Ep 84: Neuroplasticity

Recently, I met with a therapist and we went to grab a coffee. The therapist said that a lot of times people will come to him and he didn't think he is the right fit for them, because in therapy, it's usually about healing trauma and looking backward.

But sometimes, what somebody needs is to create a positive vision for the future and manage the mind to set up a plan the next time you notice the triggers.

Mind management or self-directed neuroplasticity helps you stop the stress cycle and teach you ways to release stress. Yes, stress is supposed to be released and this is possible when we use tools to manage our mind.

And in this episode, I will give you data, tools, and steps on how you can make it a habit to manage your mind and achieve permanent change.

Learning about self-directed neuroplasticity is the best gift that I have given to myself and now, I'm here to share it all with you.

What you'll learn in this episode:

The synergy between coaching and therapy
Self-directed neuroplasticity and its benefits in managing our minds
Practical tools and techniques for mental management
An overview of Caroline Leaf's research on mind management

Mentioned in this episode:

How to connect with Marie:

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Welcome to the Bloom Your Mind podcast, where we take all of your ideas for what you want, and we turn them into real things. I'm your host, certified coach Marie McDonald. Let's get into it.

Well, hello everybody. My voice is a little scratchy today. I think it's because we got back from Hawaii and our timeline has been all wonky ever since then because of the three-hour difference, which is such a small difference compared to places that I've traveled. But my children have not been able to go to sleep at night, so we'll get in bed at eight or nine or whatever, and then they're still awake at like midnight and so we're all thrown off right now. But we're also totally full of beautiful memories from a couple of weeks with family in Hawaii.

One of the things that I love so much about Hawaiian culture are the uncles and the aunties, and it sort of carries with me when I come home, because Hawaii is a place where we have family, right when my husband's dad and brother and cousins, who are now are, you know, my brother and dad and cousins in a way too. They'll live out there. So, we go out a lot and it's sort of like a. Every time I go I have more and more appreciation for the culture and it becomes something that I feel like is a part of me more and more, and one of the things is that there's a respect that is given to anyone in the community that is a little bit older and there's some humor with it and some, you know, with the names. There's like humor.

Like uncles always have the right of way in the road right, so everybody's going to stop for an uncle that needs to cross, no matter if it makes sense that they're crossing right there or not right. Like the uncles and aunties have this lived experience and wisdom that comes from age and even if you've never met someone before, you refer to them as uncle or auntie when they're in this older age bracket. That, just like. I just love it so much and I'm always looking for ways that we can embed some of that reverence and respect for age into our own culture. We've lost a lot of that. The uncles and the aunties, oh, I love it.

And when we're out there in Maui for any of you that have been out there, there is a thing called the Hana Highway. There's a town or a small city called Hana on the east side of the island and it's very remote, hard to get to. It is a day sojourn to spend doing the whole Hana Highway and it's one of my favorite things to do.

It's some of the most beautiful lands that I have ever seen, and it sort of transverses many different ecological ecosystems which Hawaii has. I don't know, out of the 13, Hawaii has eight, or I'm probably getting that number wrong, but Hawaii has a ton of the different ecosystems that you get to experience as you drive through this one road, one after another after another. So, it changes from lush jungle to this like lava landscape and then fields and then sort of like misty mountaintop. It's just amazing. And our cousin has some land out there about half an hour before you get to Hana. He has some land there and it's very wild. So, you have to do some courageous driving and then some bushwhacking to get to the land.

Right now, and we did it a whole group of us sort of spent a day going to see his land, which is number one. I'm talking about this because I love it. I love how we as family members and friends and community can support the burgeoning ideas and exciting life changes of the people around us, right, so the whole family like how many of us were there?

There were like seven of us or something that got in a couple of cars and drove spent the entire day driving across the island letting our cousin lead us to all of his favorite spots the big giant waves in the ocean, down the hill from his new land. He was like jumping into them and body whomping, which is body surfing these giant waves right and taking us to local farm stands. And then we trekked all the way up to his land big, long walk and we got to the top and it's all raw right now.

It's full of beautiful plants that have just populated the land for a long time, and he started to clear it. But not only did we get to go there and choose to invest a day of our time experiencing what's exciting to this person that we love, which also, I believe, really builds energy and supports individuals that we love, maintaining their idea and moving forward with their idea when we all show support of it right.

So, I just share this with you to ask who in your life has an idea that you could ask them about, take them out to coffee and listen to them talk about their idea.

Who has an idea that you could spend some time just looking at right and like experiencing, watching, understanding. Can you tour a studio or learn about a business idea or have someone who's learned to cook something for you? We can all be a support system for that beautiful passion that comes for the people around us by giving our time and energy to witnessing it.

Last episode was about ikigai, which is a Japanese word to describe this passion, this flow state, this idea of when we have something in our life that we're really passionate about and that contributes to the world. It sort of kind of keeps us busy and keeps us having a long and fruitful life. Where are the people in your life practicing things that are ikigai and are trying to share those with you? How can you experience them? So, this was really wonderful to support this idea, but also to go and see raw land. My parents are building a house from scratch in Taos, New Mexico.

My husband is moving his design build wood shop from this place he's been at for years and years, maybe decade or close to it, and then he's doubling the size and moving to this new place. That's a blank slate. Our cousin here in Hana has this raw land. It's so wonderful to see all of these brilliant people taking a blank canvas of land or building and ideating, coming up with their idea for what it's going to look like and then going through the process of making their idea real.

So, we got to go up there and see it and one of the things that came to me the most important thing that I see in my clients that I feel has changed my own life and that I see in all these people making big moves right, taking their dream and making it real, wanting to own a piece of land. My cousin's story is just so inspiring, for all the ups and downs he went through to get this piece of land that is his dream right and now he's building on the land. Same with my parents Many times over I've told some of their stories, definitely same with my husband and myself.

But one of the things that is most significant in all the people I just described is what is called self-directed neuroplasticity, and that's what I want to talk about today, because I am just seeing it as such a common thread in the people in my life who are making their ideas real and living their dream. I see it as one of the most fundamental things, that the biggest gift I've ever given myself was to learn this. And another thing has happened lately to corroborate how important this is.

So first I'll just say I believe that their you know physical practices, health practices in sleep, in eating well, in an exercise. That's like one leg of the table of being really functional in your life and living a happy, healthy, long life is your health practices. Another leg of the table is your relationships and creating community, creating strong bonds to the people you have deep relationships with, being an excellent communicator and working on yourself so you can bring your best love and highest self to those relationships is another leg of that table. And to me, the third leg of that table is this self-directed neuroplasticity is mind management. Everything starts in our mind, and so that's what we're talking about today.

Now, the second thing that has happened that's really supported me wanting to make an episode about this is that there've been a lot of findings lately for the efficacy of coaching. There was a meta-analysis conducted by the University of Sydney that really gave a lot of evidence to the effectiveness of working with a coach. There's research done by the International Coaching Federation and then in psychology review in Journal of Positive Psychology there have been studies which is really exciting because the field of coaching is pretty new that have really corroborated how effective it is to work with a coach, how it positively impacts all these different areas of life.

But I've also recently had therapists reaching out to me over the last few years, always until last month or a few months ago. It's always been indirect. I've had my clients say to me my therapist loves you over and over again. My therapist thinks you're amazing. My therapist, really you know. Every time I share with my therapist what we're working on, my therapist loves you over and over again. My therapist thinks you're amazing. My therapist, really you know. Every time I share with my therapist what we're working on, my therapist says, wow, you're on the right track there.

And I've had a couple of people that have gone to sort of like reboots over time where they go into a thing where they're doing deeper therapy for a couple of months at a time and so they're experiencing like panels of you know five or six therapists and they come back and say everybody is really glad I'm working with you. When I get that type of feedback, I feel like the therapist and me are running through a field towards each other and like giving each other a high five.

We never get to meet each other but like on some spiritual level we are like high fiving each other because we've got our clients or, in the therapist world, their patients backs. So, I've always had this wonderful feeling of collaboration with all these people. I don't know because my clients tell me that their therapists love my work, but recently I had a therapist reach out to me. That therapist said I'd love to meet up with you. So, we went to coffee and the therapist said you know, there's a lot of coaches out there and some are certified, and some are not. I have seen really great effective change for some of my clients that you've worked with. That I was really impressed by, and I want to hear a little bit about what you do. We had a beautiful connection.

The therapist really loved my work and background and stuff and at the end he said a lot of times people will come to me and I just don't think I'm the right fit, because I am a person this therapist said that practices sort of like healing trauma, looking backward, healing what has happened in the past. But sometimes what somebody needs is someone who's going to just take them into the future, help them create a positive vision for the future and give them the training and the tools and the support that they need to get there.

And so, I want to send them to you, right, yeah, and it felt so good. I of course will, you know, refer to each other, but it felt so good to actually meet someone in person and I started thinking afterwards like why are we all so excited about collaborating together, right? Why do we feel so good about being aligned in our work here as coaches and therapists? Right, looking back, looking forward, and it lined up with some research that I've done around self-directed neuroplasticity.

So, there are over 800,000 people that die of suicide every year a preventable cause of death, right, and I did read that it is the second highest cause of death. I think the first one might be automobile accidents, but I read it's the second highest cause of death for a pretty young age bracket, which I believe was somewhere in the mid-teens through the mid-twenties or late teens through the mid-twenties, which is so devastating to think about, right so preventable for these beautiful minds. I've also been reading in The Anxious Generation, which I referenced before, about rates of anxiety and depression going up since 2010, related to a digital lifestyle and social media.

So, we're seeing all of these mental health issues cropping up, but I have to say that if you don't relate with depression, anxiety, any of these big markers that we can measure, I also talk to a lot of people that just feel burnout or feel hopelessness or feel sad or feel like they can't make a positive change because there's too much work to do in the world.

I think a lot of that has to do with accessibility of information, how we can all see all the problems and a lot of other things global warming, politics, all these things. But you know what we can do. We can self-direct our own minds, and whether I'm thinking about the people that I started this episode talking about, who are buying pieces of land that are their dream pieces of land to build their dream house in an area that they love, or whether it's my husband, you know he started in the backyard. He started his business in our backyard with giant shade structures in this house. We were renting in San Diego, just taking on whatever jobs he could, and that was like 10 years ago. And now he has this beautiful business that he's built, that he's doubling in size, getting big CNC machines, all these things because he's made his idea real.

Whether I'm thinking about these or the clients that come to me and work with me to do public speaking events to 10,000 people or to write a book or start a business or make an album or just change how they want to be in the world, whether I think of these big goals, or I think of just going on a vacation. We just went on a two-week trip. The amount of stuff that comes up on a trip like that to deal with right Plans going awry, other people's energy and emotions, other people's communication you know when you have to change plans over and over again because the plan that you had didn't work out. All of these opportunities, my kids, energy going up and down, the kid's disappointment or hopes or whatever. Everybody coming together to talk, to plan, to be together.

Self-directed neuroplasticity is the thing that I see making people really successful at regulating themselves and at being able to connect and communicate and change their plans and effectively have wonderful trips. I kept calling on it to myself over and over, and so did my husband. So, I want to talk about that today and share a study, and then I'll close out. So, I'm going to share this study that supports mind management. This is done by a woman named Caroline Leaf, who is an incredible thought leader and psychologist that studied self-directed neuroplasticity, which I was trained in through. A woman named Melissa Tiers practices hypnosis in New York and neuroplasticity teaches it. I'm going to go see her next week in Vegas to hear her talk again about it.

But what Caroline Leaf found is she did a study with patients that practiced her format for neuroplasticity, which is pretty related to what I teach in episode 18, the tool that changed everything the cognitive model reframing technique. She teaches a little bit different of a format of self-directed neuroplasticity, but in any practitioner that teaches it, we're all kind of teaching the same tools, which are to process the emotions of whatever it is whether you're making an idea real or just experiencing life or going on a trip to write and reflect and reframe so that we catch our own toxic behaviors and so that we don't take other people's toxic behaviors or emotions or thoughts personally, because they are a reflection of whatever that person's going through and then taking action to either manage ourselves or communicate it in a different way.

So, I'll talk a little bit about that again at the end. But what she found in her research was amazing and this is what I really want you to hear that self-directed neuroplasticity and let's just call it mind management for right now, which is the main thing that I focus on in my coaching programs as a tool to turn ideas into real things.

She found through her research that it increases longevity. It literally practicing mind management increases the length of your life. She found that through measuring telomere length which telomeres are the caps at the end of chromosomes that measure biological aging and toxic stress actually shortens those telomeres which she measured in her control group and her experimental group, where the people that were practicing mind management over six months and limiting toxic stress and being able to really use their brain to work for them instead of against them, elongated their telomere lengths and the people that did not, their telomere lengths shortened.

So toxic stress and not managing our mind actually shortens the length of our life and there are a few different reasons for that. When we are not managing our mind, our cortisol and homocysteine levels are higher. Those are our hormones that are related to stress. So even when we're trying to be positive and just being like it's all good, it's all good and pretending that feelings of distress or stress are not there, that's what we call toxic positivity, because it literally is toxic to our body.

When we're not looking to understand why we're stressed and seeing the signals our body is giving us, it increases. Or when we're just rolling with the stress and just feeding into it and creating stories around it, which I see happen a lot it increases these stress hormones which create inflammation throughout the body. You know, we all know right, how bad inflammation is. We're all fighting inflammation, right, and so high stress levels which come from not managing our mind, create inflammation throughout the body, which it decreases our immunity, increases, likelihood for cardiovascular disease, dementia, all kinds of health problems which shorten our lifespan. And when we practice mind management, our long-term health and happiness increases.

This was measured in Caroline Leaf's study after six months and throughout the six months by the BBC's well-being scale, by a hospital scale that measures anxiety and depression, and by narrative measures, as well as by measuring blood to measure those stress hormones cells, which we saw in the telomere length and through EKGs where we measured she measured I was not there she measured activity in the brain and saw all this amazing improvement in brain function.

Okay, so when we do not manage our stress let's just look at it from that way, we have shorter lifespans, rough relationships, we have higher stress hormones in our life and we are, through all of the general wellbeing measures, less happy. But we also see and then I'll stop talking about all this data in just a sec, but you know I'm a data nerd we also see in her study that when people are not managing their minds, there is a disconnect between the amygdala, which is basically our emotional library, where our emotional perceptions that are attached to our thoughts are all stored there, and the part of our brain where decisions and judgments are made. So basically, that means that there's less activity between good, wise thinking and our base responses that are emotional responses, right?

So, if we're not practicing mind management, that's when we see ourselves being creating stories around things, just rolling with the stress, blaming other people, making ourselves victimized, accusing other people or going into shame cycles and stress cycles. I see this all the time. I see it all the time. People create a story in their head and then roll with it, and it creates. People create a story in their head and then roll with it, and it creates a lot of strife in relationships. And you lose out on your ability when you're doing that, when you're just diving into that stress, that victimization.

What we do is we lose our ability to think with our higher mind and to reflect on how was I a part of this? What could I do better? What could I do about this? How could I look at this differently? So, we lose our ability to connect, build these long relationships with people, but we also limit our lifespan and make ourselves more prone to disease. So, if that is not a case this beautiful study by Caroline Leaf, which you can read more about in her book your Mental Mess, which the biggest fan of that title, but the content is great in her research Let me just tell you a little bit about what the subjects that did practice mental management, what they saw. So, all of this great activity between the two sides of the brain increased energy flow in their brains so that, instead of getting stuck, they could access. How about this? Okay, what do I actually think about this Right Through practicing mental management every day, they had way more control of how they were reacting to things but also along with the improvement in brain function.

That was permanent. Okay, so the study was 63 days, but then they measured it six months out and beyond that. And it's permanent change because mental management is a habit, just like exercise. The wave frequencies changed in their brain, so they spent I don't want to go deep into this, but you know. But brainwaves are really cool to read about and think about, but there was a lot of increase in the areas of their brain and the changes in the brainwaves the gamma brainwaves, the high beta brainwaves, the delta brainwaves that showed that new patterns were being made.

So, what I mean by that is that practicing mental management actually changes the structure of your brain. That's why we call it self-directed neuroplasticity. If you practice mental management every day, you change the structure of your brain for the rest of your life. I feel it in my own brain. I feel the change. That's why I say it's one of the best things I've ever given myself. It's been about five years since I've really been practicing it every day and it changed my life. So, the last thing I want to say to really support the idea of practicing mental management every single day, along with being a great communicator in your relationships, which those are interwoven, but also practicing strong health habits, which, again, are over or both interwoven as well.

Subjects in the study who practice mental management got more and more confident as they went. They felt better and better overall. But because they were the ones that were causing themselves to feel better, the circumstances outside of them had not changed. Y'all, we talk about that all the time here, right? The facts of life, the things we cannot control, are going to go the way they're going to go. That's how they be right. We can't control other people; we can't control the weather. There's lots we can't control. But because their increase in happiness and overall wellbeing was related to their own ability to manage their mind, they felt more and more confidence because they have the tools to deal with life. So, they went from I don't know what to do, I feel confused, I feel foggy a lot too. I know exactly what to do. I have a process that I can apply. I just need to look at how I'm thinking about this and from there I'll change. So not only can we decrease stress hormones, increase the length of our life, make ourselves more resistant to disease, but we can also use these tools to increase the quality of our relationships and turn our ideas into real things.

The last thing I'll say here, before I review the tool and then close out, is that stress is supposed to be released when we use mental management to release stress. This cycle of tension and release that's supposed to be there, right? Our systems in our body are supposed to get a little stressed. When we're afraid of flying or we're speaking to a large group for the first time or whatever, it is right, we're going into a hard conversation. But when we do not have mental management tools and somatic tools hopefully, to release the stress, it becomes chronic. We get in the habit of perceiving the world, the physical world around us and our own body's sensations of stress as bad for us instead of good for us. Does that make sense? So, when we don't understand how to break, stop the stress cycle, which is written a lot about in the book burnout, we then become masters of cycling in stress all the time. So, when we get stressed, we're stressed, that we're stressed, and we react negatively. Actually, Caroline Leaf says we then react negatively to daily stressors over long periods of time, which compromises instead of enhances the immune system. So mental management will help you stop the stress cycle and teach you ways to release stress. So, then you have access to your higher thinking mind, and you don't erode your immunity. All right, so what are the main tools to use for mental management?

I talked about episode 18, the tool that changed everything. I share a lot of these tools on the podcast, and we focus on them in the bloom room. We're going to be launching a bloom room. That's a yearlong program. That's just slow, steady, attachment to a community that is supportive and that teaches all these tools in a way that will just change you could practice for your whole life. So, we're taking them slowly and steadily. I'm going to do it over the course of a year to help us turn ideas into real things, but also for all the reasons that I'm sharing today. So, the first thing is that we teach and that you can learn.

You know from other books, other processes, but the process of self-directed neuroplasticity is to acknowledge the emotion or the feeling or the inputs that are there in your body, not to pretend they're not there. What am I feeling? Why am I feeling like that? What's going on? What do I notice in my body? What are the physical sensations? Then writing, which can happen in any way. You can use voice notes or write on a phone, or write handwrite, which is my favorite writing out what's in your mind, reframing it. So, we're looking at our stories and our behaviors closely and taking ownership over those, and also separating those out from the stories and behaviors of other people, who are always a projection of their own mental state. So, we can always separate out where am I and where am I receiving a projection of their mental state, which is always the case when other people are upset with us or talking to us. It's always showing where they are at.

And then the last step, which is so, so, so important, which Caroline Leaf makes a big case for, is action and implementation. So, it's not enough to just look at the thoughts, it's not enough to reframe them, but we need to actually have a plan for action. So next time I have this trigger, what am I going to do? That'll be different. What am I going to think? How do I want to be? What do I want to think and feel? That's different. So that is what Caroline Leaf teaches, which is very related to episode 18 that I use all the time. It's just reframing how we are reacting to the circumstances of life through processing the emotions and the physical sensations that we're going through and then reframing and taking action on them in a new way.

Also, I work with meditation and self-hypnosis. And I work with community, creating positive communities to reinforce who we want to be. Those are the three elements of self-directed neuroplasticity, in my point of view working with a conscious mind you're reframing. Working with a subconscious mind through meditation and hypnosis and being in a community that supports where you want to go. What's the idea you're making real? That's what I got on self-directed neuroplasticity. I hope that you enjoy this and please reach out with questions, or if you want to be a part of the bloom room that's starting in September, or if you want ideas for other ways that you can start adding this tier of wellbeing to your life. You've got your physical practices; you've got your relationships and you've got your mental management. Let's go.

I love you all and I'll see you next week.

Thanks for hanging out with me, friends. If you like today's episode and you want more of them, please take two minutes right now to subscribe and give me a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. Then send this episode to a friend. See you next time.

Bloom Your Mind

Ep 84: Neuroplasticity

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