Asking for a Friend - Health, Fitness & Personal Growth Tips for Women in Midlife

Ep.116 Improving Mental Health and Personal Control: Emotional Brain Training with Dr. Laurel Mellin

• Michele Henning Folan • Episode 116

Share episode

The mind is amazingly powerful, and we have more control over our brains than we sometimes think. In episode 56, we discussed dialectical behavioral therapy and midlife mental well-being. In this episode, we will dive into emotional brain training or EBT, and how it can be used in many ways with long-lasting results. 

We are joined by Laurel Mellin, PhD, a pioneering health psychologist, founder of Emotional Brain Training (EBT), and New York Times bestselling author. She shares her deeply moving personal story, including the loss of her first child, which inspired her groundbreaking work in emotional health. Dr. Mellin explains how EBT can rewire the brain's stress circuits, helping manage stress, prevent chronic diseases, and promote lasting mental well-being. Find out how you can incorporate EBT into your daily life to transform your emotional health and overall wellness.

From addressing food addiction to overcoming significant life challenges, Laurel provides a roadmap for mastering emotional wellness. She discusses her latest book, "One, Two, Three Joy," and emphasizes the importance of maintaining a joyful brain state. Whether you're struggling with evening snacking or looking for tools to enhance your emotional resilience, this episode offers invaluable insights and resources. Join us for an enlightening conversation that promises to enrich your journey towards healthier living.

One dollar is all it costs to download the EBT app and join for a month of group coaching. Dr. Mellin and her colleagues are very confident their method will be successful and offer hope to people who want to be the solution in their emotional well-being. 

You can find EBT and Dr. Laurel Mellin at:
https://www.ebtconnect.net/
https://www.instagram.com/drlaurelmellin/

Dr. Mellin's most recent book, 1-2-3 Joy!: Easy, Natural Weight Loss that is Scientific, Proven, Drug-Free & Fun, can be found at all major booksellers.



Send us a text

_________________________________________
Are you ready to reclaim your midlife body and health? I went through my own personal journey through menopause, the struggle with midsection weight gain, and feeling rundown. Faster Way, a transformative six-week group program, set me on the path to sustainable change. I'd love to work with you! Let me help you reach your health and fitness goals.
https://www.fasterwaycoach.com/?aid=MicheleFolan

Have questions about Faster Way? Feel free to reach out.
mfolanfasterway@gmail.com

Follow Asking for a Friend on Social media outlets:
https://www.instagram.com/askingforafriend_pod/
https://www.facebook.com/askforafriendpod/

Please provide a review and share. This helps us grow!
https://lovethepodcast.com/AFAF

*Transcripts are done with AI and may not be perfectly accurate.

**This podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine, nursing, or other professional healthcare services, including the giving of medical advice. The content of this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Users should not disregard or delay in obtaining medical advice for any medical condition they may have and should seek the assistance of their healthcare professionals for any such conditions.

Michele Folan:

You've tried it all Keto, weight Watchers, atkins. Maybe you've even tried one of the GLP-1 shots. Then there's Orange Theory and other high-intensity cardio. That's, I don't know, I think, kind of boring, and the results Meh.

Michele Folan:

I, too, struggled to figure out what was going to work for my midlife body. We are not necessarily to blame, though. Diet culture threw us a curveball, and what may have worked in our younger years may not be the secret sauce for success now. What I have found is that many of my clients have been under eating, which blunts our metabolism. We're doing too much cardio when we need to be lifting weights. What if I told you that you could eat all the food groups, including carbs? Eat more than you're likely consuming now, and wrap a bow on it with 30-minute at-home workouts for any fitness level. Have I piqued your interest? It doesn't have to be complicated or expensive, but you do need to take the first step. Go to the show notes of this episode or send me an email at mfolan, that's F as in Frank O-L-A-N fasterway at gmailcom. Health, wellness, fitness and everything in between. We're removing the taboo from what really matters in midlife.

Michele Folan:

I'm your host, Michelle Folan, and this is Asking for a Friend. The mind is amazingly powerful and we have more control over our brains than we sometimes think. In episode 56, we discussed dialectical behavioral therapy and midlife mental well-being. Today we're going to dive into emotional brain training, or EBT, and how it can be used in many ways with long-lasting results. Dr Laurel Mellon is a health psychologist, new York Times bestselling author, and founder of Emotional Brain Training. She developed EBT during her 40 years as a professor in the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Her work has received awards from the American Medical Association and the US Department of Consumer Affairs. Laurel Mellon, welcome to Asking for a Friend.

Laurel Mellin:

What a pleasure, Michele. Thank you so much for inviting me Well.

Michele Folan:

I think this is a fascinating topic, and I don't know if how we found each other. I think someone on your end reached out and I said, ah, I like this one. This is a great topic. You're from the California area, then. Is that where you grew up?

Laurel Mellin:

Yes, I'm a ninth generation Californian. I'm really here, and I grew up in this area, just north of San Francisco, right near the university where I worked for so many years. So, yes, I'm here. I'm married to a wonderful man that I only met 12 years ago. It was not the first marriage and I have three grown children, so I'm very fulfilled. I'm married to a wonderful man that I only met 12 years ago. It was not the first marriage and I have three grown children. So I'm very fulfilled as a woman and really I'm at this time of really giving back that time, and I know that's something we do our whole life. But as you get older, I'm 75. I started emotional brain training as a young faculty member at UCSF when I was 28. So remember, the years go quickly, yeah.

Michele Folan:

Oh, my goodness, so you've been doing this research for a very long time. Can you explain a little bit more about the nuts and bolts of emotional brain training and really how this came to fruition with your research?

Laurel Mellin:

It came to fruition. You know, we all have our own problems, right, and one of my problems was overeating and addiction to food, and as a young girl even at the age of 11 or 12, I started having a lot of stress and I turned to food and I was suffering a lot. And so, when I went in to decide what I was going to do, I married at an early age my childhood sweetheart and I was pregnant with our first child about six months later and the baby died. And when the baby died, they told me this was a major organization, that is a HMO. It was a lot of stuff going on that wasn't right, and they told me something that wasn't true, which is I could never have children, and I'm a big believer in that. Everything is perfect, and particularly when something really terrible happens, you don't want to bring that on yourself, but if you dive into it, you will evolve in ways that you couldn't if you just were living the charmed life.

Laurel Mellin:

So I ended up going back to graduate school, first in nutrition and then health psychology, and got a plum job at the University of California School of Medicine. They didn't really know what to do with me. I was on a grant. And so I got to do what I wanted, which I wanted to find the root cause of suffering in humans, and for me that was suffering around food. And so I delved into the literature and finally found it was about emotional connectivity. So I was a young woman and I said oh, that's not a problem, I'm just going to create skills that make people emotionally connect to themselves and others.

Laurel Mellin:

So, lo and behold, I did it and everyone thought she's got to be crazy. So I did it. But you know, I'm a scientist. You know, when you're at the university, all of us are scientists. And what happened is? It turned out that it turned off the drive to overeat in children in ways we've never seen before, and the parents would come to me. Mother would come to me and say what is going on with my child? She used to be stealing money from my purse to go down and get the candy from the local store, and now she doesn't care about it. So I was only about 28 at the time and I realized that I would be a bad person if I didn't dedicate my career to understanding what was going on there and to be able to give it to others. And it turned out, it would take more than 25 years before the brain science showed exactly what was happening, and now we have this method.

Michele Folan:

Emotional brain training Did you have any difficulty getting your colleagues to kind of buy into what you were getting to here?

Laurel Mellin:

Well, I will say that it's been highly variable and one of the reasons I could persist in EBT is because I don't have a lot of ego based on this. It's a spiritual mission for me. So if someone slams the door in my face, I say, oh well, those things happen, and I go on to the other. And also, by being part of the university, I'm around absolutely brilliant people. And my colleague who is a scientific director of EBT, who's Igor Mitrovich, who is also a full professor of physiology at UCSF, his wife actually I had a bestselling book and his wife gave him my book for his birthday book and and his wife gave him my book for his birthday, and they said, hey, this woman's at UCSF2 and I think she's on to something here.

Laurel Mellin:

So he tried the tools and he was like flummoxed. He says what's going on, it really works. And then he started, started collaborating and, of course, he brought a wealth of science to the neurophysiological aspect and neuroplasticity aspect of EBT and he's been instrumental in taking EBT to the next level. So I would say that for anyone out there thinking about another career or whether just the same old thing, you better have your heart in it and that means your spirituality, your sense of purpose and your drive, because you're going to get beaten up a lot and you have to just smile and say, okay, I'm back and do it. But it's been a very wonderful career because every day I get up and I know that I'm doing the best I can, even when I mess up, to move this method forward. So it's been very rewarding.

Michele Folan:

On your website you mentioned that the brain's stress load predicts accelerated aging and chronic diseases and mental health problems. Can you dig into that a little bit?

Laurel Mellin:

Absolutely. It's really at the essence of emotional brain training. EBT is a major paradigm shift in medicine. Some people have said it should get a Nobel Peace Prize or a Nobel Medical Prize or whatever a Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine and even peace. Because what happens is when we're controlled, our responses in life are controlled by circuits in our unconscious mind, in our emotional brain. No one disputes that and no one has done anything about it except give medications or use treatments that target one particular circuit or another. But never before has anyone really looked at okay, the emotional brain circuits are the problem.

Laurel Mellin:

How do you switch them off in the moment? Let's say that the circuits are making you want to overeat or get depressed. How do you find a way to shut those circuits off in the moment? The way you do it is because they are emotional tools, they do not respond to cognitive methods. So whether it's mindfulness, cognitive behavioral therapy, DBT, whatever it is it's based on high-functioning a thinking brain is not going to work. So what EBT does is says you can be in stress, because you have to be in stress to change the circuits. You can be in stress and your thinking brain is really being doused with all these chemicals. But if you focus on processing your emotions in a very, very precise way we call it precision EBT you will not only switch off that circuit in one to three minutes, which you can tolerate, okay but that same set of tools. If you use it in a very focused way, like, let's say, you have a, you have a strong drive to overeat or a drive to get depressed or to essentially people please, or whatever that drive is that you don't like. You use the same tools not for what's called self-regulation or in other words switching off the bad circuit in the moment, but for reconsolidation really important word In order to have lasting results with EBT or I mean lasting results biologically you have to fry that circuit, you have to dismantle that circuit so that it's no longer dominant in your brain. And when you have rewired that circuit, in other words activated it with stress you have to stress, activate it the neurons go flying in the air. You know the synaptic connections are very fluid and in that moment, if you think or feel differently, you will update that circuit to abolish the old circuit. So this is very important because unless you get rid of these circuits, they just hide out in the bottom of the brain and then so you lose all this weight, you lose 50 pounds and these oh my gosh but the circuit's still there and so as soon as I'm stressed, boom, it comes right back on and then we blame ourselves and then we get depressed and everything else.

Laurel Mellin:

So the reason that I mentioned this is because, overall, if you look at your aging, how is how it is to go through menopause, what your moods are, what your behaviors are, what your other health problems that have to do with inflammation are? What predicts it is if you have a dominance of the kind of circuits in your brain they're called allostatic circuits or stress circuits that make you go into dysregulation. If you have that, you have what's called a low set point. The stress in your brain just accumulates day to day. If you don't take that stress that you suppressed your emotions, it just accumulates in your brain and every brain has a set point and if your set point is in stress, what's going to happen is you begin to live, you begin being vulnerable to every health problem there is, particularly those that you have genetic or environmental tendencies to accumulate. So the most important thing you can do is change the circuits in your brain. It takes about one month to learn how to self-regulate with ebt. We call it up so you get immediate results with eating, mood, anxiety, whatever that is because you switch off the circuit. But that's 10% of the value of EBT. The other 90% is you.

Laurel Mellin:

Once you've learned how to how to spiral up and self regulate and switch off that circuit in the moment, then your brain is ready to do the real work, which is to choose four circuits you don't like. Maybe it's overeating, maybe it's anxiety, maybe it's relationship merging or distancing, maybe it's judging your body or work stress, whatever that is. You choose four and you focus in on them and you clear those circuits. And the way you know you cleared the circuits is you stop the drive. So the circuit makes you biochemically overeat, get depressed, get anxious. People please obsess about you know, be perfectionistic.

Laurel Mellin:

Whatever it is that you don't like, that is a circuit and so you don't try to change your behavior or your mood. You focus your attention on that circuit. With emotional brain training. You get into a group. There's seven people plus yourself and an EBT provider and you focus on that circuit until you no longer have the urge. You have freedom from the urge and that gives you the information you need to know that you've rewired that circuit. You rewire four and then you stay with EBT until your brain is wired for joy and purpose. So the set point is optimal. So your brain just naturally moves through life's difficulties and moves back to a state of connection where you can be your best self and do whatever you came to earth to do to give back. Okay.

Michele Folan:

I've got a lot of questions here. So, all right, let's back up to if you are. Let's, for example, say you're a midlife woman and you snack after dinner. You are the evening snacker and that is your crutch. Is it a word? Is it a phrase? What is it that is breaking that circuit? Oh, what breaks the circuit?

Laurel Mellin:

Well, there's two parts of it. Number one you stay in EBT for one year until your set point is in joy. That's also called homeostasis scientifically, because when your brain is hanging out at a connected state it's much less risk that you'll reinstate an old circuit. So you want to get to a beautiful state of optimal physiology, the brain state. But to get there you've got to rewire these circuits.

Laurel Mellin:

And when you're you're eating after dinner, when you're not really hungry, the first thing to do is say this is not my fault, this is a wire in my brain. I've gone to dieting programs. I mean you can go and take weight loss drugs. They're not going to change your wires in your brain. They're just going to become a dependency for you because they're trying to give you the chemicals that you can naturally have. When you use ebt to rewire these circuits, they're just going to be expensive and also for some people quite damaging. But you know when you say and with the diet, if you're going on a diet and trying to force yourself to eat differently, please don't do that. The reason I say that is overeating is not a behavioral problem, it is a biochemical problem. And even though I believe anyone should take any medication they want. I'm not a big fan of weight loss drugs simply because they don't work in the long term and they're really giving you an opportunity for the circuits in your brain that are causing the overeating to get stronger and stronger, Because if you don't rewire them, they keep getting stronger and stronger.

Laurel Mellin:

But the idea is that the root cause is these wires in the brain that are encoded through no fault of our own. Now, this is really important. I had my food circuit. You know you put a name to it. You don't say, oh, I have an emotional overeating problem. That is way old fashioned.

Laurel Mellin:

We now know that that drive to overeat is a wire in the unconscious mind that was encoded through absolutely no fault of our own. Because these wires are encoded when we're in super, super stress and we the brain, when we have a big fight or flight circuit, think in terms of circuits, because you can change circuits. You can't change issues. You change that circuit is really big and your brain is saying I'm going to be annihilated here, because with psychological stress the brain is primed to consider it a threat of death. So even you say, well, that situation wasn't that difficult. Well, biochemically it was, because your brain is activating a fight or flight drive.

Laurel Mellin:

And when that happens, the brain tells you just do anything you have to do. There's no tomorrow here. Just eat, drink, spend whatever you have to do. And once I for example for me, when I was 11 years old and I'd been bullied at school and I came home and I didn't really know how to talk about my problems to my mother. She was actually there, but I didn't know how to talk about it and I reached for some cinnamon rolls that were on the table and there was a whole package. I ate three of them. Those are those big ones with the white stuff on top.

Michele Folan:

Oh, I know exactly what you're talking about.

Laurel Mellin:

And, of course, my dad was diabetic. So we were always about food. And you don't, I can't have sugar and all this kind of stuff, so I eat it and I was thinking very guilty. I ate without asking if I could eat it and um, but I didn't know that. The problem was, if I, if I knew EBT, I would have processed my emotions before I went to bed.

Laurel Mellin:

If something happens during your day and you don't process your emotions to clear that circuit, what happens is the hippocampus stores it in long-term memory and you have it potentially for the rest of your life. It's in long-term memory. So I got this circuit telling me I get my survival from sugar. Okay, so you can see that it was not my fault. The reason is I was stressed, my thinking brain was offline and my biochemistry. There are eight chemicals that are surging at that point, not just one, like the weight loss drugs. Eight major chemicals are surging that tell me I absolutely have to have that food.

Laurel Mellin:

And then, once it's encoded, I blame myself for overeating. I feel ashamed of myself, whereas truly, somebody who knows neuroscience could have told me Laurel, it's not your fault, it's just a circuit and I'm going to show you how to rewire it. So when you focus, not on your behavior but on finding the message in your unconscious mind, which the EBT gives you the tools to do, the exact message Like I get my even with food, I get my mothering from overeating, I get my security from stuffing myself with food, I get my comfort from nibbling all the time. Whatever the exact words are that are in the unconscious mind, ebt gives you those words in your conscious mind and then once you have those words, you use EBT and you crush that circuit until, boom, it's gone.

Laurel Mellin:

So appreciate, not your fault, it's just a wire, it's an emotional wire. You can't think your way out of it. You can't think any more than you can think your way out of a binge eating. You need to use emotional tools to change the emotional circuit until it's gone All right, we could do the same thing with alcohol then.

Laurel Mellin:

Yes. So the other part is with the American Psychological Association. Their whole spectrum of different diagnoses is not brain-based and we hope that EBT will inform APA about that, because you tell people they have these diagnosis substance use disorder, whatever. What do you do with that information? How applicable is it If you say to yourself, sweetheart, you have first of all your set points low, so you're in the stress zone all the time, so all these chemicals are spewing. Why don't we have a goal of not just getting past alcohol or food or depression, but having you be wired for joy? You know, essentially, a set point in your brain that keeps you out of that zone and in order to do it, we're going to rewire some of those patterns in your brain that were encoded through no fault of your own. So, just to give it a sense, there's something in our brain called survival circuits, in our brain called survival circuits. Now the food circuit I mentioned when I was stress, overload, reach for the food, that fight or flight drive combined with this little measly food circuit. I didn't have food problems at that point, but once it combines with the fight or flight, you wake up the next morning and you have a fight or flight drive to repeat that pattern and think how pernicious that is when it's activated through what you know. Maybe a friend of yours says something nasty to you or you have a customer at work that gives you a hard time. It can be encoded, activated by anything, and once it's encoded, thinking brain offline, those eight chemicals are surging and you're going to have the alcohol or the spending or the depression or the obsessive thinking and as if your life depended upon it.

Laurel Mellin:

So what we're looking at in terms of addiction is the survival circuits are the source of addiction. If you learn EBT essentially if you learn those tools you will identify four of these. And anxiety is an addiction too. Why? Because you have a reflexive response, biochemically driven, to get into that mood state and then you get stuck there.

Laurel Mellin:

So the new definition of addiction has nothing to do with how many drinks you have or how many whatever's you have. It has to do with do you have a survival circuit that takes you out of control and makes it impossible for you not to continue to repeat that pattern? So this is very liberating to anyone who's been in a family or had addiction problems, because we are all addicts in one sense or another. Everybody's got a few of these survival circuits and that's why what we want to do in the United States particularly because this election is going to be really difficult the aftermath of it, no matter how it goes, is going to be really stressful. There's probably going to be a lot of stress in the next months. We want everyone to have EBT so that they can self-regulate when they're really, really stressed out and they can rewire any of these circuits.

Michele Folan:

Yeah, we don't cover politics on this show ever, but I just think that was such a funny comment about the election. That's awesome. We'll talk after we're finished here. You said something earlier that had me super intrigued. You mentioned that if you go to bed before clearing the circuit, then you're going to carry that with you, and I want to know what that practice could possibly look like in the evening or sometime during your day where you have to clear multiple circuits, because it could be more than one. Right, yeah, right.

Laurel Mellin:

Okay, so first of all, as you you know, I'm 75, I was 28 when I started this, or 20, whatever something like that when I started. So you can see that we've been working on EBT for some time and the whole issue with EBT is to make it as quick and as easy as possible, and I'm one of these people that I believe if you don't do it quick, don't bother doing it. You know, get in there and getting it done, and I really respect each person's time. It's the only thing we can't get back. And so EBT is now super simple. It is you choose one of three buttons on our app One button.

Laurel Mellin:

If you only have one minute to clear a stress, you choose button number one. It's called Instant Boost. Number one it's called instant boost. If it is, it is you have two, two minutes. You choose quick and easy and that feels better because you feel your feelings more. Or, if it's a big one, deep work, you push three and you do that throughout the day, and because the basic tool only takes one minute.

Laurel Mellin:

Now, remember that mindfulness and cognitive take 30 minutes to switch off the stress response, because what we're doing here is using emotions. Remember that mindfulness and cognitive take 30 minutes to switch off the stress response, because what we're doing here is using emotions in just the way the brain likes to switch those circuits, that you do it throughout the day and you know you might do it 5-10 times and then what happens is you can't solve every problem every day because the circuits are. It takes a few minutes to do the deep work, but you get into a group. This is why our research at the University of Kentucky showed that you can't really just use this app on your own. You have to learn. It's a program. It's a one-year program to become wired for joy, and a lot of mothers do this because we pass our circuits from our childhood or our trauma along to our children, whether we want to or not. A very close relative of mine who's just about thinking about having a baby, she says I'm going to take another six months and do more EBT before I get pregnant because I don't want to pass these along. But the idea is, what you want to do is take the time to learn how to do this. We are doing something very bold. We are rewiring the unconscious mind. That's what Freud wanted to do, and what we're saying is it's not about going to a shrink and sitting on a couch or lying on a couch, although you might want to go to a psychiatrist, that's fine, but this is look at the time we're in. We're in the time of AI. We're in the time of AI. We're in the time of the internet. We're in the time of all this.

Laurel Mellin:

Emotional health should be for all, and you need to not rely excessively on your therapist or your psychiatrist or even your medications. Rely on yourself. Learn how to rewire these circuits and make it. You know, when I was a kid, they'd had two people would for dental health. They brush their teeth and now, starting maybe 20 or 30 years ago, people brush their teeth and they also floss their teeth. You know there's something called dental hygiene that people take very seriously. Well, I'm talking about emotional hygiene. Everyone needs the skills throughout the day. When you're when somebody assaults you emotionally or you're triggered by the past, you stop and you say this is perfect. I feel horrible. That means that the circuit that's causing me, that's been laying dormant in there throughout the day, is now activated. All I have to do is take three minutes, go for my app, go to the deep work pathway and clear it, and then I won't have to store it at night and live with it on an ongoing basis.

Michele Folan:

Okay, it is really fascinating and I like the self-reliance piece of this because I think so often we are the answer and that, I think, gives people a lot of hope and makes them feel empowered, right To know that they don't have to necessarily depend on someone else for results to get out of the slump that they're in. I wanted to know if you could discuss the study that validated the benefits of EBT and how there are lasting results, if you are, if you do it correctly.

Laurel Mellin:

Yes. Well, on our website at ebtorg, what we have is all 13 of the studies that have supported its success, but there was one study in particular that was both a two and a six-year study. That was really important. So this is why, if you look at any drug or any other method, frankly, other than EBT, what you'll find is there's something called the V-shape results curve. What that means is, let's say, it's weight. You want the weight to go down. So during the time of the intervention, whether it's when you're taking the weight loss drug that's costing you an arm and a leg, or whether it's a diet that you're trusting in, or whatever, you will lose weight. Okay, you've got external support. You get enough external support to help you use your thinking brain to change your circuits or tamp them down. Anything will work. And then, as soon as you go off it, the V goes back up and people regain the weight. Now people blame themselves and our whole healthcare system. That's why, when you choose to become an EBT or you're doing something for our nation, our whole nation is based on short term interventions that really don't help empower us to be healthy naturally. So what we're going to do is the idea is with EBT. This is why this study was so important is the weight went down and it stayed down two and six years later. Now this was only after 18 weeks of EBT given at the University of California, san Francisco.

Laurel Mellin:

The reason this is so important is because if you get to the root cause of something and change it, you'll get lasting results. If you're just skimming the surface, like with these GLP-1 drugs, there are eight major chemicals activated by stress that cause overeating and weight gain. Glp-1 is one chemical and that's why there's so many side effects, because it disbalances your. It puts you in starvation mode and it's not naturally balancing. All you have to do is turn off those stress circuits in your brain and all of a sudden you get all eight beginning to go back to a, to a healthy level. So you get to the root cause and biochemically it's optimal health because you're you're tapping into something natural which is called homeostasis. You know that's how we survive and thrive.

Michele Folan:

The one thing that I will say is that I don't. I don't sense that there's breath work and meditation and that sort of thing involved here. It is. It's a it's a totally different process, but it it is. It really is amazing, though the effect of stress on the brain is it affects everything, right.

Laurel Mellin:

Well, think of it this way the central nervous system affects everything, and when the central nervous system is in a state of stress, the circuits make us sick in every domain of life. When the central nervous system is in the opposite of stress, which is not relaxation, the brain wants joy. Joy is the sign, in other words, higher order purpose. It doesn't mean happy, happy, happy. It means staying connected, being of purpose. And what happens in that state? You have sustainable neurotransmitters of you know, endorphins and dopamine and oxytocin. All these healing chemicals start flowing. So it's about the brain, it's not about the neocortex, it's about the circuits in the emotional brain. And when you take charge of those circuits with EBT, you have a new sense of control in your life. You'll never blame yourself again for anything and anything that really bothers you. You'll just roll up your sleeve. You'll have your EBT group and people will listen to you. All we do in the group is listen to each other and a provider teaches, but we don't offer advice, because it's really about the circuits and you're with other people who will listen to you. So the tools work better and you clear that circuit and then you go on to the next one.

Laurel Mellin:

There was a man who just came. We just had a big article in the Wall Street Journal about EBT. It was a letter to the editor. He had a flooding of men into EBT. So you know, mainly it's more of a woman's thing, you know, because women are more open to feelings than men are. Well, these men say this is neuroscientific, I have a depression problem, I have an eating problem or whatever. And so we just tell them now it's good that you came here, now let's do the work, jump in and get it done. And so we've all the every single day at EBT there's a group that's open to everybody so you can drop in and listen to others. So it's very nurturing to do this, and there's always an EBT provider there. They say get in and do this.

Laurel Mellin:

So this man came in and he was a doctor and a lawyer, and so you know, this is a brilliant man and he's he's. He's gone his whole life with this eating problem, and so he joined one of my groups and he's getting to talk to the other people. He's learning this stuff. He comes to me because he was doing coaching with me too. He says Laurel, what is going on? And I said what do you mean. I've heard this thousands of times, no-transcript. I've never had anything like this before. I said because you did the work, you know you spiraled up using it and you rewired your food circuit Fantastic. So he says it's effortless.

Michele Folan:

That's a great success story. The other kind of aha moment I just had about your groups If you are going somewhere like AA, well that's Alcoholics Anonymous. Everybody has the same problem. But when people are meeting with their EBT group, they're all there for different reasons, right, it doesn't matter why they're there, right, it doesn't matter.

Laurel Mellin:

Yeah, we actually have two complete programs. One is for stress eating and you rewire your food circuit, your mood circuit, your relationship circuit and your body circuit. The body circuit is very important. If you don't rewire the body circuit, you will have a drive to hold on to the weight. If you rewire your body circuit, you have a drive of joy to release weight. And for everybody else, we have the stress overload program, which is a mood, a relationship pattern, a work pattern and a habit. So what happens is people are focused not on their problems or their pathology. They want to get wired for joy, they want to raise their brain set point and so they help each other. It doesn't really matter what the topic is. So we're not again, we're not bonding around pathology. We're bonding about the human brain and transforming our lives and getting to that joy state where we can be our best selves.

Michele Folan:

Yeah, that's really neat. Now you have written more than one book, right I?

Laurel Mellin:

think I've written at least 13, and I've written another 20 workbooks. I do that a lot.

Michele Folan:

So your most recent book was what?

Laurel Mellin:

Oh yeah, this is a good. This is a. If you're really interested in, uh, in EBT, the best way is just to go and get to our website and get started. But the book for those people who want to look at the science, want it all all, all chronicles what it is. The book is called One, two, Three, joy by Laurel Mellon, and what that book does is it tells you exactly how to rewire your brain so that food and weight are no longer issues in your life and you can get to a point in your weight. It's not just about accepting your weight, but it's finding the weight that's right for you whatever weight is right for you, and being able to attain that weight comfortably and reliably and have that weight stay off. That's what we're looking for freedom.

Michele Folan:

Got it All right. I like that. I would like to ask you a question what is one of your personal pillars of self-care?

Laurel Mellin:

Oh, just one. I wake up in the morning and I do. It's brain-based, it's scientific. I'm so surprised.

Michele Folan:

All inclusive.

Laurel Mellin:

I wake up in the morning. I've had some health problems recently and I last year my husband was actually essentially fell down this huge bunch of steps outside at a monastery that's near us and he basically crushed his body. So it was a concussion it was his shoulder, it was his neck and then all these compressed vertebrae, it was his hip and he spent eight months in a hospital bed in our home. So it's been a time of of a lot of stress. And remember I mentioned to you that the only time you can rewire trauma is to momentarily activate that circuit to be at the same stress level. So you need you can't just mindfully change your trauma circuits. You've got to stress, activate it and with EBT you come straight back up to joy right away. So it's, it's safe and quick. But all this, these moments of terror, you know, when he's taking four different pain medications, nothing works. He's awake all night, he can't sleep anywhere. It was really hell. And whenever you're going through hell, remember, don't invite it, but use it to your best advantage.

Laurel Mellin:

And so both of us raised our set point during that time. So we set our goal on joy. So I wake up in the morning. I say to myself, hey, what am I doing with my day? And then instantly I think, oh, I have this appointment, this appointment and this is I stop. No, what I? The most important thing I can do is raise my set point or keep my set point, and we call it brain state one or joy. I am creating joy in my life and anytime I'm not feeling in that connected flow state, I'm going to reach for my app, I'm going to spiral back up and that's what I do with my day and that's the only real security anyone has in life their own brain set point, so that's what I do.

Michele Folan:

Oh, all right, I'm starting to really understand this now. I mean, there's a lot of science here, but I'm getting it. I do have to ask how's your husband doing now?

Laurel Mellin:

He's wonderful and what we're doing is just to mention. It's been tough. And then I had some health problems and so we just realized that EBT is developmental. In other words, when you're at a stress state, we all act like two-year-olds there, we all do. When you're at a stress state, we all act like two-year-olds there, we all do. And when we're at one, we couldn't be more loving wonderful people.

Laurel Mellin:

And so we decided, when we realized that he was really we call it, there's five different levels of stress One, two, three, four and five. And five is the worst and one is the best, one is joy, five is stress overload. He was at five, a lot. And I would just say to him I can't listen to you anymore, I don't have the bandwidth. I'm sorry. I'll listen to you, use EBT and spiral up, but I can't listen to the complaints because I had to have a boundary around myself so I would survive, right.

Laurel Mellin:

And we started looking at the gift of this problem that we were going through and we said developmentally, as you age because I'm now 75, he is a little couple of years older than I am we say you either go into regenerativity or despair what we're going to dedicate this time to and our life to is continue to give back. And so what happened is we became more loving people, better limits with each other and you know, I just have to tell you this because it's a little self-serving, but I can't help it and that is that we just decided that we're not going to overwork either, and so we're going to do something. That's an interest that we both have. And so yesterday we bought a horse, because we both love a horse.

Laurel Mellin:

Are you crazy? Crazy? Yeah, so we invented this beautiful horse, and it's a fair chunk of change that we didn't really necessarily have. We said we have to be in joy, we have to have outlets other than our family and working, and we need to celebrate our life every single day, because you never know when something will change. And so we've learned that lesson and we are all about joy.

Michele Folan:

And he's doing great. I'm so glad to hear that because when you started telling that story, I'm like, oh my God, this sounds so bad. I just felt terrible for you. Laurel Mellon, where can listeners find you and your app?

Laurel Mellin:

Oh, the best way is and, by the way, we don't give out anything at Emotional Brain Training. That's not effective and the app is the structure of how you change the brain. But in order to change it deeply you need to be able to use it well. So we train you how to use it well, and best is to have other people listening to you. So everything is based on telephone groups. So anyone in the world over can get to EBT.

Laurel Mellin:

You go to it's you look up emotional brain training, laurel Mellon, or it's EBT, which unfortunately is the same initials as food stamps, but it's emotionalbraintrainingorg. And if you go there for $1, we believe that after one month of EBT you will be transformed and you'll want to complete the whole program, which takes a year, and all of it is very, very affordable. And it is $1 for the first month and you also get every single day you can drop in with the health professional who is training you on how to enjoy this method, how to get started answering your questions. So ebtorg. The newest book is a one, two, three joy, again by Laurel Mellon, which goes through all of how you get past any food addiction, any, any difficulty with with weight and food with EBT. So those would be the two main ways. Ebtorg, just come on by and uh or or on Amazon the 123joybook.

Michele Folan:

I will put all that in the show notes. Laurel Mellon, this has been fascinating. I've enjoyed this immensely. Thank you for being a guest today. Thank you, michelle. What a pleasure. Follow Asking for a Friend on social media outlets and provide a review and share this show wherever you get your podcasts, reviews and sharing help us grow.