Welcome to the high performance health podcast with your host, Angela Foster, the show where we talk about everything you need to break through limits and achieve a high performance, mind, body and lifestyle.
Hi, friends, here's a little interesting question for you. Where is the mind? We know we have a brain we know you have a body and we know we have a mind or spirit if you like, but where is it? Where is it located? And what's it really responsible for? Certainly responsible for our life force, or our kind of inner spirit or whatever you would choose to call it really. And my guest on today's podcast really helps break it down and also helps you understand how you can kind of clear your mind of toxic thoughts and trauma. And we also dive into my own experience a little bit with clinical depression. And so I hope that you will find this episode valuable or maybe, if not you, but someone you know who's been struggling a bit, feel free to share this episode with them if you think it may help them. My guest is Dr. Caroline leaf. And she is a communication pathologist and cognitive neuroscientist with a Master's and PhD in communication pathology, and a BSc in logo PDX specialising in cognitive and metacognitive neuro psychology, she has written no less than 19 books, they're amazing. I highly recommend that you follow her on Instagram. And you'll also go and check out her website, Dr. leaf.com. It has a fountain of information. But without further delay, let me introduce you now to the lovely and highly knowledgeable Dr. Leaf. So Dr. Caroline, I'm so excited to have you here. You've written I think, is it 19 books is
just phenomenal. Yeah, the 19. One is just just basically going in and metal in layout. At the moment. It's I've done a book on mental health for children. So that's coming up next year. So how to help parents help the children with their mental health. And that'll be number 19.
Amazing. I just find all your work so inspirational. And there's just the way you integrate science with kind of the quantum world and the holistic nature and kind of everything is just absolutely fascinating to me. And I know it's going to be to listen to this podcast, I think a really good place to start because people don't understand this is, and I don't think I fully understand this, to be perfectly honest with you is what is the difference between the body, the mind and the brain? Because the mind, for example, seems to be no like Dr. Joe Dispenza talks about when the body becomes the mind. And I think people get very confused. So how do we define the mind? And how is it different?
Such a good question. And it's often the first question people asked me, and it's really the most important question. We've made the mind such a complex thing, and it's not complex at all. And the easiest way to understand the mind is to to, as I'm going to tell you, first of all, you and I are having a conversation, you're listening to me, I'm listening to you, I know about you, you know about me, if we didn't have a mind, we couldn't do this. So our mind is our ability that we have as humans to actually use our brain and use our body to express our uniqueness and to be able to process conversations and process life. If someone was dead, we had a dead person sitting in the studio with either your mailboat or both of us, they wouldn't be able to do anything. Because once you die, your mind pretty much goes. And we we don't know. I mean, there's all kinds of philosophical and spiritual things we can talk about there. But essentially, there's a driving force that keeps the brain and the body alive. And that is, I believe the mind. And I've been researching this for 30 years. So from a scientific perspective, and from a very philosophical and if you go back to like ancient texts and things, we've always made the distinction between mind and brain. It's only in the most recent last sort of 40 years for decades, that we have collected the concept of mind. And brain is the same thing. So they will always seen as separate. So in our current paradigm we talk about, and yeah, I've got a model of the brain, we talk about mind and brain. So those are the synonyms so they're the same thing. And we often hear people saying that the brain produces the mind, but I'll say it again, if we had a dead person here, we could hold up the brain, we could stare at it all day, it would never produce a thought. But you and I, as I'm talking you thinking, people are listening, they're watching, they're thinking they produce they they're pulling up on memory, say thinking of all kinds of things that they've read in this in this field. So the mind is our ability, or aliveness. It is our ability to think feel and choose on a psychological level. On a very physics level. It is a field and electromagnetic field, a gravitational field, a quantum field, we talk about biofield it's what helps the heartbeat, it works. It's what helps us make 800,000 2 million new cells every second. It's what's helping you sit there and be alive. It's what we would measure when we do a Q E, G, and E G on the on the heart. Any it's what's making the blood moves through your veins is what's making your body warm. Everything about your aliveness is coming from this driving force of the mind. So you take mind out and the brain and body immediately that lifeforce is gone, and immediately it disintegrates. So there's another word for mind, lifeforce. And if you want to get technical mind can be broken up into three different types, three different levels. And the most the biggest most driving intelligent force, part of mind is the non conscious in, in non non conscious, not unconscious, not subconscious, but nonpoint in and that is a part of you that's unlocked 24/7 It's what catered towards keep it active 24/7 I should say, it is helping us now to processes information, it is helping us to, as we listening, we drawing on all kinds of existing thoughts with embedded memories to help us to have this conversation is what helps us process and build every experience we have, as we alive, as we consciously awake during the course of today, into our brain and our body. And you know, in the field of our mind, and what sorts out our thinking while we're sleeping. So that's the biggest part of us, every experience we've ever had, since a certain point, like really late in the in the womb, and then birth up to the age that we had now is being converted by the mind into the brain as a physical structural change as a change inside every part of your body, which is body memory. And then also in the fields of the the the gravitational field all around us. So in someone's dead, that gravitational field that's around interest goes, it disappears, there's, you know, like now we can go past each other and you can get an electric shock from each other. That's kind of almost an example of the this field around us, that drives us that of which mind is basically what it is. And if someone's dead, that doesn't happen.
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These and then the other part of mind is the conscious mind the next the most obvious conscious is awake when we're awake, it's actually quite slow in comparison to the non conscious and unconscious, as I said, operates 24/7 and it speeds up so fast. But then 400 billion actions per second, the conscious mind is slow, it only operates at about 2000 actions per second. It doesn't mean that the conscious is not intelligent, very intelligent, we are conscious minds help us process what's going on. But our non conscious mind is actually enabling us to understand what's going on. So the non conscious has to drive the conscious and the conscious has to draw on an unconscious in order to make sense of what you're hearing. Now I'm talking about conscious and unconscious. So then there's something in between. And that's the subconscious. So the subconscious is like a portal or a bridge between the infinite non conscious and the finite conscious mind. And you basically operate in the non conscious 24/7. But the conscious and the subconscious is only working when you're awake. So that's kind of a broad overview of it. And I'll give you one more example that makes it really I think, quite easy to understand. And if you think that you and I neither of us are floating we both sitting in our chairs, and the tables and things behind us are not floating. And that's because of gravity. We can't see gravity but we could see the product of gravity we don't float so gravity operates in the spirit we go to the moon there's no gravity so people float. The mind is something some is a similar way. That's an analogy for mind. You can't see mine. I can't see I can see me I can see you. We can see our hands. We could open your head and look at your brain. But we we can't see my this clearly we can see it now technology and neck have seemed like someone's heart beating. That's evidence of mind as well. But we see the product of mind, which is your and my ability to communicate you and you and I are ability to be parents, whatever it is do this podcast. Does that make sense? That's a long answer. But
it's fascinating because then when when we look at that sort of three tier system, a lot of times we're here that our decisions and things are driven, like, you know, we might consciously decide that we want to adopt a new behaviour, for example, but actually 95%, were told is driven by the subconscious mind, actually, we have this other part that you're saying is the non conscious mind, I'm just kind of curious how that intersects in our behaviour, and really what part what becomes our personality effectively?
Okay, so the subconscious doesn't actually store anything. So everything is actually inside the non conscious and non conscious is this very misunderstood part of us. And it's often referred to as the unconscious in the subconscious. So the subconscious think of as just being a portal, it's a transition point, between an unconscious and the conscious. So in example, as I'm talking now, thoughts are moving, are stimulating all kinds of thoughts to move into a hit, we are, they're coming from the non conscious, what are they going through the subconscious where they're coming into the conscious, so everything's you are trillions of thoughts made of memories, because thoughts look like trees, and they're made of, like a tree is made of roots and branches, a thought is made of memory roots and memory branches. So in one thought, you'll have a cluster of similar memories. So this could be office conversation, people are building a thought. And everything that I'm saying, and you are asking, and we're discussing is going into the root system. So this thought of this conversation is made of memories. So memories are different to thoughts like brain is different to mind, thoughts are made of memories. And our mind makes these thoughts made of memories, out of experiences, and builds them into the brain as structural changes that look like these dog treats, and then are in our body, the brain sends an instruction via the mind to the body. And we store the thoughts into inside every cell of our body as a structural change in our body. So we making a lot of rebuilding every experience into the brain, the body and the mind. And it's the dreaded non conscious that's driving that process, the subconscious is just this alerting system, this portal, this bridge between the conscious and unconscious. So when we have in any one day, we are exposed to all kinds of stuff, we only consciously aware of somewhere between one and maybe 5% of what we actually expose to, because that's what we're paying attention to. But actually, there's a whole bunch of stuff that's being absorbed by your mind, and being built into your brain in your body. And a lot of what we had to know what percentage is different for every person is different in every one day. But in any one day, you may read a lot of negative political news or be most interested in negative environment. In that case, this may be of that 95 to 99% of stuff exposed to a large part of that could be negative. And another day, it may be more positive. But the point is that it's it's a conscious mind only aware portion. But that non conscious stuff is still building into our brain and our body. So one of the major roles of our non conscious mind is to scan through everything we were exposed to in a day, and then obviously over time, and then make us aware of those so that if they are toxic, so this would be a healthy thought if they're toxic, I just use these as representations because they do great representations. And it's easy to hang on to these because they're basically what the thoughts are black in the brain, these proteins fold nasty, that's what pretty and these proteins don't fold nicely, so totally and it's inflamed inflammation and chemicals, everything's out of balance here, but in it so our non conscious mind always trying to find these and get rid of these because these are destructive to our functioning. They steal our peace, they make us feel you know mental health challenges and physical challenges because our brain and our body are not designed to hold these for very long. They are mind brain and body are designed to get rid of them. So therefore our non conscious mind scans for these finds the ones that are the most damaging and sends a message through the subconscious into your conscious mind. And those so you become consciously aware of this by through four four ways your emotions, so anxiety, depression, frustration, irritation, whatever, or combination. Your behaviours, what are you saying and doing your bodily sensations, okay, what's going on in your body because you're going to pull up the memory that was in your body. And then these three channel into perspective, your mindset, your attitude, and essentially what we want to do as humans is train ourselves to tune into these false signals, because they will then take us to the thoughts and then the thought once we find the thought we can then find the details or data or memories, and then we can do something we can actually get past are overdue to be constructed and reconstructed. Because we know from neuroscience, that once you become aware of something through paying attention to the signals, this thing moves into the conscious mind from the unconscious through the subconscious into the conscious mind. And now I can change it, the minute you're aware, the branches, weaken the proteins weaken the bonds, the clinical bonds weaken. And now you can actually change that, or you can never change what's happened to you. But because your story is of the past, that's what's happened, but you can change what's in you. So you can change this into a healthy version. Over time, this gets smaller and smaller, eventually, it's tiny, and this takes over. But that takes time. And it takes cycles of at least 63 to 66 days and sometimes multiple cycles. So it's not one not four, not 21 days. To do this, we we deconstruct and reconstruct by listening to our signals takes us process. And this is pretty much a summary of what I've been researching for all these years, is what is what is the memory? What's the mind brain connection? What kind of power do we have? Can we can we respond to all the other stuff we feel? What do we do that? How can we make that more manageable and practice and practical, etc. And so the system I've developed for this is called the neuro cycle, which helps you to do this whole thing that I've just described. Did I answer your question, which you
very well, and I think just to just to clarify for people that are listening, rather than watching, what you're holding up, there is two versions of a sort of mini tree. One is lush and green and vibrant and healthy. And the other is kind of entangled and grey and sort of lost all its vibrancy, right, just so people can visualise.
Thank you. I mean, I always when we do that I got so caught up, I forgot, you
know, don't worry, don't worry at all, as the night's draw in and it's getting darker in the evenings here in the UK. And the mornings are much less bright is seems that we are just turning on our lights more and more and that can really disrupt our sleep. But the best way to avoid this is first of all, obviously to dim the lights in the evening and but also to pop on a pair of blue light blocking glasses. Now not all blue light blocking glasses block enough blue light are the ones by red light rising do and they are my favourite, I tend to put a yellow lens pair on in the afternoon. And then as I transition into the evening, I put on the red lens, which blocks 100% of blue light and just sets me up for a fantastic night's sleep every night. In fact, it's not just me or members of my household, my kits included, wear these blue light blocking lenses, and you can get yourself a core 10% off their lens or by heading over to Angela foster.me forward slash blue blockers as Angela foster.me forward slash blue blockers and entering code Angela at checkout. And if you're thinking about getting a red light, you can also get the same discount of any of their red light therapy devices as well. That's Angela foster.me. Forward slash blue blockers. Now let's get back to the show. What's interesting to me what you're talking about there and the rewiring of neuroplasticity is your saying how it can take time is when I have my own battle with clinical depression, which actually started postnatally, it then got sort of worse after each trial, I found it became more and more entrenched. And I know you talk about you know, we can end up taking power away from the individual if they're told that they can't get better, or they can't change things. And that was definitely something I was told by a by a psychiatrist that actually I was possible bipolar and I will be on medication for life. Now, I questioned that. But it did take me a very long time to transition of anti psychotic and antidepressant medication. And as you say, create those neural path new neural pathways. And the first step for me was actually highlighting the thoughts like you were saying. So I learned to recognise with CBT and other therapies, that that feeling that I was holding within my body came from a thought somewhere. And it took a while to make that connection. But as soon as I could understand that the feeling was created by a thought and I could track back and understand what that thought was and then begin to question it. I found that over time, and it's, it's still work in progress. It took me I think, five years maybe to go through that process of coming off and fully transitioning off medication. And even now, it's sort of three years on, I still have to remind myself to put one foot in front of the other right, neurologically, I know that I'm still sometimes wired in the morning to wake up feeling depressed. And I have to kind of actively participate if you like, and I almost compare it. I don't know what your thoughts are on this. But for me, it feels like if we had a cornfield, and the grass was really long on one side, and then there's a really well trodden path on the other. It's almost like my brain can easily slip into to go down that well trodden path. But what I've had to do is forge a new path and let the grass grow up over the old world. That's kind of how I feel it's going on. But it is difficult, right? Because these things can become quite entrenched, I think.
Well, absolutely. And what you described is thinking for sharing that, that story, and that is so totally what's happened. So you sent the link. Let me simplify this. When you go through something I'm gonna start from the beginning, when they told you you had clinical depression after having a baby postnatal depression, you would have been told that there's something wrong with your disease, when you will, your brain, your brains, disease and specialists, killing you bipolar and all these things. That's the biomedical model. And the biomedical model says, What's wrong with you, there's something wrong with your brain, you wired this way you even made a comment. You wired neurologically to wake up and feel depressed. That's not actually the truth. You know, there's no neurobiological underlying cause for the depression. So you're not feeling the viewer and feeling depressed because you had a weakness in your brain or heritable thing or a chemical imbalance. You were feeling depressed because your hormones were thrown out of gear from having a child and your whole life adjusted. And that is not an easy task. So postnatal depression is a very, very normal response to a very challenging situation. But they've medicalized something that's very normal. And what we should be doing is not labelling and medicating someone with postnatal depression, which is something goodness and well done for coming off your off your meds and, and not receiving that diagnosis. Because we know that diagnosing and labelling shortens people's lifespans and takes hope away and they don't heal as quickly. Basically, what should have been done was that you should have been given the support that you needed or let you speak about these things and talk about these things and process and someone should have told you, Hey, it's okay to feel like this. This is a very normal response. It's not that there's something wrong with your brain. But then to say you have bipolar and these not these are not even proper scientific categories. So these these, the whole biological math is falling apart. And yet, it's still very dominant. 85 to 90% of people still believe that they have depression because there's a inherited chemical imbalance because of a gene genetic flaw inside the brain or some neurobiological damage. But that's not what the 36 years have been down that road has not produced the neurobiological logical cause. And a paper was just released. And I interviewed your animal Crieff and Mark Horowitz, who are the authors of the paper. And they basically confirmed what we've known for years, which is that there is no link between chemical imbalance and serotonin, chemical imbalance of serotonin and depression and that you can't have an antidepressant to push backwards serotonin back. That's an incorrect story. And even psychiatrists have known this since the since the 70s. It's been in the psychiatry textbooks since the 90s. It that's the message that still son, so someone like yourself gets told, Hey, there's not something wrong with me. And in that, that thing, why is a thought that there's something wrong with me that I'm stuck on medication the rest of my life, and that we see from the research removes hope from people. But when you say to someone, hey, you having a normal response, and it feels very difficult, and we need to get we need us not say what's wrong with you. But what's happened to you, you've had a baby, these changes in your life, what support system do we need? What you need to talk about this you need to processes we need to find what do you need to deal with the situation so that you can feel a sense of peace. Also, the other thing is, we need to allow ourselves to feel the pressure, there is nothing wrong with feeling depression, feeling anxiety, feeling, fear, worry, frustration, these are not bad things, we've got to stop saying this is a bad emotion, that's a good emotion, I'm not going to do a technique to suppress the body motion. So coming to your pathway analogy, we always have that worn path because you can't change your story. But you've grown, you've changed the nature of the pathway, it's weakened. And it's not as strong as before. But you're so your story has is still there. But it's now you've rewired and you have a new way of functioning. And you do have to work with because you can remember how you were now we can't just take as you've experienced yourself, it comes a behaviour therapist is saying this is bad. And I need to take this user's technique to control this, you it's that will never work either. Because if if CBT is used in that way, because basically it's the it's if it's the white elephant in the room, the white theory fit, you tell a person not to think about something, they're going to think about it. No matter how many pathways you wire and I practice this and I say enough affirmations and I make the strong, I'm still going to fight this, what I need to do is recanvass I need to accept this. And I need to reconnect and I need to change its power. Now energy is never lost in the mind brain body connection. Energy is only ever transferred. So when you go through what you went through and you wean yourself off entities and all the antidepressants and whatever else they gave you and you psychotics as soon probably multiple drugs. You were going through a process and you input therapies, you are going through a process of doing this of pulling this app from an unconscious into the consciousness saying I'm feeling like this, these are my behaviours as we may not have consciously said these words, but this is essentially what you were doing. Recognising and deconstructing you are taking the power and transferring that energy over to a new way of thinking. Now this got small but it's still there. So if I now choose to pay attention to that I can regrow that. You know And that's that's unfortunately part of life, I can fall back into the into someone abused you and you and your victim and but you've been bitter about it and you have right to the button to feel bitterness, but at some point you're going to have to move into, into into releasing that, otherwise it's going to control you. But if you choose to get better again, it can come back in control you. So we've got to we've got to change we've got to build. And this takes time, this takes cycles of minimum cycle 6663 to 66 days. Now that patients who've done 12 cycles over two years to get to the point where they feel like they, okay, I'm starting to get a hang of this. And you mentioned that yourself. Now on top of going through the healing, of undoing the damage of thinking there was something wrong with you, meanwhile, you just had a baby. And there was a normal response, you had to deal with all the self. There's a lot of non conscious damage that was done to your own identity and your selfhood. Because you weren't, you know, your mom, your new mom excetera is not turning around with your brain, you had to fix that then they were probably all kinds of other patterns and things that came up. And you also coming up the drugs. Now those medications, those sacral Tropix, their long term safety has not established at all. In fact, they change the brain in a negative way. They're also not a disease. They're not fixing the disease. They simply psychoactive the drugs, they're not like insulin that fixes a disease of diabetes. They are drugs that have a psychoactive effect. So they like cocaine, and they're like alcohol. So they changed the way that the brain functions. And they like an anaesthesia, they suppress the emotions, and that's overtime, that's not fixing the problem. That's just how
I agree. And also, as you say, it's hugely disempowering, because actually the medication that I would take at night, I mean, my husband will remind me now that, you know, I had to, I had to know that I was going to be in bed within 15 minutes, because otherwise, I was pretty much just going to fall asleep, it was so strong, you know, and just be sort of almost unconscious. And I would have terrible night sweats. And I think, you know, I just I love the information you're sharing, because I think so many people at the moment, particularly after the pandemic, now we're kind of entering into, you know, stress around the economy and things are really strong anxiety and depression, there's like never been a great time really for the work that you do. One thing I guess, is that sort of interesting for me, meditation really, really helped going inward journaling really starting to understand myself. And strangely, hypnosis was very powerful hypnosis I found allows me to access this kind of invisible thing that we call the mind.
Conscious mind via the sorry, the mind is not, the mind is visible not to ask because we having a conversation. But these are the driving forces at 95 to 99%. That's the sort of thing hypnosis is helping you access, what's deep down these things that are deep down inside that you that you're not even aware of. And so you should use something like hypnosis, or you can do this consciously as well, you're going to have to go through hypnosis to find this. But it's basically finding these things and putting them up. Sorry to interrupt you, I just wanted to share that. But you can do that process as well, you can. That's what I've spent all these years researching. And I've developed a system based on research. And we still do a lot of clinical trials and research and studies. And it's called the neuro cycle. So I'm sure you've probably aware of it, it's in this, it's in this book, pushing this book, and I have an app as well. And it's literally the how you can train yourself to get your conscious mind to connect to listen to the subconscious to find the thoughts in an unconscious, locate an unconscious to talk to the conscious, and finding those patterns, and then deconstructing and reconstructing. So it's a daily 15 to 45 minute process that you do in cycles or 63 days. But what's beautiful about this, when you get a handle on getting the conscious to talk to the non conscious through the neuro cycle, you can put any CBT technique and anything AACT whatever technique you want affirmations that you can put them in at the right place. Because if you do CBT, and all those kinds of things at the wrong place, they actually won't work. They'll be damaging, they weren't there'll be a temporary relief, but not sustainable. But if you put them in at the right place, there's a five step process. And your first step would be things like CBT, and that sort of thing. Meditation is this your prior step. So meditation creating is so many different types as we know, the meditation, decompression, etc. That prepares your brain neuro physiologically. So yes, it's extremely helpful. We've got it helps to to calm down the neurophysiology and get us ready for the work of deconstructing and reconstructing. But if we just just do meditation alone, which I know you've experienced, you're going to actually feel worse because it brings stuff up and manage that, you know, mindfulness, meditation, etc. You don't manage what's come up, then you've got to you it's going to cause make you worse. So you've got to meditate to get yourself or I call it brain preparation, which meditation, breathing all fall under that category. You prepare your brain and then you go into go beyond brain preparation, beyond mindfulness beyond meditation, into actively embracing processing and re conceptualising. And that's what I mean about there. Pull this up, pay attention to the signals, deconstruct reconstruct, you can't just take say this is bad. And I'm going to do this and say there's times to step that up, you've actually got to go through the process. So that's what the neuroscientists in the book, and they actually help people do. So nobody's throwing up a lot of stuff. And there is a scientific technique that is literally a way of me giving you therapy that you can take what you're really doing, but putting it in the correct framework, so that you drive the mind brain body connection. If that makes sense.
It does make sense. And we'll link to that in the show notes there neuro psycho app and your annual book as well, because I think it really helps speak to so many people and listeners will message me, you know, how do I overcome trauma and things like that and release it? And I think this will really, really help them. One thing I'm really curious about, because thoughts of things effectively, and how we create our own reality. Just your thoughts around that I know you touch on some of your books as well, how do we how does this sort of interlink with the manifestation and what we're bringing into our world?
Okay, so that's an excellent question. So let's say now that you take this conversation, you've had this conversation and people, everything that we've been saying, is being taken by the mind and the built into the root system of the of the state. So we building a thought about how to manage our mind, mental health, all this stuff, trauma, etc. So that's the name of the thought and every bit of detail that I'm giving you is going into the root system. So the name of the podcast is the seed in the ground, and our conversation is building the roots. So that's the source the origin story, then as you're hearing this, as a unique individual, as I've been explaining, other thoughts will be stimulated from the non conscious to move through the subconscious into the conscious mind. And that helps you then interpret what you're hearing. And you build this interpretation into this part. So this is a physical thought made of proteins in the brain with these three parts. That's the origin. This is the interpretation in a toxic situation. That's the source of the pain. And this is the interpretation. And that's the distorted processing. Both of these show absolutes like this one. So now in order for me to talk about this stuff, I've spent years building these kinds of thoughts into my brain about all the work that I've done all the studies and the research and the clinical practice. So I have lots of these as I'm talking to you. These are manifesting in our discussion, I'm drawing on this data, this information, as you asked me a question, it's pulling up an appropriate experience or something I've studied or part of a clinical trial, and I'm drawing on that. And this information, the origin story, my interpretation, how you pulled the question posed the question, that is then all this is what I am using to say what I'm saying. So I'm manifesting what I'm saying. So what we say in what we do is an outpouring of our thoughts, everything you feel, say do in your perspective. And what your body feels is not a random thing coming out of fresh air. It's coming from a source and that sources of thought, and this is a nice thoughts can constantly be changed when we pull them into the conscious mind. So therefore, I have blacked out in our current environment. We are being told all the time there's a pandemic in mental health our children are going through a pandemic and mental health is so much fear of mental health, we have the most overdiagnosed children in history and over medicated children Gen Z and Gen alpha, the most medicated children in history, and basically are going to lead the short lead literally chopping off 15 To 28 to 25 years of their life to these diagnoses and medication based on science. It's not good science at all. And so what we have, that's why that's why I'm releasing the book next year how to help a parent to help their child in the metal maze. So this problem for the adults and then now how do you help your child. So essentially, what we are trying to what I'm saying is that we can have this constant barrage of fear of and I have to see a professional, I have to get a diagnosis. If I don't get that medication, I'm not doing the right thing for my child. Maybe that's the messaging we've had before toxic messaging, that that has run manifested in a fear of for the parents not even knowing how to be a parent. I don't even know what I'm talking about. It's like, you
know, I had a psychologist came, you know, that they needed to medicate my, my son is on the autism spectrum, but he's very high functioning, had anxiety. And we actually felt my husband and I that it was the wrong school environment. And we needed to move them out of that. They wanted to medicate and when we said we're never ever going to medicate a child with a growing brain, it's just not going to happen. So we looked at his nutrition, we looked at coaching him we looked at so college, you know, sessions, he does meditation and everything else and remove them from the environment. And he has flourished, his exam grades have gone up. And it's just amazing to see like, I love what you teach. I think it's so important.
But a lot of my early work on developing the neuro cycle, that system that I keep talking about was on children with autism that had gone through the same stories and we said Listen bits rather change this whole way we do this and work with them in terms of helping them to manage their mind and look at the whole story, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, we if we constantly send a negative message that your to your child, or there's something wrong with you, and you need this medication now And the medications already telling the brain and the messaging is adding another toxic wiring. I mean literally a wiring back telling someone that you have a label telling someone there's a pandemic promo telling someone that you we have to get a consult with a professional to get a diagnosis we building in the wrong expectation, and in that manifests in us losing our selfhood. If we think oh, when bottom line is that life is tough, these challenges, bad things happen. And we have responses to those things. So instead of pathologizing and medicalizing a normal human response to COVID, to loneliness, to death to loss to trauma, depression, anxiety or normal responses. Grief is a normal response to these adverse circumstances. They don't need to be middle class. Childhood does not need to be pathologized. What we need to do is get together as a community and embrace and process and re conceptualise and do what you did with your child, change the environment, change the diet, look at them as a holistic person, build up the selfhood, etc, etc.
Amazing. Thank you so much for coming and sharing that I know we have a very short time today. And I'm grateful for you to come in because you know you have other commitments today. Hopefully we can do a part two. Where can people find you? It would be amazing to do that. Where can people find you? Dr. Caroline that your app your books and everything.
My Instagram handles Dr. Caroline leaf all my social media handles Dr. Caroline leaf, my webpage Dr. leaf.com. The books available wherever books are sold. My podcast is actually called cleaning up your mental mess. The app is called neuro cycle, you can go to new recycled dot app on our webpage, you can go to iTunes, Google Play wherever you download. And we've also just started recently launched in this country as a certified facilitator programme, where you can actually become a neuro psycho coach. And then you can coach other people in how to use this in the therapies and coaching counselling, how
exciting and how create that ripple effect across the world. It's amazing. Thank you so much again for coming on the show.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. As always, the show notes will be over on my website, Angela Foster performance.com forward slash podcast. And you can download the transcript there together with the show notes and all of the other resources that I have on my website, Angela Foster performance.com Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.
Thanks for listening. Remember to review and subscribe, you can grab the show notes, the resources and highlights of everything Angela mentioned over at Angela Foster performance.com You can also snatch up plenty of other goodies including the highly helpful Angela recommends page which is a list of everything she personally recommend to optimise your mind, body and lifestyle
