What’s neurocycling? When should you practice neurocycling? What are the steps for performing it?
Neurocycling can help you clear out any mental toxicity in the brain, which also improves your mental health at the same time. Dr. Caroline Leaf describes the six steps of the neurocycle, explains when to practice the neurocycle, and discusses four ways the neurocycle could help you live better.
Keep reading to learn everything you need to know about neurocycling.
Neurocycling Steps
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 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 throughout 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.
(Shortform note: If you want to use the neurocycle to achieve multiple goals, consider starting with just one; then, once you’ve established a solid routine, you can gradually incorporate additional goals. Setting too many goals at once quickly leads to being overwhelmed, which can cause you to give up on all of them. This is one reason many people struggle to accomplish their New Year’s resolutions.)
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.
(Shortform note: Studies support the idea that regular mental health maintenance enhances well-being and resilience. Many people maintain their mental health by practicing self-care activities, like getting enough sleep, eating well, and exercising. Other self-care activities target mental health more directly—for example, some people keep mood diaries to be better aware of their emotional states, while others engage in mindfulness practices to manage stress and improve focus. If you struggle with negative thinking, you could make neurocycling part of your self-care regimen, or you could explore alternative ways of keeping your thoughts in check, like CBT worksheets and exercises.)
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.
(Shortform note: The neurocycle’s approach to changing habits by addressing underlying thought processes is similar to the Allen Carr method, famously used for quitting smoking. The Carr method also focuses on changing the mindset behind the habit, such as the belief that smoking relieves stress. By debunking this and other myths, the Allen Carr method aims to eliminate the desire to smoke, making it easier to quit. Both methods highlight the importance of cognitive restructuring to facilitate lasting behavioral change.)
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. (Shortform note: Studies suggest that mental health treatments based on cognitive restructuring, like CBT and neurocycling, may not be effective for processing trauma. Trauma has a physiological impact that changes how survivors perceive and respond to stress, so challenging trauma-related thoughts isn’t always as simple as reasoning your way through them.)
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). (Shortform note: Experts say that forgiveness isn’t necessary to heal trauma—and that pressuring trauma survivors to forgive those who’ve hurt them is counterproductive, since it implies that they’re to blame for their own suffering. Additionally, Leaf’s recommendation to forgive may not be supported by the law of quantum entanglement. Quantum entanglement describes how physical particles influence each other, but this law doesn’t apply to individual thoughts.)
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.
(Shortform note: Although Leaf suggests that practicing deep, reflective thinking helps you think more positively, some research indicates the opposite—intelligence and critical thinking may contribute to depression and anxiety. This could be because wise people have greater awareness of environmental threats and therefore have stronger negative feelings about reality. However, psychologists support Leaf’s idea that it’s healthier to process information than to mindlessly consume an endless stream of it—consuming too much information can overload your brain and lead to anxiety. As for Leaf’s claim that some of your neurons may be underutilized, science disputes this—experts believe you use 100% of your brain every day.)
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.
(Shortform note: To maximize learning, consider combining the neurocycle with other experts’ learning tips. For example, during the grounding stage of the neurocycle, it might be helpful to focus on embodying a growth mindset. According to Carol S. Dweck in Mindset, having a growth mindset means believing that your abilities and intelligence can be developed through effort, learning, and persistence. This instills confidence in your ability to learn, which may be particularly helpful if you’re trying to master an intimidating subject. We cover this and other expert advice on learning in The Master Guides: Learn Anything.)
