Guest Episode
August 08, 2023
Episode 129:
The Power of the Subconscious Mind in Improving Mental Health
Listen or watch on your favorite platforms
Thais Gibson is an author, speaker and leader in the personal development field. She has been recognized by Time Business News, The New York Post, Yahoo! News, Success Magazine and many other outlets for her cutting-edge research on the subconscious mind and personal transformation.
Thais is certified in over 13 different modalities, including Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, NLP, Somatic Processing, and Trauma Work. Through her academic training and client-based research, Thais has created renowned courses for personal development, growth and relationships.
She is also the founder of Gibson Integrated Attachment Theory, which empowers individuals to heal different attachments in their lives and reprogram any limiting thoughts and behaviours. These teachings have been distilled into the in-depth courses inside The Personal Development School.
Today we will discuss The Power of the Subconscious Mind in Improving Mental Health.
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hello and welcome to True Hope cast the official podcast of true hope Canada where we take a deep dive into mental
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Health's many physiological and psychological aspects this is the show for you if you're looking for motivation
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inspiration knowledge and solutions and that's what we are all about here at true hope Canada and true hope Canada is
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a mind and body based supplement company dedicated first and foremost to promoting brain and body Health through
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non-invasive and nutritional means for more information about us please visit truehopecanada.com something new for the
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podcast is that we're going to conclude each episode with a specific question for each guest that question will offer
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solution-based ideas wrapped around our guests Specialties and today the question is going to be how do you begin
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to use your mind to help heal your mental health Our Guest on the podcast today are Thais Gibson now Tice is an
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author speaker and leader in the personal development World she's been recognized in many magazines including
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time business news and New York Post Yahoo news Success magazine and many many more all for her her welcome
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research on the subconscious mind and personal transformation Tice is certified in over 13 different
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modalities including CBT NLP somatic processing and Trauma work through her
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academic training and client-based research Tice has created renowned courses for personal development growth
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and relationships today we're going to be discussing the power of the subconscious mind in improving our
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mental health enjoy the show tires welcome to True hypercast how are
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you what is going well I am doing great thank you so much um
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great and uh you know it was so nice to sort of chat prior to the show and and uh
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have have really appreciated this year um being on not just sort of an ongoing
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personal development Journey as always but also really digging a lot more into health and sort of the natural way of
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things and um always appreciate learning amazing well I've been through your website been through your social media we had a chat
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just before and there's some amazing things coming down the pipeline for you and your organization which we can
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certainly touch on later on but today we're going to be discussing the power of the subconscious mind in improving
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mental health a huge thing that we are all about here at true hope Canada you know we have incredible products to
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support people's mental health but there's obviously a very powerful element of the subconscious mind being
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worked with to help people transform themselves from let's say a a damaged
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past person to somebody who can feel like that they can kind of do anything and feel empowered to you know take on
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just the small things in life because for a lot of people like they can wake up in the morning those small tiny things can just seem like absolute
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mountains to overcome so and at the end of the podcast we're going to be offering some solutions to a specific
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question which is something new to the podcast and that question is going to be how do you begin to use your mind
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to help heal your mental health and just we're going to talk about a few like Little Steps there to help people
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immediately be able to step into let's say a better place but first of all can
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you just kick us off with a little bit of an introduction who you are and what it is that you do please
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yes so my name is Tais Gibson um I'm the founder of the personal development school so it's an online course hosting
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platform where we have a particular Focus around attachment Styles but a lot of the basis of all of PDs is that we
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really take personal development and it's personal development tools specifically for the subconscious mind so my background is I went sort of
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through the traditional way of school and psychology and and then got really
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interested in hypnosis I was in one of my my um classes one day and somebody said to meal the conscious mind can't out will
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or overpower the subconscious mind and it was something I was learning and and you know prior to that I had been on
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this really intense struggle um as I share fairly openly with with opiates
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um since I was about 15 years old and I spent like six years you know obsessing
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in that sort of addictive space and a large part of that six years wondering like how did I get to this point like
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what's going on for me tried aana went to outpatient rehab all sorts of things and um it was always this daily struggle
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of I'd be like this is the last time this is the last day I'm gonna avoid this person I'm gonna delete their phone
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number for my phone I'm gonna you know and all these things and then you just go back to the same patterns over and
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over and over again and so I was fairly high functioning like I still made it off to University and was playing soccer
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and in University but really struggling behind closed doors and it was when I
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heard somebody say to me the conscious mind cannot will or overpower the subconscious mind it was like this
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explains everything that I go through every day it's my conscious mind saying this is the last time and my
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subconscious is like nope we're interested in avoiding pain we're gonna go back to the painkillers and so you
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know that just like I I got so hungry to learn at that point um and you know went down this whole
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sort of rabbit hole of um did my first major certification in hypnosis and just really wanted to
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understand how the subconscious mind works and then proceeded to do about 13 other certifications and everything from
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like cognitive behavioral therapy to neural linguistic programming to internal family systems like all the
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sort of things out there and really got interested in how can we take some of these traditional tools but utilize them
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in a way that like plugs into the subconscious mind specifically and start to see results in doing that and so that
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was sort of my journey um and then proceeded to run a client-based practice for for about seven eight years and had a two-year
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wait list and was like okay this isn't really working in terms of like how do you serve enough people sort of things
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so realize it wasn't quite scalable in the way I wanted to be so we put together um some some online courses and uh we
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have a lot of students now we have about 7 000 active students in there every day and and lots of people sort of coming in
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there and and doing a deep dive into like reprogramming childhood trauma changing their attachment style to
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become more securely attached and then really just like Breaking Bad Habits all those sorts of things by engaging the subconscious mind in the process
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wow that's amazing yeah 7 000 students yeah obviously going from you know having four or five people a day because
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you know having one-on-one consultations is a very difficult thing to do it's very draining physically and psychologically but being able to switch
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that to you know into a digital model and be able to serve so many people in such a positive way that's just amazing
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I'd love to I'd love for you to just maybe explain to us what the conscious
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minds and the subconscious mind are and maybe the differences between and that quote that you mentioned before that the
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you the the the conscious mind can you explain that again for me because yeah I
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understand what the two are and I understand the quote but let's let's break it down a little little for people who are who aren't too familiar with
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that um absolutely so we have our conscious mind and our conscious mind is responsible for roughly three to five
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percent of our daily beliefs thoughts emotions and actions so our decisions throughout the day and our behaviors and
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our subconscious and unconscious collectively are responsible for 95 to 97 percent so our conscious mind is the
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aspect of self that we sort of identify as ourselves right it's if you've ever seen the Freud Iceberg diagram the
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conscious mind is is you know as an analogy is the tip of the iceberg that you see floating above the surface and
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then underneath that there's so much more going on and that consists of our subconscious mind and our unconscious
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mind and a lot of people get confused between those two and you can think of like your subconscious mind as actually
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being the space that you can retrieve information from so if you've ever been triggered for example and you're going
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why did that upset me so much and then you realize oh you know what because as a child I went through something similar
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and that deeply affected me and and that retrievable information that you're not consciously aware of at the time that's
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within your subconscious and then your unconscious is sort of the deeper layers of the subconscious where it's much more difficult to retrieve that information
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but all throughout the day where so many of our patterns and habits and and
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beliefs and emotions and all these different things are really coming from actually exist beneath the tip of the iceberg and so I think we spent a lot of
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time especially in like our traditional way of trying to change habits or especially from you know different
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mental health approaches a lot of our mainstream system is designed to really Target the conscious mind and I think
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it's a huge reason why we see a lot of people struggle to break habits or create change especially in an efficient
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manner is Because unless you target the subconscious mind and the process and actually recondition the patterns that
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are there and become consciously aware of them then we're really living on autopilot and your subconscious mind
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really produces those autopilot thoughts and habits and patterns and you know we
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spend a lot of time trying to change something you know at the conscious level when the problem never existed there to begin with it's really a
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subconscious problem that we have to be able to Target yeah that makes a lot of sense it just
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made me think of the fact that um when you made the analogy of the iceberg it just just thinking about some friends
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the people that I know that I could tell you a lot about a friend of mine called John
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I could tell you a lot about like what I consciously know about him what he's expressed to me but then there's the
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side of him that I have no idea about there's the history he has there's the interactions he's had with his family
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the childhood the stuff that he can't even remember like there's so much more to this person that I think that I know
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that it's so complex it's so deep and as you say if we're not looking at that
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subconscious part of an individual we're not getting to the root cause of like
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what's going on because obviously everything's kind of like pre-programmed in there things that you know thoughts
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feelings behaviors that we exhibit today and then now has most likely been programmed from decades ago that we
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don't even really realize it so if we are just working on our conscious selves in the now we're we're not getting to
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the root cause and we're not going to be able to make any sustainable change that's going to change us significantly in the future
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absolutely and so that's been and it started with sort of my own personal experiences you know I grew up in this
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sort of dynamic where it was like okay you struggle with addiction you're gonna struggle your whole life it's always going to be a fight it's always going to
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be a battle and that was a lot of the messaging that I got and thank goodness you know one of the programs I actually
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got as a child was to always kind of question things and to be able to really like you know if there's a will there's
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a way sort of patterns of thinking and so I was like there's no way like I remember being 18 at the time thinking
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like this is a daily struggle for me I can't live my whole life in this daily battle like there's got to be another
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way to live and to be and to behave and so when that when I came across that quote I was like I knew instinctively in
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that moment this is gonna be a key that unlocks a whole bunch of different things and the funny part is that you
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know I think because we don't grow up hearing about the subconscious mind too much and it's not like a really you know Common concept that we're exposed to you
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would be surprised at how easy it is to reprogram your subconscious mind once we understand the patterns of what exists there and I think that we think it to be
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this really complex crazy sort of ambiguous thing but when you actually dig into it you'll see that really the
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roots are that we have subconscious beliefs and there's really Common Core ones there that we can dissect and
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realize hey we should shed this sort of belief system here we have subconscious needs that really have a massive role on
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how we make decisions and how we prioritize things in our lives and how we spend our money and where we put our
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focus and and when we understand those things and then actually design Our Lives to be in alignment with those
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things we actually have a lot less resistance a lot less sabotage and procrastination around stuff
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um and then we have subconscious emotional patterns that are familiar and a bit of a comfort zone there subconscious patterns with boundaries
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but really the two major things it boils down to are your subconscious limiting beliefs and your subconscious needs and
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when you can really just dissect those two areas a lot of different things open up for us
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interesting what does the what does the research tell us about the subconscious mind and how people
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actually get into a state of say psychological ill health
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yes it's a great question I mean there is some great research on this particularly there's a whole bunch of
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people but but I love Dr Gabriel mate's work around this he has a great book hole in the body says no if you've ever heard about this and I think like on a
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really fundamental level there's just you can't separate out the body and mind right we know for example that you know
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there's a study done at the University of Southern California's neuroimaging Institute and it talks about how we have roughly 60 to 70 000 thoughts per day
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and roughly 50 000 of those thoughts are repeated thoughts um you know our subconscious sort of
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autopilot thoughts and the way we're sort of thinking and perceiving different things and you know when you think of your thoughts what happens is
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when you have these different thoughts thoughts produce an emotional response so if I'm thinking thoughts about how
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I'm not good enough and I'm never going to succeed in life you know I'm gonna feel a certain way and then we know
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those emotions are made up of neurochemical reactions and we know that those neurochemical reactions can even under states of stress put us for
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example into sympathetic nervous system of that fight or flight mode and we know that there's a huge impact of being in
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sustained sympathetic nervous system mode in terms of our health our immune system all of these different things and
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on top of that we know that you know if we're constantly having these sorts of cortisol responses because we're
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thinking stressful thoughts feeling stressful things and then having a stress response as a result I mean there's a massive impact on our health
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and what I found over the years you know sort of anecdotally is that um you know so many individuals who have
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these constant streams of negative thinking because they've derived these programs from childhood and perhaps
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being exposed to more significant childhood trauma I mean it doesn't just impact their mental health but they're
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they're exhausted all the time their their physical well-being is depleted and so I think it's so important to
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recognize these things really deeply go hand in hand yeah I think for a lot of people the
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realization that their thought patterns that say I am not
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good enough and that repeats over a thousand ten thousand times a day and it starts becoming a significant belief and
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it starts becoming part of your personality and you you know you don't work harder in your job you don't strive
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because you don't think you're good enough to to get there that is a physical
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pattern within your brain it's physical matter of neurons and Connections in your brain that have been created been
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so solidified to the point where they are automatic because they just fire and wire right excuse me and that's that's
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happened over time that's like you know it's like you're creating a building creating a house but if you've created that house you can
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knock that house down and you can create a new house you know you can create a new thought process that's completely opposite to that belief that you have
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basically self-created over many many years and it just go it just makes me
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think about it just makes me think about the experience I have with true hope and our products here that so many people
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worldwide are unbelievable unbelievably deficient in so many different nutrients minerals vitamins antioxidants Etc
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coming into their body and if they're unable to replace their neurological
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chemistry with good quality ingredients building blocks to build this house to build this neuropathway then people are
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really going to struggle in the end because if you're not consuming enough fats for example your brain's going to
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suffer if you're not consuming enough good quality proteins muscle's gonna suffer and so on and so on so as we look
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at mental health we must be looking at what the brain is receiving through
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nutrition and whether it's adequate and I just wonder like so many people who end up like
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becoming cripplingly ill because of a psychological disorder how much of that
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is the fact that they've not been consuming the right ingredients
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to get their brain functioning and working optimally what do you think about that absolutely I mean I
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completely agree with you and and definitely my area of expertise is the psychological field but I mean
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everything I've learned and personally read and researched about health I I really couldn't agree more and it's interesting because you were saying you
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mentioned like how these neural Pathways fire and wire and you know you probably hear these these ideas oh it takes 21
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days to create a habit you know and that's because it takes roughly 21 days to actually create strong new neural
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Pathways and replacement of old ones and when we divest from things so when we stop feeding the same narratives over and over again neuropatho is also
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atrophy over time in a very similar way to how muscles atrophy and so you'll see that when we stop reinvesting in these
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Dynamics we can really create change and so if we talk for example about reprogramming these ideas right you have
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this let's say some there's there tends to be like 18 major common core beliefs
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um that really have a massive impact on how we think and and these beliefs lead to thought patterns so for example I'm
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not good enough we may think thoughts like I'm not interesting enough I'm not smart enough I'm not funny enough I'm not you know all these different I'm not
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enough extensions right the thoughts that sort of spring off of the belief and you'll see that
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um we have other Dynamics around this I will be abandoned as a big one I will end up alone as a big one I am unworthy
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I will be betrayed I'm trapped helpless powerless like you see these really common root sort of Tree Trunks of the
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belief and the subconscious mind you know when we try to outwork these beliefs like you
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said earlier you know we're not born with these things they get conditioned into us and hence we can obviously recondition them and so what it actually
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requires from a subconscious perspective is repetition and emotion and so wherever we can you know sort of
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Leverage repetition and emotion as well as imagery really because the subconscious mind doesn't speak language
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it speaks in emotion and imagery so for example um if I were to say to you don't think
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of the Pink Elephant you know you think of the Pink Elephant your subconscious probably pictures of pink elephant
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because that's the language of your subconscious and your conscious mind hears the do not but your subconscious
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doesn't really those that type of language doesn't land with the subconscious so when we're trying to rewire old ideas what we have to do is
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for that 21 day reprogramming period And there's many different tools but this is just one simple one is we can feed the
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opposite of that belief so I am good enough and we have to come come up with pieces of evidence for why because
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evidence is the container for emotion so if you say okay because I graduated with
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this degree or because I show up this way as a father or I show up this way as a husband or I'm proud of these three
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things that I did today when you're seeing the evidence for why you're good enough every time you pluck out those
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pieces of evidence it actually elicits an emotional response you see yourself as a father and what it feels like to be
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a good father or you see yourself as a husband and how you show up for your wife and care for your family and
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there's these small emotional responses so what you're doing is every time you find evidence that opposes that original
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limiting belief and let's say you pick five a day for 21 days that repetition
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plus emotion re-fires new neural Pathways that go against this original belief system and as you keep re-feeding
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it for 21 days or so you actually have these new core beliefs that that outweigh and and sort of out balance
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that old dynamic or Paradigm of thinking that's really cool yeah I think the majority of those thoughts that that
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become so repetitive in people's minds that that's called a negative some of them are just like random
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neurons just firing obviously like it's very you're not you're not thinking about thinking that I'm not good enough
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it's just fires right and it's like especially when you're feeling tired or hungover or nutrient deficient
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or you've just had a really crappy day those are the thoughts that come up right and obviously like if it's very
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difficult in the moment to sit back analyze that thought and think you know is it actually any evidence to to to
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um to interact to cancel just to make is that is that comment valid you're like
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no I am good enough you know I did all this I've done all these amazing things I've just had a really bad day like it's all right like I can be and then that's
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basically stopping that thought in its process evaluating it and having a completely different
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um Behavior rather than that thought coming up and then me ending up going like you know eat three tubs of ice
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cream because the behavior is like I want to be alone and I want to eat my pain away you know which is obviously a
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super common thing for a lot of people but being having the actual um let's say
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conscious awareness of the subconscious thought coming in and not overtaking my
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emotional regulation and then my behavior regulation by like allowing me to isolate myself stay away from people
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and then like you know maybe eating really bad foods it's so interesting that it just takes that like little step
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of creating a space of response to that whole situation rather than like we just
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automatically react and then we're already down the shops eating the ice cream on the drive home absolutely and
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so so that's another form of reprogramming it's a form of pattern Interruption right where you're able to observe consciously that subconscious
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fired out autopilot thought and then actually question it and equilibrate it right you're able to say no I am good
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enough I'm just having a bad day and you're able to really stop that from re-firing them in the same way but you
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know you're probably very aware and I find a lot of people um you know are not even aware of these subconscious thoughts it's they're not
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even able to really catch them in real time a lot of the time until they've gone down the thought rabbit hole for too long and and so the analogy I often
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give people is like you can imagine we have like btea beliefs thoughts emotions actions and you can imagine that your
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beliefs are like the tree trunk and then your thoughts are the tree branches that sort of spring off the tree trunk so if you think I'm not good enough you think
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I'm not good enough at my job or I'm not good enough as though as a husband or you know we tell those stories and then
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the emotions are sort of the leaves right then we have this emotional output and then to your point exactly what you
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were just saying is then we have an automatic action to try to cope with our emotional state and this whole train the
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beliefs thoughts emotions actions is usually all on autopilot for most people until we start actually trying to
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consciously observe and connect and so when we have a lot of these actions that take place it's so interesting because I
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often say to people like there's no actual such thing as self-sabotage because what's actually happening is
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your conscious mind when we experience self-sabotage it's actually your conscious mind intending one thing and
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your subconscious mind intending something else and your subconscious just wins because that's how it goes and so you may say for example I'm not going
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to come home and eat the ice cream today I'm not going to do it I'm trying to eat healthier but then if you go home you
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have that whole thought process on the way home you're not consciously aware of it you feed into all the I'm not good
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enough stories you get home you're in a bad mood and then if you're conditioned coping mechanisms since childhood for
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example or since some period of your life is to eat the tubs of ice cream then you go home you're in that
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emotional state you've got that automatic coping mechanism you ate the ice cream and then guess what happens next for people then they go oh I'm not
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good enough I eat the ice cream and the cycle continues but really you know on
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the point of root cause how we start breaking this cycle up is to be able to consciously observe and we can try to
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disrupt that pattern in the Moment by just questioning it and catching it but if we want to play again so that we just
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have a daily routine to really speed up the process we can plug into belief reprogramming with those five pieces of countering act counter acting evidence
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for the 21 day period you see you mentioned that
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being able to consciously observe yourself is obviously a key part of reprogramming or repairing thought
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patterns um what do you think is that keeps us on autopilot and basically
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Keeps Us unconscious to the behaviors that we exit because people go through their whole lives
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before they let's say come to the realization that they are good enough and they want to do something about
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their previous thought patterns because it's LED them to Dark Places what do you think it is that the key
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things that keep people on that autopilot not wanting to be aware of
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their their conscious ability to be able to change these things what is it that keeps us stuck in the dark it's an
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amazing question you know I think part of it is that we get so conditioned to be externally focused so we grew up in
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the system of punishment reward or classical conditioning right if you've ever heard of like the Pavlov's dogs experiment where the dog is trained to
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salivate by every time they ring the bell the job Associates the bell with food because the dog would be fed after and and when we think of that we all get
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conditioned through punishment reward and what that does is it perpetuates this very external focus into our external world not our internal world
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and so a lot of individuals you know if we're told you're punished for doing this thing you're rewarded for doing
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this or constantly being conditioned to focus on what people think of us are we
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getting approval from the outside world are we fitting in and we have a lot of that system really you know of
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socialization built out in in sort of hidden ways throughout our society like the school system our jobs performance
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reviews I mean it's everywhere because it's a system of condition we grow up in but then there's something called the overload psychology which is really
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interesting and sort of on point with um some of what you do and the overload principle in Psychology says whenever we
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are overloaded we have a much harder time becoming consciously aware what really we break more into the
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subconscious mind and different systems or forms of being overloaded include things like being hungover being
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exhausted not sleeping enough not having proper nutrients not being in a proper properly healthy State like if any of
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anybody's ever been in chronic pain or been chronically fatigued you it's hard to do this work it's hard to
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self-observe and so I think it goes back to this idea of how interconnected the body and mind are because it's actually
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difficult you know in the system we're in to begin with but it's you know exceedingly more difficult when we're
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unable to actually feel okay enough to be able to stay conscious and not be in this overloaded state where we're
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heavily relying even more so on our subconscious autopilot habits yeah there seems to have been in our
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Western culture a big attack on Consciousness and awareness and
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the individual the individuality that we have as people like as you say we love being busy we love being the
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busiest person that we know and significant significant overload
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right and when would you have the ability to sit and internalize anything let alone your deepest thoughts
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to actually be able to process them and you know we don't learn anything about meditation in school we don't learn anything about breathe breath work in
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school we don't learn anything about you know being quiet and sitting with your thoughts and your mind and how to
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process them what those thoughts mean you know we don't do any of that in our
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Western culture there's obviously very ancient practices that still go on today in you know in other Traditions that
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certainly do do that but we obviously have this big thing in our culture of distraction cell phones social media
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work busyness Hobbies you just got a go go if you've got any spare time and
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we're not filling up with something we're failing right so how can we ever
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finds you know I you know I I'd say I'm quite a busy person I've got two young kids I find it difficult to do the
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meditation work that I I used to do four years ago before I had kids you know it's very very difficult it's certainly
27:24
not impossible but that is one of the biggest practices that that helps my health helps me
27:30
figure out where I am right now but we just don't harmonize that at all in any
27:36
part of you know from from kid from kids in school to to adults I know I guess maybe it's changing a little bit with
27:43
some work that's going on out there but it's certainly like it's certainly not enough because we need to be trained at
27:48
a young age to be able to analyze our thoughts and recognize what they are and recognize that other people have these
27:54
thoughts you know why is this the kid angry at me oh maybe it's because they you know had a bad day or something
27:59
rather than you know we don't we just don't think about things like that and when you when you're talking about the
28:05
internal and the external yeah we are so unbelievably focused on the external how are we ever going to be able to like sit
28:11
and be with ourselves and listen to ourselves and yeah people aren't super comfortable with sitting in meditation
28:16
for a couple of minutes because their body their subconscious Minds controlling the body wants to get them up wants to get
28:23
them doing something and it's a very very uncomfortable unfamiliar unpredictable place to be so yeah it's
28:29
like how do we how can we how can we begin to reverse that to get people to start being comfortable with their
28:35
internal selves so what an incredible question you just asked so so you know
28:40
um you raised a couple really interesting things so one of the first ones is the more we are in sympathetic nervous system mode
28:46
um the more busy we are the more we have all these things on our playthrough today we're juggling many things at once I mean the more likely we are to be in
28:53
this low-level fight or flight mode and when we're in that mode it's very hard to sit with yourself and when we actually have a history of
28:59
trauma or walking on eggshells a lot growing up or going through things that felt really uncomfortable and outside of
29:05
our comfort zone also the more likely we are to be in sympathetic nervous system mode and a second thing that I I found
29:12
personally as somebody who's done a lot of meditation throughout the years and really really huge huge advocate of
29:19
meditating is when I was coming out of um addiction and I started meditating one of the
29:26
first things that was this huge light bulb moment for me was no wonder I want to numb myself all day because as soon
29:32
as I would sit with myself in quiet my internal dialogue was miserable my internal dialogue was like you're this
29:39
you're that you're never gonna do this or that or you know it was just worrying about the future angry about the past
29:46
you know just all my internal dialogue and I was thinking no wonder I want to numb all day like no wonder I want to
29:51
self-estate because my internal world is what I'm trying to escape from yeah and that came from a history of
29:59
growing up in a household where there was a lot of chaos and a lot of different challenges that I face at a young age and internalize and sponge a
30:06
lot of those things up and so you know realizing that there's a couple different ways of doing this we can
30:12
regulate our nervous system function through things like meditation through breath work through
30:18
um yoga through light exercise through a whole bunch to different sort of possibilities that exist there to put us
30:24
more into rest and digest mode then our thoughts slow down it feels more comfortable and more safe to be in our
30:29
bodies and then from there we can start self-observing more effectively and feeling more comfortable doing so or
30:36
another entry point into it is also if we start recognizing what's going on in our internal dialogue and doing a lot of
30:42
that reprogramming work of these core beliefs that are plaguing us and we start doing that what you'll see is that
30:49
as a result your thoughts become less busy your thoughts become less frustrated and stressed and negative and
30:55
then it becomes less scary to sit with yourself because there's not a whole bunch of things that you're running from
31:00
all day and trying to self-avoid and if you think of it as like you know somebody's following you around all day
31:05
all day long and they are telling you all the things that you're terrible at or not good enough at or all the reasons
31:11
you're going to fail or you're unlovable or whatever it might be you know in that particular instance like of course you
31:18
want to escape from that person of course you want to avoid that and so when we clean that up within the relationship to ourselves it also
31:23
becomes safer to start embarking on a meditation journey and I find that nervous system regulation tools or somatic work combined with
31:31
um a lot of the reprogramming of of our thinking has a very very powerful effect in a very short window
31:37
yeah I think being able to reconnect your mind with your body in a very conscious manner is a really beautiful
31:43
healing process for a lot of people because they're usually very separate they're very split and yeah for a lot of
31:49
people there subconscious mind is controlling their body to go from place to place you know especially with you
31:56
know if you have a very similar day every morning you wake up you get outside of the right side of the bed you
32:02
put the coffee on you you do this you do that and then you repeat you come home and you do that kind of every single day like what part
32:09
of your conscious mind is really controlling much of that like your subconscious mind is is doing a lot of
32:14
it so yeah becoming conscious is absolutely huge and I love your what you said that
32:19
consciously becoming to observe consciously huge I absolutely
32:25
love that that's a big big first step I want to ask you about um a connection between the subconscious
32:30
and Trauma and how and how our body responds in conditions like PTSD for
32:36
example so it's a fantastic question again questions well
32:43
well what happens is you know I think we think of trauma as being this very extreme thing and in the case of PTSD
32:49
generally you are looking at a few you know one or a few very specific cases of extreme trauma and you know how we
32:57
talked earlier about how you know the subconscious mind gets reprogrammed through repetition plus emotion well the key ingredient is is emotion
33:04
over repetition because you can acquire a really negative core belief through
33:09
one experience of substantial trauma so let's say as an example that um you know I never grew up let's
33:15
pretend in a in a home where I felt unsafe um and let's say I felt generally safe
33:20
in my world and in my personal experiences through life and let's pretend God forbid that one day I'm in a
33:27
big building and there's a huge earthquake and you know I see all this chaos and I just barely survive because
33:33
of how emotionally potent that one experience is I'm likely to walk away from that experience with a new core
33:40
belief that says I am unsafe because this random very scary thing happens out of the blue and what the mind is
33:46
constantly trying to do is it's trying to interpret its experiences so that it
33:52
can gain a sense of certainty which is one of our basic needs so the mind will constantly project meaning onto things
33:58
to try to be able to put it in a box understand it gain the certainty and so in doing so we form these limiting
34:04
beliefs we form these core beliefs so I have this scary incident in the earthquake and I make it mean I am unsafe and now that belief is formed at
34:11
a subconscious level because of how strong that emotion was and now what's likely to happen is I'm going to go
34:16
through life carrying this core belief of I am unsafe so I may constantly worry that I am unsafe I may fear being unsafe
34:24
you know doing things on a daily basis and and because of how emotional that experience is it can imprint directly so
34:30
we can have PTSD in that kind of circumstance we can also have complex PTSD which is you know a lot more common I think than than it's necessarily being
34:38
shown right now um I think a lot of people are probably walking around with undiagnosed complex post-traumatic stress disorder which
34:44
tends to essentially be that if in childhood you had a significant degree of lower level traumas but they were
34:50
more repetitive then they can have similar a very similar impact on the subconscious mind is PTSD in terms of
34:56
how you feel about yourself nightmares you know confidence issues um you flashbacks inability to trust and
35:03
ability to feel safe in your world your environment excessive time spent in sympathetic nervous system mode there's
35:09
a whole bunch of sort of outputs of that but generally when we go through trauma the mind is a way to try to you know
35:15
adapt to that trauma gives the trauma meaning it creates this set of beliefs or single belief at the subconscious
35:21
level of mind and then the subconscious mind is like the lens we see and interact with the world through so then
35:26
what happens is you know if we believe I am unsafe I am helpless I'm powerless
35:31
I'm trapped and these are some very common core beliefs that come out of traumatic events for example then we
35:37
carry that with us in our subconscious mind on a daily basis and those core beliefs are likely to have a massive
35:42
impact on those 60 to 70 000 thoughts we have per day because they provide sort of the root level lens that we're going
35:49
to interact with the world through and you'll also see the these will be the most likely conclusions we jump to so if I'm you know if I have a huge core wound
35:56
of feeling trapped you know if if somebody tells me to do something I don't feel like doing I'm not going to
36:01
be like oh I don't feel like doing that and I'm free to set a boundary I'm going to say this person's trying to trap me I'm trapped and so these core beliefs
36:09
that we take from past events we carry with us we constantly see the world through that lens and we're much more
36:14
likely to also project our old trauma onto our presence and future experiences until we actually have the capacity to
36:20
do the reprogramming work so if you're interesting it you just made me think of the fact that like
36:25
whether somebody said like a rather a really big trauma in their lives like the earthquake um example you just got
36:31
even funnily enough I think we have at least two um peer-reviewed research journals on
36:39
PTSD and earthquake cues and the use of mpower Plus in those individuals that experience the earthquake and how their
36:46
symptoms significantly reduced on the product I'll send you those papers because I know you're super scientific
36:51
it's very very interesting you brought that topic up but whether you had a really big trauma like that like you
36:58
know that happened in the now or though things happened repetitively when you were younger
37:03
yeah all of those things engage with sympathetic nervous system which is going to deplete your nutrition
37:09
capabilities like you say you've got that big trauma and you just like you're basically scared and worried like all
37:15
the time your body has to ramp up its um burning of fuel to actually make you
37:22
feel like anxious and worried right your body's gonna have to Galvanize all of its resources to make you feel that way
37:30
as a as a safety response right and if we're not replacing that nutrition
37:35
whether that's through really good food or really good quality supplementation which I would highly recommend
37:41
um you'll never go you're always going to be like depleted it's like having some an app on your phone that you can't
37:46
get rid of that is constantly working draining your battery and you're unable
37:51
to replace it quick enough and even with the small traumas that happen let's say 20 30 years ago they are still
37:58
subconsciously working and depleting you in those moments of maybe when you're susceptible to
38:05
um experiencing similar experiences when those those symptoms come up for you so
38:10
it's super interesting you're being excited I I thought about that before but like with that that big thing happening all those small things
38:16
happening regardless most people are walking around in a very sympathetic State meaning their body is not really
38:23
digesting their food properly all of their nutrition all of their like energy and is not anywhere near the digestive
38:30
tract it's going to be their extremities you know in that fight or flight response and we're just going to be
38:35
massively depleted for long periods of the time so it just goes to show that there's a very very complex
38:43
um beautiful synergy within a lot of these PTSD disorders anxiety depression bipoda Etc and the
38:51
fact that loads of people are massively nutrient deficient because they're just burning their nutrition at an
38:57
unbelievably so strong subconscious rates and and you know the health I'm
39:03
very interested in but it's not my area of expertise very much mental health the mind but I would also imagine that the
39:09
more depleted you are um from your your nutrients and minerals that the more likely you are so to be in
39:16
sympathetic nervous system what I imagine it becomes a vicious cycle because your body's probably feeling like it's exhausted and needing these
39:22
resources and it's probably putting you in this more survival state to you know be revved up to be able to go find those
39:28
nutrients and I imagine it just comes full circle that way from a health perspective as well yeah and when you're
39:33
when you've gone through something traumatic or you're in a very stressful State you don't really go for unless
39:39
you're super conscious and aware you don't really go for the super healthiest nutritional nutritious food right you go
39:45
for the junk you go for the quick stuff because you're in a sympathetic State your blood sugar is going to be all over the map you're gonna go for those sugary
39:52
Foods you're going to try and get yourself back up there and you're replacing um the nutrition that's been burnt off
39:58
with let's just say poor quality nutrition say like fast food for example so you're not giving your brain the
40:05
ingredients necessary to produce good quality neurons um you're not giving the rest of your
40:11
body the ability to create good quality structure you're kind of creating a house out of straw rather than being
40:18
able to like replace those nutrients with something high quality that's high quality it's
40:24
bioavailable it's got all the nutrients that you would absolutely need you don't have to have good quality digestion you could be in a stressful State and still
40:31
take Empower plus and you're going to be able to absorb it because it's in such a bioavailable form so yeah it's just
40:37
super interesting that we we have that connection yeah sure
40:44
um what other modalities um have you seen support people when it
40:50
comes to Healing their mental health obviously you've got this unbelievable program and you've mentioned things like
40:56
meditation you've mentioned yoga you've mentioned breath work do you find like all of these benefit or is it kind of on
41:02
an individual basis it's so interesting so a lot of the work I do that's that's focus is around
41:08
attachment Styles and so there's sort of different attachment cells there's four groups everybody has an attachment style there's a securely attached style and
41:15
generally if you grow up with very limited trauma and and pretty healthy patterns you're more likely to be
41:20
securely attached and then we have our three and securely attached Styles our anxious preoccupied attachment style who
41:26
in their relationships family relationships romantic friendships um tends to be very needy clingy afraid
41:34
of being abandoned Alone um then we have our dismissive avoidance who tend to be a little bit more they
41:39
need their space and their time and their freedom in relationships and they may not want to commit as much to things
41:45
and then we have our fearful avoidant attachment cells who sort of share a bit of the anxious and avoid inside but they generally are exposed to more trauma and
41:52
so they've got a lot of trust wounds a lot of fears of getting close and yet they yearn for it at the same time and
41:57
it's interesting because one thing I found over the years is that different attachment Styles actually take to different Tools in in a more effective
42:03
manner so I find that there's sort of these groupings right and securely attached individuals they generally have less
42:09
trauma to begin with so we can sort of leave them out of this conversation but when we look at the three insecurely
42:14
attached Styles um dismissive avoidance tend to be very out of their bodies they tend to be very disconnected they're very mental and
42:21
intellectual because usually what causes dismissive avoidant attachment style is childhood emotional neglect and
42:27
sometimes that can be something that flies under the radar sometimes neglect Isn't So overt sometimes there can be
42:32
food on the table structure in the home no fighting but there's just a total lack of emotional Attunement or bonding
42:37
that takes place and as a result children feel generally unsafe in that kind of home and they tend to really
42:43
repress their emotional selves because there's no place to really Express that and and get rewarded for it and so I
42:49
find that a lot of somatic work tends to be very effective for this type of Personality um so a lot of actually like you know
42:55
guided meditations but really practicing embodiment right practicing somatic um you know noticing the sensations in
43:02
your body getting back in touch with what it means to feel an emotion and what since because all emotions are are
43:08
Sensations in the body right that's all that it is it's a reflection of the mind and the body so if I think I'm not good
43:14
enough and if that makes me feel sad sadness would feel like a hollowness in my chest a heaviness on my shoulders
43:19
maybe a little bit of knots in my stomach or a ball in my throat and so emotions are just Sensations so if I
43:26
find that there's different entry points for different personalities so Matic work tends to be very important for people who are mildly dissociated or
43:33
really disconnected from being in their body and experience their emotions I find that cognitive behavioral therapy
43:39
and subconscious reprogramming tends to be extremely effective um for a fearful avoidant attachment
43:44
style so the ones who have a lot of chaos and Trauma as children that was my attachment style and and it was
43:50
extremely powerful for me to realize my thoughts to challenge them to question them and then to work to actually take
43:56
CBT and drive it down into the subconscious mind where it could be sped up essentially and become more effective
44:02
by engaging CB2 with different principles of hypnosis and suggestibility
44:07
um meditation I find to be really effective as well because a lot of fearful avoidance spend a lot of time and their their sympathetic nervous
44:13
system mode um and then I find that with anxious preoccupied individuals
44:19
um learning to meet their own needs is extremely powerful I think there's a lot to be said um I mean there's a lot of powerful
44:25
tools out there there's Shadow work there's internal family systems and parts work I mean there's so many incredible things but I find that
44:33
um a huge part of trauma it can stay sort of like in this
44:38
regenerated State it's like we have to imagine for example right let's say you had a trauma when you were eight years
44:43
old and let's say you're still carrying it with you you know years and years later decades later well why how is that
44:50
possible and what happens is is the way a trauma stays with us is we have to keep refeeding it on autopilot without
44:55
realizing so you'll see for example our anxious preoccupied styles to sort of go down the rabbit hole the clingy person
45:01
in the relationship um they tend to be the types who they have a huge abandonment wound but they
45:08
continue to self-abandon and that's actually them recreating the trauma and the relationship to self and so we tend
45:14
to take a lot of our traumas and how we were treated as children in regards to our needs we treat ourselves that way so
45:20
if you were your needs were not emotionally met as a child you're not meeting your emotional needs as an adult so we we become suggestible in that
45:27
sense right we tend to take trauma we recreate it in the relationship to self and there's a lot of really powerful
45:32
benefit that I don't think is talked about enough in terms of individuation like learning to actually say well what
45:37
needs were not met as a child was it validation was it presence was it connection was it somebody to make me
45:45
feel supported or protected or seen or heard and then how can I actually re-parent or re-nurture these things in
45:51
the relationship to myself and you know so needs needing and actually breaking that trauma in the relationship to self
45:57
through behaviorally implementing new patterns in the way that we treat our own needs is also a very very powerful
46:04
tool and so you know at a high level I would say different people respond to different practices in different ways
46:10
um but for me the the big ones are subconscious reprogramming cognitive behavioral therapy
46:15
um somatic processing and embodiment work and then individuation work and re-parenting in terms of us being able
46:21
to meet our unmet needs and and doing that work from from childhood how much of um how much of that work
46:30
I'm just thinking about the type of there's so many different individuals are going to come visit your website and then start working with you
46:38
is there a particular type of person that comes and does visit your website and takes that plunge because you know
46:44
you people struggle with themselves for a very long period of time but what's that what's
46:50
that switch what's that moment where they decide to like sign up to something to invest their time to invest their money to invest their energy into
46:57
starting to feel better do you see a pattern in those individuals that do take that that turn
47:04
I do see that the the big thing so we have a lot of people who are fearful avoidance or anxious preoccupied a lot
47:09
of people who come in and they're more anxious and Afraid and you know they're feeling their feelings a lot more and so
47:15
they're they're recognizing how uncomfortable these feelings are but the way we set up the personal development schools you actually take a test when
47:21
you before signing up so we have a free attachment style quiz and it determines your attachment style and then you get a
47:28
report that tells you your biggest core wounds your biggest unmet needs the emotional patterns you'll tend to
47:33
struggle with the most the boundary issues you'll have and I think what happens is because people take that test
47:38
and then feel very much like wow this is me these are all my patterns how did it know this and because it's very specific
47:46
um then we actually have these course designs for them that are like Hey we're going to start with the core wounds
47:51
first we're going to teach you how to reprogram your beliefs okay we're going to start with the needs we're going to do the needs work okay we're going to start with you then we'll go to the
47:57
emotional regulation and nervous system work and so we have it set up in a pathway that's designed to best impact
48:03
the person themselves so it's a lot more individual and specific that way but as
48:08
a general overarching rule we tend to in terms of our demographics have people who were exposed to a good bit more
48:15
overtrauma growing up and and who are probably sick and tired of feeling sick and tired and and sort of ready to dive
48:23
in and do that work and I find as well that a lot of when we go through different things in in childhood and
48:30
they don't make sense or we're confused or we're frustrated or we're anxious or resentful you know understanding that
48:36
there's also a way out of that that really engages the subconscious mind and it doesn't have to be this six year process of healing right your process of
48:43
healing to recognize hey there's a sort of shortcut to doing that where you still have to put in the work of course but it doesn't have to be this like
48:50
lifetime journey to feel good again um I think tends to be very encouraging
48:55
for people yeah there's a there's a very positive part to like Google because a lot of people well they won't actually like go
49:02
and ask their friends or family for support or help but they'll they'll seek it in a search bar right and they'll
49:08
find websites like yours you know or they'll search mental health supplements depression supplements what can I do for
49:13
my mental health with supplements and our products will come up so there's obviously some really powerful um ways
49:20
that that type of Technology can help us out and I'm just looking at the quiz now I'm probably going to take that later on
49:25
today and see if we can see see uh see what results I get but I'll make sure that I link that in because yeah like
49:31
those four attachment Styles is very very interesting and that's a really great way for people to kind of
49:37
gently get themselves in the door on this on that kind of step towards wellness and healing and yeah people who
49:43
are sick and tired of being sick and tired you know um just coming up to like the 50 minute
49:49
Mark here this has been awesome so I just want to ask you the question that we discussed at the top of the show
49:54
because I want to give people some some um some tools that they can put into their lives literally like right now so
50:00
question was how do you begin to use your mind to help heal your mental health and I wonder if you've got a
50:07
couple of things that you can you can give us to take away please absolutely so one of the first things is
50:13
you know I think when we look at how do we use our mind what the most profound at least in my experience way of doing
50:19
this is is to use our conscious mind to start self-observing our subconscious mind right if we can start seeing what's
50:24
there I think a lot of people have this idea about healing and they're like how do I heal something like where do I
50:30
start what does it mean to heal and I think healing first means recognizing our patterns and you know a lot of our patterns can
50:36
they start you know rooted in our thoughts um but they're also you know rooted in
50:42
our needs that we're trying to meet at all times so we spend a lot of time talking today about you know their thought patterns and doing that work so
50:48
I'm going to sort of touch on the needs for a moment here and every single decision we make all day long Believe It
50:55
or Not is an attempt to meet a need while working through a system of beliefs and that's sort of a long
51:01
concept to explain but if I for example have a need for novelty but if I believe
51:08
that you know um so many things in the world are unsafe and I'm unsafe out in the world
51:14
but I have this novelty need I may for example try to meet the need for novelty through playing a video game right
51:19
because there's novelty there but it's in a safe way so we constantly have these needs and these beliefs interacting but when we can start
51:26
observing like what needs are really important to us what are the things that I'm trying to meet through my unhealthy
51:32
patterns one thing you'll see is everything that we do that we consciously judge ourselves for like why
51:37
did I eat the ice cream or why did I sabotage going to the gym or you know what's actually going on what you'll see
51:44
is everything we do is still trying to get a specific need met and when we can start sort of pulling out what the needs
51:51
are that we're trying to meet so let's say for example we look at eating the ice cream since that was the example from earlier and you know when we eat
51:59
ice cream there's actually a whole bunch of needs that are being met and our subconscious mind when we can't get needs in direct
52:05
ways we'll start trying to rely on more and more indirect ways so ice cream when we look at food in our relationship to
52:11
food our earliest experience of food is our mother's breast milk right we're being breastfed and in that process
52:16
there's a tremendous amount of oxytocin produce which is the bonding neurochemical and at the same time we're being cared for we're being held we're
52:22
being cradled we feel a sense of comfort and safety and so the Deep subconscious emotional needs that food actually
52:28
represents and that we've been conditioned with are that food equals emotional connection comfort and safety
52:34
and so it's really interesting because these different habits that we have that we find to be sabotaging habits they're
52:40
all actually just designed to get needs met for us and what it's telling us similar in a way like in in an analogy
52:47
would be like we're deficient in our needs we're like we're nutrient deficient in our needs right so when you
52:54
see okay keep relying on ice cream what's going on here that I'm just eating ice cream all the time or whatever habit it is that we're like we
53:01
don't like this habit this is an unhealthy habit what you'll see is it's actually an attempt for your mind to
53:07
meet healthy needs that it's starving for and so when we can start observing our unhealthy habits and instead of
53:13
judging them get really curious about them and be like well what does this mean for me as a person then what it's
53:19
telling us is okay these buckets are empty your emotional can if we're eating ice cream every day all the time my
53:24
emotional connection needs are are probably running on empty my comfort needs my safety needs are probably running on empty how can I actually
53:30
revamp my life to improve that overall and when we start making those small steps and executing on that it's
53:36
actually a huge part of pulling away from these unhealthy patterns and we're able to invest in healthier updated
53:43
strategies to get these old needs and that that we tend to be starving for so I find that to be a really powerful
53:48
concept is use your conscious mind to observe your subconscious patterns understand the needs that are trying to
53:55
be there and then proactively fill those needs buckets up so we don't have to rely on the unhealthy form of getting
54:01
things done beautiful great advice I think that's something people can just like literally
54:06
get into right now so I really appreciate that thank you so much can you let us know how people can connect
54:12
with you please yes so um we have the free attachment Style Quiz that personal developmentschool.com and then I also
54:19
have a YouTube channel where I put out a daily video um and that is called personal development School
54:27
amazing well I make sure all those links are in the show notes thank you so much toys for coming onto the show I feel
54:34
like we could have spoken for hours like especially on this attachment style maybe we get you back on the show and we can talk about that in a little bit more
54:40
in depth very very fascinating but I really appreciate you coming on today thank you so much thank you so much I
54:46
really enjoyed being here I really enjoy this conversation so thank you so much for having me I am glad thank you very
54:52
much well that is it for this episode of True Hope cast the official podcast of true hope Canada we'll see you next week
55:02
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