managing your mind Archives - Amazing Health Advances

Small Things You Can Do Every Day to Protect Your Mental Health

AHA Publisher — Fri, 20 May 2022 07:00:09 +0000

Dr. Caroline Leaf – In this replay from Lewis Howes’ amazing podcast The School of Greatness, I talk about ways to handle the mental conditions that affect us all. Lewis and I dive deep into the topic of how mismanagement of mental health is on the rise, and I share my five-step Neurocycle process to help people manage their minds. We also discuss how to protect your mental health if you’ve undergone painful and traumatic experiences in your life. Emotional states like anxiety and depression are our body’s way of responding to painful experiences. Despair, anger, depression, anxiety—these are all normal responses to life. In fact, they can be helpful. They are messengers and warning signals telling us what is going on in our lives, not just scary illnesses. We need to shift our focus and change the way we talk and think about mental health. It’s important to focus on the story and the person’s experience, not just their symptoms. The mind is complicated, and to properly heal, we need to focus on specific ways of dealing with negative emotions. This is where the Neurocycle comes in. This process is an alternative way to manage our mind’s response to traumatic memories or painful experiences. For instance, in a tremendously acute traumatic state, you have the options of going into two zones. The first is the mental mess that you’re in, where you are the pilot. However, you also have the zone of the co-pilot, which is also you. The only difference is that your co-pilot can see what is going on from a more objective point of view. It has its wisdom because inside each of us is what I call our “wise mind”. This co-pilot state is necessary for us to prepare ourselves for the Neurocycle process. Once we hand the control over to our mind’s co-pilot, our wise mind, then we can proceed to the five-step process below: Gather awareness: In this gather step, you are gathering awareness of your emotional and physical warning signals, behaviors and perspective/attitude. It’s a bit like gathering apples into a basket versus letting them all fall on your head and knock you out. In this analogy, the apples represent all of these warning signals. In this step, allow yourself time to feel. Validate your feelings, don’t run away from them! Reflect: Put your thoughts and feelings on the witness stand in your mind. Ask yourself questions like: Why do you think you feel the way you do? What has happened recently? What has happened in the past? Have you been suppressing or ignoring anything? Are you trying to avoid anything? What triggered you? Be as specific as possible. You can do this in a minute or less because you don’t need too much information—you don’t need to find all the answers right now! Allow yourself to be curious with your emotions and feelings. What you are feeling is valid, but may not be true, so question everything. Write: Pour you mind and brain on paper. This doesn’t have to be organized or even make sense—just get it out! You can organize in step 4. This type of “pouring your mind out” writing will pull what’s in the depths of your being up and will help you both organize and clarify your thoughts and feelings. It also increases brain health, so that you can think more clearly, be less impulsive and have more wisdom and cognitive flexibility! Recheck: In this recheck step, you are making more sense of what you have gathered, written and reflected on. So, I want you to go back over what you discussed, wrote down and thought about more deeply, reflecting and analyzing your thoughts and feelings. Do a mental autopsy; become a detective and look for patterns, triggers and activators. Write whatever you discover into your journal in another color so you can track what you are reconceptualizing. Some questions to ask in this step could be: What truths are hidden in your writing? What patterns? What are you noticing about your thoughts and reactions? Has anything changed? How are you planning to proceed? What can you learn from your reactions? What can you learn from what happened in your relationship? How can you reconceptualize this situation? How can you turn the destructive into something constructive? Active Reach: This step is essentially an action you take to reinforce the new, reconceptualized pattern of thinking you want in your life (which is replacing the old relationship habit). This step will be based off what you rechecked in step 4. If you want something to change, what will this look like? How can you practice this change? If you want to restore the relationship, what will you do? Once you start permitting your mind’s co-pilot to take the reins, it’ll be easier to fight that urge to come back to that dark place. It is also helpful to engage in brain building to build up your cognitive resilience. This means taking the five steps of Neurocycling to learn new information. Every morning, new cells are born, just waiting for us to use them. If we don’t, they become toxic waste and affect our brain negatively. There are many ways to build the brain, like reading, studying, and even doing physical activities. By allowing your mind to engage itself in thinking, you can build your mental and physical resilience, take control of the urge of going back to that deep dark place, and transform your life altogether! To read the original article click here.

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Using the Neurocycle to Break Cycles, Heal Generational Trauma & End Toxic Family Patterns

AHA Publisher — Wed, 10 Mar 2021 08:00:35 +0000

Dr. Caroline Leaf – In this podcast (episode #261) and blog, I talk about how to use the Neurocycle to break the toxic cycles we have in our lives, whether these come from our own past or are a pattern that is inherited as generational trauma. When it comes to the mind-brain connection, we don’t have to be beholden to the past. We can change how these cycles play out in our future. Our thinking, feeling and choosing changes our genetic expression. We switch genes on and off with every thought we have, and every thought we have is a response to how we perceive our life and the world around us. In fact, as I discuss in detail in my latest book, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess, research has shown that around 5% of genetic mutations cause disease; an estimated 95% of genes are influenced by our environment and lifestyle factors. What does all this mean? The way that you think also contributes to this environment. Your genetic activity is significantly determined by your thoughts, attitudes, and perception, which collectively create the environment of your mind, brain and body. Even though this may sound overwhelming and a little scary, it is actually very hopeful! The science of epigenetics shows that our thoughts can control our biology, and we can control our thoughts, positively directing genetic expression in our body and passing these genetic markers through the generations. Essentially, this means that what you are thinking at any one moment is vitally important because your thoughts affect the signals your genes receive. By managing your mind, you are in effect managing these signals and how they impact your genetic expression and biology. So, how does this all work? Epigenetics shows us that our thoughts are a predominant factor controlling genetic expression; our mind controls what we think, eat, exercise, respond to and so on—it controls how we live our lives. Epigenetics shows us that how we think, feel and choose (our mind-in-action) will influence the behavior of our genes and our subsequent mental and physical wellbeing. These epigenetic changes represent a biological response to an environmental signal. The response can be inherited through the generations via epigenetic markers. However, if you remove the signal, the epigenetic mark can fade. If you choose to add a signal, on the other hand, the epigenetic mark can be activated. In sum, we are not merely our genes or biology. Our past doesn’t have to be our destiny. How we think and choose to live our lives impacts a big part of the picture! What you are thinking at any one moment is vitally important because this is the signal your genes receive. This means that when you learn how to manage your thoughts through managing your mind, you can change your thoughts. And, by changing your thoughts, you can change your genetic expression; you rewire your brain (through neuroplasticity), which then impacts your biology. Research studies, including mine (which I discuss in detail in my latest book Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess) show that managing your mind can even influence how you age and your vulnerability to disease, while there is strong scientific evidence that controlling one’s inner thought life and detoxing the mind is preventative against cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s! So, how do we start breaking these cycles? As I talk about in Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess, this process begins with deliberate and intentional mindfulness that activates our self-regulation, which then helps us go beyond mindfulness and into mind-management. To do this, I recommend using the mind management technique I have researched, developed and applied clinically over the past three decades, which is called the Neurocycle. The kind of self-regulation that is achieved using the Neurocycle is a great way to deal with the root of the toxic generational cycles in your life, reconceptualizing them and how they impact your genetic expression. It is done in 5 steps: Gather awareness of what you are feeling emotionally and physically as you work on a toxic cycle in your life. Reflect on why you feel the way you do—be as specific as possible. Write this down—this is way to help organize your thinking and gain clarity. Recheck what you have written. Look for patterns in your work life, your relationships, your responses, your attitudes and so on. Take action. I call this step an “active reach”. It is essentially an action you take to reinforce the new, reconceptualized pattern of thinking you want in your life (which is replacing the old, toxic cycle). To read the original article click here. For more articles from Dr. Leaf click here.

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