Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking

by Caroline Leaf

Benchmark Days in the 63-Day Cycle As you go through this 63-day process, there are benchmark days that can motivate you and help you get through the thought you’re detoxing or building. These specific benchmarks are at days 7, 14, 21, and 63. Knowing a little about the timing of these benchmarks and what’s happening in your brain at each one can help you push through the hard times and achieve true and lasting change in your life as you use the 5 Steps, just as seeing the difference in your body after a hard training regimen can motivate you to continue on. On day 1, you’ll experience a type of apprehensive excitement as conscious awareness builds with self-regulation and awareness. At first, the prefrontal cortex (executive function) has controlled high-beta bursts of energy as you begin to focus and a nice pattern of low-beta as your awareness increases. The amygdala (emotional perceptions) and hippocampus (memory conversion) have a lot of low-beta energy and coherent bursts of high-beta, theta, and gamma as thoughts with embedded memories are being recalled—even delta is high as suppressed thoughts are being activated. Then, as processing takes place, gamma increases and peaks, which means learning begins taking place a little each day (the neuroplastic changes happening in the brain). You’re starting to positively affect the architecture of the brain—you’re starting to push the structural changes in your brain in the direction you want them to go. By day 4, the increa...