What's on Your Bookshelf?
“What’s On Your Bookshelf” is a personal and professional growth podcast exploring the intersections of passion, potential, and purpose - featuring multi-certified coach and leadership development consultant Denise R. Russo alongside Sam Powell, Zach Elliott, Tom Schweizer, Dennis LaRue, and Michelle King.
What's on Your Bookshelf?
145 Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: Mental Clarity Starts Here
We kick off a new year and series with Dr. Caroline Leaf’s Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess, linking emotional warning signals to health, performance, and leadership. We share why mind management beats quick fixes and how small, steady practices rewire thought patterns for real change.
• five-step mind management as a response to stress signals
• the difference between mind and brain and why it matters
• how toxic thinking drives inflammation and disease risk
• turning emotion into data, not directives
• from information overload to deep, applied learning
• self-leadership practices that improve team outcomes
• practical pacing for reading, reflection and habit change
• resources: Agile Brain exercise and Substack archive
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If you haven't gotten it yet, Zach will have some links to the book in the show notes
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Welcome to What's on Your Bookshelf, a life and leadership podcast where we live out loud the pages of the books that are on our shelves. With your host, Denise Russo and Sam Powell.
SPEAKER_02:Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another episode and a new year of What's on Your Bookshelf. This is our Life and Leadership podcast where we're living out loud the pages of the books that are on our bookshelves. My name is Denise Russo. My co-host is Sam Powell, and we are starting the first book of the year and a new series, which we introduced last week. Sam, how are you doing today? I'm great.
SPEAKER_01:New year, new book. Uh just I don't know. This the holidays of this year went by way too fast. I think it's because it was like the Wednesday, Thursday of like Eve and holiday that it just was like you spent a couple of days preparing and then it was the things, and then it was like Friday hangover, you know, of all the activities, and then it was the weekend, and then we did it again. So it feels like there was no break, and we're just right back in the year. Uh, and so I'm feeling very messy mentally, and I think this book is perfect for getting us going this year.
SPEAKER_02:I agree. So this book is called Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess. If you haven't gotten it yet, Zach will have some links to the book in the show notes by Dr. Caroline Leaf. It's well, the tagline says five simple scientifically proven steps. Not really sure if they're simple, because maybe they're well, we'll see. We'll see as we get through the process. But it's intended to help us reduce anxiety, stress, and toxic thinking. And when we were picking out the books for this year, we immediately were like, let's do this one.
SPEAKER_01:This sounds good. Yeah, I think we need this. And I loved it. Like from the first few lines of the preface of this book, I was like, Yep, we all need this. Because she starts it with, do you ever feel like your brain has just been switched off? Have you ever felt discouraged, unfocused, or overwhelmed? Are there unhealthy patterns in your life or your family that you just can't seem to break? Do you start your day exhausted and depressed? Are you anxious about the future? Are you haunted by your past? Do you feel lost and uncertain? Like, there's not a human being on this planet that doesn't feel one of those, all of those at some point in our life. And so it's like, yep, this is sort of where we're at. And uh I don't know if I think it's a good, it's a good thing. Like last year we spent the whole year talking about, you know, how to really work with our problems, how to face the things that kind of get in our way, our obstacles and things like this. And you and I said, we just feel like that's great. We've learned a lot. We've learned how to be happy, we've learned how to tackle habits, we've learned how to uh, you know, tackle our problems, but it still feels messy. And that list of questions, I think, is why we chose this book, right? And so it made me really excited to get into this.
SPEAKER_02:I had that whole part highlighted as well, and then I laughed because there used to be this episode years ago when I was a little girl from I Love Lucy, and it was an episode where she was hired to do a commercial for this vitamin drink, and it was called Vitavita Vegemen. And so in the commercial, she's she says things like, Do you ever feel this? And does this ever happen to you? And so they kept making her do new takes of the episode for the commercial, and so every time she would drink the the vitamin, it was like alcohol, and so she got so drunk. And so by the end, she's like, Do you have a poop out at parties? Do you have a pop out at poopers? So it's funny because the very next page of the book talks about this kind of it says that this is what we all experience, but it's a it's not a sign that something is wrong, it's a state of disequilibrium. So in the case of Lucy, she was just drunk, but in this case, it is not that we have a defective brain, it's that we're out of balance. And so I'm really looking forward to getting into this with you about how to get in balance by removing things that no longer serve or satisfy us.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and she really frames up, right? I mean, the title on the front page of the book on the uh cover, it says, you know, reducing anxiety, stress, and toxic thinking. And she really starts this out by saying that like these feelings that we have, like when we feel anxious, depressed, burnout, frustrated, angst, anger, grief, like these are emotional and physical warning signals telling us we need to face and deal with something that's happening or has happened in our life. And I think that, you know, we so often want to brush past these feelings and these, you know, these things that are happening. And this is really like setting the tone from the beginning is nope, we we gotta pay attention to these things that are happening in our life. And I think that like for us, that's a lot of what this podcast is about, right? Like drinking deeply, paying attention to the things that are going on, and then putting this into action. And so, you know, I I I always say this about emotion, and I'm a big advocate of like you've got to feel your feelings all the way through. You've got to recognize them for what they are. They're telling you something's messy and off, or so, you know, something's going on, and you got to pay attention to that.
SPEAKER_02:I'm gonna make a quick plug because we're giving away something for free. We decided that even though we did it last year, we're gonna extend it this year as well. Agile brain. So, agile brain is a two to three minute exercise that you can take and it helps you to see these 12 dimensions of your subconscious emotional being. And what Dr. Leaf says here is she says, if there's one thing I've learned from my work in this field, is we all have to learn how to catch and alter our thoughts and reactions before they become toxic neural networks and habits. So if you go all the way back to when we did the series with atomic habits, fast forward to the special edition we did with Dr. JD Pincus on the 12 uh emotional agile brain, the 12 states of emotional agile brain. And then you think about what this book is doing, what all of our books have done. I just listened, Sam, to all of the episodes that we did for the four agreements. I listened to them again last week, and it was as if I was hearing stuff that I didn't remember saying, let alone listening to. And it was great. And I took notes and I thought all of it really is this is about our podcast, it is not just about doing, it's about being, it's about becoming, and it's about how to become more aware of the things that sit at that sub-conscious level, which I do think we talked about on a past episode is that that's the thing below your conscious level, but it doesn't mean it's invisible, it just means that we have to find ways to bring it up into our conscious thinking. And so she goes on to basically say that she gives this five-step cycle, and we're gonna get into that over these weeks together. But this cycle is to help us not just be aware of anxiety, stress, and toxic thinking, but how to be more resilient, have better mind health, brain health, and how to have a better quality of life, which harkens all the way back to my favorite of all of our series so far, which was The Year on Happiness.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah. And this book is, and you and I talked about this as we were like prepping for this book, is this book, as you read it, reminds me a lot of the how of happiness. It's very scientific. There's a lot of research-based stuff. It feels like a very great grounded way to sort of start this topic, like it did with happiness. But she says too in this preface that, you know, although events and circumstances can't be controlled, we can control our reaction to these events and circumstances. And it really reminds me of kind of the foundation of that how of happiness book that we started with of 40% of your overall happiness is determined by your intentional activities, what you choose to do despite anything going on in your life. And this is sort of the same thing, right? Is like we can't control what's happening to us. We can't control the emotions that we feel. Like we're feeling them for a reason. They're a flag for us to be like, this thing is triggering me in a way that's either good, bad, happy, neutral, whatever. And it's up to us what we do with that. This is the lesson I teach my kids all the time, right? Like you can be mad, but you can't do X, Y, Z with that mad, right? You can't, you gotta be control of the actions. You can't control that you got angry about it, but you absolutely can control that you threw something, that you yelled at me, that you did whatever. This happened last night with me and my son, right? Like, you can control these things. And that's really what this book is is like we can't control what's going on, but we can control how we react to it. And she's taking this kind of all the way of this step further of you can control it to the point where you rewire your brain so that it's working for you. It's working in a non-toxic way, it's working in a way that's really benefiting you overall in your life.
SPEAKER_02:Well, and you know the tagline of our show where we say this is about living out loud the pages of the books on our bookshelf. She ends this preface by saying, articulating what you just said about being able to apply this. She says, We can spend lots of money and time on self-help books and seminars, wellness fads, great teachings and podcasts. Thank you for all the listeners out there, by the way. But but all of this will simply become nice to know information if we can't apply it. And so that's my hope as we go through this, which is the same with every book that we've read, is my intent and hope is that we can apply it. We talked about this maybe on last week, even that it used to be that we would whip through a book really fast, but we realized that we weren't really remembering what we read, applying what we read, having change in our life on what we read. And so, this book, we intend to take it slow, but in such a way where hopefully, if you're listening, even if you're not following along with the book, that you'll get value from it. Now, you don't have to read these books with us to hear our stories of how we're living it out loud. But if you want to drink deeply, like Coach Wooden's dad taught him when he was a young boy, then I would recommend that you get the book and just know that we're going to attempt, we'll see. We're gonna attempt one to two chapters every week. So feel free to read as fast or as slow as you're comfortable with, but you can always then follow along with us the week you listen in. And you can even go back and listen to episodes. They're still out in the atmosphere if you missed a chapter one week.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, absolutely. We paste this to where it's very um, very doable. And it's nice to have the deadline too of like, okay, next week we're gonna read this, which is great. Um, yeah, and so jumping into the the content of this book, right? So this is broken down into two parts, but part one is called the why and the how. And in part one, she's really discussing what the mind is, what happens when we don't use our minds properly, and why mind management using her five-step solution really helps clean up our mental mess. Um, and it also talks about her research. So, this first part of this book is gonna be really about kind of setting the stage of, you know, what is what is your mind? How does it work? What's the research telling us? What does mind management really look like? Um, and she starts this with the foundation in chapter one of what happens when we don't use our minds correctly, right? And she says, when our thinking is toxic, it can mess up the stress response, which then starts working against us instead of for us. And, you know, I think that I think we've all experienced what it feels like when we're not using our minds correctly, when it's working against us, right? We're caught in a toxic pattern, and then we feel like physical stress in our body because of something going on, right? Like we're not stressed because of anything's happening to us or we're sick or anything like that. I think we've all experienced that feeling of like the pressure's on us, something's happening, and our response to that is stress in our own body, and that's really what she kind of kicks this off with is when you're not using your mind right, this is physical stress that you experience.
SPEAKER_02:I was really intrigued, Sam, how she was describing the mind being different from the brain. And I'm sure we'll get into that in a couple of the episodes as well. But one thing that you just said, she was very bold about. She said there's a cost to this bad way of thinking because it's toxic. And if you think of even just something toxic, it's poisonous, right? So she says if you have toxic thoughts, toxic stress, anxiety, depression, those in turn increase our vulnerability to disease. So that alone should make you want to read this book because this is not just about your feelings and happy, clappy. This is about your physical body health and longevity. If you don't get this right, and so he goes on to say, what if there's another way? What if the answer lay inside of you? What if you held the key? And I marked that part because that's the point of getting a good quality coach, isn't it? That you sometimes can't see the door. You don't have the key in your hand. You don't know the questions that you should be thinking about for changing in your life and why a good quality coach can help you to be the person that isn't the locksmith, that isn't the one turning the door handle for you, but is there guiding you so that you can see the path forward.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah, that's absolutely it, right? It's that external perspective that we need, um, you know, to really, to really think about that and to expand that perspective out and get ourselves out of this like toxic cycle. And she says that when an individual is in a toxic thinking state, the release of stress hormones, such as cortisol, homocyten, I don't know, uh, can significantly affect the immune system, cardiovascular system, and neurological system. And so she's really talking to us about like you are your mind. You're always using your mind, your mind is always with you. You can go three weeks without food, three days without water, and three minutes without air, but you cannot go three seconds without thinking. And knowing that there's this baseline of what you think and what you do can have this physical kind of toxicity to yourself, right? Proven in research, right? And I think in all of our lived experiences, we all do feel this, whether or not we're bringing attention to it or not. And her point is that mind management is key to the mental peace that sustains us through tough and happy times.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I love that. Uh, I was talking to somebody, Sam, yesterday, who's going through a re-org. It seems like some companies just can't stop with change. So this person is going through a re-org is so stressed out about the changes, but it's really about the lack of communication around the changes. And so I think we can all say we've all experienced some sort of stress, whether it's personal, whether it's professional, we've all experienced it. Dr. Leaf says that many researchers believe that toxic stress is responsible for 90% of illnesses, which are heart disease, cancer, diabetes. Only 5 to 10% of diseases are said to come from genetic factors alone. And then you think about how here we are in the top of the year. Lots of people have gone out to get gym memberships to get their physical well-being together. Lots of people have maybe even gone on a fast to change their diet. But this is talking about how many people lack the necessary mind management skills. They need to apply the knowledge to everyday life. So we know we don't want stress, we know we want to lose weight, we know we want to live healthy lives, but then we still don't.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah. And this is really about breaking that pattern, right? And I don't know. If you read this chapter, you're gonna be super depressed. You're gonna you're gonna be like, oh no, because like she talks about this data around like you're increasing so much of your chances of having, you know, like terrible diseases, right? Like lifestyle level diseases. And she really, really emphasizes that through uh a lot of data about, you know, she says that in 2014, federal data started to show that for the first time in decades, the trend of people living longer has been reversed, with people between the ages of 25 and 64 being the worst affected. Like we are living less years than we were. And the people most affected are the people you would consider in the prime of their life, right? This is when you're living your life, all the things are happening, right? This is when you're, you know, you're working, you're spending time with families and friends and all this sort of stuff. And we finally turned this corner to where now we are not living longer than previous generations. And her argument that she goes on to talk about is everything you just said. It's that we are now dying from lifestyle diseases, right? These are things, these are choices we're making because our mind is such a mess. And the trajectory we're on, right? Like back to atomic habits, you should be far more concerned with your trajectory than your current point. Like you might feel fine right now, but what's the trajectory you're on if you continue in this current state? And the data is bad. Like it is really bad. And like, I don't know, it's one of those things like you like people talk about it. Like, I feel like it's like trendy on the internet of like, you know, reduce your stress if you'll be better. But this is the data, this is the research. This is people who scientists who spend their time looking into this stuff, and that is that's insane to me. Like, that's just I don't know, like I said, scary, scary, scary, scary stuff.
SPEAKER_02:It's scary. She says mind management must be a priority, but she also says nobody else can fix it for you except for you. If you don't shape your life, it's gonna be shaped for you. And to shape your life, you need to know how to shape your mind, which is mind management. And she says also when you were talking about some of these stats, what was scaring me as well is it's like a wake up. She's like, wake up, you will lead to early death, not just from suicide, but from heart immune systems, GI systems, your brain, your entire body goes into states of low-grade inflammation that can increase vulnerability to disease by 75 to 95 percent when you're in a constant state of turmoil. And then she says the death rate from these chronic debilitating conditions from stress has risen 20% just in less than six years. And this is a problem. It's a Problem because people have sacrificed processing knowledge for the gathering of data. I highlighted this part, Sam, because I've got highlighted it's highlight. Like, okay, everybody's going to chat GPT to get more information, but they're not getting transformation because they're not doing anything with what maybe the information is providing to them. So we have all this knowledge, but it's not being effectively applied. It's maybe not being consumed. And the way she described it, I thought was interesting. She said you're being nutritionally starved and you can no longer get from point A to point B. So it's really important that yes, we leverage and use uh technology. It's never going away, it's only going to speed up. But if we don't get control over our minds, the toxic energy that will affect how we think, feel, and make decisions will shorten our lives. I mean, that was just like banner in this chapter.
SPEAKER_01:Exactly. And the thing that I thought about in that part you were talking about, like this consumption of information. We've got access to literally learning anything about anything that we want. And especially in the world of short form, right? TikToks, YouTube shorts, right? Like the amount of information, like she's saying that our brains are not wired for this whatsoever. We are wired for deep, deep thinking, right? And all I could think about was the Coach Wooden book and the drinking deeply from books. And what you and I are doing here, and we've talked about this a lot, of you know, like we we could read a lot of books and we've done that and you know, and things like that. But this slow pace, we only do four books a year, but we do them deeply. We we learn, we implement, we go through it slowly so that you've got an entire week to put these lessons, to read this chapter and to put it in, you know, off the pages and into your life, because this is how our brains are designed. And this is like the research kind of it backs, this is what you actually need to do. If you're just consuming, consuming, consuming, consuming, consuming, you're hurting yourself at the end of the day, like actually hurting your brain, because that's just not how we were meant to work, right? When you think of the human history of things, it's much slower pace, right? Much slower, like assess, learn, talk, discuss, think, argue over, you know, things, and then move forward and implement. And that's it's very different than the current kind of setup of this digital world we've got.
SPEAKER_02:I was talking the other day, Sam, to a very good friend that you and I both have that leads a leadership development program department team at a really big company. And he was telling me this week that there's a lot of changes happening, a lot of things about this program that's been going on for almost a decade now is being changed. And it's being changed to now just give managers manager training, uh, you know, how to run reports and spreadsheets and how to have a QBR and you know, things like that. And so when we pick books, we are very conscious about selecting books that may not necessarily show up on the bestseller list as the top business leadership book of the day. These are self-development. We talked about this, I think, even maybe it was last week. Zach has a series on a book where it talks about in his book that you have to start with yourself. So if you are listening and you're a people leader, uh or even a process leader, but you're a leader in your job, you have to start with yourself first. It's like the whole adage of when you get on the airplane, the the flight attendant says, if we get into an emergency, put the oxygen mask on yourself first. That way you are strong enough to help others. So each book that we've selected, and I love the four agreements that we ended last year with, that was not even showing up on a radar of a leadership development book. And it's a book that every leader should read. Yeah. So, anyways, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And to me, I think it's about like the term I always use and I talk about a lot in my business is self-leadership, right? It's the it's the skills that leaders use to lead people. You should be using to lead yourself. And I think when we look at the books that we do, that's what this is really about. It's how do you implement these concepts in a way that you can lead yourself instead of just following along on like the playbook of life that's been handed to you by whatever, whoever, you know, all that sort of stuff. And so this is really about how do you draw awareness? How do you drink deeply from these lessons? And not only how do you just consume, but how do you put it into action in your life in a way that makes you the leader of your life? And that's, I think, where you've got the ability to live the life you really want is when you step up and you say, All right, I'm gonna set the direction. I'm going to learn the skills that I need to to get myself moving and under control. And like, and away from this horrible changer of like, it all leads to early death. It all leads to disease and to things that like just don't need to happen if we learn proper mind management, is really like this whole point, you know, whole point of this. And she does a whole discourse in here, especially if you're somebody who's like in the medical field, a whole discourse that's really interesting on like medication and treating like depression, anxiety, ADHD, all that sort of stuff, like or like kind of this um narrative on where her thoughts are on that, which is all super, super interesting. That, you know, if you're a medical person, it's worth a read for sure. But really, she comes back to we're whole people with whole stories, and our mind is something that can and must be managed for our own holistic health.
SPEAKER_02:Facts. She ends this chapter with saying something important by putting her kind of foot in the sand, which is this book goes beyond mindfulness and positive psychology and the self-help industry. This is about sustainable life management. Next week at chapter two, we're gonna talk about what is mind management and why do we need it. What else do we want to share today before we close this episode?
SPEAKER_01:I think uh read the book. This is a good one. There's a lot, like there's there's a lot in these chapters, and we are definitely like skimming, skimming the surface of what it means. But I think um, you know, definitely check it out. Um, and two, we have started a Substack this year. So join us there. Um, lots more coming, but you can see uh all of our episodes. Things are organized. If you're trying to go back and track down an old series, um, and there will be fun things from Denise and I as the year goes on. We're figuring out exactly what that is, but it's um w oib.substack.com. So check it out and come be a subscriber and keep up with all the latest and greatest and you know kind of insider information from us.
SPEAKER_02:I love it. I love it. Next week we dive deeper into this book. Please come back and share our episodes with those that you think would get value from this as well. For today, my name is Denise Russo, and on behalf of my friend Sam Powell, this has been another episode of What's on Your Bookshelf, and I'm gonna go to the house.