“Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess” from Finding Your Way With Caleb
“Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess”
Source: Finding Your Way With Caleb + Dr. Caroline Leaf (Listen 1 hr, 10 min)
Contributor: Selena Garcia
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“Embrace it…the minute that you embrace something, you get control over it.” - Dr. Leaf
Sometimes it's nice to be reminded that even those with a lot of growth and healing under their belt still face challenges. They are not immune or too "healed" for life. When your growth game is strong, opportunities for more growth seem constant.
Caleb Campbell is a former Army officer, NFL Draft Pick, and emotional speaker. He sits down with Dr. Caroline Leaf, someone he says helped change his life, to break down five action-oriented steps to help you identify the root of anxiety, depression, and intrusive thoughts. The goal is to help you begin to build "a healthy, new, and automated neural network inside of your brain."
Going into the science behind our emotions, Dr. Leaf touches on epigenetics, neuroplasticity, and behavior. It's an hour-plus conversation, but they keep it movin'. There's a good Frodo analogy from The Lord of The Rings, and Dr. Leaf passionately dives into the mind thought by thought, cell by cell to help you learn how to understand and “drive your mind.”
“Accept that loss of hope. Accept that loss of happiness. Accept that despair. Face it. Because now as soon as you face it, it’s weakening already.” - Dr. Leaf
(11:45) CALEB: “It’s just so easy to feel like ‘I’ve tried this before, it didn’t work,’ and then fall into the despair of, ‘I must be really broken if this isn’t working.’ It’s so easy to fall into that trap. What would you say to somebody who has maybe walked down this journey a little bit and life didn’t turn out the way they expected? Or it’s not going the way that they had planned?”
(12:08) DR. LEAF: “I would answer, ‘Embrace it.’ Embrace it because as we embrace something… you bring it into your fold. You’re not running from it. You’re embracing it because the minute that you embrace something, you get control over it… if you are pushing things away or suppressing, or even covering with guilt, or shame, or condemnation, or comparing to someone else’s journey, those are all ways of trying to not deal with stuff. If you compare yourself to someone else, or you get mad at yourself for not achieving, or feel guilt, or shame, or just shove it down and don’t think about it. Or get caught up in a sort of an addiction to try and suppress it, or whatever it may be—all of that is giving whatever it is that you’re battling with control over you. So as painful as it is, the only way out is through. We have to embrace, we have to process, and we have to re-conceptualize. And those are three really beautiful words, and three guiding philosophies that I’ve used with all the work I’ve done for 38 years in the mind-brain research, neuroscience, epigenetics, everything that I do. And the 25 years of clinical practice, my own life, my kids, is, ‘Everything, don’t push it away, embrace it.’”
(54:48) DR. LEAF: “People give up hope because they feel there’s no control. If you break down hope, ‘I have no hope. I don’t know how to get my mind under control. It’s scary living in my head. I’m having nightmares. I’m stuck. I can’t see a future.’ People will die from that. It kills people. And there’s many reasons why people lose hope, but essentially it starts coming down to feeling terrible about yourself… Everyone has their narrative and their story about what’s happened to them. But when people lose hope, they’ve lost belief in themself. And so, my main goal is to show you, “Accept that loss of hope. Accept that loss of happiness. Accept that despair. Face it. Because now as soon as you face it, it’s weakening already.”
(57:47) DR. LEAF: “Your brain sees a toxic thought in the same way it sees a virus. And so it’s trying to expel it. And so that’s why we get the bodily reactions. That’s why we get the warning signals. And our mind is trying to expel it. That’s why we get the emotional warning signals. Depression is telling you, ‘I’m trying to get rid of something.’ So listen to those, and then follow these five steps, and then do it diligently over time, and you then create a pathway to empowerment.”
LISTEN HERE (1 hr, 10 min)
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