Toxic thoughts, depression, anxiety–our mental mess is frequently aggravated by a chaotic world and sustained by an inability to manage our runaway thoughts. But we shouldn’t settle into this mental mess as if it’s just our new normal. There’s hope and help available to us–and the road to healthier thoughts and peak happiness may actually be shorter than you think.
Backed by clinical research and illustrated with compelling case studies, Dr. Caroline Leaf provides a scientifically proven five-step plan to find and eliminate the root of anxiety, depression, and intrusive thoughts in your life so you can experience dramatically improved mental and physical health. In just 21 days, you can start to clean up your mental mess and be on the road to wholeness, peace, and happiness.
Do you ever feel like your brain has just been “switched off”? Have you ever felt discouraged, unfocused, or overwhelmed? Are there unhealthy patterns in your life or your family that you just can’t seem to break? Do you start your day exhausted and depressed? Are you anxious about the future? Are you haunted by your past? Do you feel lost and uncertain?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, you’re not alone. More and more of us are suffering from anxiety, depression, and burnout. But this doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with you or that you have a mental illness. Anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress are all ways of describing natural human responses to adversity and the experiences of life. And we all face adversity in many different ways: challenging events and circumstances are as much a part of modern existence as they were a part of human history.
Calling these mental and emotional responses diseases misses the point entirely. Anxiety, depression, burnout, frustration, angst, anger, grief, and so on are emotional and physical warning signals telling us we need to face and deal with something that’s happened or is happening in our life. This pain, which is very real, is a sign that there’s something wrong: you are in a state of disequilibrium. It’s not a sign of a defective brain. Your experience doesn’t need to be validated by a medical label. Mental health struggles are not your identity. They’re normal and need to be addressed, not suppressed, or things will get worse.
Yet this is often what happens. Modern psychological and psychiatric approaches to mental health, particularly the use of drugs like antidepressants and antipsychotics, don’t address the complexity of the human mind. Indeed, they haven’t reduced the prevalence of mental health issues—major depression, for example, has remained at around 4 percent between 1990 and 2010.
Population studies indicate that something is going terribly wrong: people ages twenty-four to sixty-five are dying eight to fifteen years younger than previous generations from preventable lifestyle diseases. There’s a pressing need to change the way we approach health care, including mental health. We must shift our focus from a symptom-centered approach to one centered around each person’s complex story and unique experiences. This is the approach I’ve taken in this book.
You are uniquely, wonderfully you—your quest for optimal health and well-being should be just as singular as you are.
If there is one thing I have learned from my work in this field, it’s that we all have to learn how to catch and alter our thoughts and reactions before they become toxic neural networks and habits. How? That’s what this book will teach you. In this book, I’ll show you how to become the interior designer of your mind and brain in five simple steps, using the principles of neuroplasticity. In my clinical practice and research, I developed my Switch On Your Brain 5-Step Learning Process, and in the years since, I’ve continued to research and refine these powerful steps toward healthy mind-management, which I now call the Neurocycle.
In this book, we’ll apply the simple, practical, and scientifically researched and clinically applied 5 Steps of the Neurocycle to such issues as anxiety, stress, and toxic thinking. We’ll also learn how to build brain and mind health and resilience. You’ll find the 5 Steps are sustainable because they’ll help you learn how to use your mind and brain in a way that directs the neuroplasticity of your brain to your benefit, improving your mental and physical health in the process.
Mental mess is something we all experience often, and it isn’t something we should be ashamed of. This is my profession, and I still have to clean up my mind daily—neurocycling is a lifestyle! The events and circumstances of life aren’t going anywhere; people make a lot of decisions every day that affect us all, and suffering of some sort for you and your loved ones is inevitable. That said, I wholeheartedly believe that although events and circumstances can’t be controlled, we can control our reactions to these events and circumstances. This is mind-management in action.
In fact, managing the mind is more than a lifestyle—it’s a necessity because you don’t even go three seconds without thinking. If we don’t mind-manage our mental mess, our life will feel like a mess. We can spend lots of money and time on self-help books and seminars, wellness fads, great teachings, and podcasts. But all this will simply become nice-to-know information if we can’t apply it—more notches on our belt, more knowledge gathering dust.
Mindmanagement through using the 5 Steps of the Neurocycle, on the other hand, can transform all this great information into applied information. When we apply mind-management, we’ll learn how to actually use the advice and information we gather as we go through life. When we learn how to manage our mind, we can go from posting inspiring quotes on social media to inspiring others through the way we actually live our own life.
Part 1 of this book discusses what the mind is, what happens when we don’t use our minds properly, and why mind-management using the 5 Steps is the solution to cleaning up our mental mess, including the results of my recent research. Part 2 provides my clinically applied and scientifically researched mind-management plan—the Neurocycle.
If our minds are messy, we mess up our lifestyles, and when our lifestyles are messed up, our mental and physical health suffer. The 5 Steps are a way to harness our thinking power—any task that requires thinking can use a neurocycle, which means everything can use a neurocycle because we are always thinking! So, are you ready to begin cleaning up your mental mess?
Part 1 The Why and How
- What Happens When We Don’t Use Our Minds Correctly
- What Is Mind-Management and Why Do We Need It?
- Why the Neurocycle Is the Solution to Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess
- The Research
- How Can All This Science Help You?
- What Is the Mind?
- The Interconnected Mind
Part 2 The Practical Application of the Neurocycle
- The 5 Steps of the Neurocycle
- Directing Your Brain for Change
- Why It Takes Sixty-Three Days of Neurocycling to Form a Habit
- Neurocycling to Build Your Brain and Develop Mental Toughness
- Neurocycling to Detox Trauma
- Neurocycling to Break Bad Habits and Build Good Lifestyle Habits
- Neurocycling as a Daily Mind-Management Routine for Cleaning Up the Mental Mess
Appendix A: The Geodesic Information Processing Theory
Appendix B: The Metacog
Notes
Author : DR. Caroline Leaf
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