What’s Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess by Caroline Leaf about? Do you need a mental detox?
In Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess, Caroline Leaf discusses mental toxicity, its sources, and its effects on the brain. She explains her solution to mental toxicity, neurocycling, and how you can practice it.
Read below for an overview of the book Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess.
Overview of Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess
In Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess (2021), Caroline Leaf presents her approach to healing your mind from trauma and toxic thinking. This approach, which she calls neurocycling, teaches you to exercise mental self-control and leverage neuroplasticity—your ability to literally rewire your brain for the better. Leaf argues that neurocycling is both innovative and effective: While traditional mental health treatments ignore the power of the mind over the body, neurocycling takes full advantage of that relationship, enabling you to become happier and healthier.
Leaf is a communication pathologist who teaches mental techniques for healing and healthier living through her books and podcast, also titled “Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess”. Additionally, she’s the force behind the Neurocycle app, which helps you put neurocycling into practice.
Understanding Mental Toxicity
The crux of Leaf’s argument is that the root cause of mental illness is unhealthy thinking, not deficiencies or abnormalities in your physical brain. She refers to this kind of unhealthy thinking as mental toxicity. In this section, we’ll lay some groundwork for understanding mental toxicity by discussing the nature of the mind, the brain, and thoughts. Then, we’ll define mental toxicity and explain how toxic energy accumulates in your mind and brain. Finally, we’ll explore the effects that Leaf says mental toxicity can have on your mind and body.
Your Mind, Your Brain, and Your Thoughts
According to Leaf, your mind and brain are two independent but interconnected entities: The mind is an energetic field that constantly creates, contains, and responds to the interplay of thoughts, emotions, and choices that make up our moment-to-moment existence and identity. In contrast, the brain is a physical structure that enables you to be conscious. It’s not the source of your mental experiences; rather, your mental experiences shape your brain.
Leaf argues that thoughts exist in three forms: as metaphysical energy, as physical structures located in your brain, and as physical structures in your body.
In your brain, physical thoughts consist of vibrating particles of energy in a protein called tubulin found within dendrites (which are parts of brain cells); Leaf uses images of brain cells to illustrate her view that physical thoughts are shaped like trees. In your body, thoughts exist inside cells as cellular memory, which allows you to recall and associate physical experiences with psychological events. For example, if you broke your arm shortly after a breakup, your arm might hurt when you think about your ex. Leaf also says your body cells are irradiated with the energy contained by the thoughts inside your brain.
What Is Mental Toxicity?
Leaf explains that unhealthy thoughts consist of toxic metaphysical energy. If you have too many unhealthy thoughts, then toxic metaphysical energy can accumulate in your mind, causing the mind itself to become toxic (a state of mental toxicity).
Leaf says that since toxic thoughts are physically real, she can measure mental toxicity by evaluating toxic energy patterns in the brain. Physical thoughts generate energy that can be measured with brain mapping technology that detects brainwaves (patterns of electric activity in the brain). This technology reveals either coherence or incoherence in your brain. When your brain is coherent, different parts of your brain demonstrate similar energy patterns; this indicates that your thoughts are primarily healthy. When your brain is incoherent, different parts of your brain produce different patterns of energy; this means that your mind contains more unhealthy thoughts, which indicates mental toxicity.
How Toxic Energy Accumulates in Your Mind and Brain
What causes some people to suffer from mental toxicity? Let’s explore two sources of unhealthy thinking and discuss how a single unhealthy thought can lead to mental toxicity.
Sources of Unhealthy Thinking
Recall that Leaf says mental toxicity occurs when you’re prone to unhealthy thinking patterns. She describes several reasons this might happen. The most common reason, according to Leaf, is that you’ve been exposed to some of life’s harsh realities—for example, you may have experienced a traumatic event like a natural disaster or grief following the loss of a loved one. This may have caused you to think unhealthy thoughts if you didn’t have access to resources—like a mental health professional or a trusted loved one—to help you process those experiences in a healthy way.
Additionally, says Leaf, many unhealthy thought patterns stem from a negative outlook on the future. Some of this can be tied to socioeconomic concerns: For instance, you may obsess over questions like “Do I fit in?” or “Do I make enough money?” Leaf says millennials may be particularly vulnerable to these sources of mental toxicity because they’ve faced unprecedented social and economic challenges, including the advent of social media, which facilitates social comparison, and growing wealth inequality.
How an Unhealthy Thought Leads to Mental Toxicity
Leaf says that unhealthy thoughts travel through three mental planes. These planes are the nonconscious mind, which stores information about your identity as well as thoughts and memories that shape your perspective of the world; the conscious mind, where you actively think and are aware of your thoughts; and the subconscious mind, which uses physical and emotional hints to bring nonconscious thoughts to the conscious mind.
According to Leaf, unhealthy thoughts form in your nonconscious mind. Your subconscious mind likely alerts you to them, but you might ignore these hints (Leaf says many people have a tendency to avoid unhealthy thoughts because acknowledging and working through them is emotionally taxing). When you ignore such hints, you can’t bring an unhealthy thought into your conscious mind for processing. This allows the unhealthy thought to fester in your nonconscious mind: It becomes larger and more powerful because you continue to pour metaphysical energy into it. This pattern can become habitual, leading your nonconscious mind to become full of toxic energy (hence Leaf’s definition of mental toxicity).
To illustrate, say you make a mistake and form the nonconscious thought “I’m stupid.” According to Leaf, you’d likely become aware of that thought via physical or emotional hints provided by your subconscious; for example, your cheeks might flush with shame as you realize your mistake. You may ignore such hints if you don’t have enough emotional bandwidth to deal with them. As a result, the unhealthy thought begins to fester. The next time something happens to make you feel stupid, you pour more metaphysical energy into the thought “I’m stupid,” magnifying it. Over time, if this pattern of thinking becomes habitual, related thoughts like “I’m worthless” could accumulate and intensify, leading to mental toxicity.
The Effects of Mental Toxicity
Leaf says that when toxic energy accumulates in your mind and brain, it has negative mental and physical effects. Let’s explore a few of those.
Psychological Effects of Mental Toxicity
According to Leaf, some of the negative psychological effects of mental toxicity include:
A heightened stress response: Because there are so many unhealthy thoughts lurking in your mind, you’re more reactive to daily challenges and less able to cope with stress effectively. For example, you may feel overwhelmed by minor inconveniences like traffic.
Symptoms of depression and anxiety: Leaf says your unhealthy thoughts can warp your worldview in negative ways. For example, you may feel a pervasive sense of sadness or have persistent fears about various aspects of life.
Difficulty making healthy decisions: Because mental toxicity can cloud judgment and diminish motivation, you may find it difficult to prioritize getting enough sleep, exercise, and nutritious food.
Physical Effects of Mental Toxicity
Leaf suggests that mental toxicity also has several detrimental physical effects, including:
Poor brain health: Recall that according to Leaf, thoughts exist as both metaphysical energy and as physical structures—so mental toxicity can adversely affect the physical structure and function of the brain. As we discussed, Leaf measures this effect using brain mapping technology that measures coherence.
Increased inflammation: Leaf explains that mental toxicity can cause your body to produce and circulate higher levels of the stress hormones cortisol and homocysteine, which can lead to increased inflammation throughout the body. Leaf also says that physical thoughts have structural deformities that can increase inflammation in the brain. Inflammation in the brain and body can contribute to poorer physical and mental health—for example, it makes you more likely to get sick.
Vulnerability to illness: According to Leaf, the vast majority of illness results from mental toxicity. She explains that mental toxicity makes you more vulnerable to three kinds of illness: First, you’re more vulnerable to lifestyle-related diseases like diabetes due to the difficulty you have making healthy choices. Second, the chronic inflammation you suffer as a result of stress makes you more vulnerable to communicable illnesses like viruses. Third, toxic thoughts can unlock genetic predispositions to illness and rapid aging (which we’ll cover next) via a process called epigenetics, where your behaviors and environment influence the expression of certain genes.
Rapid aging: Leaf says her research shows that mental toxicity causes you to age more rapidly by shortening your telomeres (a part of your DNA whose length is correlated with biological age—in other words, how much your cells have deteriorated): Her research suggests that people with more mental toxicity had shorter telomeres than people with less mental toxicity. She also says that addressing mental toxicity lengthens your telomeres.
Why Neurocycling Could Help You Overcome Mental Toxicity
Now that you understand mental toxicity and its impact on your health, let’s explore the program Leaf says can detoxify your mind and brain—neurocycling. We’ll describe the six-step program in detail later; for now, we’ll explain why this program could help you overcome mental toxicity. First, we’ll discuss the theoretical basis of neurocycling. Then, we’ll explore Leaf’s research on neurocycling.
The Theoretical Basis of Neurocycling
Leaf says that neurocycling is uniquely effective at clearing mental toxicity for two reasons: It overcomes the limitations of neuroreductionism, and it leverages directed neuroplasticity to positively shape the brain. Let’s explore each of these concepts in more detail.
Neuroreductionism
Leaf argues that historically, mental health experts have placed too much emphasis on the physical brain: They believe that every mental process, including mental dysfunctions and illnesses like depression, is determined by the brain’s material makeup—its structure, neurological wiring, chemical functions, and so on. She refers to this point of view as neuroreductionism since it “reduces” mental experiences to purely physical phenomena. Leaf argues that in reality, your mental state is a reflection of your identity, life experiences, and thinking patterns—your brain has no bearing on your mental health.
Leaf says that because neuroreductionists turn to physical explanations for mental processes, they tend to think of mental illnesses as biological problems that must be properly diagnosed and then treated pharmaceutically. Leaf says this can do more harm than good for two reasons: First, diagnoses can be stigmatizing and objectifying—you’re a complex person with more than just a brain, and reducing your experiences to a diagnosis can oversimplify your identity. Second, pharmaceutical drugs are ineffective because they can only suppress symptoms; they don’t treat the root problem (mental toxicity), so you’ll continue to suffer poor mental health. Leaf also suggests that mental health drugs can be dangerous due to their side effects.
Directed Neuroplasticity
In contrast with neuroreductionist mental health treatments that aim to improve your mental health by changing your brain, neurocycling targets your mind for strengthening. Recall that Leaf says your mind is a complex energetic field that becomes toxic when you fail to process unhealthy thoughts. If you can learn to control this energetic field, eradicate any toxic energy that’s infiltrated it, and prevent further toxic energy from accumulating, you can treat the root of your mental health problems (mental toxicity).
As we’ve discussed, mental toxicity leads to poor brain health, thus treating mental toxicity via neurocycling improves brain health. Leaf describes this strategy as “directed neuroplasticity.” Neuroplasticity refers to your brain’s ability to change in response to external influences—in this case, your mind (recall that Leaf says it’s independent of the brain). Directed means that you’re shaping these changes in a particular way—in this case, you’re making positive changes by eradicating unhealthy thoughts. Through directed neuroplasticity, you can rebuild your brain’s neural networks (the structure of physical thoughts) and improve its electrical activity to achieve coherence (the measure of brain health that Leaf says reflects your level of mental toxicity).
Clinical Research on Neurocycling
In addition to describing the theory that underlies neurocycling, Leaf also describes a clinical study she completed to prove neurocycling’s effectiveness at treating mental toxicity. According to this study, neurocycling successfully reduces mental toxicity (measured in terms of brain coherence) and all of its negative effects, including depression and anxiety symptoms, inflammation, and rapid aging. Leaf says these results mean anyone can use neurocycling to improve their mental and physical health.
How to Clear Mental Toxicity With Neurocycling
Now that you know why neurocycling could help you overcome mental toxicity, let’s dig into the program’s logistics. In this section, we’ll describe the six steps of the neurocycle, explain when to practice the neurocycle, and discuss four ways the neurocycle could help you live better.
(Shortform note: Leaf says that the neurocycle has five steps, but this count doesn’t include an additional step she recommends—grounding yourself. For this reason, we’ll refer to the neurocycle as a six-step process.)
The Six Steps of the Neurocycle
Recall that mental toxicity results from repeated failures to process unhealthy thoughts. With neurocycling, you remedy that by giving yourself opportunities to do that processing. According to Leaf, the six steps of the neurocycle are as follows:
1) Ground yourself: Leaf says neurocycling can be taxing, so it’s important to begin from a calm, grounded place. Grounding yourself entails connecting with your body or the present moment to stabilize your emotional state. You can use any number of grounding techniques at this stage; one that Leaf recommends is deep breathing.
2) Notice your mental state: Confront your unhealthy thoughts by acknowledging them and embracing the opportunity to begin healing them. An unhealthy thought may be obvious if it’s attached to a dysfunctional behavior, or you may have to listen to subconscious hints like physical or emotional pain or tenderness. Leaf says noticing your mental state may be uncomfortable at first, especially if you’re not used to this kind of self-awareness, but the unhealthy thought’s power and any associated discomfort should start to dissipate.
3) Understand your mental state: When you notice your mental state, you bring an unhealthy thought from your nonconscious mind to your conscious mind. Next, you’ll explore your nonconscious mind further, examining the network of memories and events associated with the unhealthy thought. Leaf recommends asking yourself a series of questions about how you formed the thought, how it’s impacting you, and whether the thought is accurate.
4) Journal about your mental state: Once you understand your mental state, Leaf recommends writing about it to deepen your understanding. She says studies show that writing helps you organize and simplify your thoughts, which makes them easier to work with going forward. Writing about your unhealthy thoughts also externalizes them—instead of being trapped in your mind where they can fester, they’re transferred onto paper, where they’re controllable.
5) Correct your thinking: When you’ve put your thoughts down on paper, it becomes easier to view them objectively and identify any distortions or inaccuracies. In this step, you use this perspective to challenge or even totally deconstruct your unhealthy thoughts. Then, you imagine healthier, more constructive alternatives. According to Leaf, correcting your thinking physically weakens your unhealthy thoughts by interrupting a process called protein synthesis, which she says is integral to a physical thought’s structure.
6) Put your healthy thoughts into practice. In the final step of the neurocycle, you complete activities based on the healthy alternatives to your unhealthy thoughts that you came up with in the previous step. For example, if your unhealthy thought was “Nobody likes me,” you might replace it with “My loved ones value me.” To put this healthy thought into practice, you could spend time with a loved one or say an affirmation like “I’m likable” aloud. Leaf says that taking action in this way physically destroys the unhealthy thoughts you’ve been weakening over the course of the neurocycle: The choice to change your behavior generates energy that attacks your unhealthy thoughts, and then that energy is diverted to strengthen your healthy thoughts.
When to Practice the Neurocycle
Leaf provides specific instructions regarding when and how often to practice the neurocycle. She says that according to her research, the neurocycle takes 63 days to become effective. For the first 21 days, you go through all the steps of the neurocycle for 30 minutes each day (Leaf recommends limiting this time to 30 minutes because neurocycling is taxing). Over the remaining 42 days, you practice the final step (putting your new healthy thought into practice) multiple times a day. This kind of consistent repetition allows the healthy thought to accumulate enough energy to become firmly cemented in your brain and easy to access as you live your life, ensuring that you won’t relapse into old, unhealthy thought patterns.
Leaf says that if you skip a day at any point in the 63-day cycle, you must start over from scratch. Missing a day depletes the healthy thought of energy, which will kill it.
Four Applications of the Neurocycle
According to Leaf, the neurocycle is useful for achieving four kinds of goals: daily mental health maintenance, habit replacement, trauma processing, and education. You can create your own neurocycling routine to support any combination of these goals. For example, if you’re a student, you may want to focus on mastering a certain subject and building productive study habits. You could practice two overlapping neurocycles to achieve both of these goals.
Let’s explore Leaf’s tips for each application of the neurocycle.
Daily Mental Health Maintenance
According to Leaf, daily neurocycling allows you to consistently process your thoughts and emotions as they come up, preventing the buildup of mental toxicity. This supports mental clarity, emotional stability, and overall well-being. It also makes you more resilient: Since neurocycling prevents unhealthy thinking patterns from becoming entrenched in your mind and brain, you’ll navigate life’s challenges more effectively and prevent traumas from wreaking havoc on your mental and physical health.
Habit Replacement
Leaf says the neurocycle can help you understand the unhealthy thought processes underlying unhealthy habits, challenge those thoughts, and replace them with thoughts that promote healthy habits. For example, say you spend too much time on social media. The unhealthy thought driving this behavior might be, “I need to be constantly updated to feel connected.” When you use the neurocycle to challenge this thought, you might arrive at a healthier perspective on connection, such as “I can connect meaningfully with others through personal interactions and quality time.” With practice, this could lead to healthier social habits.
Trauma Processing
Leaf argues that the neurocycle provides a structured approach to confronting and healing from past traumas. By systematically addressing and reframing traumatic thoughts (including your memories of trauma), you can reduce their emotional impact and develop a healthier perspective of your life experiences.
Leaf recommends focusing especially on forgiveness as you reframe your unhealthy thoughts; she says if you don’t forgive those who’ve hurt you, your unhealthy thoughts will remain strong due to quantum entanglement (a law of physics that holds that two related entities will influence one another).
Education
Although the other applications of neurocycling are focused on your internal experience, you can also adapt the neurocycle to master external information. Neurocycling enables you to think deeply and reflectively about a variety of topics—a skill Leaf says many people are missing in the digital age, which feeds you a constant stream of information without encouraging you to process it. Leaf says everyone should develop this skill because learning strengthens your mind—the wiser you are, the easier it is to combat unhealthy thoughts. It also strengthens your physical brain by energizing all your neurons; Leaf says when you aren’t in the habit of learning, you don’t use some neurons, which makes them vulnerable to infiltration by unhealthy thoughts.
Leaf says that to use the neurocycle for education, follow the first step (grounding) to clear your mind of distractions. Then, instead of noticing, understanding, and writing about your mental state in steps two through four, apply the same processes to a subject you want to learn. In step five (correct your thinking), consider whether you truly understand the subject and supplement your understanding with additional reading or contemplation. Finally, put what you’ve learned into practice by teaching it to someone else—if you can’t teach the subject effectively, that suggests you’re not done learning about it.
