Switch on Your Brain: The Key to Peak Happiness, Thinking, and Health (28 page)

“I can”—choose “I can” or quote a Scripture.

You can’t trick yourself, and you can’t trick God. After all,

you are made in his image and are, therefore, exceptionally in-

telligent. Now using your exceptional intelligence, look at the

simple summary below of how to do the 21-Day Brain Detox

Plan and start renewing your mind and rewiring your brain.

Summary for the 21-Day Brain Detox Plan

1. You do the 5 steps of the Switch On Your Brain tech-

nique daily for 21 days on one specific toxic thought.

2. It takes you seven to ten minutes to work through the

5 steps, and then you do your selected active reach at

least seven times throughout the day. So the active reach,

step 5, has an action component that you
do
throughout

the day. You have worked out what your active reach

would be through using the insight you gained from

steps 1–4.

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Active Reach

3. One brain detox cycle is 21 days.

4. You can do as many 21-day cycles as you need on the

same toxic thought to rewire it, but most times one

cycle will do.

5. You are simultaneously breaking down a toxic thought

and building up a healthy thought.

6. You need to practice automatizing the new healthy tree

by consciously practicing using it for at least two more

21-day cycles.

Below is a guide to help you master the 21-Day Brain Detox.

Learning to Break Down the Toxic Thought

1. Gather (1–2 minutes)

• Purpose: bring thought into consciousness

• Example: worrying about money

• Don’t forget, it is the Holy Spirit who “will guide

you into all the truth” (John 16:13 NIV), so let him—

and not yourself or someone else—make the decision

about what you need to renew.

• Activity: go to chapter 11 for all the step 1 gather

questions to guide you.

2. Focused Reflection (1–2 minutes)

• Purpose: loosen up branches

• Activity: review chapter 12

3. Writing (1–2 minutes)

• Purpose: start shaking the branches to loosen the

glue

• Activity: review chapter 13

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THE 21-DAY BRAIN DETOX PLAN

4. Revisit (1–2 minutes)

• Purpose: shift the glue to the new healthy thought

• Activity: review chapter 14

5. Active Reach (1–2 minutes)

• Purpose: start melting down the branches

• Activity: review chapter 15

Learning to Build Up the Healthy Thought

Now let’s look at the parallel building-up process, which you

do at exactly the same time as you do the breaking-down

process to balance the negative with the positive. You don’t

want to get stuck in the negative—toxicity—so you imme-

diately bring balance to the situation.

1.
Gather

• As you identify the toxic thought in the breaking-down

process, you immediately, prayerfully, consciously think

of the replacement thought. For example: “My God

will supply every need of yours according to his riches

in glory in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 4:19 ESV). (See chap. 11.)

2.
Focused Reflection

• Grow and integrate healthy branches by reflecting

on the positive and not just dwelling on the negative.

(See chap. 12.)

3.
Write

• Add more information and links with other branches

by writing the positive alongside the negative. (See

chap. 13.)

4.
Revisit

• You are doing the same thing in the breaking-down

and building-up processes here. The steps cross over

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Active Reach

because you are planning the solution to replace the

problem. This starts stabilizing the branches to firm

up the “glue” bonds. (See chap. 14.)

5.
Active Reach

• This is the same step as in the breaking-down pro-

cess, but here you actually
do
the active reaches. This

strengthens the new thought branches. (See chap. 15.)

Repeating steps 1 through 5 daily for about seven minutes

eventually eliminates the toxic tree and stabilizes the healthy

tree. Like the Scripture says in Mark 11:22–23, “You can say

to this mountain, ‘May you be lifted up and thrown into the

sea,’ and it will happen” (NLT).

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Afterword

As I sat down to write this, I wondered why it is that

certain things stick in your brain. Then I thought,

Why is it that the guy writing an afterword for a

book about how the brain works is asking questions about

how the brain works? Why don’t I just read the book and

get my answers?
Caroline certainly answers my enigma in

these pages.

Let me digress. For me, some of the “stuck” memories

are events, locations, smells, feelings, visions, and dreams.

Some are good; some are not as good. Diesel exhaust is a

real bummer of a memory for me; it can almost immediately

make me nauseated. (I went to Israel numerous times as a

teenager, and traveled the length and breadth of the Holy

Land by diesel-belching buses.)When I feel extreme cold, I

think of football. (I opened the door of a hotel one time in

Detroit for Lions’ great Hall of Famer Barry Sanders.)

The geometry definition “two lines cut by a transversal

so that alternate interior angles are congruent and the lines

are parallel” is burnt into my brain. (I was rudely awakened

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Afterword

from an awesome daydream and then traumatized by a math

teacher summoning me to the blackboard to solve a math

equation from another planet in front of my entire class.)

When Laurie, my wife of almost thirty years now, tilts her

head at a certain angle to look up at me, I feel a “slap a ring

on that girl’s finger and run down the aisle and get married”

kind of LOVE. I am taken back to the fall of 1984, stand-

ing in Pastor Don Price’s church embracing her, instantly in

love, holding her longer, tighter, and wondering how many

people were like,
Um . . . What’s up with the major PDA in

church!
We were hardly ever apart after that fateful evening

and married a few months later.

When I am introduced to a person named Tom and/or

sometimes just hear the name Tom, I want to giggle, seriously!

My brain can replay a movie of Laurie looking at but past me,

eyes going wide like she was seeing a ghost over my shoulder!

(We were at a friend’s home in Los Angeles for a dinner party,

and unbeknownst to me two-time Academy award–winning

actor Tom Hanks was standing behind me, waiting to say hello

to our host, but I was mid-story and rambling on and on, and

Laurie was desperately trying to tell me to shut up and turn

around with her “Lucy Ricardo” eye gestures! I finally did,

and Tom said, “Hi, I’m Tom.” I said, “Yes, I know.”)

When I see an advertisement for a certain global technology

company that manufactures telephone systems, tears can well

up in my eyes. I answered a phone call in 1991 to the sounds

of sobbing on the other end of the line. (Laurie choked out

the news to me that she had miscarried our second child.)

I can remember where I was when I heard about President

Reagan being shot; the Challenger disaster; September 11,

2001; the birth of my boys, Caylan and Cody, their first steps,

birthday cake being smashed into faces, etc.

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Afterword

Hopefully you are tracking with me here. I pray you are

able to conjure up your own random memories, good and

not so good, and are asking the same questions I am. Why

do these events become us, become the very persona of who

we are? Why
those
memories? What makes them “stick” in

our brains?

This book is the owner’s manual for how our brain works.

Refer to it regularly. Caroline Leaf’s first appearance on TBN’s

Praise The Lord
program with Laurie and me is one of the

“stuck” memories in my brain too. I remember thinking that

I was not listening to a doctor’s opinion regarding how God

created our brains but was actually hearing a revelation that

was divinely inspired. I vividly recall saying, “Let me repeat

what I think you just said. Our thoughts are actually ‘proteins’

forming the way our brains will actually think about matters

in the future? So the Scripture that says, ‘as a man thinks, so

is he’ actually means that ‘as a man thinks, so is he’? Wow!

Science is actually catching up with the Bible!”

That was Caroline’s first program with us. She has taught

us more and more truth over the years, and is now in produc-

tion on an entire TV series that will air on TBN for years!

These pages are not information—they are revelation. And

Caroline’s revelation will change the way you think.

Literally!

Matthew Crouch,

Trinity Broadcasting Family of Networks

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Notes

1. Eric R. Kandel,
In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind
(New York: Norton, 2006).

2. Sigmund Freud, quoted in D. Church,
The Genie in Your Genes
(Fulton, CA: Energy Psychology Press, 2008).

3. Norman Doidge,
The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from
the Frontiers of Brain Science
(New York: Penguin Books, 2007); Joe Dispenza,
Evolve
Your Brain: The Science of Changing Your Brain
(Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, 2007); Henry Markram, director of the Brain and Mind Institute of the
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
that founded the Blue Brain Project, which accurately predicts connections between neurons,
Science Daily
, September 17, 2012, www.

sciencedaily.com /releases/2012/09/120917152043.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_

medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fmind_brain%2Fneuro

science+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Mind+%26+Brain+News+—+Neuroscience%29;

and Allan Jones, http://www.ted.com/speakers/allan_jones.html.

4. 98 percent of mental and physical illnesses come from our thought life: www.

stress.org/americas.htm;
www.naturalwellnesscare.com/stress-statistics.html; Harvard Medical School’s Mind-Body Institute, www.massgeneral.org/bhi/research/;

Church,
Genie in Your Genes
. The Institute of HeartMath discusses an experiment titled “Local and Nonlocal Effects of Coherent Heart Frequencies on Conformational Changes of DNA.” http://appreciativeinquiry.case.edu/practice/organizationDetail.

cfm?coid=852§or=21. A study by the American Medical Association found that stress is a factor in 75 percent of all illnesses and diseases that people suffer from today.

The association between stress and disease is a colossal 85 percent, Brian Luke Seaward, www.brianlukeseaward.net/articles/SuperStress-WELCOA-Seaward.pdf.

“Cancer Statistics and Views of Causes,”
Science News
115, no. 2 (January 13, 1979): 23; H. F. Nijhout “Metaphors and the Role of Genes and Development,”
BioEssays
12

(1990): 444–46; W. C. Willett, “Balancing Lifestyle and Genomics Research for Disease 207

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Notes

Prevention,”
Science
296 (2002): 695–98; C. B. Pert,
Molecules of Emotion: Why You
Feel the Way You Feel
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997); B. Lipton,
The Biology
of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter and Miracles
(Santa Cruz, CA: Mountain of Love Productions, 2008).

5. C. M. Leaf,
The Gift in You: Discover New Life through Gifts Hidden in Your
Mind
(Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2009).

6. Church,
Genie in Your Genes
.

7. Herbert Benson MD, president of Harvard Medical School’s Mind-Body Institute,

www.massgeneral.org/bhi/research.

8. Glen Rein and Rollin McCraty, “Local and Nonlocal Effects of Coherent Heart

Frequencies on Conformational Changes of DNA,” Proceedings of the Joint USPA/IAPR

Psychotronics Conference, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1993, http://www.heartmath.org/

templates/ihm/e-newsletter/publication/2012/winter/emotions-can-change-your-dna.

php; Rollin McCraty et al., “Modulation of DNA Conformation By Heart-focused

Intention.” HeartMath Research Center, Institute of HeartMath, publications no.

03–08, Boulder Creek, CA, 2003.

9. “Stress,” Your Dictionary, http://www.yourdictionary.com/stress. Emphasis mine.

10. Sheldon Cohen et al., “Psychological Stress and Disease,”
JAMA
14 (2007): 1685, http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120619-how-stress-could-cause-illness; http://www.