Review of Neuroscientist and Best-Selling Author Dr. Caroline Leaf's "Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess" Coming March 2nd!

Welcome back to the Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast episode #106. This episode is a deep dive into Dr. Carolyn Leaf's NEW book that is coming out March 2, 2021 and App "Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess." Stay tuned for the interview that will be released on March 1, 2021.  My name is Andrea Samadi, and if you are new here, I’m a former educator who created this podcast to bring the most current neuroscience research, along with high performing experts who have risen to the top of their field, with specific strategies or ideas that you can implement immediately, whether you are an educator, or in the corporate space, to take your results to the next level. If we want to improve our social, emotional and cognitive abilities, it all starts with an understanding of our brain.  This week we are going to take a deep dive into the work of Dr. Carolyn Leaf[i], as we did record a bonus interview with her this week, but this episode will be released on March 1st, one day before the release of her new book, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress and Toxic Thinking.[ii] This book is timely and important, backed by clinical research and illustrated with compelling case studies, where Dr. Leaf provides a scientifically proven five-step plan to find and eliminate the root of anxiety, depression, and intrusive thoughts in your life so you can experience dramatically improved mental and physical health. This 5 step plan will build a healthy new and automated neural network in 63 days, the length of time to properly build a new habit. Dr. Leaf told me “I truly believe that mental mess is something we all experience often and that it isn’t something we should be ashamed of. She mentions that “this is my profession, and I still have to clean up my mind daily. The events and circumstances of life aren’t going anywhere; people make a lot of decisions every day that affect us all, suffering of some sort for you and your loved ones is inevitable. That said, I wholeheartedly believe that although the events and circumstances can’t be controlled, we can control our reactions to these events and circumstances. This is mind-management in action!”  Which to me is exactly what self-regulation is all about. Dr. Leaf leverages the strategies she has developed working with patients over the last 38 years (which to me is shocking since she doesn’t look a day over 35, but she was doing research in the 1980s that complements the work that Dr. Daniel Amen was doing back then) and she’s taken her years of research to teach her readers how to foster and cultivate the power of their own thinking and direct their own brain changes. Mind-management, when done correctly, helps facilitate talk between the conscious, the subconscious, and the nonconscious mind. This, in turn, gets brainwaves flowing in a healthy way, optimizing brain function. This is done by implementing the Neurocycle, a simple, clinically researched mind-management tool for personal use to address anxiety, depression, toxic thinking, inability to concentrate, irritability, exhaustion and burnout before they take over your mind. Last week I was speaking with my good friend Nancy, who asked me what book I was currently reading, and I shared with her that I was reading Dr. Leaf’s book to prepare for her interview, and that her book was coming out on March 2nd so it wasn’t out just yet. My friend went over to Amazon, read the title description, and told me “I need this book NOW” so I decided to release a deep dive into Dr. Leaf’s work so we can all prepare for the release of this important book, become familiar with her research and get a head start at Cleaning Up our Mental Mess. I’ll share the back story to how I came across Dr. Leaf’s work when I release her bonus episode next month, but I will share that I don’t believe in accidents, or that things happen by chance or luck. I believe that we are all faced with mult