149 Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: Mind Management For Real-Life Peace

We unpack how toxic thinking shows up in the body and how a practical, five-step mind management process can turn awareness into lasting change. Real stories meet research on stress, immunity, and neuroplasticity to help us build peace that holds under pressure.

• moving from data to daily application
• naming and handling cognitive dissonance
• distinguishing useful stress from toxic stress
• how thoughts influence immunity and inflammation
• stories that turn science into lived practice
• why awareness without strategy backfires
• rebuilding habits over 63 days through repetition
• millennial and Gen Z burnout drivers and fixes
• empowerment through competency and simple tools

Get the book. Read along with us one chapter a week. If you want an agile brain exercise, just message us and we will give it to you for free with no strings attached. The best ways through our Substack, W-O-Y-B, for what’s on your bookshelf. We’ll have a link to how to get the book.

Transcript

Setting The Book On The Table

SPEAKER_00 1:17

Welcome to What's on Your Bookshelf, a life and leadership podcast where we live out loud the pages of the books that are on our shelves. With your host, Denise Russo and Sam Powell.

SPEAKER_01 1:29

Hello everyone. Welcome back to another episode of What's on Your Bookshelf. This is our Life and Leadership Podcast, where we're living out loud the pages of the books that are on our bookshelves. The book we've taken off of our shelf is called Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess by Dr. Caroline Leaf. It's five simple scientifically proven steps to help you reduce anxiety, stress, and toxic thinking. Today, Sam and I are going to be talking about how all this science can actually help you. And Sam, I'm looking forward to seeing how it can help me.

From Research To Real-World Meaning

SPEAKER_02 2:00

Yeah, seriously. There's actually a part in this chapter that calls out millennials, and I fall into the millennial generation. So yep, it's it's got some good stuff for us. This was an interesting one. And you and I were talking before we started researching. Like the last chapter was all about the research, and we highlighted quite a bit of like, you know, the interesting aspects of that. But you and I both said that like we highlighted a lot more in this chapter because I think it's that, well, what does it really mean, right? Like when we're looking at all this research, when we're looking at all this data, like what is it really telling us? And what does that mean for kind of the individual and collective experiences we're having?

SPEAKER_01 2:36

Dr. Leaf says in this chapter, this is what the science means for you. You can transition from just being aware of your chaotic or toxic thoughts to being empowered to catch these thoughts in the early stages and manage them to improve your overall peace and well-being. We had an episode that was kicking off one of our years. And you had said in that episode that you were asking me, like, what did I want to talk about for the next year? And then I just said, I just want peace and I just want to be happy. And that's what prompted us to spend an entire year on studying happiness. And we are spending this entire year on decluttering, whether it means decluttering our mind, decluttering our relationships, decluttering our thoughts about work, and maybe even decluttering our desk or office or stock door.

SPEAKER_02 3:25

I did that the other day. I felt nice.

SPEAKER_01 3:28

Yeah, I actually did the same. I cleaned my bathroom like deep, deep cleaned. And afterwards, I thought to myself, let's see how satisfying it was. I'm the type of person where I love clean sheets and a clean bed. I don't understand anybody that doesn't, but there's just something about after you get it all washed and put back on the bed and just how nice it feels to go to sleep. And this is sort of the same way as we're we're looking at how we can take the things that are toxic or or dirty, if you will, that are in our thinking patterns, and how we now take science to rework and rewire our thoughts so that we can do that. Now, she does go into some detail about still the process of this. Like she talks about something called neuroscientific measures Q E G. And so there is some complicated stuff in this chapter, but I think if you go into it, if you're reading along with us with the open mind, that it's about learning about how your brain actually works inside of your body and how your mind can be changed through neuroplasticity to help you get healthy.

Cognitive Dissonance Gets A Name

SPEAKER_02 4:39

Yeah. And it's and it's super interesting. And she talks about like, yes, this is challenging. Yes, this takes a lifetime. But in this part where she's talking about the Q E G, the quantitative electric electro ensigal, I have no idea. I definitely am not a medical person, but um, right, it's looking at that like energy response. But it really she talks about like cognitive dissonance. And I think this is an important thing because we feel this a lot. And I think that we don't realize that there's like there's words for this. There's science behind this, like feeling of I think I believe one thing, but I'm saying, acting, and doing something different, right? This cognitive dissonance between what's going on inside of me and what I'm going like out in the world and presenting. It's when you get to that point in your life where it's like, I just can't live with this conflict inside of me anymore, right? This space of like, I, you know, I say that like outwardly I'm presenting one way, and inwardly I know that that's not true. And I think that like we come through this often in our life through different like big stages, right? Of coming around to self-acceptance about things, of breaking maybe like societal expectations, family expectations, religious expectations of us, and getting to a point where it's like I can't live under this set of expectations. And I am living that way externally and internally, I know something to be different. And so I think that like, right, it's interesting that this is where this went. And I just, this is one of those pieces of the chapter that really like hit me deep, right? Because I just feel like there's been many times in my life where it's like I've come to this deeper realization or this deeper understanding as I've grown, as I've experienced things in life, where it's like, oh, I just can't go back to the way of behaving of how I used to, because now I know better, feel better, learn more, you know, just have a whole different belief process to me. And I can't go and I can't go backwards. And that that rub is real, has a word, right? It's like cognitive dissonance. And right, and she has she asks the question of like, what value do you give peace and freedom in your mind? And I think that that's such an important question that we wrestle with as we grow through life. And and I think that you know what's so interesting is like there's actual like you can measure the brain waves of this. You can measure this physically happening in your brain, which I is like, I don't know, to me, just takes it to this whole other like level of validation of the many different times I felt this in my life, where it's like I just I I I've gotta like step into who I really am now or how I really feel about something now, because it's it's literally hurting me, right? It's hurting how my brain is working. And I just thought that was fascinating that it's a measurable thing at a brain level.

Feeling It Before You See It

SPEAKER_01 7:44

You know, it's interesting because this is talking about how you may not be able to see something, but it doesn't mean you can't feel something. And then we suppress the thing we're feeling, right? And then that shows up. It shows up through disease, it shows up through anxiety, it shows up through insomnia, it shows up through bad attitude or whatever it shows up based on your own circumstance. Yesterday, this guy came to my house to check out my um water softener that I have attached to the house. And it wasn't that it was not functioning the way I thought it should, like I drink the water out of the faucet and I take a shower and I use the water to cook food or whatever. But the lady called and said, Hey, it's time for your annual checkup. And I thought, okay, well, it seems like everything's fine. So he came over, he turned on the faucet, and he said, Do you notice how this one little area is spraying like unevenly? And I said, You know what? Now that you consciously made me look at it, I can see that it's coming out a little bit sideways. So he said, Do you have one of those straws, like a like a brush that you put in a straw to clean a straw? And and so I handed him that. He put it in the in the uh filter, and he said, Now watch the difference. And all it was was like cleaning out this quote unquote plaque, if you will. It was it was just like chlorine buildup or whatever it was. So he did that, and then he said, Tell me about your shower. Do you ever have water spots on the shower? And I was like, Oh, yeah, you know, it's it. I have to clean that, I have to use a special cleanser to make sure there's no water spots because my shower is a glass door. And he said, Well, let me test the water. Now you turn on the faucet and put it in a cup and it's clear, it looks fine on the surface. It looks fine. But then he did all the tests and he said, Well, you have too much chlorine, or you have too much of this, or you have too much of that. And then he said, Look, here's the downside. If I take out the chlorine, it's gonna do this other thing that's gonna cause you to have to use these filters or this kind of thing. So it was like complicated, right? But at the end, he said, here's how to optimize and maximize your best results for clean, safe drinking water. So I became aware, I became empowered, I had to pay the bill for it, but I could have been paying the price for it, which is drinking unhealthy water. Yeah. So when I read this chapter, this to me is about that, which is the biometrics, which you and I have even talked about offline a lot about looking at what's our heart rate variability, what's our resilience ability, what is our stress level, what is it doing to our aging? Like, why do people, as they get older, start to get wrinkles or fine lines or have dis-ease in their bodies? And so if you can learn to identify the causes of the things that you're thinking about and manage it over a simple thing, 63 days, what if you could change your life? Like that to me is so empowering and powerful. But that what would happen if you don't?

Pay The Bill Or Pay The Price

SPEAKER_02 10:53

Yeah. I I love your I paid the bill, but I would have been paying the price thought process. Like, well, I would I would love to hear I would love to read something where you expand on that. Um, because that I mean, that's right. Like, do I want to pay the bill or do I want to pay the price? And it's like I'd rather like you know, and it's that it it hurts to address it, right? It hurts to be preventative, to you know, notice that the problem is there to really do the work to figure it out. Like that's the bill, right? But if you don't pay the bill, you're going to pay the price long term, right? And this and her argument throughout the whole book is it's in your health, it's in your, you know, just overall well-being. And she she talks about this, she gives us some nice charts about all sorts of things about like the symmetry of like the electrical signals of your brain and how like as that gets balanced, like you get healthy overall. But she says when people get into toxic thinking habits, it can mess up the stress response. And stress response is good for us, you know, it's part of a balanced lifestyle. Like you need to feel some stress, it's what keeps you moving at the end of the day. I used to run this um process with my team when I managed an organization. Anybody who reported to me, like twice a year, we would do this measurement of how stressed do you feel? Like on a scale of one to 10, how stressed are you about your job? And they would give a rating. And then they would give a rating that was how stressed do you want to be about your job? And nobody ever went down to zero. Nobody was like, oh, I don't want no stress. They'd be like, that would be boring. I'm like, yeah, exactly. Because stress isn't about like we we put this toxic or we put this like toxic label on it, like stress is bad. But stress is what gets us into action, right? Like I feel like I need to get off the couch and do something. That's stress, but it's not a bad stress. You do need to get off the couch and do something, probably, right? And you know, what she's really talking about is getting into a place of like out of the toxic realm of that. And we talked about that a little bit last time, but um, I thought it was really interesting that she said that the psychoneuroimmunology, right? So, like brain immunology research has shown how conscious thinking controls the function of the immune system. When we stress, we impact the abilities, the body's ability to protect itself. And so when we think about these patterns that we get into, like I'm thinking like so much about this paying the bill versus paying the price, like it's hard to face our stuff and to deal with it. But if not, right, the science is telling us that like our immune system, like we're impacting the our own ability to heal ourselves, to protect ourselves from this, you know, the diseases that happen, the the things that happen if we're not willing to pay the bill. We pay a long-term price here. Like that's just like I don't, I don't know. I highlighted that part because it's like, I don't know. That's just something to me that you know, learn you can really learn to have your stress work for you instead of against you. And against you has got really, really long-term price consequences.

SPEAKER_01 14:14

The important part that you're talking about is toxic stress. And your toxic thoughts show up as toxins in your body, it creates inflammation. Inflammation creates heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. Toxic stress has been demonstrated as being responsible for up to 90% of illnesses. The little part that you were just talking about um regarding the psychoneuroimmunology part. I highlighted that area about something that my dad went through several years ago. He had a very rare sinus cancer. And the doctor said, you are likely going to lose all your teeth, your you may have um your jaw will crumble apart, you will lose all of your taste buds, you probably have a high likelihood of dying because we're going to be putting radiation straight on your face. And Sam, there was like 60 people in the world that had had this cancer at the time my dad had had it, and thank God he had the doctor that was one of the researchers of this science. He ended up going through all the radiation, all the process, and then afterward, not shortly afterward, but over process of looking at it afterward, my dad was cancer free, like not even a slight hint of cancer. And they had to pull out a giant cancerous polyp from his sinus cavity. And so when I think about him and what his doctor said to him, it wasn't about the radiology, it wasn't about the medicine, even though that was contributing to helping him. The doctor said to my dad, this was a medical doctor, said to my dad, I think what healed you was your positive attitude throughout the process. Not a denial that you had cancer, but a denial that cancer was going to take you down. And he said, your positive intent, your positive thinking, your mindset, your ability to get past that this was just an obstacle in your life and you were going to get beyond it is what healed you. And my dad became cancer-free from that. Now I know it doesn't happen that way for everyone, but I can say this if he had gone into it with a bad attitude and thinking he had a doomsday uh report, what's the likelihood that that would have gone south? Probably much more so. There's another person I know that is uh a colleague of mine from years ago, and she ended up getting stage four cancer, like pancreatic cancer, which is the take you down cancer. It's the cancer that killed my friend Wendy, who's one of the most positive people I ever knew. And it's it took her still. But this lady that that was okay from it, she said the same thing in post after post on her Facebook page about how she was not going to let that take her away from life. And she today, which has been many years now later, is cancer free, free, no sign of it whatsoever. And she attributes it to her faith and to her positive outlook on what she did. And so, if this is about removing toxic thinking, life is overwhelming. Like if you have cancer, uh you have a diagnosis, you have a death, you have a relationship break, you have a job uh severance, that's a lot. It's a lot and it's pressure. But she goes on to talk about these control subject stories and about how just by increasing self-awareness, looking at your lifestyle decisions, your day-to-day activities, that you can look deeply into your thinking patterns. And then she used the science and the charts to show the person almost like when you see a lie detector test, there's no getting beyond what the test is saying is happening. So when you're looking at your brain test, it's telling you the truth of what is really happening in your subconscious mind.

Stress: Friend, Foe, And Balance

Mindset, Immunity, And Healing Stories

SPEAKER_02 18:10

Yeah. And I think it's that like you know, we can't control all the things that happen to us, the diagnosis that come our way. But I think that like the point she's really making is like you can give yourself your best chance at being well, at being healthy by managing your thoughts, right? Like sometimes you can't control the outcome, right? Like once cancer or something like is coming for you, sometimes there's not a path back to healthy, right? And this isn't, and this isn't based on like you had said, I think it was the beginning of the last episode in the woo-woo, like, oh, we think this is, you know, like because you have a positive mindset, you're gonna be healed and all that kind of stuff. Like, this isn't that. This is that how you manage stress and thinking and all of this does have a physical effect. And so it gives you your best chance at health, at life by bringing your thought process under control, right? And I think that that's really what it is. Like, I want to give myself the best chance at a full and healthy and well life. And to do that, the research is showing you've got to back it up. And these the case studies were really interesting. And she goes on from those charts and all of that into like I mentioned at the beginning, like she talked about millennials. Um, and I think this was published before Gen Z really became adults, right? Before they really like hit the workforce. Because I think that anything you like, she talks about in this kind of millennial generational space, like could be applied to Gen Z and probably like even more extreme. So, but she talks about like, you know, over the past decades, you know, they've seen an alarmingly noticeable increase in mental distress belong among millennials. So these would be people like in today's world who are like just a little over 40 and younger. Like we're talking about like basically anybody like middle-aged down type of like that's this is this is what we're talking about now. So this is anybody spanning like in their like mid to early 40s to their 30s, and like I said, I this is came out before Gen Z really became adults. Um, and I'm I I think reading all of this and you know, reading all the discourse about, you know, just mental health of our 20-year-olds right now, like I think this all applies. But um, you know, she talks about like many people in these younger generations, or these, I guess not younger anymore, but they're facing physical and mental burnout at a really young age at alarming rates, right? They're sitting in really highly competitive work and living environments without opportunities of previous generations with little and no hope of the future. And there's this extreme, you know, living cuts, unequal wealth distribution, increased isolation, a narrow focus on what we don't have, um, alongside and a desire for instant gratification. A lot of this is due in large part to social media, causing more issues with self-esteem and self-uh and increased self-contempt. And the despair and lower levels of well-being are playing a key role in fuel fueling premature death of this group. I mean, we're talking premature death, like we're seeing measurable premature death in people who are like 40 and younger, which is crazy. And she talked about the beginning of this, like we it was all the way up to like 60s, like people who are all in the prime of their life. But like this is really talking about like, let's take this group that should be like just kind of hitting middle, mid-career, middle age, and younger. I mean, 20-year-olds, like you should be living it up, having a great life, right? Like experiencing just all the, I don't know, joys, but what we're seeing is premature death in this group. We're seeing so much around this. And one of the things that she points out here, which I think is really important, and I think why this book is so important, is she says that, you know, one of the reasons could be that there's increased awareness and conversation around mental health struggles, mental health struggles, right? And like I I have a TikTok account, I sit on TikTok all the time, and there's a lot I follow a lot of therapists and like people talking about mental health struggles and things like that. And there is, and I think we see this a lot when we talk about Gen Z, especially, right? Like we're seeing there's this huge discourse around mental health, and like we're seeing all the problems, we're seeing all these issues about this, but without the solution to how to deal with it, you end up spirals. Like that's what we talked about in the data from last week. Like, that's what this is really reiterating. And I think that you can visibly see this in these two younger generations that are like the two younger adult generations right now, is that there's all this increased awareness without the increased strategies to deal with it. And she says, you know, there's a desperate need to teach people of all ages how to define their own success and happiness by managing day to day life in a sustainable way. And so, like, I think that that's like for me, there's a lot of people who feel this way that I know, right? I sit in this generation, I have In the younger generation. Like I see that your kids are in the Gen Z generation. Like, I think we see a lot of this. And it's if you're feeling this way, it's a collective feeling. And I think that that's why this book is so important, right? Is that you need strategies to deal with life and clean up how your thought processes and patterns really work. Because if not, like the results are dire, really.

SPEAKER_01 23:37

There's a lot of research about the ill effects of social media and people comparing themselves to others. And she says in this chapter that our society overemphasizes physical self-care, such as diet, exercise, and sleep, which are all important, but not the whole picture. There's an exclusion of mind management. And so the key takeaway here for this chapter and this book is we need to become aware and empowered to manage what we become aware of. So you can become aware of something and do nothing about it. This gives you the empowerment through, like you said, the strategies, the tools, this five-cycle process that we're going to get through. And she says, empowerment comes through competency, which comes from having self-regulated, systemic, systematic steps and know-how, how to apply the knowledge. And it's and she concludes it by saying the brain and body don't lie, they reflect what we're thinking, doing, and experiencing. And so if you are somebody that is listening and you feel stuck, or you really want to get out of this cycle of thinking things that are not giving you the results that you want, or you're wondering, well, why is so and so this way? Or why won't such and such do this? Or I don't like my boss, or I don't like my teacher, or I don't like my relationship, or I don't like my circumstance. But you're pointing outward instead of looking inward as to, well, what will you do about it? I think I said this on an episode in the past that one of my mentors years ago said, if you can't change the people around you, then change the people around you. But this book is showing me that it isn't just changing the people around you, it's changing yourself and what is in your mind and what is dictating itself into your brain and how you get past some of the limiting beliefs that maybe are carrying you to places you don't want to be. And being able to accept that there is this element of non-conscious, subconscious, and conscious mind. And I think that for me is how I would close out my thoughts on this part of the book and chapter, Sam is that we we can analyze what we know in front of us, what we can see, what we see is what we believe, and that's the conscious thinking. But there's so much deeper, which is why we continue to say we will give you no strings attached, no obligation, free agile brain exercises, which goes one layer deep. So think about it like the layer below the skin, the subconscious level of your thoughts. If you want an agile brain exercise, just message us and we will give it to you for free with no strings attached to it, so that you can start taking proactive action and empowerment. I would also say get this book if you don't have it. Just like all the other books that we've taken off our bookshelf are all books we recommend for you to have on your shelf. But this one is going to give you the tools that you need to be able to change your thinking, which can change your life.

Millennials, Gen Z, And Burnout

SPEAKER_02 26:41

Yeah. And I think that I mean, go through it with us, right? I was looking at my bookmark today and I was like, oh, we're halfway through. And um and and it was hard to start, I think it's hard to start a lot of books like this sometimes. And I think just going through this with us like this, like we're just doing a chapter a week here. Like, read the chapter, listen to the episode, like force yourself to stay on a schedule with us. And if you like need to force that to catch up or whatever, like I think that's how you just iterate through this stuff because I do think that this, I always say that every book we read will change our life, and I think that they do, but I think this one is she's really driving home the fact that this is imperative in the world that we live in, in the feelings that we're having, in the spaces where we're trying to fix things in different ways. And, you know, like I I like your um, you know, if you can't change people around you, change people around you. I tell people something similar. It's like sometimes you need to change your environment, but if you can't change your environment, you have to change your relationship with your environment. And that's usually where the most of the work is. And I think the times that for me have been the biggest breakthroughs in my life is when I've done the hard work to notice, like you were saying, the patterns, notice what's wrong here, and then feeling empowered and having the strategies to be empowered to make those changes and do something with it. Because if you just draw awareness over and over again, I think that was like part of the thing with the millennial and like I said, Gen Z too, is like we're drawing a lot of awareness to problems that we're facing, but we're not equally drawing and probably need to be more heavily leaning on the solutions to and the strategies to deal with those things because that's where real change happens and where we she we've seen in the control groups that she talks about is when you draw awareness without the strategy, you will spiral yourself into a worse spot. Like they ended the control group ended up worse because they didn't have the strategies, but they started to draw awareness to the fact that like they had these subconscious patterns going on. And like, as somebody who's done a lot of work with that in their life, like I can tell you it's a hard journey, but like you gotta take it all the way through. And so I think like read the book, come along the journey with us because we're moving towards how to really deal with this and how to how to take control of your subconscious mind and rewire it.

SPEAKER_01 29:03

She's super blunt. She says, This is brain damage, but there's good news, it's not brain dead, you are brain damaged, which means you can change it through neuroplasticity. So next week we're gonna talk about the mind, which this is a little bit complicated because sometimes we think that our thinking comes from our brain, but there is a mind and there is a brain, and they are complementary, but they're not the same thing. And so we're gonna get into what is the mind next week. Sam, as always, I look forward to every conversation with you. I learned so much hearing your stories and insights from what you're reading. And I hope that I'm doing the same for you and same for our listeners, for those that are sharing with us the stories and things that you're experiencing. Please keep sharing with us because it helps us also to have a community to understand what things did you take away that really uh mattered to you or what things were hard to understand. And let's keep that dialogue open. The best ways through our Substack, W-O-Y-B, for what's on your bookshelf. And if you're new to the podcast, you can always go back to former episodes that we've had at any time, or if you need to catch up, get the book. We'll have a link to how to get the book. And then you can always listen to the episodes. We re we read the book, then we record an episode, we listen to the episode, we talk about the episode. Sometimes it takes all those pieces that we learned in Atomic Habits from James Clear to be able to cement the beginnings of a habit. And like Dr. Leaf says, a habit isn't formed in 21 days. It may be created in 21 days, but it is sustainable after the 60 odd days that it takes to really reinforce that into your into your body. And so this is about healing. It's about healing. So I'm looking forward to next week. But for this week, my name's Denise Russo. And on behalf of my friend Sam Powell, it's been another episode of What's on Your Bookshelf.