E199 - Dr. Caroline Leaf: How to Stop Your Brain From Holding You Back

**Caroline Leaf** (0:00)
If you're feeling very anxious or stressed out, you feel that in your body. That's your mind talking, not your brain. Your mind is the superpower. A lot of people think the brain is boss, but there's no science to back that up.

**André Duqum** (0:10)
It feels like most people experience life as almost like a victim of their own brain.

**Caroline Leaf** (0:15)
I had clients that were literally written off by neurologists as vegetable. Within eight months, they were finishing school, going on to university. That's when I really saw that, wow, mind really does change the physical. And yet, it was pushed aside as pseudoscience, coming to mental health. The biomedical models tie people into disease diagnoses that limit people. You can't have depression. You can't have schizophrenia. They are signals. There's a because of behind that.

**André Duqum** (0:40)
What kind of world would we live in if someone knew how to regulate their nervous system?

**Caroline Leaf** (0:43)
It's fundamental. I had to have something practical, and that's when the neuropsycho was birthed. We saw significant changes, 35 to 75%. Once you start doing it, it changes your life. I wish I knew about this when I was at school. I wish I knew then what I know now.
We just need 60 seconds. It creates enough of a pause to be able to stand back and observe. So the first step is gather awareness. The second step is...

**André Duqum** (1:11)
Hey, everyone, welcome back to the Know Thyself Podcast. Our guest today is a cognitive neuroscientist and bestselling author. For over four decades, she's been studying the connection and the differences between the mind and the brain.
Her work in psycho neurobiology, it's a mouthful.

**Caroline Leaf** (1:29)
It is.

**André Duqum** (1:31)
Her work in psycho neurobiology has been over 40 plus years exploring the deep ties into behavior change and to healing brain injuries and trauma. And at a time when neuroplasticity was just emerging as a field of study, Dr. Caroline Leaf, such a pleasure to have you here.

**Caroline Leaf** (1:50)
Oh, thank you, André. I've been so looking forward to this. And it's such a pleasure to actually finally meet you. I've watched you a lot and I love your show.
So thank you for having me on. It's great.

**André Duqum** (1:59)
It's the greatest joy. I love getting to meet people outside of the, you know, fruitful conversations that we get to have. And your work is so fascinating. You've been devoted to it for so long.
What would you, how would you articulate what the essence of your work is aiming to share with the world at the stage of your life?

**Caroline Leaf** (2:17)
I love that question. Yeah, it's been 44 years now that I've been doing this. And I think the essence is to help people to understand what the mind is and the difference to the brain. Because we live in such a physicalist, materialistic world that's just so consumed with the whole neurocentric approach to brain, brain, brain. And we've lost so much of our humanity in that process and got so out of touch with the deeper things, the spiritual things, philosophy, what consciousness is. And it's affected people's mental health. So I really try and that's my whole field of study, but try and open people's minds to understanding that in a very practical way. So people, I love the philosophy side, which is so important, but helping people know how to do not just talk about it, but actually understand how to manage their mind and how to apply that.

**André Duqum** (3:06)
Yeah, applied philosophy. For most people, we think the mind and the brain are sort of interchangeable terms, and you make a clear distinction. So I think it's really important to set our definitions. That way we know what we're talking about throughout this whole conversation, and then we can dive deeper. So what is the difference between the mind and the brain from your conception?

**Caroline Leaf** (3:25)
My favorite question, the first question I'm always asked, especially in this time frame. Okay, so your mind is pretty much 99% of who you are. It's you. It's all your you-ness, your aliveness, your ability to think, feel, choose. Your brain and body are the physical organs that the mind codes life into and uses for you to physically show up. So they're very much, not even so much more than storage, but they are the things that are coded to help you function physically. So your mind drives everything. It drives your physiology, your neurology, and your psych, your whole mind.
And so you're, and it's got different divisions. So that's what people don't really get, is the different divisions of mind, because people often hear the word consciousness or, and as you say, they use the word mind-brain interchangeably, and then consciousness is this kind of elusive concept somewhere out there. So I'll try and make that very clear. So the brain doesn't think, the brain can't generate. The brain just simply responds to the stimulation received by the mind. The mind is doing all the processing, all the thinking, all the everything we're doing now, and we're using our brain and literally coding it into our brain. And that happens fast. I mean, it's around about 400 billion actions per second, just in the neurons that are happening. But our mind is even far way faster than that. So it's almost hard for people to picture. So we should say, in a simple analogy, would be something like if you think people understand if you're hungry, you eat, and when you eat, that changes your body, it changes your cells, and you'll get energy. And if you eat healthy, you feel the difference. If you don't, so if you think of that, like that concept, the way that food, you think you're hungry, you think about food, you choose the food, you put it in your body, it changes your body.