How to Raise Emotionally Resilient Teens: Expert Tips with Dr. Caroline Leaf

Are you struggling to raise a teen who can cope with life's challenges? In this transformative episode, Dr. Caroline Leaf, a clinical neuroscientist, bestselling author, and expert in mental health and resilience, shares invaluable insights into how to build emotional resilience in teens. Dr. Leaf is the host of the popular podcast Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess and the author of 18 books, including Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess and How to Help Your Child Clean Up Their Mental Mess. She’s dedicated her career to understanding the mind-body connection and empowering families to nurture emotional wellness. In this conversation, Dr. Leaf introduces a practical, science-based process that helps teens (and their parents) overcome obstacles with strength, clarity, and hope.

 

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN IN THIS EPISODE

• How the mind-body connection shapes our resilience and why it’s unlimited.
• The Neurocycle process Dr. Leaf developed to help build emotional resilience.
• Why resilience isn’t a limited resource—and how to tap into it effectively.
• The importance of modeling resilience for your teens instead of "fixing" them.

  5 KEY TAKEAWAYS FOR PARENTS OF TEENS

1. Model Resilience for Your Teen
   Dr. Caroline Leaf emphasizes that teens are more likely to follow your example than your words. Show them how you handle challenges with resilience, so they can learn from your actions.

2. Use the Neurocycle to Reorganize Experiences
   The Neurocycle method can help your teen process their emotions and experiences. Dr. Leaf shares how parents can guide teens to recognize the "signals" of their experiences, dig into them, and reframe their thoughts.

3. Avoid Pathologizing Your Teen’s Struggles
   Instead of labeling your teen’s emotional struggles as mental health problems, focus on helping them reframe their experiences as opportunities for growth. This helps them see challenges as normal parts of life, rather than something to be "fixed."

4. Create a Safety Net for Your Teen
   Dr. Leaf recommends "safety net parenting," where you support your teen through their failures, instead of trying to prevent them from making mistakes. This allows your teen to learn resilience and face adversity without fear of judgment.

5. Embrace the Power of Neuroplasticity
   Help your teen understand that their brains are capable of change. Dr. Leaf shares how the Neurocycle, used consistently over time, can rewire negative thought patterns, leading to long-term emotional growth and resilience.

 

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RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

• Neurocycle App (20% off with code NEUROCYCLE20)
• Book: Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess
• Book: How to Help Your Child Clean Up their Mental Mess
• Book:Think, Learn, Succeed
• Podcast: Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess

 

EPISODE CHAPTERS:

• [00:00] – Introduction to Dr. Caroline Leaf’s Approach to Mental Health
• [03:15] – Resilience: Beyond What You’ve Been Told
• [06:45] – Why Building Resilience in Teens Requires a New Approach
• [10:30] – Modeling Resilience as a Parent
• [14:00] – The Power of Neuroplasticity in Teen Brain Development
• [18:30] – Overcoming Trauma: A New Way of Thinking
• [22:00] – How Parents Can Use the NeuroCycle to Build Resilience
• [26:15] – The Science of Emotional Healing: 3 Steps to Rewire Your Teen’s Brain
• [30:00] – How Long Does It Take to Build Resilience in Teens?
• [33:45] – The Importance of Taking Action: Changing the Way You Respond
• [37:30] – Toxic Positivity vs. Healthy Emotional Support for Teens
• [41:00] – Do You Want to Change? How to Make Lasting Emotional Change
• [45:00] – Conclusion: Building Resilience and Navigating Parenting Challenges

 

CONNECT WITH OUR GUEST: Dr. Caroline Leaf

• Website: DrLeaf.com
• Instagram: @DrCarolineLeaf
• YouTube: Dr. Caroline Leaf
• Facebook: @drleaf

 

CONNECT WITH YOUR HOST: Dr. Cam Caswell

• Website: AskDrCam.com
• Instagram: @DrCamCaswell
• TikTok: @the.teen.translator
• YouTube: Parenting Teens with Dr. Cam

 

TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Cam (00:00): Today we're embarking on a transformative journey with a true expert in the field of mental health and resilience, Dr. Carolyn Leaf. Dr. Leaf is not only a communication pathologist, audiologist, and clinical neuroscientist, but also a pioneer in the study of the mind-brain connection. With her extensive background in psychoneurobiology and metacognitive neuropsychology, Dr. Leaf dedicated her career to understanding how our thoughts and emotions shape our brains. As a host of the podcast Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess, and the author of 18 bestselling books, including Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess and How to Help Your Child Clean Up Their Mental Mess, Dr. Leaf is a leading voice in the field of mental wellness. Join us as we learn from Dr. Leaf's wealth of knowledge and experience gaining insights into how we can raise emotionally resilient teens in today's challenging world. Dr. Leaf, welcome to the show.

Caroline Leaf (00:08.91): Thank you so much, Dr. Cam. It's lovely to meet you and lovely to be with you today.

Dr. Cam (00:29.602): Dr. Leaf is a leading voice in the field of mental wellness. Join us as we learn from Dr. Leaf's wealth of knowledge and experience gaining insights into how we can raise emotionally resilient teens in today's challenging world. Dr. Leaf, welcome to the show.

Caroline Leaf (04:12.374): I, as I practice for 25 years and I've been doing research for 38 now, and I don't practice anymore because I decided I'm going to have more impact taking what I'm doing in my research and my clinical practice and putting that into accessible tools. We have a mental health technology platform, web and iOS and Android, which we're constantly developing and growing, where we are trying to empower an individual as well as teams of people. But people, every single human needs to know how to understand.

Caroline Leaf (07:06.18): I'm so glad you asked that question because, as you and I both know, that is such a common word used everywhere. It's on book covers, it's in conversations, it comes out all the time. And so it's something that we instinctively know as humans is important for us. And what we've been told in the last 30, 40 years, which has actually been disproved, is that we have limited supplies of resilience, that we run out of resilience. But that's not actually the truth because your brain I was explaining this to someone the other day and it really worked. So let me use it like this. And this is an analogy in a book that I'm actually currently writing at the moment. So you're getting a sneak preview of my next book. Think of a door and a doorway that opens. And that doorway that opens into just infinity. You know, we've seen images of that. We've seen movies with that kind of analogy. You see, you can, you know, just that feeling of this door. Now, that's what resilience is like. It's when you open it, there's unlimited supply of resilience.

If you have any kind of trauma or any kind of anything at any stage of your life that disrupts your functioning, that you basically are reducing your resilience. It's getting less and that you're broken forever and that because you're broken forever, you need a label, you need a diagnosis, you potentially need whatever. And this is what our teenagers are growing up with. This is what our alpha are growing up with. This is the messaging.

Dr. Cam (17:03.426): I love the whole rewiring and neuroplasticity and how do we as parents use this knowledge? And we've already talked about, we want to build resilience. A lot of what we're doing to build resilience based off what you just said is actually making them less resilient because we're trying to fix them, right, to build them. So what do parents do to help build up our children's resilience or open up that door wide open for them?

Caroline Leaf (17:38.468): Three parts to that answer. It's a great question. It's a great question. The first thing is we model it for them because our children and our adolescents will really do what we do. It's easy to say something. It's much more difficult to model it. So that's very, very important. I often get asked this question and they say, what would you do for this current crisis, which has also been mis-explained.

Application, we constantly upgrading that all the time. Even have a neuro. Explain something and answer questions. In other words, that's how, because people say, okay, that's great. I need the knowledge as a parent. I need to model, but what do I do? So the second part of the answer is these are, I've got the tools, the Neuropsycho. We can even talk a bit more about what that is. I'm happy to explain it. And then what...

Dr. Cam (23:03.298): Right. Worst-case scenario.

Caroline Leaf (23:18.596): That if you help a person with a traumatic brain injury, you can actually help them transform their life. So I work with people that were, that were, had shortly come out of comas, that were non-functional, and quite extreme changes happened in sort of, under 12 months, they would go from like a... They would go from, let's say, there was the one case was a 16-year-old who had basically sort of lost all functionality and was like functioning at about a second-grade level. Within 12 months, caught up with a peer group, went on to get degrees.

How often, how long, and the bottom line, and we still do research, we've just done another study, I've published papers, we had a paper coming out this month, and for this year, we're doing more studies, but basically it takes around nine weeks to rewire a network. So in the first three weeks of working daily, and I will tell you what the neuro cycle is, but in the first three weeks of working through the neuro cycle daily, you will basically find what those signals, the depression, the anxiety, those things in your body, the perspective.

Those are just signals. They're not symptoms of a disease. They're signals of an experience. So in the 21 days, you'll be able to learn to recognize the signals, dig into those signals, find the thought, which is the experience that they're attached to and find the...

For that science to all of us. And I've got great images in here to be able to explain, for parents to explain to children. So you basically are healing the roots and so on. And that process takes around three weeks. Then you've got this tiny little newly...

As a little tree-like structure and then in your body cells as hedges. So if you recall at the beginning, and I know this is quite a lot to digest, but if you recall at the beginning, we said that memory and experiences are a body-wide thing. The body keeps the score that people hear about. We know that people go to yoga to release the energy. We know that exercise helps depression. Well, I'm talking about that, okay? So I'm talking about the fact that every experience we have, that traumatic experience, it was an experience that was taken in by your mind, processed.

Stored in your brain as a tree-like structure in every cell of your body as a hedge-like structure, like a little hedge, tightly packed hedge and in your mind as a little wave pattern. So three places and the wave patterns kind of keeping the whole thing going. So that's what you're doing with the neuropsycho is you are opening those all up, you're finding them and you are reorganizing them. So they never go away, but instead of saying...

And you then basically are growing it bigger and making it stronger. So I'll walk you through this in the app, in this book, in the adult book, all of it. So you get the combination, that's a good combination. You don't have to, but people want to know what the resources are. Okay, so in essence, what do you do each day? What is the neuro cycle? It's five steps for the first 21 days, you do it for around 15 minutes a day. First couple of days, you'll take longer as you learn the system. And then the second set of 42 days, totaling 63, which is nine weeks.

Going to it now but there's a way of organizing information that really makes us very effective but it's a mind dump it's not journaling then still flying you need to now look at what you've written which is accumulation of the three steps to those three steps taking off flying and now you're going to reconceptualize what does this mean this has happened what do about this and then you end off with step five which is then landing the plane with an active reach which is an action to help you to be able to anchor yourself so it's accumulation of...

I can't find out why, why did that person bully me? They're going through stuff. I don't need to know why they bullied me. I just need to know that my behaviors are coming from that. So it's not me, there's a because of. And so I reconceptualize what can I do going forward? Okay, that bullying, I can release, I can whatever. So that's what you're doing. What is happening a lot, Dr. Kamen, I know you know this, I'm telling you, I feel like I'm speaking to the choir here. So forgive me. For those of you that are listening, is that there's a huge movement and there's...

Caroline Leaf (36:35.364): That's such a good question. And I know what's happened because you swung from the coddle to the, we've swung from, just pull yourself together to, gosh, you know, let's, so there's two extremes. So you can't wallow and you also can't have toxic positivity. You know, so it's defined and that's what I'm hearing you say, you know, how do we get that balance? And you're absolutely right, there is that tension.

Not promoting toxic positivity, but one of the big things is, and I talk about this a lot in my books and I often refer to the two books I'm holding up here. The first one is, in a nutshell, do you want to be well or not? And that's a tough question, but that's the whole question, do you really want to feel better or do you want to stay in a state of victimhood? And that's the question every person and parent has to answer. Do you really want to change the state you're in?

Dr. Cam (38:22.234): I love that you said that. Yes.

Caroline Leaf (39:14.444): Start, like I say, with those three things: pay attention to the fact that it is not who you are. Recognize the signal, it's not who you are. You can understand the why. And it all comes back to the fact that you’ve got this.

 

ABOUT THE SHOW

The Parenting Teens with Dr. Cam Podcast is your go-to resource for navigating the challenges of raising teenagers. Hosted by Dr. Cam Caswell, an adolescent psychologist and certified parenting coach, this podcast offers practical parenting strategies, expert advice, and real-world insights to help you build a stronger relationship with your teen and support their emotional growth.

Whether you’re struggling with teenage behavior or looking to improve communication, each episode provides actionable tips to make parenting teens easier and more rewarding. Perfect for both new and seasoned parents, this podcast helps you build the confidence to handle teen challenges and thrive together.

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