>> Hi.

I'm Lewis Howes, New York Times best-selling author and entrepreneur.

And welcome to "The School of Greatness," where we interview the most influential minds and leaders in the world to inspire you to live your best life today.

In this episode, neuroscientist Dr. Caroline Leaf shares how to own your mental health journey by better understanding common mental health issues like anxiety, depression and PTSD.

I'm so glad you're here today.

So let's dive in and let the class begin.

♪ ♪ What is the difference between the mind and the brain and does the brain control the mind or does the mind control the brain?

>> I've got some props.

Is it okay?

Can I use some props to show you?

>> Show me.

Explain.

I need to understand in a simplified way.

>> Okay.

So here's a brain, not a real one, in a skull.

And the terminology for about the last 40 years is that the mind and the brain have been used interchangeably.

So most people think when you talk mind, you're talking brain, and when you're talking brain, you're talking mind.

And the most of the popular literature, even the scientific literature that the media tends to put out, talks about how the brain produces thoughts or the brain produces the mind.

But your brain actually can't do anything on its own.

So if you did and if I was holding up -- If this was a real brain and I just took it out of someone's head, which I wouldn't do, but if it was beating and whatever and you looked at this brain, we could stare at this all day long, but it would never do anything.

So what is the difference between a dead brain and yours and mine and the listeners' and the viewers'?

It's that you are actually thinking, feeling, and choosing.

You're alive and your aliveness is your mind.

And your mind is this ability of what you're doing right at this moment as you're listening to me, you are processing the auditory sound waves, the electromagnetic light waves through your ability to think and feel and choose, which is mind.

So your mind is this processing -- unique, brilliant processing field, gravitational field around and through your brain and body, and you convert what you're hearing and seeing into actual meaning.

And that meaning is formed from trees that you actually grow into your brain.

So 400 billion actions per second, you're using your mind to translate auditory and visual signals into protein-tree-like structures in your brain to make sense of what I'm saying.

And then each new thing that I say, you're going more and more.

And everything I'm saying is in the root section because it's the source of the information, and the tree trunk and the branches are your interpretation of what I'm saying and you're linking it to other existing whatever I'm triggering at the moment that you know about, whatever in your life, related to a subject and that keeps going and that's what we do all the time.

That's -- Your mind is always with you and your mind works through the brain and the brain then responds, So here's a little model.

So your mind is the gravitational field.

And this is not woo-woo science.

This is hard-core, Nobel Prize-winning science, this discovery of the gravitational field.

In fact, Einstein spoke about it back in the early 20th century, how each human has this gravitational field, this electromagnetic field around us, and that is basically through us.

And when you die, that's not there anymore.

And that's the thing that's kind of keeping you alive.

And that's the thinking, feeling, choosing, the psychological version.

And the science-y version is this gravitational field.

The brain is like the magnet and the field is your mind, and the relationship allows you to express your behavior.

So the little pattern is your behaviors.

And the biggest cool thing is that that's the primary source.

You never stop thinking.

Your mind is always going.

You wake up with your mind, you eat with your mind.

You choose your clothes with your mind, you're doing a podcast with your mind.

You go to sleep with your mind.

So mind is the source.

And if you don't understand and manage it, it's changing anyway.

>> So the mind, your thinking, your ideas, your thoughts is a field, an energetic field around you, inside of you, connected through your whole body and then outside of your body.

Is that what I'm hearing you say?

>> Exactly.

Totally.

>> How far does the field extend?

Is it two feet in front of us?

Is it six feet?

Is it a football field?

How far can it go?

>> What the science seems to show is that it's kind of a almost how, you know, like around us, sort of.

>> Like a halo-y field.

>> Yeah, and it's probably more because -- But it interacts because everyone's got this field and we live in gravitational fields.

So everything around you is a gravitational field.

So everything's interacting.

And so that's why, you know, when you come up to someone -- An example would be like a electrostatic shock.

You know when you brush past someone, you get that.

And on a more psychological level, you can experience that.

That field is like maybe you're in a really great mood.

And then you get into a conversation with some friends and they're so totally depressed and you come away from there thinking, "Oh, I feel awful.

I need to go and have a shower."

You feel so -- So their field has interacted with yours and impacted you because those fields -- that field is coming from your mind, which then uses the brain and converts what you're experiencing into these thoughts.

And then these thoughts are generating, you know, there's this whole relationship, the iron filings concept, and it's this back-and-forth and this literally is photons.

Einstein literally showed this, that we're literally generating from our thoughts as we talk from our thoughts, which we -- You can't talk without thoughts.

You build thoughts and then your actions and behaviors and communication come from the thoughts.

So this would generate healthy, a nice healthy green tree, and here's a toxic one.

So this would be a toxic, you know, the depression or whatever, you know, being negative or whatever.

That would generate toxic photons.

And these are the ones that would make you -- you know, you feel it.

You feel that negativity.

This is a sense of you're around a happy person and you just feel like amazing, you know?

So it's very real.

This is not some ethereal thing.

We talking about the nonphysical sciences of quantum physics and physics and things like that, but it's real.

And there's an impact and an effect and we can control it.

That's the interesting thing.

>> We can maybe influence certain events to manifest in our life, but we can't control the things that are happening around us necessarily, just how we respond, like you said.

So how do we learn to reframe our mind or rewire our mind and so that we can have inner peace when there is trauma or pain around us?

>> The biggest thing with the mind and managing mind, Lewis, is to accept that depression, anxiety, even the scary words like bipolar and schizophrenia, and then going to the mood, sort of things like that, we can accept grief, anger, et cetera, these are not illnesses.

This is the biggest message that I probably have.

Despair, anger, depression, anxiety, these are all completely normal responses.

They're helpful messengers and warning signals as opposed to being scary illnesses.

They are not neuropsychiatric brain diseases like we've been told.

They are actually responses.

And because they are responses of our mind in and in the world, we only use our brain and body to express them because we've got -- The mind has to have the brain and body to build the thoughts.

And then we use that to speak.

We're using our physical to store what we've processed and to convert and then to speak.

So obviously if our mind's a mess, our brain and our body will be a mess, but because our brain's neuroplastic, and if we manage our mind, we can change our brain, we can change our DNA, literally.

That's what I've shown in my research.

You can literally change your DNA, your blood markers, literally.

>> If you change your mind?

>> Okay, let me explain it in a very simple way.

I'm testing out a glucose -- continuous glucose monitoring device for some research purposes.

And I happened to, while I was wearing it, because you wear it and you track your levels.

And I wanted to see in terms of mental health and the NeuroCycle that I've developed, I wanted to see the impact, and I happened to be going through, I experienced a very acute trauma in our family over December.

And in the moment of the trauma, I happened to see on my glucose monitor that my glucose had shot up to 240.

Now, that's heart attack level and I immediately managed my mind through the NeuroCycle, which is the concept that I've developed, which is just a system.

Anyone can learn it.

And I dropped my glucose levels within seconds back down to a normal level.

Your brain's immune system and your body's immune system will recognize that traumatic event or that established trauma or that mismanagement of whatever, it will recognize that as an invader, like a virus like COVID.

So you get the same response to a mind thing, a thought, which is the consequence of mind, think, feel, choose.

You build thoughts.

Thoughts are made of roots and trees, branches which are the memories.

So thoughts are made of memories like trees are made of branches.

This is toxic.

It will stimulate the same response in the immune system as if I had COVID, or if I had a flu virus, or if I had measles or something or any kind of damage in my body.

The immune system sees that as threatening survival because we are wired for survival.

So this is not survival.

So your immune system says, "Hey, that's a threat.

Let's send out the army."

T lymphocytes, B lymphocytes, macrophages.

Let's go fix this thing.

And it creates inflammation, which is a temporary state of healing.

So initially, inflammation is to isolate and fix.

>> To protect, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> Exactly.

Isolate and pr-- And then you're supposed to, you know, fix this up and sort this out and find the root cause.

And then this goes away.

And then that anti-inflammatory effect has come in and the inflammation goes away.

But if we don't deal with the stuff and we don't deal with our past traumas, if we don't deal with those patterns in our life that we are enacting, that's constant arguments -- You know, we all have these toxic patterns.

No one's immune.

We all -- And the signals of those are things like depression and anxiety.

And those are simply telling you, "Hey, there's a pattern."

It's either a trauma-based pattern or it's a toxic habit you've developed.

But that pattern is actually putting your body under tremendous stress.

Life and managing your mind doesn't mean that it's going to be one big rosy, you know, put on rose-tinted glasses.

That's crazy.

It is actually the ability to be okay and at peace with having moments of depression and actually looking for the message and seeing them as helpful.

We have this really weird philosophy which has been about 40 years in the West now where we look at depression and anxiety and those kind of things as illnesses and neuropsychiatric brain diseases and as bad symptoms that we must suppress.

Like cancer symptoms, you must suppress.

So it's been lumped.

Our misery of life has been medicalized.

The real truth is that those depression and anxiety are not illnesses.

They are just survival instincts.

It's telling you, "Hey, pay attention.

There's something going on.

You need to go and unpack."

>> Something's not working.

>> Something's not working, and it's manifesting as a pattern that needs to be addressed.

And that will block the greatness.

>> Did I hear you say that there isn't a mental health disease?

It's more of just a pattern or something that we should be mindful of but it's not an actual disease?

>> No, it's not a disease.

And I know this counters the current philosophy.

But if you look at the science, there's a large body of science.

In fact, if you interpret all the science around this field and you really look at what's being tested, you actually will see it's not a -- they've been looking for the neurobiological correlative.

You're looking for where in the brain is depression?

And for years we've been told about the serotonin imbalance causing depression.

I mean, that's not -- It was a theory never proven.

Great for marketing, for, you know, for selling drugs.

And also a simplistic way of telling someone, "Hey, you're depressed?

Don't worry, it's chemical imbalance.

Let me give you a drug to fix it."

As medicine has advanced and technology has advanced, so we've become very caught up in the quick fix.

But life's not like that.

Mind is not like that.

Mind is separate from brain and body.

You can apply that kind of thinking, not quick fix, but you can apply a symptomatic diagnosis treatment approach to body, to physical brain and body.

But when it comes to mind, this gravitational field, this force, this think, feel, choose thing, it's not going to go -- A medication is not going to change how you're thinking, feeling, and choosing.

It's not going to get rid of this.

It's just going to numb your brain.

So maybe you don't feel this for while it's working.

But at the same time as then when that drug wears off, this is still there.

This is still being recognized by the immune system of your brain as a problem.

So this is increasing your -- The longer it's there, the more you increase your vulnerability to disease.

>> Oh, my gosh.

>> You know, and this is what gets you stuck.

And these are the patterns.

So, no, it's not an illness.

It is a normal human response.

Mental health has always been an issue, Lewis.

From the beginning of time mankind has battled with life, with issues, with death, with fighting, with war, with whatever.

So mental health's not on the rise, but the mismanagement of mental health, making it a disease has created a whole new problem.

>> Wow!

>> So we know -- we all hear this message.

This is what we've heard.

People are living longer because of the advances in medicine and technology.

None of us question that.

But something happened in '96 that did start questioning that.

By the mid-2000s, the trend of people living longer has actually reversed and that we have a pandemic of deaths of despair, where people are dying from preventable lifestyle diseases and the age group most being affected are between 24 and 65.

Lifestyle disease means that there's something in our body that's weaker.

Why?

Lifestyle, which is mind-driven.

How am I eating, drinking, sleeping?

But more than that it's what's my mind behind all of that?

How am I actually managing the day-to-day moments?

How am I managing the patterns, the traumas, the established toxic habits?

What am I doing about that stuff?

>> Is there such a thing as a chemical imbalance in some people, you know, when they say, "Oh, I have depression, it's a disease" or bipolar or "I have this mental health disease or I have a chemical imbalance.

I was treated with this.

Don't try to say I don't because this is who I am."

Is that -- Do some people have that?

>> The narrative of "I have a chemical imbalance and my depression is from chemical imbalance" is a narrative that is the only explanation that people are being given.

So the most important thing is that anyone listening to this podcast, I want to validate your depression, your anxiety, your grief, your despair, your PTSD, whatever label you've been given, I want to validate that that doesn't need to be validated with a disease label.

You're not diseased.

You're not a broken brain.

Your brain isn't defective.

You are going through something.

So you're on to something.

You're on that.

You are going through something.

>> You're experiencing something.

>> You're experiencing something and you're experiencing and you've coped in the only way that you could cope in that moment, so it created this adverse response because it was an adverse situation and you were just trying to cope.

So what we have to do is go through a process of embracing and processing and reconceptualizing.

So the important thing here is to recognize that chemical imbalance isn't the cause of your despair.

The cause of your despair is what you've gone through and what you're going through and learning how to -- and not knowing how to manage it and how to deal with those thoughts that are driving you crazy in those flashbacks and the trauma of the flashbacks and going back into those situations.

It could drive a person crazy.

And that's not crazy in the sense of illness.

It's crazy in the sense of your mind is like this erratic tidal wave around you and it's going through your brain and you've got these in your immune system and everything screaming at you and saying, "Hey, let's fix this."

So a disease label invalidates it.

It's better to say, "I'm experiencing post-traumatic stress issues because of what I've been through versus I am PTSD" or "I have the sickness of PTSD."

It's better to say "I'm experiencing symptoms of bipolar, these intense swings because of my whole story," than saying, "I have bipolar, I have a chemical imbalance."

There's no ways that serotonin imbalance -- You can't even measure that.

There's no gene for -- There's no genes or serotonin imbalance causing it.

It's what you've experienced that's the cause.

And then that moves through your brain and your body.

So obviously your brain and your body respond.

So we will see changes in the brain and the body.

We will see neurochemical chaos, not necessarily serotonin imbalance.

That's just one.

Sometimes it's dopamine.

And if dopamine is down, serotonin is off, and then anandamide's off, and then -- I mean, I can give you a list of big chemical terms and that's going to change every function in the structure of your brain and your DNA, your telomeres.

1,400 neurophysiological responses are off.

So, you know, and that's the response, though.

And that doesn't mean that you have this thing hidden inside of you, this scary thing that's controlling you, and that invalidates it.

If someone comes back from war, someone's had a sexual trauma, to tell them that the depression or anxiety they're feeling is an illness is an insult to what they've gone through.

But if I say to you, "Gosh, that's terrible, tell me about it.

I want to hear your story.

I want to support you.

Your depression and anxiety that you're feeling is a signal that there's stuff going on, there's an origin story, there's a source.

So can I listen?

Can I help?

Can I support you in trying to recognize the signals and go through the process to find the origin story and then to reconceptualize it?"

>> So what should we be thinking when toxic thoughts about ourselves -- "I'm not good enough.

I'll never amount to anything.

I shouldn't try this."

Whatever it is, when we have a toxic thought that doesn't support our dreams, that doesn't support the betterment of our future and our vision, what should we be thinking in terms of replacing that, in terms of the process, or is that something we shouldn't be rejecting negative thoughts?

We should be analyzing and being aware, but how do we do it without consuming our life?

>> The only way to get control is to embrace and to process and reconceptualize, and you do it in a very accepting manner.

So it's like getting to the helicopter and be the messy pilot.

>> Follow the steps.

>> And be the copilot.

Yeah.

And get into that state of mind because -- and then it's very nonjudgmental.

You start by telling yourself, like, the very first thing as you're getting in the helicopter, whichever point is to say "it's okay, it's okay."

There's been a million, billion people who have been in the same position as you that are battling -- In fact, most people battle with self-esteem.

It's very few people that don't, for some reason, battle with self-esteem.

For example, just take that example, thinking "I can't do this" or "I am ashamed," because every toxic experience we have completely rips at the core of who we are and the core of who we are is "I'm needed, I'm valuable and I have something to contribute to the world that no one else can contribute."

So when someone tries to take that away from you through an abuse, or that attacks the core of you, so you kind of hide amongst shame and self-esteem comes out of this, "I shouldn't be feeling this," but especially a young child like five, to be abused, you don't know how to process that.

So the most immediate thing is because it's so against survival and because the adult in your life who's supposed to be the protector, everything's distorted.

You don't have the language, you don't have the brainpower yet, the mind power to process, so your coping strategy will be, "well, this made me feel bad so I am bad."

So you tend to have a pervasiveness.

Sexual trauma tends to create a pervasiveness of shame.

And that comes out in all kinds of behavior manifestations, whether it's withdrawal, whether it's being difficult, aggressive, and it's pervasive and that attacks self-esteem because something at the core of who you are has been attacked and that's why it takes time, as you spoke about, to go back and find that.

So in terms of what you say to someone, the first thing is to get to the point where we have to change our narrative.

We have to forget what the world said about all these scary words and see those as very helpful.

It's a complete 360-degree change.

Despair, anxiety, shame, thinking, "I am shame," thinking, "I have no self-esteem," thinking "I can't do this," that's okay.

Because as soon as you say that's okay, as soon as you can admit to feeling that, you've controlled it.

You've now -- >> You got power back, yeah.

>> So instead of -- this is now in the nonconscious.

It's this trauma.

It's the 5-year-old that's gone through the years, whatever.

And there's been this -- and I'm not saying you did this, but there may have been a period that you suppressed because you didn't know how to process it till maybe 15, 16, 17, when you were getting more metacognitively able and started seeing things.

Maybe it was older.

Very often it hits around between 18, 22, early childhood trauma, where we start seeing those patterns manifesting and a bit of awareness coming.

So now that this comes into consciousness in the brain, this thing is now weakened.

So these protein branches, which are the memories and the emotions, the data of the event, which was that... >> Right.

>> ...is now weakened.

The minute I say, "okay, I feel shame, I feel like I've got no self-esteem, I feel like I'm useless and I'm ugly" and I'm this and I'm that and I can't ever achieve anything, the minute I can accept that, I can look at that objectively.

Pilot, copilot, and the copilot can say, "What do you feel?"

"I feel okay."

Let's now see if that's real.

And that whole calm just the way I'm speaking -- calm.

It's okay.

Own it.

It's fine.

It's okay.

Now we can fix it.

That weakened these chemical bonds, protein bonds.

I've started changing the structure in my brain.

I've now shifted 1,400 neurophysiological responses to work for me instead of against me.

I've now started re-creating balance in the brain.

I've increased blood flow.

So I'm setting myself up to be more resilient, to do the very hard work of unpacking, and it gets worse before it gets better.

>> Is it healing the trauma of the past?

Is it healing the memory of the past?

Is it healing all of it?

What is the process?

What should we do?

Is it only through therapy?

Can we do it alone?

Through just journaling?

>> You can do it alone.

You can do it with therapy.

You can do it -- I would never do anything completely alone.

I would make sure you have some sort of support system.

If you can get to therapy, it will definitely help.

But therapy is a catalyst.

It's not actually -- and it's your place where you can unpack the pain and get the guidance for how to manage the next step.

But you're still living with yourself 24/7.

>> You got to do the work, yeah.

>> You've got to do the work.

And this is where having a system of mind management is so vital.

So what you've described is the whole thought tree and that thought tree -- Let's take the incident of what you went through as a child.

And that would have been, you know, the actual incident would have been -- is the roots.

>> The event, yeah.

>> The event, and the details and the timing and the -- all the -- everything and that then builds your perspective of how you viewed yourself and how you viewed this whole -- this is your emotions and the data and that manifested in how you actually lived your life.

But there's this protective system in place.

It kind of cocoons it for a season until you're ready to deal with it.

So that's, you know, and then something will come, an event will come in your life where now you have to deal with it.

>> Right.

>> And sometimes we ignore that.

We ignored it a few times before we did, and eventually -- So there's kind of a cocoon, so it's protective, so it is damaging, but because you're not ready to deal with it, it's not wiping you out.

It's still causing problems.

It's still creating a few shock waves there in the ground and that kind of thing.

But when you're ready to -- Then suddenly something will happen in your life and it's being -- it's slowly infiltrating.

It's a slow infiltration.

So it's sending out little tendrils, you know.

It's growing.

You're still surviving, but things are getting worse and worse.

And eventually the cocoon starts breaking down and it explodes in your mentally, physically, in something, in a relationship, in a work environment, in a -- it builds, it cascades, and little things happen, then eventually there's a big explosion.

That's this thing, the cocoon starting to come off as you are maturing and getting older and doing more with your life and experiencing more.

This has to then get sorted out.

So your body gets to a point where it has to reject it.

It has to -- The past has to go, for want of an awful analogy, but it's a good example.

At some point you can't stay there anymore and that's when it explodes.

And I mean, it explodes.

These are all the memories as you recall it.

This is the concept of the abuse as a child.

That's the thought.

This is the detail.

>> This question I ask everyone towards the end is called the Three Truths question.

So I'd like you to imagine it's your last day on Earth, many years away from now, and you get to accomplish all your goals and dreams.

They all come true.

But eventually you got to go to the next place.

You've got to leave this Earth.

And you've got to take all of your work with you.

But you get to leave behind three lessons that you would share with the world.

This is all we would have to remember you by, are these three lessons or what I like to call Three Truths.

What would you say you would share?

>> That the mind is something you can control.

If you don't get your mind under control, everything else is just window dressing.

>> Yeah.

>> So that would be sort of the main thing.

And then the how-to.

I would definitely leave behind do this and develop it, grow it further, make it even better than what I've done.

But this is what I can offer humanity, is this is how I'd manage mind.

A thing I'd leave behind is three words, three lessons, that psychologist William James is quoted often as saying.

And that's three things in life are so important.

Be kind.

Be kind.

Be kind.

To yourself.

To others.

And with those three things, I think we'd be pretty well-equipped to have a decent, peaceful, realistic existence.

>> My final question is what's your definition of greatness?

>> Be something you can do that no one else can do.

And when you recognize that there's something that you can do that no one else can do -- which is your mind, it's what you're doing, it's your perception -- then there's no envy or jealousy.

There's no desire to be like someone else.

Competition goes because you can't be competed with because no one can do what you can do.

So everyone is in that same boat so suddenly now we move from competition to enhancement and that is key.

So we may enhance each other.

That's when we really grow as humanity.

>> We hope you enjoyed this episode and found it valuable.

Stay tuned for more from "The School of Greatness" coming soon on public television.

Again, I'm Lewis Howes.

And if no one has told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter.

And now it's time to go out there and do something great.

If you'd like to continue on the journey of greatness with me, please check out my website lewishowes.com, where you'll find over 1,000 episodes of "The School of Greatness" show, as well as tools and resources to support you in living your best life.

>> The online course Find Your Greatness is available for $19.

Drawn from the lessons Lewis Howes shares in "The School of Greatness," this interactive course will guide you through a step-by-step process to discover your strengths, connect to your passion and purpose, and help create your own blueprint for greatness.

To order, go to lewishowes.com/tv.

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