Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess Quotes

“Things are uncertain, but I can handle it. I’ve never experienced this before, but I can handle it. These are uncertain times, but I can handle it. I have no idea what’s going to happen, but I can handle it.”
― Caroline Leaf, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking

“Your brain cannot change until you accept the anxiety or depression as a signal giving you information on its cause, or origin, and in this way you make the anxiety or depression work for you and not against you.”
― Caroline Leaf, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking

“When you use the 5 Steps, your self-regulation improves and you can start getting a handle on managing your anxiety. This doesn’t mean it will go away entirely; you actually don’t want it to, because anxiety is telling you something about your life that you need to know. It does mean, however, that your anxiety will decrease over time, and you will learn to manage it—it will work for you and not against you. Anxiety is not an illness; it is a warning signal that something needs attention in your life. It is normal to feel periods of anxiety. The Neurocycle method can help you find and manage what needs attention.”
― Caroline Leaf, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking

“In fact, when it comes to exercise, your nervous system changes first, followed by your muscles.”
― Caroline Leaf, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking

“New thoughts are formed over twenty-one days, and these new thoughts are formed into habits after sixty-three days.”
― Caroline Leaf, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking

“The brain is never the same because it changes with every experience you have, every moment of every day—and you control this with your unique thinking, feeling, and choosing. You use your mind to use your brain. You are the architect of your brain.”
― Caroline Leaf, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking

“Why the Neurocycle Is the Solution to Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less. MARIE CURIE Overview Simple mind-management tools for personal use—to address and ameliorate such warning signals as anxiety, depression, toxic thinking, inability to concentrate, irritability, exhaustion, and burnout before they take over someone’s mind and life—”
― Caroline Leaf, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking

“The bottom line is this: we cannot improve our lifestyle until we learn how to manage our thinking. This is incredibly empowering.”
― Caroline Leaf, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking

“Step 1 (Gather) involves embracing the toxic thought, habit, or trauma (cutting open with the scalpel). Steps 2 and 3 (Reflect and Write) are the processing steps (performing the surgery). Steps 4 and 5 (Recheck and Active Reach) are the reconceptualizing steps (closing up and healing).”
― Caroline Leaf, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking

“Every time you have a negative thought, use it as a prompt to think of three positive things you have in your life, such as three things you’re proud of yourself for, three things you’re grateful for, three things that make you smile, three things that are beautiful—whatever works for you. You are essentially using the negative thought as a habit loop trigger to help you recognize what to change, but you are “padding” the negative with the positive, which is healthier for the brain.”
― Caroline Leaf, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking

“Ask yourself not what you want to or have to do today but rather who you want to be today and how you want to feel.”
― Caroline Leaf, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking

“Every moment of managing your mind is selective. It’s just as easy to generate negative changes as it is to generate positive changes in the brain—this is called the plastic paradox.”
― Caroline Leaf, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking

“a mental mess produces a messy life.”
― Caroline Leaf, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking

“Thinking, feeling, and choosing (also known as our mind-in-action) precedes all communication; all we say and do is always preceded by a thought.”
― Caroline Leaf, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking

“Change requires action and application,”
― Caroline Leaf, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking

“Everything we do begins with a thought. If we want to change anything in our lives, we first have to change our thinking, our mind.”
― Caroline Leaf, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking

“a healthy lifestyle is important; we should all eat wholesome food, exercise regularly, sleep well and enough, control our stress, limit our screen time, and get outside more, insofar as is possible based on our unique life circumstances. More and more research is showing how many diseases are lifestyle-related (which includes what we think about), so what we choose to do and not do can have important consequences for our mental and physical well-being.”
― Caroline Leaf, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking

“The 5 Steps of the Neurocycle”
― Caroline Leaf, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking

“Many people are broken and without hope. It’s not surprising that a Brooking’s report in October 2019 noted how “deaths of despair” were affecting many sectors of society, particularly in America’s heartland.5 Carol Graham, Brooking Institution’s senior fellow, made this eye-opening observation: “The metric that really stands out is not sort of happy, or unhappy. Happy today doesn’t matter a whole lot. It’s hope for the future or lack thereof that’s really linked with premature mortality.”6”
― Caroline Leaf, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking

“We’ve forgotten the art of deep and focused mind-management. We want things fast, quick, now. We often don’t want to put in the hard work that leads to true change, or we’ve never been taught what this kind of work looks like.”
― Caroline Leaf, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking

“The events and circumstances of life aren’t going anywhere; people make a lot of decisions every day that affect us all, and suffering of some sort for you and your loved ones is inevitable. That said, I wholeheartedly believe that although events and circumstances can’t be controlled, we can control our reactions to these events and circumstances. This is mind-management in action.”
― Caroline Leaf, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking

“all have to learn how to catch and alter our thoughts and reactions before they become toxic neural networks and habits. How?”
― Caroline Leaf, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking

“frustration, angst, anger, grief, and so on are emotional and physical warning signals telling us we need to face and deal with something that’s happened or is happening in our life.”
― Caroline Leaf, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking

“5. Acercamiento Activo. Escoge vestirte de una mentalidad para el día. Para saber más sobre las mentalidades, consulta mi libro Piensa, aprende, ten éxito. Estos son algunos recordatorios útiles de Acercamiento Activo en la mañana: Escribe cinco cosas por las que estés orgulloso de ti mismo; ¡comienza tu día celebrándote a ti mismo!”
― Caroline Leaf, Limpia tu enredo mental: 5 pasos simples probados por la ciencia para reducir la ansiedad, el estrés y los pensamientos tóxicos

“Feeling guilty because you “failed to think positively enough,” “didn’t have enough faith,” or didn’t reach some “ideal” is damaging to your psyche and your physical body.”
― Caroline Leaf, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking

“First, you prep that amazing brain of yours, and this is where mindfulness, meditation, breathwork, tapping, and so on are essential. You can do some breathwork (my favorite, because of its scientific base and effectiveness, is the Wim Hof method)3 or something similar. This is a simple, mind-driven action that prepares your mind and optimizes your brain and body, allowing you to calm down enough to react in the most favorable way. Next, you go beyond the mindfulness your preparation has created into directed neuroplasticity through the 5 Steps:”
― Caroline Leaf, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking

“Quantum physics points at something we all sense intuitively: that our conscious thoughts have the power to affect our actions. This book will teach you the mental precision needed to harness this power. This all sounds nice, but what does quantum physics and all this mind talk have to do with your daily life? Well, have you ever asked yourself, Who is this person I’ve become? or What can I do that could help me change and or manage my problems? Am I actually happy and at peace? How do my thoughts, feelings, and choices impact the world around me? Searching for these answers often goes two ways. Perhaps you believe you’re a prepackaged, preprogrammed genetic avatar. The fates have decided what will happen to you—there’s no fighting it. Or you believe you have some level of influence over the quality of your life, perhaps through that elusive magic elixir, that exercise regimen, that new diet, or that meditation or breathwork you just did. Or maybe you do all these things and just hope for the best—because they’re healthy and good for you and must do something, right? And you may feel good for a few hours, but what happens when things aren’t going so well? What do you do when your spouse walks mud into the carpet, that person you can’t stand at work sends you a nasty email, or your best friend has a breakdown? The 5-Step Neurocycle Good mind-management skills can take you beyond healthy but short-lived mindfulness practices, such as meditation, which help in the moment to calm and prepare the brain but often don’t address the main issues behind your thinking. Meditation may bring awareness, but what do you do with that awareness? Awareness, not managed correctly, can do more harm than good.”
― Caroline Leaf, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking

“practical mind-management is the first step to getting anything done. Thinking, feeling, and choosing (also known as our mind-in-action) precedes all communication; all we say and do is always preceded by a thought. The process is so logical that we hardly “think” about it, but it’s worth taking the time to do so. It’s so obvious that we miss it because we’re looking for some elusive, complex key. Our mind is staring us in the face, and mind-management is therefore a critical skill we need to learn. As I will show you in this book, if our mind isn’t managed, everything downstream will be chaos—a mental mess produces a messy life. Unfortunately, in our era we have focused so much on the biology of the brain that we have forgotten about the mind. Perhaps you didn’t even know they were two different things. Indeed, if you just read a handful of neuroscientific articles at random, you would think we’re preprogrammed mechanical brains walking around and occasionally malfunctioning.”
― Caroline Leaf, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking

“ourselves. We need a new narrative, one where we listen to each other’s narratives and problem-solve through them together. In fact, I strongly encourage you to seek out a support system for your healing journey. The 5 Steps of the Neurocycle method we are going to learn are how you’ll get through the day, the week, and the rest of your life. Talking to someone about how these steps are helping you in this journey can give you perspective and provide a sounding board. Humans need this—because as we’ll discuss, it’s not about you, it’s about you in the world.”
― Caroline Leaf, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking

“Population studies indicate that something is going terribly wrong: people ages twenty-four to sixty-five are dying eight to fifteen years younger than previous generations from preventable lifestyle diseases. There’s a pressing need to change the way we approach health care, including mental health. We must shift our focus from a symptom-centered approach to one centered around each person’s complex story and unique experiences. This is the approach I’ve taken in this book. You are uniquely, wonderfully you—your quest for optimal health and well-being should be just as singular as you are.”
― Caroline Leaf, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking