neurocycle Archives - Amazing Health Advances

The Surprising Benefits of Disappointment + How to Embrace Disappointment & Use It to Your Advantage

AHA Publisher — Mon, 11 Jul 2022 07:00:42 +0000

Dr. Caroline Leaf– In this podcast (episode #392) and blog, I talk about managing feelings of disappointment before they negatively affect our mental wellbeing. Disappointment is the feeling we get when an expectation that we have isn’t met. It is an emotional signal, a messenger, telling us that something is out of balance in our lives—what we want doesn’t reflect our reality. If we take the time to analyze feelings of disappointment, we will notice they are attached to three other signals: behaviors, bodily sensations, and perspective. This means that we don’t just feel disappointment as an emotion; it can also impact how we feel physically, how we act, and our perception of ourselves and the world around us. The key to managing feelings of disappointment is going beyond awareness and learning how to make our feelings work for us instead of against us. Disappointment can quickly become toxic if we immerse ourselves in it for too long, which is why it is so important to learn how to manage our minds. Disappointment tends to breed more and more disappointment, and before we know it, we may develop a “disappointing mindset” that becomes our outlook on life. Remember, whatever we think about the most grows! By seeing disappointment as a messenger, a way of gathering data about what is going on in our lives, we can actually make life easier and become more resilient. In fact, the decisions we make after we experience a major disappointment can transform the eventual outcome(s) and help us make better decisions. By putting our disappointment in perspective and learning from it, we can reconceptualize what happened (think about it in a different way), thereby gaining a new perspective that enhances our creativity and develops our intelligence as we learn over time to have a more diverse range of expectations. Disappointment provides an opportunity for growth! We can learn to manage disappointment in the moment by embracing, processing and reconceptualizing what has happened to us, which is known as mind management or self-regulation. 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. (I discuss this in depth in my latest book Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess and my app 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). In terms of managing disappointment, the 5 steps could be: Gathering awareness of your disappointment. This means embracing the aforementioned signals, including how you feel emotionally and physically. Processing how your disappointment is affecting you by describing what you are disappointed about in as much detail as possible, reflecting on the “why” and writing all this down to help organize and clarify your thinking. Reconceptualizing how your disappointment is affecting you by looking at what you have written down and thinking deeply about it. This will help you gain perspective, allowing you to better to see things for what they really are instead of getting stuck in the highly emotional state of disappointment. This, in turn, will help you find ways to practice thinking about your feelings of disappointment in new ways, which will build a new mindset that will make you more resilient to depression in the future. To read the original article click here.

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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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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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How to Use the Neurocycle to Break the Cycle of OCD Thinking

AHA Publisher — Tue, 16 Mar 2021 07:00:38 +0000

Dr. Caroline Leaf – In this podcast (episode #262) and blog, I talk about how to Neurocycle to break the cycles of OCD (obsessive-compulsive thinking) and avoid getting stuck in toxic thinking patterns and rumination. Let’s start with getting stuck in our thoughts. OCD is often defined as an anxiety disorder characterized by uncontrollable, unwanted thoughts and ritualized, repetitive behaviors someone feels compelled to perform. If you battle with OCD, you probably recognize that many of your obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors are irrational—but even so, you feel unable to resist them and break free. I see OCD-type thinking as a way of coping with an underlying unresolved issue. It’s not always the most effective or sustainable way to deal with pain or trauma, but it’s a coping mechanism—a type of distraction you use to try to manage or keep the source of your pain bearable. It’s not “brain damage”; it is a pattern that is set up to help you cope in a situation that is threatening your safety or survival in some way, which can develop into a toxic habit that takes over your life. With OCD-type thinking, there is an underlying cause that needs to be identified and reconceptualized, as I discuss in my most recent book, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess. You can’t just condition yourself to stop because the automatized driving force is still there—you must get to the root of this type of thinking using self-regulation and mind-management techniques, as I talk about in my book. You need to observe the pattern of your thoughts and behaviors, discover what the activator is and reconceptualize this using what I call the Neurocycle, which is a 5 step, scientifically-based process that helps you manage your mind and change your thinking. Over a period of at least 63 days, you can perform the Neurocycle steps to find and address the root cause(s) of this type of thinking: Gather awareness of what you are feeling emotionally and physically and your perceptions as you work on your OCD thinking. Reflect on why you feel and act the way you do—be as specific as possible. Write this down—this is way to help organize your thinking and gain clarity into your thought patterns and behaviors. Recheck what you have written. Look for patterns and triggers (or activators) 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 and behaving you want in your life (which is replacing the old, toxic OCD cycle). To read the original article click here. For more articles by Dr. Leaf 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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The Difference Between Rest & Restoration, Why Resting Alone Is Not Sufficient

AHA Publisher — Fri, 12 Feb 2021 08:00:29 +0000

Dr. Caroline Leaf – In the middle of a global pandemic, the idea of rest seems so…complicated. What is it? How do you do it? How do you find peace when things seem so crazy? In this podcast (episode #253) and blog, I talk about the difference between resting to restore versus just resting, why rest alone is often not enough, and how to use a Neurocycle to effectively and sustainably restore your mind and brain. How many of you have ever binge-watched a Netflix show because you desperately needed a break, only to feel completely unrested the minute the binge ends? How many of you went on that weekend break or holiday, and came back feeling like you are still exhausted, even though you spent hours lying on that beach and going for long walks in beautiful scenery? If this sounds familiar, you are not alone! Indeed, finding ways to rest well can be incredibly challenging — it is a recurring challenge in my life. Although there is a ton of information out there (just look at how many social media posts are encouraging you to make self-care a routine part of your regimen!), so many people are still exhausted and burned out. It seems like almost every day I get a new article or research notification telling me how bad things are! So, what can we do? Is there hope? Although this may sound counterintuitive, rest has so much to do with the mind. Regardless of what technique we use or thing we do to rest, if we can’t manage what is going through our heads, it can backfire on us, leaving us feeling tired and downcast. To do this, I recommend doing a Neurocycle, the scientific mind-management process I have developed and researched over the past three decades and discuss in my upcoming book Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess and in my latest clinical trials. These 5 steps can help you learn how to rest well—speaking from experience. Recently, I started using the Neurocycle daily to find out why I was still having frequent periods exhaustion and burn-out. I knew the main reason why I felt this way was because of the issues I was dealing with in my business and family—I knew the root cause and was analyzing this because I try to live a mind-managed lifestyle (I really do apply my own system in my life!). I also have an incredible relationship with my husband—we live and work well together. I do daily fasted workouts and hot yoga, I eat real food mindfully, I have daily infrared sauna sessions, and really do try to take care of my mind and body. But still I was not truly resting, and I kept saying “I am so exhausted”. I couldn’t seem to catch my “mental breath”, so I knew something else was going on as well, and that I needed to dig deeper to find the vein of that root in my life. So, starting on Jan 1st, for around 7 minutes a day, I went through the 5 steps of the Neurocycle (gather, reflect, write, recheck and active reach—see below) to find out why I was not feeling rested even though I was taking “breaks” and living a mind-managed lifestyle. This is what I did daily: Step 1: Gather In this step, I gathered awareness of the rest I had that day and my physical and emotional warning signals, behaviors and perspectives. Step 2: Reflect I then asked, answered and discussed why I am feeling the way I do, based on what I became aware of in step 1. Step 3: Write I then wrote my answers down to help me organize my thinking and gain more clarity into how I felt that day and why. To do this, I used a Metacog, a way of writing that is naturally and instinctively based on how we try to work out meaning from information. In this method, I focus on the essentials, which is usually around 15 to 35 percent of the information we are processing. For more on this, see my book Think, Learn, Succeed. Step 4: Recheck In this step, I did what I call a “mental autopsy”. I rechecked what I wrote on my Metacog, looking for patterns and triggers, and thought about why I felt the way I did and how I can do better. Step 5: Active Reach Lastly, I worked out an action for the day from my recheck, which would help me practice what I learnt about myself and my need to rest better that day. Today is day 34—I still have 29 days of practice left to establish this thought as a habit in this 63-day cycle. However, I was so excited at what I have discovered thus far, which is helping me enormously, that I wanted to share it with you in this podcast and blog. I noticed the obvious pretty quickly, which was that I still wasn’t taking sufficient time out, and had been swinging between a heavy workload, financial strain, and a family crisis. I addressed this through my active reaches daily by taking time alone in the sauna and having long, hot baths at night. However, I was still battling with exhaustion. So, what was going on here? What was I doing wrong? My “ah-ha” moment came around day 14 (two weeks in): I had learned how to build rest into my routine, but I still wasn’t fully restoring! So, for the next week, days 15-21, I embraced, processed and reconceptualized this realization using the 5 steps of the Neurocycle until I worked out how to rest to restore versus just rest. And this is what I want to share with you now: Let’s begin with the definition of restoration. Restoring is a transitive verb; it means to give back, to return, to put or bring back into existence and use…to renew. The opposite of restoration is to weaken, undermine, cripple, undo, depress, split or dull. Rest, on the other hand, is defined as ceasing of activity to relax and refresh, or to recover strength. I recognized that, by days 19-21, I was getting the rest bit right, but I had missed the restore element. I wasn’t watching what my chaotic mind was doing while I was resting! So, for example, when I binged watched Netflix in my infrared sauna or with my family, or went to an exercise class, or had fun with my family, I was resting physically, but not restoring. Deep down, I was still worrying about a family member, the work I had to do, how this person was going to react to that person and how could I prevent it and all these things! Instead of allowing my mind and brain to renew and return to baseline, thus bringing coherence back into my mind, I was weakening, undermining and undoing my rest, which was impacting me mentally and physically. After realizing this, I came up with four active reaches I have been doing daily to rest to restore: 1. Taking more thinker moments Research shows that we spend half to ¾ of our day in our minds and time-traveling through our thoughts and memories. How we do this can either help or harm our ability to rest well, which is why it is important that we take what I call “thinker moments” throughout the day. These are periods where we let our minds wander and daydream, which help us rest and restore because they give our brains the downtime they need to function optimally. When we let our minds wander, we internally reboot our thinking, giving our internal dialogue some quality “me time”. I have found that the best way to have a thinker moment is to close your eyes and allow your mind to release a free flow of thoughts creatively for 5 minutes. I find that having pen and paper at hand is useful during this process, so you can write down the thoughts that are flowing freely and their direction, as well as the thoughts you keep coming back to that are stealing your peace, which you can then work on in a separate Neurocycle. 2. Avoiding “milkshake” multi-tasking Multi-tasking is really not good for the brain. Even though we can do it, our minds aren’t good at this kind of scattered, jumpy thinking. It draws energy from our brain and creates something akin to a dust storm in our minds, which can affect our mental and physical health. When we multitask, we end up with what I call “milkshake thinking”, which is the opposite of mindfulness. Every rapid, incomplete, and low quality shift of thought makes a “milkshake” with our brain cells and neurochemicals, which is the opposite of how the brain is designed to function. When we consciously try to jump rapidly from one task to another, we essentially cloud our ability to concentrate and think deeply, which impacts our ability to do a task well, leading to unnecessary levels of anxiety and stress in our life. If you are anything like me, sometimes it is hard to resist the temptation to multi-task when resting. However, I realized that when I consciously made an effort not to multi-task (I did a Neurocycle on this too!), I really did feel more restored and renewed. 3. Making my rest periods about myself, not other people. I came to the realization that I need to make my rest periods about my rest, and stop letting other people pull on my energy reserves. Indeed, you can’t help someone or deal with them if they are on your mind all the time, because it will wear you down. I also realized that being around negative people resulted in poor restoration. I needed to balance my time with healthy people and healthy, happy conversations, and I needed to enforce my own boundaries. 4. Practicing self-regulation. I realized that I felt more restored if I prepared myself mentally before whatever rest activity I was going to do, and self-regulated my thinking during my periods of rest to make sure I appreciated every moment. I would ask myself questions like “what am I thinking of now?”, “Is this bringing me mental peace?” and “Can I solve it now? If yes, then solve it and move on, and if no, then set a later time to deal with it”. To read the original article click here. For more articles from Dr. Leaf click here.

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