touch your face and say, "Daddy, why are you sad?" And you'll say something and they'll give you something that is like, "Why didn't I think of that?" Children are incredibly insightful and wise and that wisdom— and every human is wise. And when we get so caught up in these networks, we almost forget our wisdom. And if we— with our technology, it's so easy to live like that because the stimulation that has come from technology, which is a really brilliant thing. Trust me, I really believe it's brilliant. It satisfies the network, but it's supposed to be managed. The network is not supposed to be bombarded all the time with, um, and in an unfiltered way. We have to create filters. We have to know how to recognize when that, that I've observed or focused on, is making me feel like this, and then I can bring in the draw on my wise mind, see, oops, I'm building this network, do some deconstruction and reconstruction. In that way you can actually manage the process and you can get the benefits out of technology. Because change is inevitable. Technology is inevitable. When the radio was first invented, when TV was first invented, all the same cries that we're hearing now from, "Oh, this is so bad," happened then as well. Every generation had to face something. This is not the first pandemic and war that's been faced. This is just part of humanity. So what we are lacking in this generation, in the last 4 generations, is this, hey, let's stand back and let's observe how life is affecting us on the scale of 1 to 10, and let's as a community come together and talk about this. We've shoved that aside and we've said, oh, you're sad, that's a symptom of a disease. Let's label you, let's diagnose you. Instead of diagnosing, we need to describe, and that's huge. And we need to teach or we need to enable our Gen Z and our Gen Alpha and our children that are battling with all the things that they're exposed to. We need to help them to have the tools to say, you know what, Mom, Dad, whoever, uncle, aunt, this made me feel really uncomfortable. I need to talk to you about this. This made me feel like something's wrong. I don't know what's wrong, but— and we've got to create those safe spaces that they feel safe enough not 'No, don't do that. Don't put your— put your cell phone down. Don't do this. Don't do these things.' That's the white bear effect. You tell them not to do it, they're going to do it. You tell yourself not to do it, you're going to do it. But if you say, 'Okay, I give myself permission. I am messy. I'm doing this. Let me see what it does when I do this,' and observe yourself and how you shift and change when you listen to the sad music. It's that shift that we need to bring back in that I'm trying to do with the work that I do.

If that makes sense. Well, you know, so much of this, Dr. Caroline, goes back to this it's a type of emotional intelligence. It's this self-awareness of self-distancing, right? Being able to step outside of oneself, sort of look at yourself, look at yourself almost like you are, you know, a friend or a kid and say, hey, this is, this is, you know, these are the actions that are best for you. We need to be able to do it with our kids. And you remind me of something. You use the word consume there. It's the same principle. You are what you eat. You are what you consume. And so when somebody's on social media or listening to songs on on social, on their device or whatever it might be, we should be feeding ourselves the cleanest, the healthiest, the most life-giving, you know, songs and stories and social media that there is. You know, I went through my own social media and I do this regularly and I go through and say, okay, who are the people I need to follow and what are the accounts I need to follow that are going to be iron sharpens iron for me? They're going to support my growth. In, uh, in my development of my body, mind, and my spirit. And who are the people that don't do that? And not to say I don't want to be aware of certain things like the news and what's going on in the world and have some sort of, uh, some form of negativity, because sometimes, right, those things can help us grow our hearts and our compassion for others. But, you know, I go through and I say, okay, you know, people I'm following, you know, Dr., you know, Caroline Leaf, Andrew Huberman, John Maxwell, you know, these sort of people that I know are going to help me grow in body, mind, and spirit. And the others, if there's a level of self-comparison or negativity or something that I know that is going to create more toxicity in my mindset, you know, I'm eliminating those and getting rid of those. And I think with our kids, like, I think about my daughter and Arwen, and she's still— she's 3. We still actually even explain this a little bit to her as we have her on YouTube. You know, we have all the parental blocks on certain things at 3 years old, of course. And whatnot. But also, it's like, like, she was watching something the other day around— now listen, some people may not agree with me on this, and that's okay, uh, but she was watching some things around Halloween and just a lot of kind of scary witches and things like that. And we said, hey, Arwen, we're not going to watch this one right now, you know. And it just explained why. I said, hey, we want to watch things that are funny and uplifting and positive and that, you know, how are going to help you grow into a woman of God and things like that. So we spent time even explaining that to our daughter of, here's why we watch this, here's why we don't watch this. Another, just here's another silly example. There's someone she likes to watch and they're always throwing a fit. Like the kid is like, if they, you know, they don't get their way. And we're like, well, she's gonna, and, and by the way, we started watching this. It is, I mean, you know this already cuz you have kids, but it's unbelievable. Like she'll watch a kid on her iPad and they're throwing a fit. All of a sudden she's throwing a fit and we're like, well, she doesn't throw fits. Why, why is she doing that? They're like little sponges and we're all sponges. And so this is, this is huge, all the things you're sharing.

Well, 95%, Josh, thanks for sharing that. 95% of what is going into our network, we're not even aware of. So that conscious deliberate stuff that I was telling you about is only around about 5 to 10%. So we're absorbing our environment and we're then trying to make sense of it. So when the child sees that stuff, then they, they're not trying to be naughty. They just trying to process so that that wires into the brain, it creates very disruptive energy, so it's got to come out. So they don't know how to let it come out except by visualizing, by doing, showing up in the way that they just saw. So if they do that, it's not to discipline the child, it's to actually say, "Okay, well that's, when you do that, that's, those are the consequences. I understand that that's, you know, that you're showing up like this." The words for a child would be, you know, you, let me show you, we've got a little character called, this will be easier to understand, in the book, I've created a character called Brainy, which is a cartoon, and the entire book I teach the parent how to teach a child with a cartoon. So if you've got a 2 and 3 and a 4-year-old, even the older kids, it's all cartoon. It's written, but there's the little characters. I've created a character called Brainy, and Brainy is the superhero that walks your mental health journey with you. So parents can get the little toy, and Brainy has a superpower called the neurocycle. We even have a coloring book with all different scenarios with Brainy and Friends. So you can color, the child can, you know, there's a little picture of this child, this Brainy's nervous about sounds, and there's a blank page so you can do all your writing on that page. And we've got a whole series coming, we've even got storybooks coming out with this Brainy character. The idea being that, let's say now that this is your child throwing the tantrum, so now you pick up Brainy and you say, I see Brainy's very mad and Brainy's throwing things and Brainy's yelling and Brainy wants to kick things Why is Brainy so upset? Why is Brainy kicking? So you then label, you'd go through the neurocycle and you know, in simple language, and I explain exactly how to do it in the book, and you'd use the doll to demonstrate, I wonder what's wrong? And then they immediately invite, this immediately invites collaborative, deep, meaningful connection and they'll say, well, Brainy, this Brainy, and they'll probably say, well, they'll probably pick up Brainy, take it to the iPad and actually show the show. That's how, so you you've given them a way of communicating. And the best way to help your child with their mental health relating to this whole thing we've been talking today, Josh, is for you as an adult to manage your mental health. People often ask me, what would I do? What would be the first thing that I would do in this mental health crisis? And my answer is, I would train the parents to understand how to manage yourself and to be authentic and honest. And if you're having a bad day, you go sit down in a designated space in your house that you've created with your child or your children, and that's your neurocycle or mind or whatever you want to call it area of your house, and you go, it's got a nice chair there and there's brainy and books and toys and a notepad that you can write in with art supplies, and you sit down and you say, "Oh, I had such a bad day. I yelled at you. I'm so sorry. I was, I'm so mad," and you go through the neurocycle, you demonstrate to the point where when you get into recheck, you, you, by that stage when you're writing on you know, let's say you're drawing pictures of like a cross face or something, the child's peeking over your shoulder and they, they're pointing and they're saying, "Ooh," you know, and then in the recheck you invite them in to, to share that journey with you and they may give you or not give you statements, but you have then modeled for them, "Oh, okay, now I feel so much better," and you activate, "Let's go play with our puppy," and "I'm going to phone my friend who upset me." So you've modeled the process. So for parents, I would say learn this yourself. I've got an app too, Neurocycle is in an app where I literally give you the therapy where there's the whole 63-day cycle decompression activities. There's little mini Neurocycles, and we've just built a parent add-on that's coming in, in a couple of weeks, and that will actually go with the book where there's different scenarios. Like, for example, how to manage a tantrum in the shop using Neurocycle, how to deal with first-day fears of going back to school or daycare or whatever. So there's a multitude of different scenarios where where you can create this, this tool. But as a parent, you learn it for yourself because you've got issues and everyone's a mess. We all need help. So by you managing yourself and then demonstrating, obviously language appropriate and age appropriate, demonstrating how you're managing your mind, you then teaching your child the skills of that, well, it's okay to be a mess, but you don't stay a mess. I threw a tantrum, okay, it's a mess, but why? Let me manage that. There's a consequence. That's not the way I can manage, but I feel— I don't know how to explain how I feel. So you're providing those, those mental skills to manage what they've been exposed to and what we've been exposed to. We've got to manage ourselves, and the kids will relate to that.

That's so good. I love it. You know, one of the things I think as a parent that I've been more aware of, uh, is there's a level oftentimes, you know, that— and by the way, you've seen this discussion in these debates on probably Twitter and social media of of, you know, there's a generation of everybody gets a trophy, right? Oh yeah. What do you— what, what are your thoughts on sort of— what, first off, what are your thoughts on that? But also, what are your thoughts on striking a balance between nurturing your kids but also challenging them and pushing them in a healthy way to be their best?

Well, that's a, that's a really great question. And what we want to do is teach not competition but enhancement. So there are going to be people that do things better than you and they get the trophy. You don't always have to get a trophy, but you can celebrate their win and them winning the trophy because that's— in that you're developing your intelligence, your own intelligence. So by celebrating other people, you become healthier and more brain intelligent. If you give a child the trophy all the time, we're breeding narcissism. We're literally growing the behavior of narcissism into our children and entitlement. And I did a whole— there's actually a whole reel that I've done in a podcast. We have to— in my podcast, Cleaning Up the Mental Mess, that you've been on, and you need to come on it again. I've done a whole podcast on how we build— we've got to be careful of building entitlement and narcissism into our children through this trophy thing, that everyone's a winner. Everyone is, but that's not how it works in life, because you're a winner if you can celebrate someone else's success. That's winning. That's the correct version winning versus you've got to also get the trophy. It's an empty trophy. You know, that person ran faster than you or they got a higher grade— celebrate it! There's something that you can do that's going to come down the line. So we've got to teach our children not to be scared of that. And we have. We've made the— I shouldn't say we because I don't do that, but that philosophy has— it's breeding narcissism, it's breeding entitlement, it's breeding confusion, it's attacking identity. It's very unhealthy.

That's so good. You know, you talk about— so, so the neurocycle is incredible, by the way. I'm so excited about this. I'm so excited to, you know, I practice this in a way, but I think you going through the exact process and being able to fine-tune the way that I already do this is going to be incredibly helpful. You know, what are some of the other— when you think about the best habits kids could have, so, uh, in terms of becoming more successful as just human beings, what are some of the most important habits that you think that we should think about, uh, you know, having our kids do?

So the first and most and foremost would be to let them understand this concept of mind and mind management. And the tool of the neurocycle is the tool that helps you do that. Now, in the neurocycle, when you get to the active reach, that's where you can start developing the habits that you them to develop. So for example, if you are, if there is a social media pattern that's developed in your child that they're getting, they want to keep on getting stuck on certain social media patterns, you can do a neurocycle to work out why and the impact and then your active reaches are what can we do instead. So that's where, you know, you can build in, you don't want to just say, "I must do this," or, "You must do this," without understanding why. So the neurocycle takes you through, this is how I'm showing up but I could show up in a better way. What could that 'What better way be?' And that's, you know, giving them the ownership, the empowerment to be curious and get the locus of control internal. So you initially co-regulate and then you teach them to self-regulate. That's really important, a really important process. And that they can learn, 'Alright, this is something that's happening in my life. I don't feel comfortable with this.' I don't— they won't use big words like that, but they recognize the discomfort and recognize, you know, why. They get curious about the discomfort. Discomfort in the emotions and so on and work down to the, okay, this is what's going on, alright, what am I going to do about it? And that's the recheck and then the active reach is then the what am I going to do about it? So it could be, you know, I'm eating so much junk food and at school and it's making me get lots of sore tummies and I don't concentrate so well. So active reach, how can I replace the junk food with something healthy? You know, it's the, so the actual actions would come into the active reach. But until they've been curious and empowered to understand that internal locus of control, you can remove all the junk food you want, but you've got to teach them how to understand what it's doing to themselves. And that's in every situation. So that would be very critical in terms of really self-empowerment, internal locus of control, self-regulation. Those are— and you can use the neurocycle as your sort of framework for teaching them to do it very quickly. You could be in the car driving on holiday and your kids are having an argument in the back about a— something and it's getting heated and you can say to them, "Okay, well, let's just cool it now. Let's take a deep breath. Let's just see, okay, let's talk about how, you know, how you're feeling. You're feeling like this and this is what you're doing, you're yelling and you, you know, you're mad and you think this is like that, your brother's stupid and your sister's dumb and this is just crazy and you—" and so you label it for them and say, "Right, well, "Okay, so why?" And then, "Okay, so now let's pretend that you're looking at yourself through your iPhone camera and watch yourself now in the car." You tell them that, you're directing them. You say, "Okay, now watch what you're doing. Watch yourself having this little argument." Immediately that ability to stand back and observe will start giving them a different perspective. That's the third step because they may not have paper in the car, so you, you know, you visualize. And then say, "Okay, well, so how are we going to solve this?" you don't agree with each other, that's okay. It's totally okay not to agree with each other, but it's not okay to hit each other in the car or say mean names to each other. You need to understand, why don't we ask each other why you each have those different opinions and then accept that you are allowed to have different opinions about that movie or that song or that person at school. And what are we going to— and then the active reach would be, okay, let's each share our opinion and agree to disagree. You can do that in 2 minutes, you know, 5 minutes, you know, and that's, that's a really good habit. You're teaching them how to be curious about everything that's going on and how they're reacting and what to do about it.

So good. You know, I think one of the things that frustrated me so much when I was growing up as a kid, my parents were very concerned about who I spent time with. And looking back, I'm so grateful for that. But I would love to hear from you. Is there any research or science science behind who we— both kids and adults— how we might become more like those we surround ourselves with. If somebody is stressed, we become more stressed. Is there any science or research behind that idea of, you know, the importance of peer groups, or we become who we, we, we spend time with?

Absolutely. So there's a lot. And in fact, I mentioned earlier on about how 95% of our environment we are absorbing. So you, the people you hang out with, you're consciously absorbing their mannerisms, their behaviors, and depending on the influence they have over you, if it's the mean group or the mean girls, you maybe want to be like that, and you shift your functioning in that group because, and you compromise because you want to be accepted. So that's conscious, that's happening on a conscious level, but on an unconscious level there's this 95% going on, or 90% of a absorbing the culture around that, those people and the conversations, and you're absorbing their messes because how they showing up is because of their issues, and how they showing up is because of the issues they, of the people in their lives that they're exposed to. So all of it's this boomerang effect. So it doesn't mean we abandon people and shut people out of our lives, but we definitely do need to teach ourselves and our children how to look at the impact of people that are around us that are impacting us. And how they're impacting us, and is it compromising who you are as a person, in which case you need to maybe make some decisions for a time until they've sorted themselves out. You may need to pull away or you need to be confrontational and say, look, you know, this and this is happening, and that's what we've got to teach ourselves and our children how to do that. You know, an example I was listening to, just happened to be listening to a podcast the other day about how the, that whole thing on the Housewives, What's it called? The Housewives of Orange County. And, and what's it? It's a spinoff from Desperate Housewives. What's it? What's the title of that show called again?

Maybe I don't, I don't, I don't watch a lot of it either. So you and I are probably two of the people that watch the least of this stuff in the world.

But so basically the idea was that it's a reality show and I don't know, I was listening to an analysis. It was basically a science show talking and analyzing analysis of what is happening in the mind and the brain when people watch these things. But the whole show is a reality show and how people shift— it's Housewives— that, that shift the, the lifestyle to be part of the mean group. And it's literally reflecting the mean groups that happen at school and how people— so the point they're making is our culture that we put ourselves into is going to change how we function and compromise values in ourselves. So it is very important that we understand that those destructive people are showing up because they are being destructed by other people who are destructive. And so it becomes a point of you have to put your own oxygen mask on, confront to a certain point, and remove from that if necessary, if that person isn't going— or persons aren't going to change. So yes, we do absorb who we hang out with. It becomes part of your networks. You wire— you literally wire that into your networks and will become a driver if you don't catch yourself.

I mean, it's so incredible because what you shared there is our, you know, even mannerisms. I know when I've spent time around friends growing up, I just realized I start acting more like I did in the past or like them. And so we've all experienced this, uh, in different areas of our lives. But think about it, I mean, you start modeling the mindset, the behaviors, the thoughts, the actions with it. I mean, this is really important for us and for our kids. You know, Dr. Caroline, one of the things that I wanted to ask you, uh, you give so much advice to so many people, right? I mean, daily. I mean, you're giving, giving so much advice. What is the best piece of advice you've ever gotten in your life?

It's, uh, gosh, I, it's so— I've had so many good pieces of advice, but one of the things that has really stimulated my whole field and my whole life's work, which is nearly 40 years now, was a statement made by one of my professors when I was, I think, probably 20 years old at university, was he was my first degree, and he was saying that the brain cannot change. And that was the going philosophy in the '80s, that your brain couldn't change. And I remember saying to my— saying, putting my hand up and saying, but we different, life changes, we change. So if we are, as humans, are changing, we use our brain, our brain must change. And he kind of, sort of, fobbed it off and kind of said, "Well, go do research." So I said, "Okay, what area?" And he said, "Go and work with traumatic— go work with people that have had brain injuries, like traumatic brain injury." And he was being facetious. He was basically saying it's pointless because if someone's got a damaged brain, there's no hope. That was what they were teaching us in this neuroscience lecture. And so I didn't, as a young student, student, I didn't, you know, think anything more except, oh, okay, I will go and do research on traumatic brain injury. And I started setting up my thesis for undergrad and for postgrad in that area. And I did some of the first neuroplasticity research in my field and in the world at that time on showing that if you change a person's mind, you change their brain. We didn't even have the technology. We had CT scans and QEGs weren't even around. EEGs weren't even being used in the way they are now. But we saw changes in people's— we would look at more behavioral outcomes and I had people going from being literally non-functional at 18 years of age from a car accident, not even functioning on a second grade level, going on to get university degrees. And that's when I knew something shifted. So it was his challenge to me that that challenge, the essence was, you know what, the impossible, you know, he's like almost brushing it off. He said, just, you know, you know, go and— it's impossible to change something, that's the reality. This reality always changes. It was the fact that he challenged me that in a way that said things can't change, that caught me. Things always change. And that led to the research, but it was that challenge that was a very, very good piece of advice that taught me that change is good, that I will change, that I can change who I am as a person, that I, as I learn more and I may become a better parent and know more. I may have completely different values to what I had 10 years ago or 5 years ago, and that's improved me as a person. Change is an inevitable part of life, and that change affects the entire functioning of the human. So that was a great piece of advice because I pursued change and understanding change for the rest of my life.

I mean, this is such a powerful message that you can change. You can be so much better. I mean, 10 years from now, uh, you can be probably more than you even thought you ever could become. And so I think that's one of the messages for people, is you can become somebody of greater character, greater skill, accomplish more than you ever thought possible. So what a powerful, empowering belief and message.

That really helped me because it also means, Josh, that you may change a philosophy. You may have a way of thinking that was so right for you at that stage, and you see, hey, that actually wasn't good. That actually— and it was maybe not a bad thing, but it changed how you viewed something, and you can shift. And that doesn't mean you're fickle, it means that you've grown. So don't be scared to change who you are as a person, you know. That's really very key.

I think it's very key. So good. Last, last two questions for you. One is, you share a lot of information, so this, you know, it could feel like a lot for a lot of people. Now I know because I've gone through the process, once you get into it a little bit and you've done it one time and a second, the third, it almost becomes— it just become his nature to you. You kind of naturally know the process. But what advice do you have for any parents who might feel like a little overwhelmed? This is a lot. What, what, what, what is your advice for them?

Uh, get, get the app and do the app. Go through it because I will, I'll walk you through it and get the book and put the two together. 'Cause in the book I'm explaining it so simplistically and in the app you're experiencing it and teach yourself first. And as you teach yourself first, then you'll see how easy it is over time. Don't expect yourself to learn. It's like learning to play a musical instrument. It's going to take you time to get into the process with your children and get into sort of a routine and stuff, but it doesn't take that long. There's a story in the book of— because I have a whole section on trauma and social identity and identity and social— there's a whole— the third section is all the major sort of issues that can hit sleep issues and that kind of thing. And there's a story of a young boy who, observing his mom— he was very traumatized, sexual abuse and all kinds of things— but observing his stepmom using the Neurocycle just to cope with the challenge of bringing this child up because he had so many issues from all the terrible trauma. He observed her and watched her change, and she sat with him, and within a few days, 4 days of using the Neurocycle, this child slept through the night. He'd never slept through the night before, and this child I was 8 years old, and that was this version, the adult version. So the hope— you, you, it will take you time to get all the concepts, but that's okay. But the basic principles you'll get into place fairly quickly. So this is a great combo to get, and, and the, the coloring book and the toy are such good for young kids. The Burst book is 2 through 10, okay? And then the, the, my other book, Clean Up Your Mental Mess, that you've interviewed me about before, that's adolescent adolescents onwards. The app is for adolescents and adults. And then we've got a parent add-on coming in that the parent can use to guide the child. And that will be in the next couple of weeks. The coloring book and Brainie, these are available only on our website, drleaf.com. And there is always a special going on. And so the app you can download iTunes, Google Play, and we have a web version. So that's where I would start. I think that's probably the easiest place.

So good. I want to encourage everybody, check out Dr. Caroline's new book, How to Help Your Child's Mental Mess, or How to, How to Help Clean Up Their Mental Mess. It's on Amazon, it's in bookstores nationwide. Also, there's an app, there's a coloring book, all of the, all of these great tools. And this is such an important message because mental health is on the rise. And even if it's something you might not have grown up with as a kid, our kids today, they are dealing with it across all ages. And so the more we can help our kids improve their mental health the more they're going to be successful in their relationships, which really impacts every area of your life. It impacts marriage, your work life, just success and everything, generally speaking. So I want to encourage everybody, run out and check out Dr. Caroline's new book. And Dr. Caroline, again, I'm just so grateful for you coming on and sharing your wisdom with us today. Uh, and I know we can find you on YouTube. You've got a podcast. It's fantastic. I want to encourage everybody to check that out as well. But again, Dr. Caroline, So thanks much for coming on and sharing your wisdom today. Thank you, Josh.

It was so great chatting with you again, and thank you for your excellent questions. I think we got into some really good stuff. Yep.

Agreed. Well, hey everybody, thanks so much for listening to another episode of the Growth Lab Podcast where each and every week we talk about how to grow yourself, your health, your wealth, and in your career and relationships. Thanks again to our, uh, our special guest, Dr. Cara Lionleaf, talking about how to rewire your brain and improve the mental health for you and your kids.