Laughing Through The Pain: Navigating Wellness

The Real Reason You’re Struggling: Why Mental Health and Obesity Are Rooted in the Same Problem with Dr. Laurel Mellin

• Richard & Andy • Season 1 • Episode 41

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Discover the groundbreaking world of Emotional Brain Training (EBT) with Dr. Laurel Mellon, a distinguished retired professor from UCSF and an experienced nutritionist who offers insightful critiques of traditional psychotherapy. Dr. Mellon reveals how the mental health and obesity epidemics may share common roots in stress-induced neurophysiology, a topic often overlooked by conventional therapeutic approaches. Learn how EBT empowers individuals to erase harmful circuits, addressing the core of psychological and physiological issues through a method that promises long-lasting change.

Unpack the intricate ties between obesity and mental health as we explore the cycle driven by stress and emotional disconnection leading to food addiction. Hear a moving account of a mother's journey watching her daughter transform through EBT, a system designed to rewire the brain's stress response by accessing deep-seated emotional circuits. With an emphasis on reaching states of joy and compassion, EBT offers profound tools to navigate and transform negative emotions, providing relief from conditions like depression, anxiety, and eating disorders.

EBT is emerging as a powerful alternative to traditional therapies, promising a shift from short-term fixes to addressing root causes. Through intimate group sessions, individuals learn to rewire specific brain circuits, fostering emotional connections and holistic well-being. As EBT becomes more accessible globally, thanks to new funding and resources, Dr. Mellon's new book, "One, Two, Three, Joy," provides a comprehensive guide to this promising approach. Tune in to explore how EBT is set to revolutionize emotional health and well-being on a global scale.

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Guest: Dr. Laurel Mellin
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Laughing Through The Pain: Navigating Wellness
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Richard L. Blake:

Hello and welcome to Laughing Through the Pain Navigating Wellness. Today, we're going to find out whether the mental health crisis and the obesity crisis are caused by the same thing, with Dr Laurel Mellon.

Andy Esam:

Yeah, and I love the way she spoke about mental health effectively being physiological. I think we kind of think of the mind and body as separate entities quite a lot and she was obviously very much pointing us in the right direction there and that it's not.

Richard L. Blake:

Yeah, and she talks a lot about the ineffectiveness of traditional psychotherapy, something that I have sort of seen firsthand and she's diagnosed that problem and she has a pretty good prescription, which is this new type of therapy ebt emotional brain training I'm I'm really interested in actually yeah, I'm fascinated, I'm gonna read this book and I may even do her training yeah, one, two, three joy, and, and she did she's.

Andy Esam:

500 000 people have used it, which seems high to me, but I mean, if it's as effective as it seems to be, um, it will grow exponentially, as she, as she's hoping for yes, well, she has a very impressive background.

Richard L. Blake:

Uh, she's a professor, was just retired from being a professor at ucsf university of california, san francisco school of medicine, which is one of the top medical schools in the world, by the way, and her background is as a nutritionist. But she then found this link between nutrition and mental health and, uh, yeah, obviously she has a phd and she's written, I think, 14 books, according to her amazon, so she's a highly credentialed person yes, not like, not unlike yourself rich.

Andy Esam:

I haven't written 14 books thank god uh, no, I thought it's um. Yes, it's brilliant. As she said to us off air, she's sort of retired so she could work more. It seems like she's really going for this and um in retirement. Very, very impressive, and I'm sure it'll go places. It sounds incredible.

Richard L. Blake:

Yeah, well she's convinced me, so hopefully she'll get you too. Listener, yeah, enjoy, hey, listener. If you're enjoying the insights and stories we share on our pod, then don't miss out on any of our episodes. Hit the subscribe button to download and listen to our conversations at your convenience.

Andy Esam:

Dr Mellon, thank you for joining our podcast. We're going to start off nice and easy for you. What is wrong with current psychotherapy?

Dr Laurel Mellon:

Well, there's so much right with current psychotherapy We've been doing the best we can but there's a missing link here that's very foundational, which is it's not based on physiology, and essentially, psychology is based on chemicals and electricity in the body. And when, in fact, those chemicals and electricity due to stress, are not optimal, that's when circuits form in the brain that cause trauma, cause addiction, cause mood problems and cause most psychological problems. So, unfortunately, what's happening with psychotherapy right now is they have a lot of talk therapies and a lot of specific therapies for one circuit or another that someone's working on, but that's really not the problem. Based on neurophysiology, the problem that we're seeing that's so rampant right now because stress has not been treated is that people are not able to actually rewire the circuits in the brain that are emotional circuits. They do not change with thoughts or decision-making or even mindfulness. They change with emotional tools that actually roust out those circuits from your amygdala, which is in your emotional brain, which stores all of our life experiences, and when you don't feel good and you're stressed and you're disconnected, people blame themselves or want to analyze what's wrong with them. There's nothing wrong with you. It's a circuit in your emotional brain and all you need is the skills to switch off that circuit and then use the same tools over time to actually erase that circuit. So you don't respond in that way. So the problem with psychotherapy is it's not based on neuroscience, and neuroscience is all about stress physiology, because it's when we're in stress that we create all these circuits, and so it's the missing link.

Dr Laurel Mellon:

They're trying to treat something without the mechanism in place to give people the power to do a lot of this work themselves and to make their own work as therapists so much easier. Because science is very pure and there are methods now emotional brain training. So people use simple skills even that I've taught children and they switch off those circuits in one or two minutes. And that's what we want, and we want to empower people to realize these issues and problems are endless. If you just deal with them on a cognitive level and don't go into the amygdala with your emotional tools and rewire them, you just substitute one problem for another and another, rewire them. You just substitute one problem for another and another, and so people go to therapy forever and they're not going to change at a root level, because these circuits are physiologic and when they're activated, what happens is that they're activated through no fault of our own.

Dr Laurel Mellon:

All of a sudden, you're out in a conversation with people and something in your brain goes, ooh like this a circuit is activated and you are biochemically different. Those biochemicals of stress there's eight of them and they fuel overeating and weight, obesity, diabetes, most chronic diseases and most mental health problems. And so people are being biochemically affected by these circuits and instead of waiting and not doing anything about it and then getting a lot of medications self-medicate, naturally with emotional brain training, there's tools where you just you know you feel bad, you know it's biochemical, you're driven or you feel depressed or you feel you can't find your joy. What happens is you say it's a circuit. You should switch off that circuit and then, once you've learned to do that, any circuits that are really important in your life maybe a depression circuit, or maybe a distancing circuit, or maybe a food circuit, or an addiction, whatever, that is, procrastination, whatever bothers you you can then learn the skills to erase that circuit so you have lasting change.

Dr Laurel Mellon:

And when you do that, over time the brain stops being in the stress habit which is called the stress set point, which is called allostasis. And in our work what we do is people stay with it until they've rewired enough circuits so their brain essentially goes, defaults, to his position of connection, of flow, of optimal physiology, and that's their new set point. And when that happens on all levels emotional, relational, spiritual, behavioral, physical they are at their best and that's what we call set point one and that's the goal. But you have to do three things First you have to learn how to use your emotional pathways in your brain so that you can get from stress to that optimal state of joy in a couple of minutes. And then you have to learn how to use the same tools with more persistence until you notice the symptom you don't like could be overeating, it could be getting, you know, really negative, it could be anxious or whatever. Whatever that symptom is, it stops.

Richard L. Blake:

And when the symptom stops, you know you have rewired the circuit and then you go on to the next circuit until you have raised the set point of your brain, and that's back to therapy. Why do you think it's been so popular and dominant in healthcare systems if it's been so ineffective?

Dr Laurel Mellon:

I think that it has been popular because it's better than nothing and a big part of psychotherapy in fact, overwhelmingly it's the emotional connection between the therapist and the patient, and then they add on various different modalities, but by far people need to emotionally connect with themselves and others in order to heal, and having a secure place to go where someone will listen to you, where it'll be safe and supportive, is enormously helpful.

Dr Laurel Mellon:

And all we're doing with emotional brain training is tacking on to that scientifically-based skills so people can use it with others, with peers and with their EBT provider. So they can essentially get that therapist in their pocket all week long and aren't completely dependent upon the therapist. They are able to have a guide there to guide their way, to stay with it and to use it well, but they have other people in their small group that they can connect with during the week. So I think that there's a huge hunger for being seen, heard and felt, and therapy does a wonderful job of that, and we want to keep all that's good about therapy but update it so people get better results and are also empowered with the skills so they are not dependent on the therapist. They use that as a springboard for their own emotional and spiritual and physical evolution.

Andy Esam:

And so how did this new technique come about? How did you come to find emotional brain training?

Dr Laurel Mellon:

Very slowly. I'm 75 years old. I have been working on this for 45 years and I started by getting lucky and I got a faculty position at the University of California, san Francisco School of Medicine and I was a nutritionist at the time and this grant that I was on for a long period of time, they didn't really know what to do with me as a nutritionist, so I got to do what I wanted to do. What I wanted to do is find the root cause of why people get out of control, and particularly with food. And so I looked back in the literature to 1940 and found an article by Hildebrook, who was a psychiatrist at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, that showed it was about the connection between people. And I thought to myself I was 28, really young and very. I thought, oh well, that's no problem, I will teach in the clinic. I will teach parents and children the tools of nurturing and setting limits, in other words, to connect. And of course, since I'm a scientist and I'm at the university, words to connect and of course, since I'm a scientist and I'm at the university, what we have to do is study it. So we studied it and what happened was we were surprised that it was enormously effective.

Dr Laurel Mellon:

And particularly, you know, obesity is a great way to study intrapsychic phenomenon because it's really due to stress chemicals. If you're not in an environment where you have a lot of emotional connection and you're getting your rewards met physiologically in a healthy way, the easiest thing to do is to reach for food. It requires no effort and then once you start doing that, it becomes pretty addictive, in that the food itself makes things worse. So what we found with these families that we were teaching this was they said what's going on? His mother came to me in the hall at UCSF and she said what are you teaching to my daughter? Because she used to be stealing money from my purse to go get food and all she would think about was food. And now she has no use for food. She wants to go out and play.

Dr Laurel Mellon:

And I knew that I didn't know why it worked in the brain and I decided to dedicate myself to finding out. So we began that research. It would take 30 years before the research confirming EBT would come out, and once we moved it to adults, then we moved it to wellness and we moved it to every health problem, because under all these problems is physiologic stress. But what was exciting was in 2007, which was a while ago, my mother was dying and I was also teaching medical students at the university EBT, with my colleague, igor Mitrovich, who's a neuroscientist and a physiologist. In the meantime I went back to school and, with my faculty job, went ahead and became a health psychologist.

Dr Laurel Mellon:

But here's what happens I was waking up in the morning at about 4 am and I was bone chillingly lonely. I was alone in my house. I realized my mother was dying and the night, the day before, the night before, I had been teaching this class to the medical students about the reward center and at that time the method was three levels of stress. You know you get to balance and you go to stress and there's something in between. And here I was feeling so traumatized by all this going on. I realized that my method up to that point was wrong. There weren't three levels of stress in the brain, there were five, because I was in a trauma state at the time and none of the tools were working, and also I knew that all of the tools needed to go to joy. It's not enough to be calm, because the stress response, the HPA axis, does not shut off with mediocre moods. It best shuts off when we're in that state of love or joy or compassion or all that state of neural integration. So I had to stop everything for a number of years to move it to a five-point system and then, once I did that which we now have with emotional brain training, it took another 10 years to get it so that individuals could rewire their own trauma circuits, because the emotional brain does all sorts of things to avoid rewiring them. And so we found ways to use precision EBT it's called so that even regular people can go in and be in our groups and you learn how to use the app so that they can bring up a memory and then safely dip down, activate that circuit with stress. You have to stress, activate the circuit just for a moment. That unlocks the synaptic connections between the neurons and whatever is done in the next two to four hours updates the circuit. So this is what is so out of date with so much of the therapies.

Dr Laurel Mellon:

They're looking to calm people, and that's really helpful, because if you start to feel your feelings when you're stressed and you don't have emotional brain training, in other words, these proven pathways of emotions, you get stuck. It's not safe to feel your depression or your anxiety or whatever, because in fact, that's why we eat, drink, spend or do whatever we have. We want to get away from that because it feels like we're going to be annihilated. Expand or do whatever we have. We want to get away from that because it feels like we're going to be annihilated. And so in the past, it was reasonable not to feel our feelings because we needed a way to drop down into whatever misery was going on, whatever bad feelings are going on, and then we had to simply get right out of it. Within a minute you get out of that state and that's what EBT allows you to do to dip down into the bottom of your brain, spark the aliveness of that circuit, the exact circuit that's making you feel bad.

Dr Laurel Mellon:

Even a brain scan cannot find the circuit that's making us depressed or making us overeat or making us do whatever. All you have to do is use your emotions and, because of evolutionary biology is based on adaptation, based on being able to have plasticity in your brain so that you can change your response to differing environments. So the brain's set up for this. But you can't be cognitive. You have to release, control, use the emotional skills say complain a little bit, really complain for about 20 seconds about something.

Dr Laurel Mellon:

Use the emotional process of VBT straight down into the bottom of the brain, activate that circuit. It will tell you exactly what's the message is in that circuit that's in the unconscious mind. Once you have those exact words, you are off and running, because you can use those words to actually confront the circuit and erase it. So it used to be that you didn't want to feel your feelings. Now you have the tools. You have the pathways in your brain, in your app, with your group, you can dip down, activate that circuit and then change it to whatever new message you want. So you are in control wow, amazing.

Richard L. Blake:

I love the how you explain things. You know how people don't want to feel their feelings and and how there's that threat of annihilation. That's definitely something I felt. I I had an eating disorder when I was younger and depression and anxiety, and I think that's really interesting, that you have linked, you know, the food, the obesity crisis and the mental health crisis. So do you think the growing obesity problem, the growing mental health crisis? So do you think the growing obesity problem, the growing mental health crisis, what do you think is causing these increases?

Dr Laurel Mellon:

I think that there's just unlimited amounts of proof to show that the stress response was not appropriate for our life today. It was essentially evolved for a very different kind of life, where you're not having constant psychological probes to get stressed, and so our stress response overreacts to stressful situations that are really not threatening, but they're perceived as threatening, and then it encodes wires in our amygdala so that we repeat that process over and over again. What's important is to say yes, it repeats that response, but the response is biochemical. So let me give you the example of obesity. What's going on right now is horrific, and what's going on is that people are self-medicating with food, and once you start doing that, it's hard to stop because the circuits in your brain are pointing in one direction food, food, food. And essentially, when you're stressed and have these food circuits in your amygdala, it activates eight chemicals that are the proven chemicals to cause obesity. They're all stress related. So what happens is that when you are stressed, what happens is the cortisol will make you hungry, the dopamine will make you crave those foods, the leptin will make you store whatever you're eating as fat, so you cannot lose weight, and then there's drained serotonin causes the kind of foods you're attracted to or increase insulin. Then there's PYY and there's GLP-1 and there's ghrelin. So these are the eight chemicals. All of them are controlled by stress. Ebt is the only method other than weight loss surgery that has been shown in clinical trials published in peer-reviewed journals to not only cause people to lose weight, but to keep it off after treatment ends. That means we got to the root cause in the brain. Now, so what happens? Enter the pharmaceutical companies and they say oh, we understand that there's eight different chemicals that make people gain weight and regain the weight afterwards and crave foods. And we're going to take one of them and we're going to engineer it GLP-1, and then we're going to charge you a lot of money for it. What it's going to do is with EBT. It's natural.

Dr Laurel Mellon:

As you rewire your stress center, what happens is people stop overeating. We used to have information about food available for people. No one uses it Because when the biochemical drives shut off because you've changed all of those stress chemicals, you lose your interest. It's like a love affair, like if you had this wonderful love affair and you just were just so infatuated with this person and then, two years later, you look back and you say what did I think? What was I thinking? That person isn't the most desirable person on earth. And the same thing that happens with food. When you rewire the circuit, the love affair is over, because this is why You're getting your chemical needs met for reward and safety, naturally from your own brain.

Dr Laurel Mellon:

And if they're not met, what happens is we do get a survival drive to do something, to feel rewarded and safe, and again food is the way to do it. Or if you can't do that, you get a shot. You get an injection of one chemical GLP-1, which makes most people nauseated, doesn't. You can't do that, you get a shot. You get an injection of one chemical GLP-1, which makes most people nauseated, doesn't work in the long term and makes people dependent upon something that's really not going to solve their problem, when all they really have to do is rewire those circuits and they have lasting and profound change and not these other symptoms. But the only side effect of symptoms of EBT is a lot of joy. You have to learn how to be in joy.

Andy Esam:

I had a question. It's probably a bit basic, but, as Rich will tell you, I like a basic question Emotional brain training, I mean. Presumably you're helping people to actually recognize their emotions as well, because I think I've come across plenty of people who can't actually spot their own emotions.

Dr Laurel Mellon:

Great, that is true, but we go one step further. The reason that knowing your emotions are so important is because then you figure out what you need. If you know how you feel, you can figure out what you need. But in the day of stress overload which is our life now, the speed of change that's going on, the information overload, the temptations, we are living in a very stressful environment and where there's no turning back. But most of us are not in what's called a homeostatic state, in other words, a connected state. There's a tendency for us to either be low and then medicate for our anxiety or depression, or just go numb or go to a false high, and in no circumstance are we really looking at our accurate feelings. So what we've done is to say it's great to know your feelings if you're in a brain state that they're accurate. So let me just describe to you what goes on with EBT. There are five levels of stress in the brain and emotions are very different at each stress level and the brain area in charge is different. So let's just go to the top of your head. If you put your finger on the middle of your forehead, that's brain state one. When you're there, all the happy memories are there, all of your feelings are beautiful. They're like love and compassion and hope and forgiveness, and awe and joy. You don't have any needs. Then go down to just above your eyebrow. That's brain state two. You feel not great, but you feel good. In that state you are connected. You are still what's called in homeostasis. All the chemicals are healthy, you feel good, but you don't feel rewarded. Now go down to your cheekbones. You're now at brain state three. Now this is the process that is not homeostatic and healthy, where the feelings flicker and they're accurate. Knowing how you feel really matters. Now the feelings go haywire. The limbic brain is in charge. You're feeling a little stressed. Then down further, then the number four. You're feeling definitely stressed, you're feeling depressed and bad, and the limbic brain starts, the reptilian brain starts to take over and then down at five. You are in overload. So three, four and five.

Dr Laurel Mellon:

What happens with EBT is there's very simple tools that will you say. I'm at three, I use the tool for brain state three and it spirals me up to one. I use the tool at brain state four. It's called the cycle tool. It spirals me up to one and then the one at five spirals it to one. So we use emotions to. What we know is if we're in stress. What our real need is to process our emotion in this highly effective, quick way. So we get back to a state where we really can tell our deepest emotions and what we really need. So that is the new stress management. Stress management is not one size fits all. Knowing what you feel, so you know what you need. That works at brain state one or two, but we have to have the whole compliment. There's five different tools for five different brain states and then you are solid for the rest of your life because you can control your physiology and your emotions, thoughts and behaviors just by using these tools.

Richard L. Blake:

Amazing, and you mentioned trials there. Can you tell us a bit more about the evidence? How robust is it? What kind of effect size have you seen? How does it compare to existing treatments in the results?

Dr Laurel Mellon:

There are only I think at this point 14 studies on EBT and those studies are impressive for a couple of reasons. Number one that they show lasting change which has never been shown before. In two studies we have a two and a 13-month, two-year and six-year follow-up and what happens is that people learn the skills they change their brain. And when they change their brain, what happens is they get lasting effects because they've changed their physiology, because all of psychology and health is based on physiology and these circuits control it. So, number one lasting change after treatment ends. When I was a young woman, you had to have five-year follow-up or they wouldn't even look at you. Now no one even talks about that because nothing is working, everything is short-term, because they're not going to the physiologic root cause. We want everyone to keep all the methods they have now and just bolt on EBT as foundational to the health. The other thing that's very impressive about EBT is you know a lot of people talk about CBT being effective and it is not effective. It is effective for one particular problem you have in the short term, and you know what, as a consumer, that doesn't work very well because it means you have to stick with it. But the reason it does not work very well is because it doesn't go to the physiologic root cause, so it doesn't generalize. So it's both not generalizing and not lasting. So this is what happens with EBT.

Dr Laurel Mellon:

Someone comes in. Let's say their doctor says you should lose weight and we say, great, okay, come to, you should go to EBT. So they go to EBT and we say we're happy to help you, but your job is to be in this small group. The emotional brain requires emotional connection. So we've made that affordable and fun by having these telephone groups. So you go to your group and the first thing you do is you rewire one problem and then you say, oh my gosh, I just rewired food, or oh, I just rewired anxiety. And then you say, oh my gosh, I just rewired food, or oh, I just rewired anxiety, and you know the difference. And then you say you know, but there's more circuits, and so you rewire several of them that bother you and then you begin to get lasting change because you've changed the set point in the brain.

Dr Laurel Mellon:

But our research shows this whatever someone comes in for, they can solve that, because they can go right to that circuit and rewire it, but because they stay with the program to have a more global effect. What we find is that they have improvements in all domains of life, whether it's relationships or mood or health. So when it generalizes, it means, in contrast to CBT, where you have to pinpoint the exact thing you want to change, in contrast to CBT, where you have to pinpoint the exact thing you want to change. Here you are, you know you can rewire circuits that are really triggering you, but in general we're changing all of physiology so you are protected to have greater well-being and prevent some problems because your whole physiology is different. So I would say the two remarkable parts of this is post-treatment improvements that last and changes that are broad spectrum, not just focus on one issue or problem. So people feel overall like they have a new life.

Andy Esam:

And you mentioned the follow-up trials, but in terms of the initial rewiring and the group training, what sort of timescales are we talking about there?

Dr Laurel Mellon:

Well, when we come in, please appreciate that most people don't know about EBT. We only have 500,000 people who've ever used it, so it's relatively given that it's a scientific breakthrough in medicine. It's relatively unknown and we know that. Everyone comes in and they have to learn first of all. I don't have problems, I just have circuits. So the initial knee-jerk reaction that people have when they don't feel good is why? And why is a four-letter word? Because asking yourself why puts your neocortex in charge, which we don't want to do. We want the neocortex to be in charge of figuring out what stress level you're at or whether you're rewiring or not. So they first need to learn a little bit about that. You don't have problems, you just have wires and so reframe it. And they also learn about how to use the pathways in the brain. There are five different pathways and it's a little unnerving at first. The most common reaction when they say what just happened to me? I felt bad and now I feel good. I've never had that happen in one to two minutes. So we don't want to scare the brain.

Dr Laurel Mellon:

So the first month people are in their group. They're just trying to get the whole idea down of what they're doing, and then we encourage them to go right into rewiring four major circuits, usually a mood, a relationship pattern, a habit, and then one other either a body image or work stress and they narrow in the next month or sometimes two months if they want to go at a slower pace. They do that and then the rest of the program. Their set point is really high and they just do a kind of a clean house and clear out other fear, memories, other situations, have a cohesive narrative of their life and raise their set points. So their brain is wired for higher purpose and so the program can take six months. It can take a year. Some people like to go slowly. It's all been studied for so long. It's a video program, so you just go through the videos and you learn something every day and you use the app to spiral up out of stress and you're with your group and so people take it at their own pace.

Andy Esam:

And the emphasis on group is that, just so it reaches more people.

Dr Laurel Mellon:

No, the app is amazing. People just go in and they love the app. We don't let anyone have the app. The reason we don't let anyone have the app is because it would be out of integrity. We have a tremendous amount of data that supports. When people get in a small group where they have other brains there, you know that everyone has the same goal raising their set point right and they help each other with these community connections. We had five minutes using your app with another person.

Dr Laurel Mellon:

Listening transforms the brain and so, without that other person listening, the tools work very well on your own. Most people use most of the time. They do it about 10 times a day. It takes a minute. It works, but having that person listen not only creates loving connection, which we all need, but it helps. The tools go all the way down to the trauma circuits in the brain and so, if you think about your brain as being a chest of drawers or a file cabinet, the number one memories, all the great memories, are in the top drawer and all the trauma memories are in the bottom drawer. We all have some things in the bottom drawer. To be able to stay present to your emotion, using these scientific, simple tools requires emotional connection. So when someone's listening to you, instead of getting down to the fourth drawer of the brain and rewiring that circuit, you get down to the fifth drawer of the brain, the very bottom. We've also learned that these trauma circuits and again I'm not talking about having been only in a traumatic childhood, although that's included too but also the brain perceives stress, even with slight disconnections or misattunements. So it's normal for everyone to have some of these five circuits.

Dr Laurel Mellon:

If you use EBT just for self-regulation, it is enormously effective and people use it their whole life. You know people, these groups. They continue to use it for self-regulation. But if you don't get the five circuits, they live there and they get bigger and stronger and you think you're on a false high. You think everything's fine, but you have this feeling that you're a little bit on edge and then boom, those circuits hit and you're overeating, over drinking, distancing, judging all the things that come normally and naturally from stressful experiences, when we haven't rewired the circuit. So what that means is we want everyone to be in an environment where they can get their five circuits and get the job done, and that requires either one-on-one therapy.

Dr Laurel Mellon:

But it turns out that our studies, for example at University of Kentucky, showed that it was the number of these little connections that you do on your app by phone with someone who's a groupmate that you know. There's only six people in a group. You know them because they're all working together over this period of time. When people do that, their health status changes. They love EBT and they lose the weight and they improve their lives and they stay with it for one year. The average person stays in these groups for one year because it is so powerful and effective and this is the great part it is fun.

Dr Laurel Mellon:

You know how traditional psychotherapy is. Oh, what's wrong with me and what are my issues and what are my problems. People come into EBT when I get on the phone because they're all phone groups so that it's easy to get into. So I get on the phone and everyone's laughing and everyone's talking and I said, okay, who wants to do some work today on rewiring a circuit? And then when someone rewires a circuit, we have a little party, people clap and celebrate. So in other words, this is empowering people to take control of their lives in a brand new way that's not only scientific and affordable, but it is fun to do. It's fun to be in power. It's fun to have that control.

Richard L. Blake:

And your understanding of trauma. Trauma is something that comes up a lot on this podcast because I think it's become the concept creep. Trauma has become anything and everyone has it, apparently, and I don't necessarily agree with that. So your understanding of trauma how does it happen in the brain and how can we avoid trauma as well?

Dr Laurel Mellon:

Well, there's some great ways to do that. First of all, trauma is an allostatic circuit. Some great ways to do that. First of all, trauma is an allostatic circuit. Okay, so stay with me for a second. All of EBT is enormously deep, but it's very simple. So let me just tell you the simplicity of it. There are only two kinds of circuits in the amygdala. There is a homeostatic, effective circuit that makes you healthy and happy, and there's an ineffective allostatic circuit that makes you sick, including the trauma circuits. Okay, so these allostatic circuits this is physiology, not psychology, it's completely accepted the allostatic circuits have no shutoff valves, so when they get activated they have to wear themselves out and because they're so strong biochemically and they have no shutoff valves, they can make for a really bad day or a really bad week when they get activated. So there's two kinds of circuits. What we're doing in EBT is activating the allostatic circuits of the person's choice. They do it and they're essentially rewiring it into a homeostatic circuit. Okay, that's what they're doing. That's the overall plan, until the set point is in connection and homeostasis. Then, within those allostatic circuits, there are two kinds. There is a survival circuit, which is the most fun kind. A survival circuit is again biological. That's been studied a lot at AU by Ledoux, joseph Ledoux. But this is what it is. It's real simple.

Dr Laurel Mellon:

When I got one of them when I was 11, I'd been ridiculed at school. I came home I was really embarrassed I didn't know how to talk about my feelings with my mother counter. There was cinnamon rolls with the white frosting on them and I reached for the cinnamon rolls and I ate three of them. Okay, this is important. And I was ashamed because we were you know that was you're not supposed to eat food without permission in our family. So, but I didn't know that in that moment what had happened in my brain was essentially a stress response. A fight or flight circuit a gargantuan fight or flight circuit was activated and then this little tiny food circuit got hooked in with it. So if in that moment I had used EBT and processed my emotions, by the end of the day that circuit would have been dismantled, I would have gone to bed that night and I would still have a healthy relationship with food. I didn't know that. So by the time I woke up the next morning because the circuits are stored by hippocampus into long-term memory at night what happened was. I had a food problem. The same thing, I got a depression circuit that way.

Dr Laurel Mellon:

Okay, these are called survival circuits and what they do is they activate strong reactive drives to repeat whatever we did when we were in stress. So if we were even stress overloaded, to that extent, that's a trauma circuit, okay. So when people first come into EBT they rewire the four of them, because four of these survival circuits are what caused their lives to be out of control. But trauma is a little bit more than that. It's not only can be that circuit. So there's a survival circuit which is a false association between fight or flight drive to get something that's not going to meet our need. That becomes compulsive and addictive. The other is a core circuit which they do a lot of in CBT, but they just don't go to the deep level like we do in EBT.

Dr Laurel Mellon:

Let's say, in a moment I was in front of my house when I was four years old. My brother, because he was older, got to go across the street with his friends and I was left out. I had to sit there, stand there in the front yard and my brain encoded I am bad. Okay, a moment when I felt bad got encoded in my brain as a core circuit that generalizes to I'm always bad. Now, you hear a lot about this in CBT, but they keep it on a thinking brain level and the circuit is not in the top drawer of the brain, it's in the four and five level and you've got to activate it, or the circuit stress. Activate it just for a nanosecond or it won't rewire. So in trauma, let's say there's a traumatic situation and what happened was someone probably got something they did during that time. They reached for food or they reached for judgment, or they shut down emotionally or whatever it is. There'd be a survival circuit there. There could also be a few of these core circuits like I am bad or I'm not worthy, and there could also be a few fear memories. So in EBT, this is how we work it.

Dr Laurel Mellon:

I don't believe that we should rewire everything in our brain. Who has the time? Life is not perfect and we have a lot of fun that we need to have, and so when people come in and they have something that bothers them let's say it's food what happens is you rewire the food circuit, but embedded within the program are other tools, like the travel back tool, and you find out when you actually use this tool to go back to when it was encoded and have a reattachment experience, a reattachment experience to rewire it. If there's any other miscellaneous clutter, we call it clutter. We call it clutter because it's emotional clutter, because we make it fun, right. And if there's any other circuits down there, you just use the same exact tools. There are only five tools to clear it, so that you take the suppressed emotions and you quickly turn them into emotions that are healthy and normal and the tension goes out of your body. You feel emotionally lighter. So that's how we rewire trauma. They're basically five circuits, but they can have other circuits associated with it and you have the tools in EBT.

Dr Laurel Mellon:

If there are other fear, memories or other core circuits, you rewire them too until the symptom goes away. So we never judge the symptom. It's coherent in the circuit. If your circuit is telling you to do that, don't try to stop overeating. It's just a circuit. Understand that. It makes perfect sense. You'd be doing that. Go back to that circuit, rewire it and you rewire it until you don't have the symptom anymore. And then you know you're home, free and the changes are lasting to that circuit. Rewire it and you rewire it until you don't have the symptom anymore, and then you know you're home free and the changes are lasting.

Richard L. Blake:

And does it work for compulsions as well, like OCD?

Dr Laurel Mellon:

Yes, so essentially OCD is a whole bunch of survival circuits. So over and over again we're triggered and then, once it's also there could be some core circuits there. But that pattern of OCD is problematic to people, just like being addicted to alcohol or food or being addicted to numbness, whatever that is the circuits. This is why it's so simple and why we train mental health professionals in this pretty quickly, because it's very simple. You know we have all these ways in psychology and diagnostics to look at 278 or whatever number of diagnoses they are, but they really come biologically down to these circuits and anyone can learn the skills to take charge of their circuits. Obviously it's better done with a health professional who can emotionally connect, and that's why we want all mental health professionals to be certified in Ebt, because that emotional connection and that stability is going to essentially help them go deeper into the circuits in the bottom of the brain and have a more complete experience well, I about the training.

Richard L. Blake:

I'm actually thinking maybe this is something I should look into, something I should add on to my training how, how does the training work? How long does it take? Do you need to be licensed in some way?

Dr Laurel Mellon:

First and foremost, we are trying to license as many mental health professionals as possible. We believe in the power of the relationship between the therapist and the participant and in order to have an authentic relationship, the therapist needs to use the tools. Because you're speaking from your own experience. The first time you rewire a circuit and everybody has them, you say, oh my gosh. And then there's a new energy to wanting to share it with other people and it's more of an equal relationship where you're the guide, but you're also able to say you know, I rewired my circuit here and there, so the therapist doesn't have to be this perfect person, because instead it's more authentic than that. So it takes a distance learning of three hours a week, plus some listening to tapes and reading science on the side, for four months to get the basic skills of what we call the EBT algorithm for neurophysiologic resilience.

Dr Laurel Mellon:

Okay, so to get that algorithm so that you can go in and give that therapy to anyone. You start very similarly to how you would start now as a therapist, and that is, you take a moment and you say how can I help? You listen to them, talk about what's bothering them, but then you shift gears and you have them find the circuit and express the emotions pretty rapidly. So it's very compatible for therapists. And then, if you want to do the entire program and raise your set point, you can continue for another six months and that gets done. So, yeah, we don't. It's interesting. What we don't do is we don't give the app out, because it doesn't work without human connection and so you need at least to be in a group and then you get the app and you get actually daily drop-in emotional support groups.

Andy Esam:

So it's comprehensive services and we don't train health professionals in it unless they are willing to do the work themselves, because then they have that authenticity and they have that integrity of being able to share their experience, so doing the work yourselves. I think you mentioned 500,000 people have used the technique. How widely available is it currently?

Dr Laurel Mellon:

It's currently not very widely available and I will blame myself for that, because I'll go back to some of my own emotional clutter, which is in 2007,. We had EBT all over the country and I realized that it could be damaging to people because the self-regulatory tools are so effective that they put people on a false high, and unless we can get down to the bottom of the brain and have everybody rewiring their trauma circuits, that is out of integrity. So I shut down the whole thing and it was then completely reconfigured, based on neurophysiology and evidence-based practices. And then we found out that still people were having a hard time with the circuits that were really deep in their brain, and so we discovered what's called precision EBT, and then we decided people had needed.

Dr Laurel Mellon:

It's too expensive for people, so we decided to make the groups less expensive and give more comprehensive services, and so we're now at a point with EBT that my perfectionism and my my word is that I don't want to hurt anyone and that I want everyone to be able to get to the bottom of their brain is we receive $500,000 from a grateful patient.

Dr Laurel Mellon:

One of the things that EBT does best is relationships, because relationships can only get to intimacy at brain state one and at brain state two they're transactional I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine and at set point three, four and five, we really treat ourselves and others like objects. And so we have several people who have donated quite a bit of money to EBT saying every human being on earth should have these skills, and they came not from weight people lose weight and keep it off but from saving their family. And so we had the funds to do the research to make EBT very precise and very inexpensive, and that's what we're doing now, and so that's why I'm here with you today is we're at the point now where we want everyone to have it.

Richard L. Blake:

Amazing, Amazing. So how going forward then? How do you see this rolling out?

Dr Laurel Mellon:

I see it rolling out in an interesting way, because we have lots of people at UCSF and at other universities who say, laurel, you're the only one that's applied. The science that people have worked for years Bench science has to get out. And I think what is going to happen now that we have covered all our bases, I think that it's just a matter of it's going to explode Because, right, and I believe, the emotional brain is also the spiritual brain. It's the seat of the soul and this work, when you connect to the, to yourself emotionally and spiritually, what happens is I'm getting goose pimples, just saying it these emotions like love and forgiveness, and hope, and and these emotions start flowing and people feel completely differently and they know that they have the skills to create that by choice, not chance.

Dr Laurel Mellon:

And so what I believe has happened to EBT is what's happened is it wasn't going to really get into the mainstream for all people until the time was perfect, emotionally and spiritually. Okay, and this world is now so hurting and we have topped out. We can't make any more medications. We're now making medications to treat medications and therapists are exhausted because everyone's going to therapy and it's very hard on the therapist because all of that stress comes into the therapist's brain and it's like the whole world is screaming that this is the perfect time for EBT. So I believe in how the world works, is all perfect in its own way, and this is EBT's time.

Andy Esam:

Wow, that's an amazing way to finish and I wish you all the very best with it. But before we let you go, can you let us know where to find you?

Dr Laurel Mellon:

Yes, it's very easy to find me. It's Emotional Brain Training, is EBT, just like food stamps in the US ebtorg. It's also called ebtconnectnet, but ebt like food stamps org. That's where the portal is, where you can get all of the program, all of the support and the app and the entire experience. I also have a new book out, which is One, two, three, joy. It's actually about weight loss, but I wrote it for all audiences because anyone who's interested in the science and practice of EBT. I documented everything there. So in one book you will see everything and probably more than you want. But there's stories, there's lots of different tools and so that 123joy, but mainly come to ebtorg. It also is ebtconnectnet and we will greet you there and you can get right into a group and you can start making some magic with these tools.

Andy Esam:

Fabulous Well, thanks again for giving us your time and yeah, it certainly sounds amazing. We'll be following your progress very keenly.

Dr Laurel Mellon:

Well, and I'm so grateful to you for inviting me. It was a pleasure.

Richard L. Blake:

Yeah, it's great to have you. Thank you very much.

Dr Laurel Mellon:

Thank you very much.

Andy Esam:

Welcome back. I am sure you found that as fascinating as we all did. One thing I particularly liked is the um normality of these circuits and the fact that everyone's got them and we're all um shaped in a very similar way, and there is something we can do about it every single one of us and it only takes two minutes.

Richard L. Blake:

Yeah, it sounds amazingly quick and I love the guideposts. It's kind of like a map of oneself. I feel like when people are struggling with their mental health they feel lost or certainly I felt lost and a lot of my clients do too. And when you give people a, a mapping system, a protocol, it can just be so relieving that you, you know you're not so lost in the wilderness. And it sounds like ebt is is doing exactly that.

Andy Esam:

Yeah, I'm going to be very keen to uh follow the progress because I think it will grow exponentially absolutely yeah, yes.

Richard L. Blake:

So, listener, go, go check out dr melon. Uh, ebtorg, ebtorg. And yeah, let us know what you think if this is something you want to try, we we would love to hear all your thoughts on the podcast. You can reach us on on instagram, you can find andy at andy esam and you can find me at the Breath Geek and there's also a feature now. You can reply on Apple Podcasts. You can send us direct messages. So, send us a direct message if you have any thoughts or questions, and we'd love to hear from you and thanks again for Dr Mellon's time Fascinating yes absolutely All right and thank you, listener.

Richard L. Blake:

We will see you soon. Bye-bye, see.