Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess Chapter One: What Happens When We Don’t Use Our Minds Correctly

Dr. Caroline Leaf – Sometimes it feels like we live in a world characterized by fear. People are fearful about their health, the economy, their jobs, the future, corruption, crime, and their feelings of powerlessness.

The cost of this fear is toxic thoughts, toxic stress, anxiety, and depression, which in turn increase our vulnerability to disease. The end result of this fear, anxiety, and illness cycle, if we don’t manage it with our minds, is a society dependent on external factors such as painkillers, medications, wellness fads, and skyrocketing health costs to fix us.

But what if there was another way? What if the answer lay inside of you? What if you held the key?

Most people understand the need to live a healthy lifestyle, even if they don’t fully understand the impact of their lifestyle choices on disease processes. What many people don’t recognize is the need for proper mind-management and how it both supports and sustains a healthy lifestyle.

When our thinking is toxic, it can mess up the stress response, which then starts working against us instead of for us. This, in turn, can make us more vulnerable to disease, which is why many researchers now believe that toxic stress is responsible for up to approximately 90 percent of illness, including heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. Only 5–10 percent of disease is said to come from genetic factors alone.

Why? When an individual is in a toxic thinking state, the release of stress hormones such as cortisol and homocysteine can significantly affect the immune system, cardiovascular system, and neurological system.
 In fact, excessive stress hormones are so
 effective at compromising the immune system that physicians therapeutically provide
 recipients of organ transplants with stress 
hormones to prevent their immune system
from rejecting the foreign implant.

Despite a more widespread understanding of the importance of healthy
 lifestyle choices, and many incredible resources out there on making good lifestyle
choices, many people lack the necessary 
mind-management skills they need to
apply this knowledge to everyday life. This 
isn’t a one-off thing. Mind-management is a skill that needs to be learned; used all day long, every day; and constantly upgraded as we grow from childhood into adulthood. For every new experience, we need a new set of mind-management tools!

Now, before you start panicking and thinking that it’s impossible, stop, breathe, and read on. I don’t want you to get stuck thinking it’s hopeless, that you have caused all your own problems, and that you cannot change. This will only make you feel worse about yourself, and it really isn’t the case. You can’t blame yourself for something you didn’t know—but you can empower yourself and shift into change mode when you learn how to manage your thinking. This is a skill that needs to be learned and constantly upgraded—I do this daily, and will continue to do so until I pass on from this world.

Most of what I share in this book hasn’t been taught to you before because it’s an area that isn’t well understood. We’re only beginning to understand mind and consciousness, which is exciting. If we’ve come this far without good mind-management skills, imagine where we can go when we’ve learned how to control our thinking!

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