mental mess Archives - Amazing Health Advances

How to Listen to & Learn from Your Mental & Physical Warning Signals

AHA Publisher — Fri, 30 Sep 2022 07:00:55 +0000

Dr. Caroline Leaf – In this podcast (episode #418) and blog, I talk about our mental and physical warning signals, what they are, and why we need to listen to them. This podcast is part 3 of my series on the different parts of the mind. As mentioned in my previous two podcasts on this topic, The Difference Between the Nonconscious, Subconscious & Conscious Mind (part 1) and How to Tap Into the Nonconscious Mind to Unwire Trauma & Toxic Thinking Habits (part 2), when you consciously engage the nonconscious mind through deliberate, intentional, strategic, and proactive deep thinking, you draw your thoughts, with their embedded memories, through the subconscious mind and into the conscious mind. When these thoughts arrive in the conscious mind, they’re in a malleable state, which means you can change them and reconceptualize them. You also tune in to the physical warning signals associated with how you feel, such as an increased heartrate, an adrenaline rush, a headache, or a stomachache. Next, you embrace any feelings, such as anxiety or depression, as an emotional warning signal that something is going on in your life. Instead of seeing these as negative, you see them as telling you something; you make them work for you and not against you. You do this in a celebratory way, not because you’re celebrating the painful memories, but because now you’re conscious of them, which means you can change them. Remember, you can change only what you are conscious of. You have self-regulatory power when you are conscious, which is kind of like what famed neuroscientist Benjamin Libet famously called “veto power” over your thoughts. This power allows you to control your thoughts. You can literally capture them, and using your self-regulatory veto power, change them. As you do this, you override the force generated from the energy of the toxic thought, and choose to speak or act, or not, according to this thought. You can even evaluate the thought and decide if you want to change it, when to change it, and how to change it. You don’t have to be driven by toxic ruminations and reactions from established negative thought patterns or traumas, because you have the power to veto them. This is a proactive way of approaching the mind and can save you a lot of heartache and anxiety! I’m sure you have already experienced this numerous times: you are just about to say or do something but stop yourself for some reason. Maybe you feel it’s the wrong timing, or that the person is already upset and it would only make matters worse. This is mind-management in action, and one of the many ways we can clean up the mental mess! Essentially, you need to become a thought detective to find the source(s) of your mental distress. This starts with understanding the signals that the mind, brain, and body send you when you are going through something. These signals alert you TO protect you. There are 4 main signals: your emotions, your behaviors, your physical symptoms, and your perspective/outlook. Some examples are: Feelings of irritability and/or hopelessness (an emotional warning signal) Ignoring calls, texts or emails (a behavioral warning signal) The world feels more negative (a perspective warning signal) Muscle aches and/or pains (a physical warning signal) Let’s say you feel depressed. As an exercise to help you start managing these feelings of depression, try to categorize what signals you are experiencing into these 4 categories. Some other examples of signals from a post I shared on social media are: Feeling self-conscious or flat around people Your personal hygiene goes out the window Your thoughts make you sad Your room gets messy Your hobbies no longer make you happy Brain fog You stop missing people and isolation feels more comfortable Constant fatigue As you gather awareness of your warning signals, ask yourself questions like: How do I feel emotionally? Physically? Are any of my behaviors bothering me? What is my outlook/worldview/perspective—how do I feel about my life/the world/etc.? Write this down any way you wish to help you start organizing your thinking. Then, once you go through this exercise, you can start listening to what these signals are telling you, and work through how you feel to reconceptualize these thought patterns using a mind management system like the Neurocycle (for more on this see my app Neurocycle and book Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess). The goal is to learn how to listen to the nonconscious mind using your conscious mind, and then using what you have gathered to start changing how these thoughts are affecting your mental health and life. It is important to remember that things like anxiety, depression, burnout, frustration, angst, anger and grief are emotional and physical warning signals, telling you that you need to face and deal with something that’s happened or is happening in your life. The mental pain, which is very real, is a sign that something is wrong: you are in a state of disequilibrium. It’s not a sign of a defective brain! The brain is going through a process of reordering and reorganizing in response to your experience(s), which are processed through the different parts of the mind (as was discussed in part one and two of this podcast series). It is also important to remember that the brain and mind are separate. The brain does not produce the mind; the brain responds to the mind. And you have the power to change your mind! To read the original article click here.

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The Neuroscience of Dreams & Nightmares + How to Have Better Dreams

AHA Publisher — Mon, 24 May 2021 07:00:57 +0000

Dr. Caroline Leaf – In this podcast (episode #278) and blog, I talk about dreaming and mental health. This topic was inspired by an email I recently received: “Since dreams come from our busy minds, can we slowly over time change our dreams in some way? I do not always remember dreams obviously but when I am awakened by dreams (often) or remember the next day, I do have a recurring pattern of always hurrying or being super frustrated, anxious! I cannot help but think this is part of why I get so tired some days as I do not rest peacefully at night. I’m just thinking dreams must be all part of the mental mind and I would love to have my dreams peaceful, pleasant, restful, whether I remember the dream or not, I feel like not having all the anxiety and frustration in the dreams would be very helpful to my awake hours.” This is a great question, and one I think applies to a lot of people (including myself!). Why? We need to remember that detoxing the mind and brain doesn’t just take place when we are awake. We also detox our thoughts when we are asleep; in fact, our dreams can help us sort out our thoughts and clean up our mental mess. They have a purpose—recurring dreams may even indicate an unresolved issue in our lives, so it is important that we try and pay attention to what we dream about. But how? Isn’t it hard to remember your dreams? People often tell me they can’t recall what they dreamt about or that they don’t dream. But the fact is that we all dream; it’s a neuroscientific process. Dreams are generally forgotten because either they have been processed or they are suppressed by the nonconscious mind because they are too hard or painful to deal with. Dreams occur during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. We start with non-REM sleep (NREM), where the mind and brain stop processing the outside world, which then progresses into REM sleep, where the mind and brain starts processing our inner thought life. Thoughts with their embedded memories are stored in three places: the mind, the brain and the body. The strong emotions that are tangled with the data of these thoughts can create an imbalance and disruption to homeostasis of the mind brain and body if they are toxic or undealt with. When we are asleep, the nonconscious mind steps to sort out these imbalances and tries to restore order and balance to your thinking. But the nonconscious can only fix things to a point; it requires the interaction of the consciousmind to resolve issues. To get the attention of the conscious mind, the information is released like “bubbles” and the content is expressed in your nonconscious mind as stories complete with a plot and characters in the language of your everyday awareness. This does not always appear in ways that allow you to immediately or easily understand things, which is why dreams can often be confusing. During the day, we process our experience with active and dynamic self-regulation. This means that the conscious and nonconscious mind work together, and we process from the concrete to the abstract. At night, on the other hand, we process the other way around, because just the nonconscious mind is involved, which operates outside of the space-time environment. This contributes to the strangeness of our dreams. Some dream experts even suggest that our perceptions are processed in dreams in a backward way – that is we don’t see things quite the same way as we do during the day, although the science regarding dreams is still in its infancy. Since all thoughts are made of data, feelings and choices, dreams can have a strong emotional impact, as I am sure you well know. I myself have woken up crying or in pain, and couldn’t even remember what I dreamt about! Dreams involve thinking about abstract ideas that are represented visually, which is another reason they can be so confusing mentally and emotionally. Neurochemically, when we are awake, the neurotransmitters serotonin and norepinephrine help us line up our thoughts, apply logic and process what we are experiencing; we only get burst of acetylcholine (another neurotransmitter) as something grabs our attention. At nighttime, acetylcholine is active, which helps us consolidate our thoughts with their embedded memories, while serotonin and norepinephrine shut down. The firing of acetylcholine without the “logic power” that serotonin and norepinephrine bring can also make our dreams feel strange or odd. As we fall into REM sleep, a host of signals fires up from the pons (part of the brain stem) into the cortex but not the frontal lobe, so the reasoning and rational explanations that happen when we are conscious don’t occur. This means we don’t have a rational explanation of the mix of thoughts that make up our dreams. The signals then move to the amygdala, where our emotional library of perceptions is woken up, creating a busy dream characterized by feelings that may not make much sense. But all this strangeness doesn’t mean that dreams are not important. When we are dreaming, different parts of the brain and body are exchanging information to clean up our memory networks and prepare us for the next day. The nonconscious mind sweeps through your “thought forests”, while the detail of the memories on these thought trees are being pulled out by the mind with the help of the glial cells (support cells in the brain), which are stimulated to get to work to prepare you for the next day. This process includes sorting out unresolved issues that threaten balance and coherence in the brain. Dreams are the result of all this intense “housework”. The poorly built, incompletely processed or toxic trauma thoughts with their embedded memories are a part of the process of cleaning up our mental mess. The other part of the equation that is equally important is our conscious involvement with our dreams, i.e. us thinking about and analyzing our dreams when we are awake. Dreams are also important in helping stabilize new information we have learned during the day. Thoughts with their embedded memories become physically stronger as we dream. If we learn something new during the day, after a good night’s sleep, we will have better understanding of what we learned, so “sleeping on a problem” can be a good thing! On a physiological level, the dream state allows the psychosomatic network to retune itself and get ready for the demands of our waking life. Shifts occur in our brain’s reaction chains, and chemicals and energy “spill” into the networks of the brain, binding to receptors on the thought trees and allowing for activities necessary for homeostasis. All these “readjustments” also enter the mind as we dream; essentially, the stories of our dreams are these readjustments trying to send our conscious mind information that something in our thought life needs attention. Brain scans show that the part of the brain that processes emotional perceptions, the amygdala (or “library”), becomes very active. However, the part of the brain that responds to balance the amygdala, the PFC, is less active. As a result, toxic blocks or suppressed thoughts/traumas may be hidden from the conscious mind and only come out when we are asleep, which is why responding to the patterns in our dreams as warning signals and messengers, or becoming what I call a “thought dream detective”, is so important. Dreams can have patterns that can tell us about ourselves and what we are going through. But it’s important to note that just as each of us are unique, so are our dreams. As the person above mentions in her question. “I do have a recurring pattern of always hurrying or being super frustrated, anxious! I cannot help but think this is part of why I get so tired some days as I do not rest peacefully at night.” These patterns are messages or clues that the dynamic regulation occurring in your nonconscious mind is trying to send you, often telling you to actively pay attention to and embrace, process and reconceptualize what you are experiencing. By doing this, you will help bring order and coherence back into your mind and improve your quality of sleep and mental wellbeing. For more on ways to do this though mind management, I recommend checking out my latest book, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess. There is, however, a difference between nightmares and night terrors. Nightmares are unpleasant or frightening dreams that can cause emotional distress, and usually occur during REM sleep. In most cases, these nightmares don’t involve physical or vocal behaviors. Night terrors, on the other hand, are caused by an over-arousal of the central nervous system (CNS) during sleep. Sleep happens in several stages. We have dreams, including nightmares, during the rapid eye movement (REM) stage, as mentioned above. Night terrors happen during deep NREM sleep, and are often associated with deep seated trauma and long-term, unmanaged toxic stress. When it comes to dealing with the mental and physical ramifications of night terrors, therapy is really important, along with lifestyle changes such as a regular relaxing routine before bedtime. When it comes to children and nightmares, it is important not to invalidate their experiences by telling them “it’s just a dream” or “it’s not so bad”. Remember, dreams are often messengers; their nightmares could be a sign of a trauma response to something that is going on in their lives. So, sit with them or let them sleep in your room—comfort them and listen to them. When they are ready, you can also help them process their dreams through drawing and pictures. It may even be a good idea to take them to therapy, especially if the nightmares are recurring. To read the original article click here. For more articles from Dr. Leaf click here.

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Use the Neurocycle to Help to Improve Sleep Quality

AHA Publisher — Wed, 24 Mar 2021 07:00:39 +0000

Dr. Caroline Leaf – In this podcast (episode #264) and blog, I talk about the surprising reasons why you may not be sleeping well, and how to use mind management to improve your sleep and mental health. 1. Stop worrying about not sleeping. We all know sleep is really important. However, as I discuss in my latest book, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess, research also suggests there’s a huge cost to pathologizing it. This means that worrying about sleep and identifying and labeling yourself as a poor sleeper may be worse than not sleeping! Unfortunately, there’s endless research telling us the impact of sleep deprivation and that sleep serves a myriad of functions. Personally, when someone tells me “You need to sleep or you will be too tired for whatever tomorrow brings,” or “Go to sleep early so you don’t damage your brain,” I won’t sleep just because I start panicking about not sleeping! It also doesn’t always help that everyone in the wellness and medical space keeps saying, “Sleep or else.” It’s like pouring fuel on the fire of your panic, which can make everything worse. Legalism around sleep is a hindrance, not a help. So, if you can’t sleep, don’t fret. Use the time to catch up on that list of books you have been meaning to read, or to do those tasks you have been putting off. Your body is really good at adjusting, and chances are you will catch up on the sleep you need later that week or even with a nap the next day. It helps to look at sleep over a period like a week or month versus nightly, because current circumstances and demands can also temporarily influence sleep! 2. Daydreaming can help you sleep better! If you’re constantly stressed during the day, and you don’t take the time to organize your thinking and reboot the brain, this can affect your sleeping patterns at night. When you go to sleep, you’re going into a “housekeeping” mode—everything is getting cleaned up, which helps prepare you for the next day. If there’s a lot of mental mess in the brain, this housekeeping function is hindered, which can affect how you sleep (including nightmares) and how you feel mentally and physically the next day. Many of us tend to panic at night as we’re trying to go to sleep because our brains are exhausted from chaotic thinking patterns during the day. That’s why it is so important to take what I call “thinker moments” throughout the day when we switch off to the external, switch on to the internal, and just let our minds wander and daydream or doodle. These moments give your brain a rest and allow it to reboot and heal, which increases your clarity of thought and organizes the networks of your brain by balancing alpha and beta activity. This increases blood flow to the brain, which helps it function better and helps you deal with challenges and stress and sleep better at night. 3. Don’t be afraid of the occasional all-nighter. Sometimes, an all-nighter is excellent for the mind and brain (the mind works through the brain). If you are having deep, meaningful discussions, for example, or pulling an all-nighter doing some really creative and inspirational work, your brain health will actually benefit in the short and long-term because you are exercising those cognitive muscles and building good, healthy memories, which help boost overall mental health and can prevent cognitive decline. 4. Preparing for sleep begins when you wake up. As mentioned above, chaotic thinking during the day can impact the quality of your rest at night and how you feel the next day. This is why self-regulation and mind management are important lifestyle habits you should practice throughout the day when you are awake—don’t just let random thoughts and feelings run through your mind unchecked. To this end, I recommend using my Neurocycle mind-management technique, which I talk about in Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess. The Neurocycle is a way to harness your thinking power through mind management that I have developed and researched over the past three decades; any task that requires thinking can use it, which means everything can, because you’re always thinking! Gather. Preparing for sleep begins in the morning, as counterintuitive as this may sound. The way your mind is managed from the time you wake up impacts the biochemistry, circadian rhythm, and energy of the brain. An unmanaged, messy mind is an unmanaged, messy brain that will result in messy sleep. Gather awareness of your thinking. What is going through your mind? Are you anxious about something? How do you feel physically? Reflect. Reflect on what you’re focusing on as you wake up. Is it on the problems and negative aspects of the day or the bits and pieces of your dreams, images from TV, and undealt-with thoughts flowing messily and chaotically in your mind? What is occupying your attention? Write. If you don’t catch your thoughts with their intertwined emotions, information, and embodied physical sensations, this messy waking state can become a messy day, and you will feel like you are playing catch-up all day. So, say your thoughts out loud or write them quickly into your journal next to your bed. Recheck your thoughts by breathing in for three counts and out for three counts, saying the opposite of what you reflected on; for example, say “I can only try to do what I can, and it’s fine if I don’t finish,” instead of “I have so much to do today!” Active Reach. Choose to put on a mindset for the day. Here are some more helpful morning Active Reach reminders: Write five things you are proud of yourself for—start your day off celebrating yourself! Write five things you are grateful for. Ask yourself not what you want to or have to do today but rather who you want to be today and how you want to feel. To read the original article click here. For more articles from Dr. Leaf click here.

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5 Simple & Scientific Steps to Detox Trauma and Toxic Thinking

AHA Publisher — Thu, 17 Dec 2020 08:00:56 +0000

Dr. Caroline Leaf – Anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress are all ways of describing natural human responses to adversity. As I discuss in this podcast and blog, we all face adversity in many different ways; challenging events and circumstances are as much a part of modern existence as they were a part of human history. Simply calling these mental and emotional responses neuropsychiatric brain diseases can create a lot of confusion and suffering. Anxiety, depression, burnout, frustration, angst, anger and grief are emotional and physical warning signals, telling us we need to face and deal with something that’s happened or is happening in our lives. They are not a sign of a broken or defective brain. The mental pain, which is very real, is a sign that something is wrong: you are in a state of disequilibrium. It’s not a sign of a defective brain. The brain is going through a process of reordering and reorganizing in response to your experience(s), which are processed through the mind (your thinking, feeling and choosing). The brain and mind are separate. The brain does not produce the mind; the brain responds to the mind. Emotional pain doesn’t need to be validated by a medical label. Mental health struggles are not your identity. These struggles are normal and need to be addressed, not suppressed, or things will get worse. Indeed, how you view your negative feelings (such as sadness, nervousness or hopelessness) will either protect you against some of the harmful health consequences of these emotions, or make you feel worse. Research, including my most recent clinical trials, demonstrates that viewing negative emotions as fluctuating, momentary parts of a natural cycle of life increases our mental and physical resilience. On the other hand, when you ruminate on the negative and see your feelings as stressful and harmful, they can dramatically impact your mental and physical health. In our research, we demonstrated that embracing negative emotions as warning signals, finding the underlying cause(s), AND then managing this by processing and reconceptualizing our thinking results in a significant improvement in bodily inflammation, cellular health and biological aging. It also empowers us to feel in control of our minds, which can increase our feelings of control over our mental health struggles by up to 81%! Feeling bad is not unhealthy if you learn how to manage your thinking! However, in today’s world, many of us are taught from youth that negative emotions are undesirable and even dangerous. To manage these undesirable emotions, modern psychological and psychiatric approaches to mental health mainly focus on the use of drugs like antidepressants and antipsychotics and treatments that numb the pain, rather than addressing the complexity of the human mind. It is thus unsurprising that this biomedical approach hasn’t reduced the prevalence of mental health issues. In fact, things seem to have gotten worse! For example, major depression, which has remained at around 4 percent between 1990–2010, is now on the rise, while population studies indicate that people between the ages twenty-four to sixty-five are dying eight to fifteen years younger than previous generations from preventable lifestyle diseases. Clearly, what we are doing is not working. The system needs to change. We must shift our focus from a symptom-centered biological approach to one that focuses on each person’s complex story and unique experiences IN CONTEXT. You are uniquely, wonderfully you—your quest for optimal health and well-being should be just as singular as you are! This is the approach I’ve taken in my newest book, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess. After many years of clinical practice and research, I developed my Switch On Your Brain 5-Step Learning Process©. In the years since, I have continued to research and refine these steps, helping people harness the power of mind-management to find healing and fulfillment: Gathering awareness of your physical and emotional warning signals. Reflecting on why you are feeling these things in your body and mind. Writing down your reflections to organize your thinking. Rechecking what you have written and how your thoughts and feelings have changed. Active Reach: taking action to reconceptualize your thinking and find sustainable healing. In my latest book, I teach you how to apply these simple, scientifically-researched and clinically-applied mind management steps to issues such as anxiety, stress and toxic thinking. This 5-Step process will help you define and refine your unique needs and mental self-care regimen. As you go through this process, you’ll find that these steps are sustainable because they are customized to your unique way of thinking, feeling, and choosing—your brilliant mind-in-action! I truly believe that mental mess is something we all experience. It isn’t something we should be ashamed of. This is my profession, and I still have to clean up my mind daily! We need to realize that the events and circumstances of life aren’t going anywhere; people make a lot of decisions every day that affect us all, and suffering on some level is inevitable. That being said, I wholeheartedly believe that although many events and circumstances cannot be controlled, we can control our reactions to these events and circumstances. This is mind-management in action! Managing the mind is more than a lifestyle—it’s a necessity. We can spend lots of money and time on self-help books and seminars, wellness fads, great teachings, and podcasts, but all of this will simply become nice-to-know information if we can’t apply it—more notches on our belt, more knowledge gathering dust. Mind-management, on the other hand, can transform all this great information into applied information. When we learn how to manage our thinking, we’ll learn how to actually use the advice and information we gather as we go through life. When we learn how to manage our mind, we can go from posting inspiring quotes on social media to inspiring others through the way we live. Part 1 of Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess discusses what mind-management is, what happens when we don’t use our minds properly, and how the results of my recent clinical trials show why mind-management is the solution to cleaning up your mental mess. Part 2 of Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess provides my clinically applied and scientifically researched 5-Step mind-management plan. To make this process as easy to apply as possible, I have grouped important lifestyle choices into nine main areas, and given you a 5-Step mind-management strategy for each of these areas. These lifestyle choices include dealing with sudden acute stressors, overcoming toxic habits and trauma, dealing with identity issues, developing deeper connections, the power of brain-building, and how to sleep, eat and exercise mindfully. To read the original article click here. For more articles from Dr. Leaf click here.

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