Dr. Caroline Leaf
Appearances
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
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.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
By the mid-2000s, it was an established, researched fact that we don't live longer anymore, that 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.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
So people at the beginning of their career and the prime of their career and through that age group are dropping down dead like flies. And it's considered deaths of despair by preventable lifestyle diseases. So we have to look at the lifestyle disease means that there's something in our body that's That's weaker. Why? Lifestyle, which is mind-driven. How am I eating, drinking, sleeping?
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
But more than that is 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? And that's when we ignore all of that because this current trend of science is saying, oh, those don't matter. What matters is the symptoms. Let's just look for the symptoms.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
Checklist, diagnose, label. When you label someone, you chop up to 10 years more of their life. It's like it's adding on. They've shown studies of people with a mental health diagnosis have chopped up to 20 years of their lifespan. People on psychotropic drugs because of all the complications and the changes in the brain and the body. chopping up to 25 years of their life. I mean, this is serious.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
So here we have this already existing, then the pandemic hits. Now in other years, they say that there's an additional year being chopped off people's lives.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
But there's such a contradiction because they're saying, hey, there's this adverse circumstance, grief of loss of people, uncertainty, medical and not knowing if you're going to live or die and how long is this isolation going to go on and economic impact and whatever, the whole lot. That's trauma. And they say that when they say, but this is the way to treat it. Let's label it. Let's diagnose it.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
Let's medicate it. So here we've come into COVID with a problem, with that stupid philosophy that's created such a lot of problems. And scientifically, this has all been researched and shown. And now we've got the pandemic. And now they want to carry on that system that didn't work.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
to this which is going to make it even worse so we've got to shift our narrative completely and we've got to stop stop saying that mental illness is on the rise and that there's one in four people on antidepressants who are depressed a hundred percent of people are depressed and anxious and and concerned about this COVID pandemic.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
100% of people in the world at some point in their life have and will be anxious and depressed and in grief and sadness and terror and despair and one of the others.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
A large percentage of the population, and I'm not sure the exact percentage because no one's really done this kind of research, but estimates it's probably 30%, 40% of people will have extreme trauma from abuse, war trauma, that kind of stuff, where they'll go down the continuum to sort of the minus 9%, 10%.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
8, 9, 10, if you look at a continuum of 0 to 10, 0 to minus 10, and have things like psychotic breaks and hearing voices and extreme states of distress, mental distress, which are still not diseases. They are simply in that traumatic situation you're having a traumatic response. Think of someone who's a war vet. I just interviewed a Navy SEAL the other day who was trained snipers.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
And I mean, the things that he had to do and that his teams had to do, you know, they come back and try and we all know the problem of trying to reconcile back into civilian life after you've gone through. I mean, you know, this is what they'd be experiencing all day long, stuff that's completely against survival, completely against our human nature.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
And now they, instead of them being allowed to process this trauma, they're coming back and being told that they're diseased. And he would tell me that what they do with a lot of, we don't hear this sort of thing, but he told me this. They will inject things like Risperidol, which is an antipsychotic, into the spines of war vets because they're a bit psychotic. And they're psychotic for a reason.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
It's their coping. How do you deal with this? Of course, you're going to be angry. You're going to be frustrated. You're not going to be able to love like you did before. You have to be able to embrace process and be conceptualized. Giving them a drug is not going to help it. In fact, it constrains the brain. It restricts the brain. There's no chemical cure for that.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
That's just going to add fuel to the fire because your mind's got to work through the brain. So now you put chemicals in, and now that's not going to facilitate change. We have to do something. So it's like a narrative.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
That's a result of 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. They're not given an alternative reaction. I mean, an alternative narrative.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
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.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
So you aren't something. You aren't that. You are going through something.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
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.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
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...
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
not knowing how to manage it and how to deal with those thoughts that are driving you crazy and those flashbacks and the trauma of the flashbacks and going back into those situations of the rape or the abuse or the war trauma. It will drive a person crazy. And that's not crazy in the sense of illness. It's crazy in the sense of your mind
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
is like this erratic tidal wave around you and it's going through your brain and you've got these and your immune system and everything's screaming out to you and saying, hey, let's fix this. So a disease label invalidates it. And for a moment, it might be nice to know, okay, well, there's a label to how I feel because it kind of gives us a bit of feels like we've got a bit of control.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
So initially that gives you comfort, but don't see yourself as that. 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.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
I mean, just researchers coming out the other day showed that we've got to stop saying this. The top psychiatrists that lead this field will tell you we've got to stop saying this, that there's no ways that serotonin imbalance, you can't even measure that. There's no genes or serotonin imbalance causing it. It's what you've experienced that's the cause.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
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 is off.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
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 and your telomeres. And 1,400 neurophysiological responses are off. So 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.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
If someone comes back from war or 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…
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
that's terrible tell me about it I want to hear your story I want to support you your depression and an anxiety that you 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 hope 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 And that takes time.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
It's not a 15-minute appointment where I can give you a label. That takes time. It's also not the conditioning kind of treatments that are in place that some of them work if they're used in the right place. But to try and put a veteran who's gone through something back into the situation to try and condition them, you can't condition. You have to reconstruct.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
So it's kind of like an algebraic equation. X is the situation. Y is how you should.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
want you want to function for mental peace so you've got x plus y and so here we are in our x situation where we are the sort of human experiencing life we're supposed to be at y and you put the two together and what the current treatment says is that okay now we're going to create z we're just going to ignore x and y we're going to create a new thing and that new thing is you diseased but that doesn't work it's actually x plus y equals x y x is what you're going through y is where you want to find mental peace
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
And you want to put the two together to live together so that you can change how the past plays out into your future.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
Okay, so it's the process of the neurocycle. Excellent question. It's the process of the neurocycle, which is in the second half of the book. So the neurocycle is five steps, right? Yeah, this is the five steps. This is what I initially developed for people with traumatic brain injury. It was my first time that I developed it and developed my theory.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
And then from there, I refined it to all the different types of situations I worked with. And then it's been refined over the years. This is the most updated research. So a good scientist should keep learning and changing and improving, which is what I've tried to do. So in this book is the updated version of the neurocycle.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
The neurocycle is how you get your mind, which is always working, under control. If in a state of acute trauma, like I was in in that moment, acute trauma creates a red brain. I showed you that picture of a red brain. That red brain means that I have a tidal wave in my brain going on or changing. that the left and the right brain will be out of harmony.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
I'll have a drop of blood and oxygen to the front of my brain. I'm going to have things like the delta. We've heard of things like delta, theta, alpha, beta, gamma. All those waves are supposed to flow like waves in the sea. And if you think of the sea, you've got the big swells, which is delta.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
slightly smaller swells, which is theta, then they build, which is beta, the crest, which is high beta, and the gamma, which is the ripple on the beach. And so we want that through the brain in this nice kind of even way. That's kind of the Y state, X plus Y. X is what happens to us, Y is that state. So X happens and then that Y state gets thrown off. So in that moment, that's what happened to me.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
So what we want to do is, because mind works through brain and body, and mind is experiencing this trauma, which is a mess, our brain and body just do what the mind's doing. So then there's a mess in our brain and our body. But if I have that kind of chaos, I can't think straight. I'm not going to have any wisdom. I'm going to fall apart. And in this situation, I would have.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
And I have in the past, but now I've learned how to deal with this. And I talk about that this neurocycle can improve how you manage anxiety and depression by 81%. That's a massive...
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
claim and i've shown it scientifically okay so what i did was to try and get myself back under control now in that state you you don't know what to do in a tremendously acute traumatic state but i knew from my science and from my knowledge so i'm proactive so i could go into two zones so i went into two modes the one mode was the mental mess that i was in which is the pilot because i'm driving i'm in this time imagine yourself being in a helicopter that's like a time capsule
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
And you're flying over this forest and the forest is your mind with all these trees. And this acute trauma has just grown because it's instant. So here's this terrible. And your helicopter is drawn to this because you are in shock and terror and fear and deep panic and anxiety. that is all the smoke signals. So my pilot's going like this.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
The co-pilot is also me, but it's my wisdom because inside of each of us is our survival. And that's our instinct that, you know, when you give someone great advice and you just think, oh, wow, where did that come from? You know, you get that depth. Like we know what we know. We know how much we can handle. We will say, I know this, that kind of thing. That's the co-pilot, this wisdom.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
So what we want to do in those states is to get ourselves into the Co-pilot, remember the co-pilot and the pilot and you use the you language. So here you flying this plane all over and the co-pilot saying, okay, let's calm down. Let's land it at that tree. So you land the plane, you land this time capsule, whatever, and you get out, but you're with the co-pilot. So you're safe.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
So you've created a distance. And this is, I'm explaining in detail and obviously you train and it's all in the book and it's all, I've got an app that explains it too. But this is the mindset that I have trained myself to, So I can go into an acute trauma in that mind. I'm still crying. I'm still freaking out. But I'm freaking out in this zone where I now know, because I know that I need wisdom.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
I need to be able to tap into that. And I cannot get through this chaos, this chaotic brain and body and mind unless I've calmed it down. So I have to get through this because I'm stuck in that black tree and I'm stuck in this chaotic brain.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
Exactly. Exactly. Or an acute trauma, which is the blindsiding stuff, the stuff you don't expect that just hits us out of the blue. Yes, absolutely. So you're going into a level of fight and flight.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
So everything physiologically, 1400 neurophysiological responses are activated to help you focus, but they can't work for you unless you do what I'm telling you to do, which is to shift your perception. So this is the how to, because as soon as you shift your perception in an instant, because I told you within seconds, I brought the glucose monitor down.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
And I mean, I didn't even expect it to work that fast. I was amazed. And as it cycled through the 12 hours of the trauma, I was able to manage it more and more. So, I mean, really, and this is not the first time I've done this my whole life, but it was just so interesting seeing it in real time.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
and seeing the reaction okay so so step one is to get the co-pilot state of mind to to land the plane that's the preparation you haven't even got to step one so there's preparation land the plane first yeah so that's it so recognize that you remember there's a co-pilot which is your wise mind you the crazy pilot going all over the place land the plane let the co-pilot tell you okay land the plane and you land the plane where you need to which is at the issue
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
And what drew you in to land the plane to find the issue was your emotional. So this is step one. You're going to gather awareness. And gather means you controlling it. You're not sitting under the apple tree and all the apples are hitting you on the head. You are standing back and you're picking the apple. So there's control. There's a sense of autonomy, a sense of agency.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
So in the midst of chaos, you can create agency.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
mentally because your mind's driving it so you stand back and you say okay i picked that apple so that's my emotional warning signals terror despair utter totally traumatized like whatever they are you pick those apples you put them in your basket so you're gathering then you gather awareness so this is gathering kind of your awareness this is how i this is how i'm feeling this is what's happened this is what's like this is the event
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
Yes, this is gathering. It's almost, yes, it is, but you're gathering in very four little distinct packages because the more organized you are, the less chaos. We're being very systematic.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
So you gather awareness of your emotional warning signals, so the despair, anxiety, whatever, panic attack, despair. Then you gather awareness of your physical bodily response. So here's your co-pilot saying, okay, how are you feeling? Gather that apple, gather that apple. What is your physical?
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
Fluttering in the heart, panic attack, tension, gut-wrenching, adrenaline, whatever flights and fright freeze mode you're in. Then your behaviors, what are you saying? What are you doing? How are you responding? How are you responding? Yeah, action. Yeah, what are you saying? What are you doing? What is actually happening? And I'm grabbing this, I'm grabbing that, get this, get that.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
So what is that and is it working? I mean, just doing this changes how you do things. It's amazing. You immediately go into this different mode. Fourth one is perspective. What's your perspective? This is doomed. This is terrible. This sucks. This is end. Or, okay, this is bad, but... So gather, you gather. Then as soon as you've got those, you then go into reflect. So it's very systematic.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
And then as you've gathered and done all this preparation thing, you've got the two sides of the brain. We've got coherence again. You've got blood flow back to the brain. You've got oxygen back to the front of the brain. When you've got low oxygen and low blood flow at the front of the brain, which happens in a trauma.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
in an acute situation, in those sudden things, it drops, then you are impulsive. You're going to make bad decisions. You're going to react incorrectly. You're going to create incoherence. Your alpha wave in the brain drops and becomes more active on the right side. And that's on the right side, which is not great because that means that we now are not going to have insight.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
So by doing what I've just said, you change all of that. You bring back coherence. You increase alpha. And it may not be excellent yet, but you've started the process. Then as you move forward through the five steps, and I put all this brain stuff in the book and what happens. So I'm just giving you the overview. So then you start now reflecting. Okay, what have I got in my basket?
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
So number two, reflect. Reflect is an incredibly beautiful word, as is gather awareness. Gathering awareness, I just want to point out, in the earlier on I said that we mustn't be frightened of despair and anxiety and trauma and anxiety, depression, those scary, don't be scared of them because they are messengers. They're helpful messengers that are telling you something.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
And if you respond to them in that way, you then control them. But if you respond to them in fear, they control you. And then you're not going to move forward. You're going to get very stuck and then stuck in rumination and the patterns will just get worse. So get the control. Even though you can be crying, screaming, swearing, I don't care what you're doing, but just get the control.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
You're at the tree, you're doing the stuff. So gather, reflect. When you think of light going through a prism, it reflects all the colors of the rainbow. So there's depth. That one thing means a lot. And so reflect is this process of being a detective. Okay, well, why am I having that reaction? Now, when it's something in the moment, we pretty much know why. I mean, I knew why I was.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
So I didn't have to do too much reflection, but I had to, the reflection in terms of why, because I knew the cause. But the difference was I needed to reflect to say, okay, if I react like this, this is going to happen. So it was questioning, what are you doing with that emotion? What are you doing with that behavior? Is that behavior helping?
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
So the reflect in that situation would be different to a reflect for someone who is having a complete and utter imposter syndrome attack. And it's a pattern and they keep doing it. So they're now working sequentially through the process. So they're going to have to start finding why. What does it track back to? What sort of self-esteem issues are? What is the origin story of it?
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
So the reflect in that case would be, you know, ask, answer, discuss, why do I feel this? Why, why, why? And so it's a different, so it reflectors to just, you know, get meaning, but in a very comprehensive way, because there's all these patterns of meaning. In that acute trauma, it's quick. I'm doing the five steps quick. If I'm working on a pattern over time, I'm going to spend longer.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
Third step is you write. And the writing step is, obviously, I was in the midst of a trauma, I couldn't write, so I visualized. So the quick stuff you can just visualize, or if you can write, write. Writing, I recommend if you write, write. Write in the form of a metacog. I teach you how in the book, and I have a video of a NeuroCycle app that goes with this.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
A metacog is a pattern form of writing that stimulates. It looks like a tree. You start in the middle.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
and you work on branches and you put words and you don't write whole sentences you basically just pour information and you literally let it just come out in this pattern format but each the one of the key things is to is to group as you as a thought as something comes up you put it on one area and there's something else comes up you put it wherever so you have these clusters of information and every words on a line
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
And every line goes out of the previous line. And that format is unbelievable. It just drags the two sides of the brain together, digs deep, and you start getting insight into what you didn't even know was there. And then the fourth step is to then go and sort out that chaos that you've just written down. So the fourth step is to, okay, I've gathered awareness. I've reflected. I'm writing.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
What does this mean? What's the mental autopsy? What's the pattern, the activators, the antidotes? How can I reconceptualize this beautiful word, reconceptualize? And then you end off the cycle with a little action.
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
And that action, if it's in the moment, like in that five seconds or whatever, it's okay, I'm going to actually take a deep breath and I'm going to act like this, or I'm going to say that, or I'm going to do this. So it's a little action that anchors you back in a state where you can function in the next moment, in that acute trauma or in that
The School of Greatness
Has The Medical System Betrayed Women? How To Take Back Control of Your Health
imposter moment and imposter syndrome moment and you've now got to go and into a business meeting you're feeling like you can't because you're in you know the imposter syndrome fraud sort of setup so in doing it in the quick moment by moment you're going to have a simple quick action in the big stuff where you're working out the pattern each day you will have you do your work for a limited amount of time and i say do the work because it's not a quick fix if you're looking for a quick fix nothing related to greatness is a quick fix or mine right