M4 : Lesson 1: What is brain retraining/ self-directed neuroplasticity?
This module alone could be an entire standalone course, please pace yourself and take the time to digest each lesson.
This is both an academic and practical guidance module to help you have a thorough understanding of the process, and the potential pitfalls I see in working with thousands who have sometimes struggled with brain retraining.
I hope that by helping you gain complete knowledge of the process, you can be prepared and navigate the bumps along the way. Again, my goal is that this course will help you to be your own coach in the process!
Brain retraining is a super potent tool and is well worth the effort of understanding the reasoning behind using this tool as a lifestyle practice.
Looking for changes in your physical symptoms only may cause you to miss the effectiveness of this tool. Sometimes we have thought, feeling, or behavior changes long before our physical symptoms change as the brain begins to process information differently.
Please commit to at least 6 months of brain retraining for best results as takes repetition and time for new neural networks to form and “stick”.
Transcript
Regulate module 4. Brain retraining home program. Module 4 overview. Lesson 1. What is brain retraining or self directed neuroplasticity?
Lesson 2. Why we target the memory and visual centers of the brain? Lesson 3. The 5 components of Primal Trust ABC Dimensional Shift Brain Retraining Technique. Lesson 4.
How to do ABC brain retraining technique. Lesson 5. What to focus my visualizations on? Help with scary imagery and intrusive thoughts. Making a list of visualization ideas.
Less than 6. Why change is hard? Less than 7. Dealing with triggers. Less than 8.
Limitations of brain retraining alone as a source of nervous system regulation. Lesson 9. Summary and homework. Lesson 1. What is brain retraining?
Why brain retraining helps to encourage self healing? And why brain retrain before deeper inner work. Neuroplasticity. Did you know that the brain can change no matter how old you are, your patterns of thinking and your reactions to life can change? The science of neuroplasticity shows that the brain has the ability to rewire to change and to adapt.
What does this mean? Well, it means that we can change our brain is sending signals to our body and this can directly improve our biochemistry and our immune function no matter how long we have had symptoms. With brain retraining, we are targeting the limbic system of the brain. We’re teaching the brain to perceive triggers, symptoms, situations, and chemicals differently. Why are we doing this?
Because we’re teaching the brain to decrease its overall sense of threat. And when the brain feels safe, it will send messages of safety to the body, and then the body responds by producing hormones that support improved function of internal systems and overall health and well-being. But as long as the brain is interpreting threats in your body or your environment, Your body’s ability to self heal or come into improved functionality is limited. We will teach the brain to desensitize its reactions to physical and emotional threats. This will increase your tolerance to things like foods.
Even if you were told you had to avoid these foods because of a blood test or you’ll learn how to increase your tolerance to smells, to chemicals, to mold, and even improve your tolerance to our internal hormones and biochemical changes, especially for those that might be going through premenstrual hormonal difficulties I, myself, had that one big time and brain retraining alone really improved my biochemical changes in my monthly cycle. We can work on desensitizing our protective reactions to things like weather, relationship conflicts, and people sounds, and more. Primal trust brain retraining. In summary, we will consciously exercise our brain to learn to Interrupt patterns of unhelpful thoughts or behaviors. Reframe what triggers or symptoms mean to us.
Become present with our breath and body and emotions. Elevate our emotional state and shift our internal biochemistry and become conscious of our true selves and our inner adult presence. Why brain retraining for self healing? Part of the issue with chronic illness is the way our brain perceives our reality. Our perception and our reaction in life is actually mostly a habit based on our past.
Over time, we literally create grooves in our brains like an established roadmap of habitual thinking, feeling and behavior patterns. And we are going to use neuroplasticity practices to reorganize and repattern this internal road map in your brain. The truth is is that much of chronic illness is a habit of the brain and the body creating survival responses affecting the function of our autonomic nervous system. This habit of biochemical reactions and body function can be changed. And we use brain retraining to change the set point of your habitual thought feeling behavior reactions so that your body’s internal chemistry can also shift.
This is a diagram showing the difference between what happens in the body with the limbic system impairment versus having a balanced brain and nervous system. On the left with the limbic system impairment, the nervous system is often carrying stressful messages throughout the body resulting in symptoms and feeling generally unwell. But with brain retraining and vagus nerve toning, the nervous system sends messages of safety throughout the body often resulting in symptom resolution or at the very least symptom reduction as you implement these practices over time. My experience with brain retraining, I was personally astounded at how much brain retraining alone made a difference in my health and in my life. After so many years of unsuccessful treatments and medicines, I found that changing my emotional state and my perceptions on a daily basis had a huge impact on my overall symptoms.
When I change the default mode network of my brain or the set point of how I saw my reality, My biochemistry changed, my inflammation decreased, and my vitality improved. I began to tolerate food, smells, chemicals and other environmental triggers, a brain that has improved limbic system processing is powerful, and that it can result in the body feeling so much better. Even if you still have underlying infections, injuries, or other conditions to be addressed. So if you are spending all of your time and energy on doctors and treatments and supplements, but you’re ignoring your brain’s limbic system functioning, you are probably missing the most important factor in your healing. And I do not say that lightly.
However, I’m not saying you don’t have to do other forms of treatments. I’m simply stating that calming down the limbic system of the brain has a direct impact on your entire health situation. There are 5 purposes of the primal trust ABC brain retraining technique. Number 1, we are changing associations to triggers and desensit sizing our brain and body to threats. We’re incrementally increasing tolerance to environmental, food, and chemical triggers We’re handling uncomfortable symptoms and desensitizing your reaction to them.
Number 2, We’re increasing our capacity. We’re incrementally increasing your tolerance to exercise work, and other activities. Number 3, we’re decreasing our stress response and changing our perceptions This will shift your brain state from a state of stress to safety and connection. Joy and love. 4th, we’re activating self healing.
Self healing occurs as we improve our body function and reduce our symptoms as a result of more coherence or harmony in your brain and autonomic nervous system. 5, my favorite, transformation. With brain retraining, we are connecting to our true self and discovering our values, our purpose and our passions in life to be able to live a life we love. I wanna touch on why do brain retraining before deep inner work. One of the most common questions I get asked is, Should I do trauma therapy, parts work, or emotional counseling before or after brain retraining?
What I have discovered in my own experience and through working with hundreds of people is that it can be very difficult to work through deep emotional wounding without being able to self regulate your limbic response. I will discuss this concept further in module 6 when we talk about trauma. But to summarize, if you are not able to find a way to have some basic self resourcing skills when you are stressed, meaning, Can you downshift your limbic activation or your emotional state at will? If you do not have basic self regulation skills, It can be a challenge to work through deep emotional triggers or scary body symptoms with trauma processing. Many people will try to find healing by doing trauma or emotional processing and spend years doing this and still remain in distress despite all of those efforts.
I did the same thing. And I was not putting my efforts to focus on becoming responsible for my emotional state. And how to use my brain as a resource for self regulation. In those years of failed trauma treatment, I did a lot of talk therapy EMDR, EFT, semantic processing, energy work, and more. But I still could not self regulate.
In fact, those treatments backfired on me and cause more trauma to resurface than I could handle. Why? Because my nervous system capacity to process emotions was very weak. My brain state was fragile, and not in a place to do trauma processing. Brain retraining will help prevent emotional flooding.
People often find that if they do deeper trauma work before they have basic limbic system regulation in place, they can become emotionally flooded and experiencing ongoing symptom flares. When our limbic system set point is stuck on danger, I feel it is more effective to calm down that part of the brain for delving into deeper healing. Once the limbic system is more balanced and not sending stress signals all the time, Your capacity to work through deeper emotional issues dramatically increases. Again, you’ll learn more about this in module 6. In the regulate program, we teach brain retraining and vagus nerve toning before going too deep into somatics even.
As it is easier to be present in the body and focus on your breath when the brain’s limbic system is not in high stress mode. We will learn more about how to do somatics in a very careful way in module 5. Now it is true that some people do focus on the body or somatic pronouncing to help heal their inner wounding before doing brain retraining with good results. Yet I find more often than not, a brain based top down approach with some gentle, vagus nerve toning is a better first step. However, in my brain retraining program, the ABC dimensional shift process, I do add a very basic somatic breath practice that is adaptable to the level you are at because excluding the body entirely from limbic retraining also doesn’t make sense to me.
12:48Overall, I recommend making sure that you can do a brain retraining practice on your own before trying to do deeper body based work, deep emotional work or trauma processing or intense energy work or meditation work. I think that training your prefrontal cortex to be more engaged through brain retraining, and basic vagal nerve toning is the best first step in the self healing process. In the next lesson, we will discuss the brain, the memory, and protection. This is a very interesting lesson about how sometimes your symptoms are actually just a memory on replay. I’ll see you in lesson too.