EP. 175 — Managing Your Mind with Dr. Caroline Leaf

 

Jameela: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to another episode of I Weigh with Jameela Jamil, a podcast against shame. This week we have such a fascinating episode that I don’t want to speak very much because I can’t wait for you to hear it because I think it’s one of the best ones of the entire history of I Weigh. My guest is Dr. Caroline Leaf who’s a communication pathologist and cognitive neuroscientist and this whole episode is about mental health and how it relates to the brain and how we understand labels and how we understand pathology and how hard it is for anyone to feel empowered around their mental health. We have so few avenues. It’s like wait months to find a doctor. Maybe it’s the right doctor. Maybe it’s the right meds. You have to try all these different meds and she’s pro doctors and meds, but she’s also about arming people with their own information and their own language and their own ability to at least start today, working on figuring out our trauma, what is a trauma, what is just an injury, and, and what we can do about these things in sensible, easy, relatable steps.

And she hasn’t just written about this for [00:01:00] adults, she’s now also written a book about this for children, about neurocycling, about these five steps that she has created to arm parents with the tools to be able to stop trauma almost at the source as soon as it’s happened. Because God knows, most of the people we know who are living with trauma at the moment, those traumas almost always occurred in their most formative young vulnerable years. And a book like this is so excellent and so full of foresight and such an extraordinary gift to parents because it’s helping them work through traumas that their children are facing so that these things don’t have to follow these kids around forever.

In this episode, we’re talking all about mental health, all about neuroscience. I’m learning about neuroplasticity. I’m learning all about exactly what neurocycling is. I’m not even going to try and summarize it for you here because she’s so much smarter and better than me. And I just want to get to the episode as soon as possible. And it’s just an incredibly hopeful, clever [00:02:00] burst of information from a woman who I think genuinely might change the world. She’s already helped hundreds of thousands of people with her writing. And now she’s taking on the next generation and the generations to come. This is such an exciting prospect for our society, and I just couldn’t be more excited to have met her, to have learned from her, and to continue finding ways to work with her. This is the excellent Dr. Caroline Leaf.

Dr. Caroline Leaf, hello and welcome to I Weigh. What an honor to have you here.

Dr. Leaf: Oh, thank you so much. It’s an honour to be with you. Lovely to meet you.

Jameela: Oh, thank you so much for making time today. I, uh, so appreciate everything that you do and everything you talk about and it really [00:03:00] resonates with me and it has resonated with a lot of people. People have been sending me your videos and your work for a long time and so it’s really nice to have a chance to kind of explore some of your ideas that I found so inspiring with you today.

First things first, how are you?

Dr. Leaf: Oh, I’m good. I’m good. I’m excited to release our new book tomorrow and being busy with all kinds of, you know, all the work that, you know, what media is like getting everything together, so it’s been fun.

Jameela: A hundred percent. And how does it feel the process of, of trying to put out something that is a relatively like fresh, a new idea that somewhat goes against the grain of current Big Pharma.

Dr. Leaf: Biomedical model.

Jameela: I don’t know, you know what I mean, the biomedical model. Yeah. How does that go for someone? Because I’ve always wondered what it’s like to be on the receiving end of maybe some scrutiny and doubt.

Dr. Leaf: Yeah, you get it. You get people that’ll say to you, well, you know, prove that and fortunately, I’ve got the science. And fortunately, I’m published, so I can do that. But a lot of people will say things [00:04:00] like, well, does that mean that, you know, there’s no such thing as ADHD or no such thing as clinical depression? You know, and I always say to them, well, you know, there’s just a way of reframing it. That’s instead of looking at a diagnosis, let’s look at it as a description. Let’s look, so people do challenge, but it’s exciting because people are desperate. And, you know, there’s, the situation is mental health has never been handled very well, but the last 40 years, it’s really the way that it’s become a sort of chemical straight jacket. And also just a very reductionistic approach has not helped anyone. You know, and, um, I shouldn’t say not helped anyone because some people have really benefited from having medication temporarily to help them with numbing of pain and that kind of thing. But it’s taken away the humanity. So there’s always that challenge. But at the same time, Jameela, parents are desperate. People are desperate for something else. There’s so much more than, you know, diagnosis is a gift, but it’s an empty gift. There’s so much more. There’s what about you and your story and the things you’ve gone through and how do I know how to process it and why, you know, that [00:05:00] kind of stuff. So it’s very exciting to shake up the sort of standard and the norms for, for a little. I enjoy that.

Jameela: So for anyone who isn’t familiar with your work, how would you summarize the kind of statement you are putting out into the world? And can you explain your book?

Dr. Leaf: Absolutely. So I look at the mind brain body connection and the message I’m trying to help the world is to help mental health become accessible to everyone because we shouldn’t just be waiting for a therapist or a professional to tell us what’s wrong. We should be empowered to understand that it’s okay to be a mess. So the biggest message I have, it’s okay to be a mess. We just have to learn how to manage the mess. And as humans, we’re very skilled and able once we know what we’re doing to actually manage that mess and give ourself a lot more compassion. And this can start as young as two years of age, which we don’t think we can help someone with mental health at two years of age, but you can. You can start scaling, some of my youngest patients were, were that young. You can start building in those tools [00:06:00] from very young, as well as helping people on the other side, it’s never too late. So, that’s really a big part of how to manage your mental health, how to build your brain, how to build a psycho neurobiological network that drives you, how you can change that, and also how your story doesn’t ever go away, but you can change what it looks like in your mind brain body connection, therefore influence how it plays out into the future.

Jameela: Yeah, you, you believe in reminding people that they have autonomy over their reaction.

Dr. Leaf: Absolutely.

Jameela: Maybe not initially, but that they can work on.

Dr. Leaf: Exactly. Because initially we’re going to cope. When something happens, we’re initially going to react to, we’re going to cope that.

Jameela: Or not cope.

Dr. Leaf: Or not cope. And that’s the moment. Exactly. That’s the reaction in the moment. And that not coping or coping badly or coping well, whatever it may be, or sort of coping may help people. You get through the moment, but it isn’t sustainable.

Jameela: Because you’re just skimming the surface.

Dr. Leaf: You’re just skimming the surface. And the other thing is that the experience is wired into you. It’s part of you physically. It’s not going, it’s not that it’s some airy [00:07:00] fairy thing. Everything we experience from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep is wiring into the mind and the brain is trees and changes in your cells. And we have 37 to a hundred trillion cells in mind is all these gravitational fields. I mean, this stuff is real. It’s not just some airy, fairy thing. So everything is becoming part of us. That’s what’s influencing how we show up. So it’s nice to know that if I show up in a certain way, that’s not the end of my story. I can actually look at that and say, okay, well, this is messing up my life. How can I reverse engineer that? It’s nice to know that and that you can do.

Jameela: Yeah. And you know, I’ve had a few episodes around the subject of late about maybe pushing back slightly against the current mainstream narrative around mental health, because especially kind of like Instagram pop psychology is encouraging people to, in a good way, own what happened to them and not feel shame around owning that thing and telling people about it, which I think is great. [00:08:00] But then it’s kind of, it’s unfortunately, as with everything, we take everything too far in order to learn our limits, and I think currently we are taking that a little bit too far and turning it into people’s identity and mollycoddling them to the point where we’re saying, well, you know, if you’re triggered, then you just shouldn’t be triggered and you should stay away from anything that triggers you. And to a degree, there’s a logic in that, but at the same time, it’s not possible to engage in a tricky and chaotic and messy world without coming up against something that’s going to trigger you. So it’s very important to be armed with the instincts and the actions of what to do when that inevitable trigger comes, and then eventually work towards no longer being triggered by that thing. But there isn’t a lot of that empowering messaging, it’s just the kind of, uh, you’re triggered. Something reminds you of something bad, we call a lot of things trauma, and we, we name trauma as a kind of large umbrella for any kind of bad experience or uncomfortable experience. And so you’ve been traumatized, you’ve been triggered, everything stop, remove yourself, [00:09:00] weighted blanket, isolation, you know, comfort foods and all these different things. And like, like I said, I think that there is some beauty and some logic within that, but it doesn’t actually set you up for any kind of resilience. And that makes you very easy to destroy.

Dr. Leaf: You said that so beautifully and that’s exactly what is happening and it’s exactly counter to how we function as humans because it’s kind of like taking a, flying a plane. If you think of flying a plane, you’ve got to prepare the pilot, the copilot, the tower, all that stuff. And you’ll see where I’m going with this in a second. It kind of summarizes your, believe it or not, it summarizes what you’re saying. Then you’ve got to fly the plane. The pilot’s got to take off. It’s a very planned and guided process. Then you have to fly the plane and land the plane. At any point, if the pilot doesn’t know how to take off, he’ll crash. If the pilot takes off and doesn’t know how to fly, he’ll crash or she’ll crash. If the pilot can take off and fly but can’t land, there’ll be a crash, and that’s what’s happening. We are very good at the moment at preparing. We’ll do meditation. We’ll do mindfulness. We’ll do awareness. We’ll go on TikTok [00:10:00] and see all this psychology and Instagram and be very good at talking about this, which is great. But what are we talking about? We’re talking about I feel, my trigger, exactly how you described. So we’re very good at creating an awareness. And they’d be pretty good at taking off, but then people are crashing because they’re not processing. They’re not going through the hard work of processing, which is flying the plane and landing the plane and doing that in a cyclic way over time. Because the thing that’s triggering you is an experience that’s physically wired into the brain as if like a tree-like structure into the body’s changes in our cells and also in the gravitational fields and electromagnetic fields of our mind, which is three separate things that work together. So if you just do something once or you just get triggered and you immerse yourself in that trigger and try and isolate and all the things you said, weighted blanket and so on, you haven’t dealt with the issue. So we have to get to the point where you stop crashing, because if you just become aware and then the awareness creates such a sensation of pain that you don’t want to cope. And you [00:11:00] then go and isolate or try and remove yourself from the trigger, it’s so unrealistic because what that is doing is it’s actually masking on natural resilience. So by going through the struggle, flying the plane, that is how you unmask and develop your resilience. If we coddle and that kind of thing, it’s not good for us. We need to be able to know how to face it. It’s terrible. You can cry, scream, shout. It’s all of these things we need to go through, so if we just meditate or breathe, I’m not saying don’t do them, I encourage people to do that. That’s brain preparation. But if you stop there, what the research shows and what I’ve seen clinically and colleagues of mine in the field too, is that now you’ve got all these thoughts coming up. Now what do I do? So now I feel terrible. So now I must go away from the potential trigger or I must now sort of medicate or I must breathe it away or, and then you get to a point where maybe you are, you’re okay. And there will be a level of change, but then the next trigger comes and it’s worse. We have to get to the point where we’ve created a change in our network [00:12:00] to the point where if I am triggered, I may have a little jerk. I may even start a reaction, but I’ll know how to self regulate. I’ll know how to catch myself. I’ll know how to move forward. Even if there’s been months between a trigger or an activator, I’ve got to create sustainable long term changes inside of how I show up and that’s rewiring the network, which is basically building habits and that takes time. It takes cycles of nine weeks minimum and it’s doing work every single day and there’s no quick fix. There’s just no quick fix.

Jameela: What’s also physiologically quite important is what I’m realizing is that as I am learning how to deal with my triggers head on or anything that makes me feel traumatized, I’m no longer having like a cortisol response, you know, where your adrenaline goes up and then your cortisol goes up and your insulin goes up.

I’m noticing like even in my blood tests that I am becoming physically healthier for having a smaller reaction [00:13:00] to things that are palpably huge things that I have gone through but that I have found via a lot of hard work and a lot of self investigation and journaling etc. I have found a way to look at it as, that’s not actually a current threat anymore. Because that’s the problem, right?

Dr. Leaf: Exactly, yes.

Jameela: The trauma tells you that you are always under current threat. And what happened to me as a child or, you know, getting piled onto by the internet three years ago, or it could be, it can come from anything like, you know, being followed as a woman in the street, all these different things. It’s like, that happened then and that was bad, and I can own that, but now I can say, okay you know what, it’s time to step away from that thing. And I like the feeling that I’m gonna fight back against the feeling.

Dr. Leaf: Exactly.

Jameela: I like feeling resilient. For a minute I was told, you know, online and in the mental health community, which I was a part of, like, no, you know, like, be soft. Just be soft and um, and be cozy [00:14:00] and baby yourself and treat yourself the way you would treat yourself as a baby. I’m sure I must have encouraged that rhetoric sometimes. And, you know, stay away from this and you should never feel bad feelings.

Dr. Leaf: It’s not realistic at all.

Jameela: But I found it a huge relief when I first found that kind of rhetoric because that feels nice. That’s what we want. We want relief. We don’t want the grit of having to push through the pain. But unfortunately, not to quote the Homeland tagline, but the only way out is through, like back in.

Dr. Leaf: It is. It really is. You’ve got to feel it to heal it. I mean, it’s all those taglines that we can use. You really have to get, it’s like if you think of going for surgery, if someone has to go for surgery, it’s painful. And then at first, you’re going to be cut up to be, go through pain, but you’ll get the healing. If you go and learn a musical instrument, if you go and become a sport, we understand everything except when it comes to mind. When it comes to mind, as you say, the current zeitgeist, the rhetoric, their rhetoric is all about if that feeling’s there, let’s suppress it. And that’s because of the biomedical model, because the biomedical [00:15:00] model, which works brilliantly for the physical brain and body, works because of it looks at symptoms and a diagnosis based on the symptoms with the assumption cause diagnosis means some sort of underlying biological course from the test, or you can look at the symptoms. You could do certain testing and then you can find some underlying biological cause and then you, the aim is to eliminate the symptoms of example, type one diabetes, pancreas is a problem. Give insulin. Makes sense. Works. When it comes to the mind, it’s not so simple. For all these years, the last 40 years, they’ve been trying to find the underlying neurobiological cause. They’ve been trying to find the brain correlates of what, why you feel depressed. And depression became the equivalent of something like diabetes. And that’s been a disservice to humanity because it’s actually, first of all, it’s not good science. It’s been disproved. It never really was a factual thing ever. And it’s led to our humanity being sort of siphoned into a set of symptoms. So if there’s 10 people sitting in front of you and I right now, and they all say [00:16:00] they’ve had a diagnosis of clinical depression and we, and then, and they’ve, and you ask them what they’ve, you know, they did various different treatments. It’s going to be very kind of almost cookie cutter. But meanwhile, if you actually get them talking, it’s okay, depression, it’s instead of diagnosis, it’s described. Let’s talk about your depression. Okay, what other emotions do you have? So can we not look at the depression as information telling us something like a signal?

Jameela: Like pain.

Dr. Leaf: Like pain. Exactly. So when you feel that emotion, you feel that in your body. The next signal. What’s the next signal? Where do you feel that in your body? Like the pain and so on. Or you may have the depression. You may feel gut ache or whatever. Then you can say things like, okay, well, how’s it affecting your behavior or how’s what you say, what you do, and then what’s your perspective on life? So maybe I’m depressed, got gut ache, I’m withdrawing, life sucks, you know, that’s great. You started the process. Those aren’t brain diseases. Those are descriptions of signals. You’re not, that’s not who you are. You’re showing up like that because of, so now let’s do the work of deconstructing and reconstructing.

[00:17:00] Deconstructing, what’s that attached to? What’s the intrusive thought? What’s the situation? What was the experience? Where did it start? What’s the root? And even if you get to the root, we can’t always find out why would someone abuse someone? Why would someone do whatever? Why do people do bad things? The eternal question. We, but if we know that we don’t know why someone did X to us in terms of a trauma, I mean, you need to talk about the trauma thing as well, how it’s been, that been misused. We, if we, we may not always have the reason, you may not be able to talk to that person or even understand that person’s head. So in deconstructing and reconstructing our life or that thought that triggers us or whatever, is we have to get to a level of acceptance and peace that, okay, that happened. It’s bad. What should never have happened, but I have to, now this has happened, what am I going to do about it? And that’s the cyclical flying the plane thing that I spoke about. You’re not going to fix that by just doing brain preparation, which is things like breathing, meditation. Those will help. They’ll help tune into your neurophysiology. They’ll help to create alignment. They’ll help you to tune in. They’ll help to ease the burden. Being kind to yourself. All those [00:18:00] things you said, those are preparing the brain.

Jameela: They’re painkillers.

Dr. Leaf: They’re painkillers. But now you have to do the work. The pain, you know, now we have to go into the process and that’s what people don’t like, you know, because it takes time. I mean, I say nine weeks. I bet you some of the listeners are thinking, I don’t have nine weeks in my life. I don’t have that kind of time, but look at it this way. Your brain’s always changing. I did some of the first neuroplasticity research back in the, in the, in my field in the late 80s.

Jameela: What is neuroplasticity?

Dr. Leaf: The ability of the mind to change the brain. So the fact that the brain is never the same, the fact that the body’s never the same, the fact that the mind is never the same, because we’re constantly experiencing new things. So whatever we experience is going through the mind, brain, body network and constantly changing it, constantly making these adjustments and changes. So therefore, um, if we don’t direct that change, It’s messy mind, messy brain, messy body, messy life. But if we learn to direct the change, we can literally rewire the networks and drive it in the direction we want, which is this deconstruction and it’s hard. It’s difficult. It’ll get worse [00:19:00] before it gets better. All of those things are true and they all kind of follow sort of timeframes. And if we can just get our head around being prepared to do that and helping our kids as young as two to be equipped from, to be good from this angle as well as from this angle. So wherever you’re at, you can jump in and start learning to, to, to manage your mind.

Jameela: So we’re kind of moving towards neurocycling, right? It’s something that you have coined, you have created. It is a method that has helped hundreds of thousands of people in handling their variety of different emotional and mental health symptoms. Can you explain what neurocycling is?

Dr. Leaf: It’s a system that I’ve developed over 38 years ago. It’s got a theory foundation. It’s got science. It’s got clinical application, whatever. What I needed to do generally when I was working, I was working with people with traumatic brain injury and traumas and autism and learning problems and major traumas and I had the, the stuff that was [00:20:00] available for me as a therapist and as a neuroscientist clinician, which is like I’d work differently to kind of looking at the mind brain body connections. It’s a slightly different approach, but the, the stuff that was available was not satisfying in terms of, it’s kind of like compensate. Well, this is it. This is your life. You know, let’s just like put a bandaid on the wound kind of thing. So they cannot be like that because if we grow as humans, which we do, if we grow from experiences, which we do, if people can heal which they do, then if we can understand that and find out what is that process, how does that fit in the brain and whatever. So the neurocycle comes from that. So it’s basically how does stuff like this conversation, how is this going from my lips and your lips into someone’s brain and changing their brain, changing their body, creating a mind, brain, body connection, making 800, 000 to a million cells literally every second. How does it do that? And then collectively become one of the things that drives who we are because we’re always changing and growing, et cetera. So I wanted to know that process and I wanted to know if that’s how stuff gets [00:21:00] in, how can I use that to improve my brain function and my body function? So how can I grow my brain and increase intelligence, increase resilience and optimize who I am? Um, and then learn, you know, education, learn at school, university. And how can I use that same process and reverse engineer it to find out the stuff that’s being established, so the traumas and so on. How can I take that, find it and reverse engineer it? So the neurocycle pretty much does that. It helps you to either build your brain and optimize or helps you to find from the signals and deconstruct and reconstruct. And so it’s a five step process that starts with a preparation phase that helps to tune your neurophysiology into a state where you can actually focus.

Jameela: And I mean, that’s a lot of big scientific words. So what do you mean? What would that look like?

Dr. Leaf: Okay. So what that looks like is flying the plane. So we’ve got to prepare it first. So how do we prepare that? Your breathing meditation, positive affirmation, little things like if you really worked up five things I can see, four things I can smell, whatever it’s saying, it’s things like that. It’s doing all the meditation, that sort of thing. So it’s [00:22:00] preparing the brain, which calms down the brain and the body so that you’ve got the chemicals calming down. You’ve got the, all the way

Jameela: So it’s like CPR, right?

Dr. Leaf: CPR. Getting your basic, getting you in alignment, getting you ready to do the work. So let’s keep it, let’s get you in a place where you can actually think with conscious, cognitive, determined, intentional type thinking.

Jameela: Is exercise a part of that, does you can use?

Dr. Leaf: Yeah, you could use exercise. Oh, absolutely. So you can, you can do it in different timeframes. You can do a minute of brain preparation. You can do 15 minutes of, you can do whatever you want. So let’s say it’s movement. You could drop on the floor and do some press ups. Um, you could do some stretches just to get whatever works for you, to get you into that state. Now you’ve prepared your brain. Your brain is going to, your mind, brain, body connections aligned. Now it’s not going crazy. You don’t have tsunamis in your brain and all that kind of stuff. You’ve got calmness. Now you can be intentional about getting the plane ready, flying, taking off, flying and landing. So, we’re getting the plane ready. We’ve done the breathing, meditation, exercise, whatever. And [00:23:00] now we’re going to take it, to take off. So taking off is the first step. It’s gather awareness. The second step as you start to fly the plane is reflect. The flying of the plane is the third step as well, which is to write, journal. It’s not actually journaling, it’s a different type of writing. I’ll explain in a moment. The fourth step, which is still part of the flying is recheck. And then the fifth step is the active reach. It’s landing the plane. So one step to take off, three to pro, three to process, and then you land the plane. It’s cyclic. So our body works in these cycles all the time and it’s happening on an unconscious level, what I’ve done is made it conscious. So when you learn the system, then you can use it for all levels of disruptions, whether it’s a severe trauma or whether it’s like day to day stuff. So we can talk about, we must talk, definitely talk about the trauma, but what, what do you do? Gather awareness. You simply say, let’s say that you’ve prepared your brain. Let’s say you did breathing exercise. In for three counts, out for seven. Great one to calm down your neurophysiology really fast. It’s called the ten second pause. Works like a bomb. If you do it six to nine times, which is 60 to 90 seconds.

Jameela: Wait, what exactly do you mean?

Dr. Leaf: You breathe in for three, [00:24:00] deep breath in, and then out for seven. That’s seven.

Jameela: Why does that help?

Dr. Leaf: Pushes oxygen to the front of the brain. If you do it, can you already feel lights like if you do it?

Jameela: Yeah, I felt it behind my eyes. Yeah.

Dr. Leaf: You do that seven or six to nine times or to 60 to 90 seconds. You push oxygen to the front of your brain. You increase blood flow to the front of your brain. You increase nutrition to the front of your brain, which helps you be more deliberate and intentional in your concentration that then has a downplay effect on all the rest of your body, cortisol, hypothalamic, all the rest, all the fancy stuff in your body starts following suit after that.

Jameela: Is it because it tells your body that you’re not in danger anymore? Like you’re calming the nervous system and then everything’s able to go back to functioning normally?

Dr. Leaf: Yes and no, because it’s not quite as simple as that. It’s basically sending the message that I’m prepared, I’m ready. So it’s more of a readiness that I can do this because the danger is potentially still there. So it doesn’t take removal the danger, it kind of just gets you into a state where you can actually have the wisdom to [00:25:00] face the danger and do something about the danger. So that’s really, that’s really what it’s doing. Then you’ll, you’ll, you’ll gather awareness, which is taking off is those four signals I already mentioned. Gather, if you think of gather, I’ve become aware with the preparation, but now I’m going to gather so I’m going to focus in and I’m going to focus in on four signals, four categories of signals that are not diseases that are telling me information. They’re messengers, they’re how I show up. So I’m going to gather awareness of what are my emotions, what are my behaviors, what is my bodily sensation in relation or connected, what’s my perspective.

Then you’re going to go to, that’s taking off, then you’re going to start flying. Okay. Why do I have these emotions? What other ones do I have? How are they linked into my body? How are they, what are the other behaviors? You start going deeper. It’s the why, it’s the reflect. Then you write. Now the write step is where you literally throw things on a page, but more messy, the better, whatever comes up. You just put that down because you’re diving down deep. You’re opening up networks. You’re getting into an unconscious mind and things that you didn’t even think were associated start coming up. And the more you go all over the place, the more in alignment is with how the [00:26:00] brain functions. And this, you can always journal later, but that’s actually on in the first step. This is more just mind dump, mind, brain, body dump, what is, whatever’s coming up. And then the next step, you look at all this chaos and you start saying, okay, what are the activators? What are the famous word triggers? What are the patterns? What are the antidotes? This is what’s happened. What can I do? How can I reconceptualize this? How am I going to move forward? And this is taking you down. If you think of a tree, there’s so far, these four steps in the preparation have activated a network that I keep talking about. Networks look like trees. Trees have roots. Roots are the source. The branches are how you’re functioning. So it’s going to take you, the gather awareness, the reflect, the write, and the recheck are taking you through the tree from the, from the gathering awareness pulls the tree up, the thought tree experience.

As you do the next steps, it’s going deeper and deeper. So you’re starting to get to the source and the roots are what happened, the cause, the origin story. And you’re not trying to, you can’t rip the tree out because it’s happened, but you can fix the roots. And that’s where you, the reconstruction comes in with the fourth [00:27:00] step and all that stuff. And then you end the cycle with a little action. You’re not going to solve all life’s problems in one neurocycle, but you do what you can in that day in a limited time, five to 45 minutes, max five minutes.

Jameela: And do you do all of this in one day or is this over nine weeks?

Dr. Leaf: You do this daily over nine weeks for the big stuff. So now the time frame. So you can do this in 10 seconds. So let’s say that you are in a meeting and someone’s driving you crazy and you have to stay calm because you just have to stay calm because you have to stay calm. So you could just be looking at them and you can actually run through this in your mind. So maybe you can’t write at that point because you’re looking and you’re connecting, but you can then visualize as though you’re filming the third step instead of writing. You can pretend that you’re filming a person through your iPhone camera. So like you’re videoing the situation, you and yourself. So it’s, it creates that visualization of observation, creates that same sort of reaction in the brain. So you can do, you can do it in 10 seconds in the moment stuff. Then if you think of a scale of one to 10, one, two, and three would be the day to day stuff, someone irritating you in a [00:28:00] meeting or something happening that’s minor, but it’s irritating and it can make you a little bit worked up. Then the four, five, six, seven, eight would be the things like being hammered on social media or getting involved in social media and scrolling social media or getting it, bad habits we develop from not necessarily some underlying trauma, just like we just didn’t, we were messy, we’re messy humans and we just get into messy patterns, but those can, can start really disrupting our life. And then the third, eight, nines and tens are the big traumas, like what happened to you when you’re a child, and those are the big traumas. So the big traumas, those take at least 15 to 45 minutes daily over the first 21 days. And then the second 42 days, around five minutes, the middle part, the six, four, five, six, seven, eight, that you can do in five minutes, but it’s still going to take you cycles of 63 days because anything that’s a pattern has been wired in and the only way you can change that protein network is to take the time daily. So it’s five minutes a day for around about 60.

Jameela: How did you, how did you work out 63 days?

Dr. Leaf: So there’s a lot of [00:29:00] research out there on, you’ve heard 21 days. Everyone’s heard about 21 days.

Jameela: It takes 21 days to break any habit.

Dr. Leaf: Which is wrong. It doesn’t, it takes at least 59-66 days, quite specific numbers. So there’s a lot of researchers out there. Not actually a lot, not enough. It’s myself, my colleagues, and there’s a few other groups of people that have done work on how long does it take.

Jameela: Does this work with addiction?

Dr. Leaf: Oh yes, absolutely.

Jameela: Interesting.

Dr. Leaf: Because addiction is a coping mechanism. It’s a coping mechanism that one is using to deal with some, to suppress something that’s painful. And so therefore it becomes a habit. And so you have to find the cause and deconstruct and rewire and create a new habit. And that’s where addiction medications are not going to fix that. You actually have to get to that source. And it’s a choice to get to that source and to work through, even though it feels like it’s not a choice for initially when one’s so consumed with the addiction.

So basically something like an addiction, you would have to work for at least 63 days. So daily for around 15 to 45 minutes, about 63 days. Now, sometimes it’s so big, the addiction, because the addiction is hiding a [00:30:00] tremendous pain. Like I’ve had some patients who had such severe trauma, sexual or whatever, that it’s taken multiple cycles of 63 days.

The 21 day thing came from a Dr. Meltzer years ago in the 60s, where he was, he’s a plastic, he was a plastic surgeon. And he found that the body heals in cycles of 63 days when you’ve had um, physical surgery, which is not, the body works in cycles of 21 days, but you need multiple. So he did a leap of assumption and said, oh, this is the mind stuff. And it became a myth. And so if your body does heal in cycles, like if you have a blister, it will take multiple cycles, but it’s more or less three weeks for stem cells to form, whatever. So the physical changes take these blocks of time. The same thing with psychological experiences: life. Life is a psychological experience that goes into a physical experience in your mind, brain, and body. And that physical thing, like if you’re cutting a physically cutting your body from having a surgery, there’s physical damage, there’s physical damage in your brain from that [00:31:00] psychological experience. Your brain doesn’t distinguish between a psychological and a physical. So it also works in cycles of 21 days.

So I’m doing a big study at the moment where we are confirming like what happens at like day one, day four, day whatever, to find out the progress to help people understand that I can expect this at this time and this at this time. And I’ve also looked at the whole, when I do my research, I look at the behavioral stuff. So the, you know, like people what they, the story, what’s going on. Then we look inside, like you mentioned cortisol, we’ll look at the body, we’ll look at cortisol, we’ll look at things like prolactin, which is not just breastfeeding mothers, it’s in males and females.

Jameela: What is prolactin?

Dr. Leaf: The hormone that is released in all males and females, more when a woman has a baby. Um, so people tend to associate it with breastfeeding. That’s just one of its functions. It’s very much linked to how we function emotionally, how we’re managing what we’ve gone through in life, how we’re managing our life. So the more messy and

Jameela: Where does it, where does it come out in the, like, is it a brain chemical?

Dr. Leaf: It’s a hormone. So it’s a neural hormone. So it comes out in response, so it’s also linked to the, to [00:32:00] the, um, reproductive organs.

Jameela: What would trigger its release other than a baby suckling on it?

Dr. Leaf: So it would be things like how’re we managing our stress. So if, if we are like, constantly feeling overwhelmed and burnt out that would affect prolactin levels, like cortisol. Pretty much the same principle. Cortisol, you’ve got to have cortisol or you’ll die. But if you have too much cortisol, that’s not good. If you have too little, same with prolactin. But age, male, female, whatever you’ve got to have, you’re kind of like there’s a range. So you can’t just look at prolactin alone and say, oh, someone’s battling with mental health. You have to look at it with other things like cortisol, like things like telomeres. A telomere is the end of a chromosome. So you think of DNA, the DNA ladder winds up into an X shape in the cell. Nails would be the telomere at the ends of the X shape. And we’re making new cells all the time in our entire body. And the health of those cells is dependent on the health of the telomeres. The health of the telomeres is dependent on the health of your mind. So your mind’s driving the process. So if we are not managing our mind, all these things are busy breaking down and increases our [00:33:00] vulnerability to disease, so that’s all it is.

Jameela: Fuck me. I mean, even I’m going to need to listen back to this, like again, because you have delivered so much information and it is so incredible and also like weirdly complex and simple at the same time. What you’re saying is incredibly practical, but also there’s so much involved. You can see how easily they’ve gotten away with going, ah, you don’t want to fucking learn all of that. Have this little pill.

Dr. Leaf: Yeah, exactly.

Jameela: Have this pill, have a comfort food, lie down, stop, you know, like, stop putting yourself in the way of Yeah, yeah, yeah. Stop the world. Get off. Like, yeah, it’s so fascinating because it is, like, it’s complicated. We are complex and we are treated as if we are not complex. We are treated as if one size fits all, as if we all have the same kind of experiences or traumas, or that it’s even vaguely possible. You know, like Sam Harris talks about free will. We have no free will because we are, like, all, uh, and I I don’t really suppose that.

Dr. Leaf: No, [00:34:00] I don’t either.

Jameela: Um, but yeah, yeah. So, but he, you know, he’s saying that we’re all a, you know, a product of all of the experiences we’ve ever had in the world and they predetermine our decision.

Dr. Leaf: He chose to say, he used his free will to say that. I don’t mean to interrupt you, but he chose to say that.

Jameela: I know, I know, I know. But my point being that like, yeah, but he would argue that like a certain experience he had when he was a child about not saying what he thinks like, you would have, my point being that, listen, this isn’t really about him. I’m just saying that, it just goes to show, though, that, like, we are all products of our environments, of our experiences, of the current environment we’re in now versus the environment that we grew up in. It’s like, how could we ever create blanket treatment for something as, like, as easy to be thrown off as the brain? And also the fact that we’re really only just at the precipice in mainstream society. I’m sure science has already been, like, talking about the hormonal impact of mental health behaviors, but we’re just at the, like, beginning of that conversation.

Dr. Leaf: Exactly.

Jameela: Or the fact that the [00:35:00] pill or contraceptives or all kinds of things can impact your mental health. Like we always, we know about like premenstrual syndrome and we’ve always accepted that women and their hormones, we’ve only just started to speak about the fact that men have a 24 hour hormonal cycle.

Dr. Leaf: Exactly.

Jameela: Some people who are transitioning are experiencing huge emotional and personality changes because of the influx of hormones that they’re taking. So that’s a really important conversation as well. And what I like about your work is, is the fact that you are combining like a physiological and chemical approach to also making space for people’s individual experiences and injuries.

Dr. Leaf: Yes, that’s priority. In fact, I use that approach to show the individuality, show we cannot use this cookie cutter approach. We can’t treat a human like a, oh, this part’s broken, you know, just add a piece that’s missing. Just add a chemical to fix the problem. You can’t do that. I mean,

Jameela: It works with an organ, but it just doesn’t work with the brain.

Dr. Leaf: Exactly. And it doesn’t, well, the org, and it doesn’t even work with the, with the entire [00:36:00] body that well, I mean, it works to a certain extent, but the mind is driving, so you can fix the physical, but if you still haven’t got your mind, like your endocrine system will go crazy if you still don’t get your mind under control. So you can have all the medications, but at some point they don’t always work as effectively as what they could, because the mind is still, we have to constantly be working on, mind drives it. Without your mind, you’re dead.

Jameela: Yeah, but also we have a, we have an understanding that when we treat a bodily organ, I was saying organ is if the brain isn’t also like part of that, but like when we treat something that’s, you know, uh, like a lung or a liver or whatever, we have a kind of common understanding that there can be knock on effects on other parts of the body, but we never have that conversation or almost never have that conversation around taking hormones or taking medication.

I’m, by the way, just to be very clear, pro medication, took medication yesterday. Uh, I take it every so often sporadically when I know there’s something I have to do that I find difficult to cope with. And I’m aware that I’m not going to, you know, I need to, but [00:37:00] I, but I’m aware that like, I’m up against something that is too, like too difficult for me. And so I just take a a little hit, and then I feel better, and then I don’t need it again for several weeks, and in the interim, I’m always working on how to not need the medication. But I’m pro medication.

Dr. Leaf: That’s very healthy. That’s the way, people ask me what I think about that, because those medications aren’t fixing the problem, they’re just providing temporary relief, as you’ve said. So to use it like that, if you have a headache, you take an Advil or something, or an ibuprofen. If we can think of it like that, it’s just temporary, temporary reducing the amount of, ah, that we feel.

Jameela: So when we were talking on the phone, you told me a terrifying statistic.

Dr. Leaf: Yeah.

Jameela: I feel as though this statistic is like a large leading force as to why you are raising the alarm now. And that was about the fact that people are dying much earlier than than they used to, [00:38:00] in spite of the fact that we are in a time of the most mental health awareness, the most mental health vocabulary, and at least, like, maybe not total access, but more access than we used to have before to mental health, and very specific different types of mental health. Can you tell me what that statistic is?

Dr. Leaf: So it’s in the region of, and it’s a combination of different studies, it’s quite a long complex sort of science-y stuff, but essentially 8 to, people are dying between 8 and 25 years younger than they should from preventable lifestyle diseases. So when we talk about lifestyle, we’re talking about lifestyle. What are we doing with our life, which includes how are we managing our mind? Because that’s number one, without your mind, you don’t have a body anyway, you just disintegrate it, nor do you have a brain. So what are you doing with your mind in terms of experience life? What are you doing in terms of, you know, exercise and, and all these things that if we don’t, we, we know that chronic unmanaged stress increases vulnerability to disease. It’s going to cause chronic physical problems in our [00:39:00] bodies, so therefore what we’re seeing though, is with this advent of a part of the health, part of preventing lifestyle diseases is very much around the mind management. I mentioned telomeres, I mentioned things like that. For example, if telomeres are shortening every day, they make your cells. You make cells every day. If I’ve got weak cells, my cells make my organs, which make my body. So if I, over time, don’t deal with my stuff or know how to, and just put myself in that little blanket, with a weighted blanket, I’m going to actually weaken my resilience, weaken my telomeres. So my body can’t do what it can do. So your vulnerability to lifestyle diseases increases. And that’s where the, the, the earlier deaths are coming from as well as chronic use of psychoactive drugs will change the brain and create a lot of problems like in your heart, which could cause early death and that kind of stuff.

Jameela: When I hear of lifestyle diseases, my brain, I’m sure other people’s brains will go, do you mean the way that people eat or drinking alcohol or taking like, you know, uh, recreational drugs? [00:40:00] That’s not what you mean. That’s not what, people are dying 8 to 25 years earlier because it’s a separate thing.

Dr. Leaf: But that’s part of the whole pattern. So when we talk about lifestyle diseases, we’re talking about people having cardiovascular issues very young, heart problems very young, and dying from strokes much younger, and people getting very sick at very young ages. Like for example, we used to see people getting Alzheimer’s in their 80s, now we see it as young 30s.

Jameela: What??

Dr. Leaf: So in the 30s, 40s, people getting early onset dementias. Um, we’re seeing people getting sicknesses that they shouldn’t be getting, that we saw them getting much, much, much older ages, that kind of stuff. So, 95% of diseases that people experience, we’re going to all die one day, we know that, but your quality of life doesn’t have to be shortened. And the length of life doesn’t have to be shortened, your quality doesn’t have to suffer as much as what it is. So this, this statistic is going to the fact that people’s quality of life, um, which is a combination of how my mind is, if my mind is [00:41:00] totally messed up and I’ve got so much trauma that I’m not dealing with and I don’t know how to deal with the day to day and I’m cushioning myself and blanketing and I’m not developing my resilience, I’m going to have a very weak body, which is going to be vulnerable to everything out there. And if I’m taking a lot of meds on top of that whole process, you creating a volcanic eruption inside of you, which is, which is contributing to this lifestyle disease.

Jameela: So I just want to clarify because I like, you know, I think I just want to make sure that

Dr. Leaf: People understand.

Jameela: That I’m not missing something. Yeah. And I understand, which is that, are you also saying that other lifestyle decisions we make, like, I don’t know, eating foods that aren’t very nutritious for us or smoking or drinking in excess or taking recreational drugs in excess that counts within the lifestyle issues that we’re having, but is part of what you’re saying is the fact that if we don’t have our mind in order, we are much more susceptible to not look after our body or to take recreational drugs and alcohol?

Dr. Leaf: Exactly.

Jameela: Right, right, right.

Dr. Leaf: You’ve got it. You’ve got it. Because why [00:42:00] are we taking the alcohol in excess? Why are we taking it? Because it’s something that we’re trying to, it’s the addiction thing. It’s something, why don’t, you know, I just don’t care about about eating and feeding our body and I mean, there’s so much around that and I know this is, this podcast is like, it’s fantastic in terms of your podcast, in terms of the I Weigh and the whole body culture and the diet culture.

Jameela: Thank you.

Dr. Leaf: We know that that is really bad what’s happened there, but there’s, there’s this logic, there’s bioindividuality. There isn’t one way of eating or exercising and that’s become a whole, that’s a whole different discussion, but just that the mental pain of someone who looks at Instagram and sees the ideal body, and that’s supposed to be now what I’m like, and I’ve got no value in this. I look like that, that kind of issue, which I know those are some of the things you talk about. And I know that that’s what is a big problem on social media with like teenagers currently. It’s a huge problem. That is a mental mindset that, I’m alive. I’m using my mind. I’m looking at that Instagram all day. It’s wiring into my brain. That’s driving me. I’m not going to eat properly or whatever. That whole [00:43:00] messy mind, that’s weakening my telomeres, that’s messing up my prolactin, my cortisol, my vulnerability of my body has increased dramatically, and that feeds back into the mental health. And you’re looking at life through this filter, and this is what I’m talking about, and this is what we see. You can’t fix that with a drug or a diagnosis. You can’t say that’s clinical depression and ADHD because that kid can’t concentrate at school or there is that young man or woman that’s just not able to focus or whatever, it’s late onset ADHD or undiagnosed, which is what they’re using.

We’ve got to look at the fact that we live in a society where there is change. It’s good. Change is good. Social media is good. But if you don’t manage it, you don’t manage the volume of information, you don’t think deeply. If you don’t become aware of whatever you think about the most growth, if people aren’t educated about it, they’re doing this stuff, and then they’re feeling awful, the sense of angst and anxiety that so many teenagers are feeling. And so I’m just like, oh, we’ve got to teach us ourselves how to manage that. So if you’re not in a management mindset, life is [00:44:00] going to just knock you. Everything, the changes, the technology, the it’s so easy to get access to being bullied all night because you take your phone home. That has to be taught and that management is missing. That will lead to lifestyle diseases.

Jameela: Yeah, it’s interesting. So, like, I got

Dr. Leaf: Where does it start? Sorry, where does it start?

Jameela: I got incredibly sick last September, October, physically sick. And my mental health was also then not great. And I became like, very, very, very, very fucked up by about February. It was really, really hard to cope anymore, or even like consider carrying on living. Um, and since then I’ve kind of rebounded via making huge changes to my life, including very, very minimal access to social media, very, very minimal access to the news, exercising every single day, walking every single day.

Dr. Leaf: Wonderful.

Jameela: No matter what, no matter what the weather, either walking or swimming, whatever my body can [00:45:00] handle. I’ve changed the way that I eat in a way that doesn’t even feel difficult or strenuous.

Dr. Leaf: Wonderful.

Jameela: Uh, and that just means eating like whole foods that are very, very organic.

Dr. Leaf: Nutritious.

Jameela: From very like sustainable and like healthy practices, right?

Dr. Leaf: Yeah.

Jameela: You know, where they, where they treat the produce well and don’t cover it in

Dr. Leaf: Exactly.

Jameela: Shit. And all these things feel so much easier to do. I don’t have a desire to take any kind of drugs. I don’t have a desire to drink alcohol. I don’t have a desire to look at social media. I don’t have a desire to eat something that’s from a fast food restaurant that is going to be full of ingredients that are full of fucking chemicals that are going to fuck with my hormones. It has, it’s incredible how, how much easier it is just to make the right decision. And I could not be a more self destructive person. Like my whole life, I could not have been more of a self destructive person. I could not be worse at adulting. I could not be, you know, less motivated, didn’t move, didn’t do anything, just constantly sat and just waited for death.[00:46:00]

And so it has been extraordinary to me to see how fast I was able to pull that, turn that around, and how easy it becomes once you start, because then you feel

Dr. Leaf: Beautiful.

Jameela: It just, you suddenly feel in touch with your instinct as to like, what is the sensible thing? As soon as peace feels accessible, now it’s become my main job. It’s the thing that I’m the most addicted to is finding out how to preserve peace. And that just becomes easier and easier, the less of these fucking neurotoxins are in my life.

Dr. Leaf: I could, it’s beautiful. The way you’ve explained that is like, it’s perfect because what you’ve done is you’ve neurocycling without even knowing you’re neurocycling. And the whole thing is neurocycle’s a word for something that we do as humans, where you actually use your mind. You use your mind to stand back and observe your life and to observe those emotions and what you’re doing with your behaviors and your body and all of that that you stood back using, why am I doing this? What am I going to do? How am I going to, so you actually went through that cycle. You chose, you did, you step by step and you [00:47:00] changed and that then carried over into the food, the exercise, the, but your mind was doing it. So first thing is mind. Until your mind, until you feel empowered that, okay, I can take, you said something and tap into that instinct. We have an inner wisdom. We literally are wired for love. Our biology, our neurobiology, our mind, mind structure is all designed for survival. So are we going to get signals from our network or mind brain body network that tells us, hey, listen, this is not working and the desire to die, the desire to give up. That is a signal that we embrace and you did it. You embraced that signal. You say, okay, why am I feeling? You may not have been deliberately conscious of doing it, but you actually did the, you did this whole process. You sat back, observed yourself and said, why, what am I showing up? This is not who I am. I don’t like this. And you slowly went through a process over time of change.

Jameela: And I couldn’t believe it. Like we all know that social media is bad for us. We know that the phone is bad for us. We know that screens late at night is bad for us. We know that not sleeping enough is bad for us. We know that like there’s hormones in the [00:48:00] fucking meat and there’s like shit on the vegetables and there’s shit in the water and the plastic, like we know it. But until you know it, until you try it and see what happens, like my hormones have changed, my weight didn’t change, but my breast shrunk. Like when I stopped eating food that could have any kind of hormones, it’s been fucking insane to see how much that’s changed my mental health, how much hormones have informed my personality and the decisions that I make, how much vitamin D or all these different things, how much sunshine and outdoor space and sunlight and movement.

You just don’t know until you actually try it and then you can’t fucking believe that that’s not the thing that we spend all our all of our time online talking about. We look at it as like a niche corner of the internet who are like green juice and like going outside every day. But it’s all anyone should be talking about in school, at home, in the fucking office. It’s like if we want a healthy GDP, [00:49:00] we need a healthy workforce. If we want a healthy workforce, we have to, it almost feels like we are deliberately, sorry, I always keep dragging people into my tin hat. But we’re deliberately in a world for profit, like, we’re sabotaging that. We are sabotaging people’s gut instincts.

Dr. Leaf: Exactly.

Jameela: I’ve been so angry for the last few months in which I’ve watched how quickly my life has turned around in a way that I’ve never experienced before, where I’m like, what the fuck? Why isn’t my phone full of this information. And the people who talk about these things are called quacks on the internet. They are dismissed. And obviously I’m not like celery juice your fucking way to like mental. I’m not. No, no. I’m not that. But there are basic fundamental principles of humanity that suit the brain of ours that hasn’t updated in 2000 years, that we are paying almost deliberately no attention to. We are constantly distracted.

And I also think it doesn’t serve us well, especially as women who are having more and more rights taken away from us, it does not [00:50:00] serve us to be made to, uh, to allow ourselves to be made to feel like we don’t have resilience or that resilience is a bad, unnecessary thing. Because we need to be ready for a fight.

Dr. Leaf: Absolutely.

Jameela: And we are being encouraged to just become softer and softer and softer and just atrophy because life is hard. And it’s like, no, right now.

Dr. Leaf: No, not at all.

Jameela: We need to be like war ready. And I’m concerned that it feels, not like a giant conspiracy, but I’m concerned that it feels like. There’s a lot to gain by the people who make money off of our misery.

Dr. Leaf: Absolutely. It’s an industry.

Jameela: There’s a whole industry built around it and that industry is so significantly profited by men. Certain men, not all men. And by the way, men are suffering in this too.

Dr. Leaf: Exactly.

Jameela: They’re also like taking fucking supplements to get their muscles bigger. We are all caught in hell and then we think the problem is just each other, whereas actually the problem is our society. Sorry, I’ve just gone on a massive rant, [00:51:00] but

Dr. Leaf: No, no, that is

Jameela: I’m pissed.

Dr. Leaf: And to have, it’s such a, it’s so refreshing to be able to have this kind of conversation with you because this is, this is what I do what I do. This is why I want people to feel empowered to manage their own mind. That our whole platform is to create mental health technology for kids and adults, all ages. To exactly to do this, to recognize the resilience, to recognize you’re not just broken mechanical machines, recognize you don’t need to be manipulated by a psychiatric industry playing on your emotions and use it, misleading us. You said the key thing, you can know about this, but are you doing it? What is the leap between knowing and doing? And there’s that huge gap and that’s what you’re talking about. And it’s what I’m trying to fill in the work that I do. You say, hey guys, there’s all this great stuff out there to make this physical brain and body work like it should. But to know that is not enough. You’ve got to do it. And how do you do it? You’ve got to get your mind right. It starts with your mind.

Jameela: Yeah. So speaking of like misinforming people somewhere or misguiding people, you referenced a few times on this podcast [00:52:00] already, like trauma, it’s a conversation you want to have. Trauma is a large umbrella now for a lot of different things, but they all fall under the same word. Can you talk to me about what you’re concerned about regarding that?

Dr. Leaf: I’m concerned because trauma is something very distinct. And that’s why I’ll come back to that little one to 10 scale that I spoke about where notice I specifically said trauma was in the seven, eight, nine, 10 or eight, nine, 10. So on a, on a number line or on a scale of one to 10, the day to day stuff is one, two, three. So the fight with the boss or someone irritating you, whatever, that’s not trauma, that’s just a day to day issue that’s irritating or a bit of a struggle in a relationship or whatever. That’s not big. Then you’ve got the middle stuff where these patterns that we saw into develop, that’s also not trauma. It can become trauma. So you can have a social media situation like we spoke about or, and you get consumed by that. And then you just get, you’ve got all this trillions and trillions of space in our brain to grow all these networks. You have trillions and trillions of experience, but if we just focus on one, that’s [00:53:00] going to mess with my mind and potentially move into up the scale and hit the seven, eight, nine, 10, which is where the trauma’s live. So traumas are the big stuff, the abuses, the physical, the sexual abuse, the war,

Jameela: But even the definition of sexual abuse and abuse and violence has shifted in the last five years.

Dr. Leaf: It’s grown, it’s grown wider and any, wherever there’s an invasion of a person’s privacy or racism, socioeconomic disadvantage, war zones, I mean, these are circumstances that have created trauma. So it’s that big stuff and it should stay, that’s why I say seven, eight, nine, ten, where seven’s on the lower end of the trauma scale. But if I just have a fight with my boss or my husband irritates me for a bit, that’s not trauma. That’s just a day to day struggle. If I have got into the habit of sitting on TikTok for 10 hours at a time and just looking at one thing and I’ve got all envious and jealous, that’s not trauma. That’s a pattern I’ve created. So we can’t compare, but what I do know [00:54:00] is that that having worked with people with sexual trauma and who’ve had assaults and worked in Africa, um, have been through extreme, terrible stuff. That is, that extreme terrible stuff cannot be likened to an argument I have with my husband, or me getting on social media and becoming very envious of someone else’s success or something, whatever.

Jameela: I think like maybe experiencing like a microaggression might be something that this audience might kind of find a bit more accessible because I don’t think they’re throwing it around with like, you know, just an argument with a boyfriend. But I think, you know, like the other day, uh, my friend was bitten by a Rottweiler on, uh, Runyon Canyon. And the owner came running over and my friend’s leg is like punctured and bleeding. And then it’s also like scratched and bitten all over the leg. And the owner comes up and was just like, oh my God, I’m so traumatized by this. I’m just so traumatized by this. Like, I’m, I’m, uh, I just can’t even process it. And it’s like, there’s someone on the fucking ground bleeding because of your [00:55:00] dog and she’s just like, I just, uh, I’m just so traumatized like this is just traumatized, this is really traumatizing for me. And like, I get it. It probably was fucking terrifying and horrific and thinking like, am I gonna, but she, but it, but it was like, you are stressed. You are distressed. You’re terrified that maybe your dog’s gonna have to be fucking put down. Yeah, totally.

Dr. Leaf: And the implications, but it’s not trauma.

Jameela: But she was able to completely exempt herself from any accountability or worry for another person in the moment because she’s traumatized so now she expects for the entire focus to be on her rather than the person who’s on the ground bleeding who will now probably be afraid of dogs forever.

Dr. Leaf: I was attacked by a dog like that and I was, it took me years to not be terrified of a big dog. So yeah, I get that. So that’s, that’s much, that’s the

Jameela: Kind of weaponizing almost like probably accidentally, but it’s fucking mad. So where has that come from? Is that like, is that wanting to find a way to shut down accountability where you can just be like, what is that? I don’t know what that is. [00:56:00]

Dr. Leaf: I don’t think people,

Jameela: I’m sure it’s different with everyone.

Dr. Leaf: Yeah, it is. And I don’t think it’s, it’s, um, a natural desire of us to kind of, as humans, to try and shut down accountability. I think it’s grown from the zeitgeist. So 95% of what we are experiencing every day, we’re not even aware of. We’re only consciously aware of about 5 to 10%. So that means that there’s this whole thing of trauma talk everywhere that’s going on. So someone has an experience that’s what they, what they pretty much wired in unless they have this kind of conversation or they listen to a conversation and they stand back and say, oh, actually it’s not trauma, it’s stress. It’s, this is, you know, all the implications of all the, and how can I help you? So that kind of trauma language makes people very selfish because it’s now focusing on me, myself, and I mean, while that person’s bleeding on the floor and they are the ones that are the victim. So it shifts the responsibility. Where it comes from I believe it’s, it’s the fact that as humans, if there’s a very strong message that is consistent across the media for more than nine weeks, which it has been, people then absorb that and [00:57:00] then that’s what they’ve wired in. So something happens and that’s what comes out. And so we have to teach people, hey, that’s the wrong word. Let’s re educate. Let’s rewire. Let’s have conversations like this. And let’s say, let’s find better words and use trauma only for and redefine, re educate.

Jameela: Yeah and what we’re, I think what we’re both trying to say is that just because it’s not trauma doesn’t mean you will not be attended to.

Dr. Leaf: Exactly.

Jameela: And that does not mean, and I think that’s the fear is that if I don’t call it the big thing then I will be dismissed and actually I am a human being who is suffering, who needs some help. And no one will help me unless I use the emergency word. And it’s like, no, we have to also figure out a way as to why we made those people feel like, unless it’s an emergency, they do not deserve help. Like that’s where we need some evolution within mental health care. Any discomfort left alone can fester and grow into significant, like acute trauma or like acute illness. So we need to do a better [00:58:00] job at making other people feel validated that like your suffering is still your suffering just because it’s not that word. It’s still suffering and here are some tools to help you get out of it. I think that’s the problem is that we only like, we we go where the house is on fire when it comes to our attention, and our immediate action.

Dr. Leaf: I’m so glad you said that because you said something about that earlier on, and that’s exactly what my work is, is trying to help people to, that’s what the mental health biomedical model doesn’t allow. It doesn’t, it’s kind of just suppressing everything. So people have to kind of be super bad to get the attention. That’s what this biomedical model has exactly how you’ve described it. It’s created because it’s. Looking for the symptom that’s bad and that’s not really bad enough. We’ve medicalized misery and have made it into this big scary thing. We’ve pathologized childhood. Meanwhile, life is tough and at any level, I can’t ever understand your experiences. You can’t ever understand mine. And what may not seem like a big thing for you is a huge thing for me, but we’ve got to watch our words and our language because that can diminish. But the biggest key thing I agree with you, [00:59:00] the biggest key thing that underlying, underlines all of this is the fact that we’re not allowing ourselves to actually process and work through issues. And that’s massive. Um, and that’s why society needs to create an environment in which, um, people are empowered to learn how to manage their minds. If I do have that, the woman whose dog attacked, how am I going to deal with it? How am I going to learn how to manage that? We need to, we’re not allowing our kids and ourselves to process. What we’re doing is we’re telling people, talk about your feelings, but your feelings can’t be spoken about alone. You have to speak about behaviors and everything else as well. What I’m trying to tell people is that mind management is something that happens all day long and whether you have a little bad thing and you need to just deal with it, you are entitled to deal with it. If you have a big thing, you’re entitled to deal with it, not just the big stuff. Does that make sense? I’m, I’m,

Jameela: Yeah. You’re saying it with you. Here are some tools.

Dr. Leaf: I’m saying what you’re saying.

Jameela: Here are some tools where wherever you are at on the spectrum to be a human of discomfort wherever you’re at, that spectrum of discomfort, here is something for you. Rather than [01:00:00] waiting on a waiting list behind people who’ve experienced the craziest fucking trauma possible and you’re waiting and then you’re given no help and maybe just a pill that might not be the right pill for you and then no one’s looking at your hormones and no one’s looking at your habits and no one’s looking at your life.

Dr. Leaf: Your story.

Jameela: You are cutting through, you are offering an alternative practice to take control back of your own mind.

Dr. Leaf: Exactly. You’re entitled to manage your mind whether it’s a little thing, whether it’s a medium thing, whether it’s a big thing whatever it is.

Jameela: Whether you’re a child, whether you’re an adult

Dr. Leaf: Whether whatever whatever level as humans, we’ve, we’ve taken the mind out with this whole new neuro reductionistic approach in the biomedical model, we’ve taken the humanity out. And life is difficult. It has challenges. It’s always had challenges. It’s going to have more. It’s not the first time we’re going to have a pandemic or war, a change in technology, it’s this what we are. We just need to know how to manage at whatever level of distress, but we’re not allowed to and suppress it all.

Jameela: I just read that Goldman Sachs said that something like a third of American jobs are going to go in the next few years to [01:01:00] AI. That’s a hundred million people’s jobs. It’s like we are about to descend into chaos. If there was ever a time to arm up with resilience, it is now.

Dr. Leaf: Exactly. To understand and also to even understand that, because there’s a lot of scary things that they’re saying there, but the more AI ramps up, the more we need humans, because AI can do nothing without humans. And I mean, there’s a whole two hours that he can go into that, it’s

Jameela: 100%. But my point is, is that there will, there’ll be a teething issue, right? There’ll be like, yeah, where people are

Dr. Leaf: Very distressed.

Jameela: Are distressed. They don’t know where to go. Eventually this will end up with like universal basic income and people no longer living to work and no longer, there was a million things that will come out of this that’ll be a little much more holistic and beautiful, but the road to that is going to be fucking bumpy and we still have rights to win back and people to fight for and that cannot be done without these tools. So I appreciate you. Thank you for coming today and please come back a million times and thank you for writing a version of your work that is for parents to help with their [01:02:00] children because preventative care early.

Dr. Leaf: Being proactive. Treatment. Coming from both sides.

Jameela: I think is just the luckiest anyone could be. I wish I’d had access to your work back then.

Dr. Leaf: Oh, well, thank you. You’ve done a great job and thank you for what you’re doing on this side of the, this side of the, of the coin. And I have to show you something quickly. Can I show you something for those that are, that? We’ve created a little character called Brainy, and this is a little Brainy character that’s for kids. So people here are thinking, how the hell do you do this with kids? I’ve created a cartoon character and there’s cartoons and everything, but I mean, adults love this too. But just mental health walks the mental health journey and it’s a brain, so you can change your brain. So we’re trying to get the messaging that if you’re not vulnerable, you’re not just a mechanical broken thing. You’re not just controlled by life. This emotion is not just the end of it. It’s, well, it’s tough, it’s hard, but here we can change. We’ve got the tools.

Jameela: And in personifying the brain, you’re no longer allowing it to be this like ethereal, scary.

Dr. Leaf: Exactly.

Jameela: Unimaginable thing.

Dr. Leaf: Exactly.

Jameela: You’re great. You’re great. Everyone go follow Dr. Caroline Leaf and please buy her books and [01:03:00] listen to her work and hopefully it will help you. But thank you for coming on today.

Dr. Leaf: Thank you so much. I’ve loved our discussion. It’s been amazing. Thank you so much. And I’m looking forward to interviewing you on my show soon.

Jameela: Can’t wait.

Thank you so much for listening to this week’s episode. I Weigh With Jameela Jamil is produced and researched by myself, Jameela Jamil, Erin Finnegan, and Kimmie Gregory. It is edited by Andrew Carson and the beautiful music you are hearing now is made by my boyfriend, James Blake. If you haven’t already, please rate, review, and subscribe to the show. It’s a great way to show your support. We also have a bonus series exclusively on Stitcher Premium called Ask Jameela Anything. Check it out. You can get a free month of Stitcher Premium by going to stitcher.com/premium and using the promo code i weigh. Lastly, over at I Weigh we would love to hear from you and share what you weigh at the end of this podcast. You can leave us a voicemail at 1 818 660 5543 or email us what you weigh at iweighpodcast@gmail.com, and now we would love to pass the mic to one [01:04:00] of our fabulous listeners.

Listener: I weigh my strength, my determination, my perseverance, my ability to heal those around me, and my love and hope for humanity.