165: Eliminate Chronic Illness with Brain Retraining f. Ashok Gupta

Optimal health for high performers. This is the Health Upgrade Podcast with Dr. Navaz Habib. Hello everybody, welcome back to the Health Upgrade Podcast. This is Dr. Habib and I am joined today by a wonderful friend, Ashok Gupta. How are you, sir?

Very well, thanks, Navaz. Lovely to, to be here with you.

You have been on quite the journey over the past many years. And I think this journey has been one of self-discovery, but also one that led to you helping so many people learn how to improve their health simply through retraining their brain. And I think this is a concept that is lost on a lot of people because they don't understand how this process works. And so, What I'm going to attempt to do today and, and have you join in this conversation on is to share initially your journey. What is it that you went through yourself health-wise? And then how you've discovered that there are truly ways to improve brain function that then result in the improvement in chronic illness symptoms. And I think this is such a powerful thing for people to understand. It's something that I I'm very appreciative of because this is something that I teach both in the vagus nerve world, but in the functional medicine world together. And it really does come down to understanding that we can affect change in our lives with simple, basic tools that are done in a consistent manner. So I'm really excited to dig into this topic with you, how we can retrain the brain to reduce or eliminate chronic illness symptoms. As we dig in with you, I want to first go through your story. I want you to share what you experienced, how you went through your initial journey and the initial discovery of this process.

Yes. Well, thank you, Navaz, for that lovely introduction. So yeah, my journey started in the mid to late '90s, which, you know, at that particular time, often these conditions were not even recognized, never mind having treatments for them. They were dismissed as yucky flu or depression, or we're not sure what this is. And, uh, so I was studying as an undergrad at Cambridge and I was burning the candle at both ends. So I was partying, but also working very hard, worried about my studies. And I got some kind of virus, didn't think much of it. I had a sore throat, felt very flu-y, had some stomach challenges. I thought, okay, no problem, it'll go. But for some strange reason, I seemed to get worse and worse and worse. So the symptoms seemed to fade in terms of the flu-y type symptoms, but I felt more exhausted, more fatigued. Uh, you know, in my worst moments, I couldn't even read the words on a page. Like I literally would pick up a textbook and couldn't read it. I would go from doctor to doctor and they would say, we don't know what you have. We don't know what to call it. There's no treatment for it. You'll probably have it for the rest of your life. Goodbye. There's nothing we can do. And for, as you can imagine, for a young man, that's like almost like a death sentence to say, right, you, You have no understanding of what I am experiencing and no treatment. And eventually I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, or ME as it's called. But really, you know, I joined support groups and they say, well, there's no treatment, there's nothing you can do. And I remember my worst moments being, you know, almost suicidal thinking I can't continue like this. And I made a contract with the universe and I said, look, if I can just get myself 30% better, 50% better, ideally 100% better. I will dedicate the rest of my life to helping others with this condition because it's such a terrible condition. And I'd met hundreds of people who suffered from it. And Nawaz, it was a really poignant moment. And I share this often is this moment when I was in a bookstore in Cambridge. In those days, we had to use books to research our way out of things. There was no developed internet at that time.

You mean we couldn't just ask ChatGPT or whatever AI we're using?

Exactly.

Yeah.

I mean, people are, you know, the tools we now have, we couldn't have dreamt of just 20 years ago. And I was in the bookstore and there was a self-help section and the neurology section, and there was one book jutting off the shelf and you can never describe why I picked that book, but I picked that book off the shelf and it was called The Emotional Life of the Brain by Professor Joseph LeDoux, who was the foremost expert at the time on the amygdala in terms of animal studies and various things. And I read that book and I suddenly saw a model, a hypothesis of what might be causing my condition. And I developed that hypothesis and I published it, that medical hypothesis. Got myself 100% well by in an ad hoc way, retraining my brain. So I had no, no tools, but I was just using those principles, retrained my brain in ad hoc way, got myself 100% better, and then set up a clinic to treat others with chronic fatigue syndrome, but also other conditions. And then we pub— we were the first to publish our neuroplasticity program, the Gupta program in 2007. So we were the first to, to kind of have that based upon my kind of 7 or 8 years then of clinical one-on-one. Work. So yes. And then since then, obviously we've published 7 clinical studies, 5 RCTs. We have an app. We've been on a 20, 25-year journey to get to this point.

It's a phenomenal journey. And it, it's so telling when you are able to uncover an idea that you then put all your effort into creating a solution through and trying to work through it. I'm sure there were many ups and downs through that entire process. It wasn't as fluid and easy as the, 3-minute breakdown that you were able to kind of share. I would love to hear what that discovery process was like for you when you first read that book by Joseph Ledoux and you had the concept of the amygdala as this pathway through which all of these processes were potentially occurring. And the amygdala, I feel, is central to this entire conversation, but I would love to hear what your discovery process was. What was that? Test and retest and hypothesis conclusion type of pathway for you? And what were those first initial steps that began to work and you started to see some changes? Yeah.

So for me, I think that the first process was understanding how is this condition created? Like, why is it right now at that particular time, of course, that I am well, I'm rested, I'm not doing any exertion, but my system has no energy whatsoever, then that must mean that there is an unconscious process occurring that is beyond my conscious awareness, that is beyond the activity that I'm engaging in, which is draining energy. And what do we know that drains energy? That first principle that I uncovered was when the brain is in a survival mode. Yeah. So when the brain is in survival mode, obviously I, I know the great work that you do. We know that the vagus nerve is then not stimulated. There's a sympathetic dominance. And of course that shifts the way that the mitochondria function. And this is all retrospectively, because this is all now recent knowledge. But at the time I was like, ah, the system is being drained of energy because it is stuck in sympathetic dominance. And that's why there isn't any kind of obvious blood tests that are showing anything particularly wrong. And as a result of that, energy is continually being drained and there must be an unconscious loop that keeps this body in this state. So the brain must be processing something in the body that something is wrong, interpreting that as evidence that the original trigger is still here, the virus, and then recalibrating, restimulating the immune and nervous systems, creating physical responses, which then tell the brain that this is reminiscent of the original sensitizing event, the original trigger, and so on. And that must be the vicious loop that's occurring. So it was, it was discovering that, that I think was the key new idea that had come to me. And that then helped me understand, ah, this is not something which I'm doing. Which is creating this. This is not my fault. And often patients think it's their fault that they have the condition. No, this is an unconscious process which has got stuck. And it comes down to this very simple principle, which is the brain is designed for survival, not your wellbeing. Your brain doesn't care how well you feel or anything like that. It cares about are you alive and surviving? And that is the, you know, one of the key principles. I think the second principle was realizing these systems are normally beyond conscious awareness. So we can't directly necessarily influence our immune system, although we kind of obviously impact our nervous system, but actually the two get tied together and how can we influence the immune system via the nervous system? And in fact, influence it directly. And that was another kind of key piece of the jigsaw puzzle as well.

I think that's the big one here is the autonomic nervous system is this kind of subconscious process that's constantly regulating and interpreting data or getting the data to where the data can be interpreted in the central nervous system. So this is like the vagal afferents speaking from the gut up to the brain, telling the brain what's happening in the microbiome, what's happening in the gut lining, in the— is the gut lining breaking down? What's happening in the liver? Is there a heavy burden of toxins within the liver currently that the body's trying to deal with? Is there potentially some sort of inflammatory trigger occurring in different areas that you're not consciously aware of, that information getting up to the brain and then the brain making certain decisions as to driving you in towards more of a sympathetic fight or flight mode, because we need to activate the immune system and keep the body in a survival state or in, in a live state. Or do we regulate and go into a rest, digest, and recover state mode and I'd love for you to explain this. It's something I talk a lot about, but I want to hear your perspective on this is when the sympathetics are turned on and we're in this sympathetic overdrive mode, what are the causes of that? Or is there, is there any research? And I'm kind of leading you into talking about the amygdala, I think a little bit as to why somebody would be almost stuck in a hypervigilant mode in the first place, and that then in turn activating more of the sympathetic than causing the vagus nerve to turn off a little bit more?

Sure. Yeah. So I love to, to kind of start this kind of explanation through the, what I call the biggest question of all, you know, why are we here? We've kind of hinted at it already in our conversation, which is we're here because according to evolutionary biology, our brain, our nervous system, our immune system has evolved to essentially adapt to our environment and survive. So. From single-celled organisms to plant life, to invertebrates, reptiles, mammals, human beings, we contain that DNA lineage. We actually contain all those adaptations, uh, even from plant life to be able to survive. So our system is essentially a survival machine and it can adapt and survive in so many different kind of difficult environments. So that's our kind of first principle. And then based on that survival process or survival instinct, The body's always thinking, how can I adapt to new situations to ensure my genes are passed on to the next generation? And so on and so on. So that's the kind of survival of the fittest. It's a selfish gene kind of idea. Yeah. Now what happens is our system then gets new threats. Like COVID was a new threat to society. We, our systems hadn't encountered that before. So when a new threat comes along, the brain then processes that threat and says, what's the optimal way I can survive? Going forward. But if our system is already, how can we put it, maladapted in the sense that we already have a lot of stress in the system, there's already perhaps someone feeling burnt out, someone feeling anxious, someone feeling depleted physically, mentally, emotionally, then the system is already weaker. So when that new threat comes along, the system makes a logical decision and it says, you know what, I am being threatened by something new, therefore I must go into overdrive. I must over-defend this body to ensure survival. Yep. And I, and, and what's really interesting is if we think about long COVID or, or rather COVID itself, during the pandemic, we think of COVID causing the deaths that occurred. Actually, it wasn't COVID directly that caused the deaths. It was people who had a compromised immune system. It was their own immune system over-responding, uh, causing the inflammatory systems to be overwhelmed, the cytokine storm in the lungs. And therefore restricting breathing. So isn't that fascinating that actually there's absolute precedent for this, that our immune system can make mistakes and can actually overrespond and cause the very thing that it's trying to avoid, which is death of the organism, by making a mistake. So all we are saying is that actually in these situations, the brain learns to overrespond. And if it's overresponding, overresponding, overresponding, it may get rid of the original threat, but the circumstances that it creates in the body in terms of the effects of an overstimulated nervous system and immune system— fatigue, tiredness, exhaustion, lack of concentration, compromised gut, leaky gut— all of these are caused often by our own system overresponding. If those symptoms then become a proxy for the original trigger, so the brain thinks, ah, I've got these symptoms in my body, maybe that virus is still here, maybe that mold is still here, maybe that bacteria is still here, maybe COVID is still here. It will then take that information from the body by the, uh, the vagus nerve. And we believe that that information then collects in the insula part of the brain. So it comes up through the brainstem, through the periaqueductal gray, into the brainstem, then into the thalamus, distributed to the anterior cingulate, to the insula, the amygdala. So this information goes there and the amygdala is just deciding, is this of immediate danger? And the insula is saying, I'm collecting all this data. How do I ensure homeostasis and survival? And so the amygdala and insula work together. And then what happens is that information, the brain has learnt that that could be reminiscent of when the original trigger was here. Therefore, to ensure survival and err on the side of caution, let me over-trigger the immune system and nervous system again, which then creates the physical symptoms in the body, which then loop back by the vagus nerve to tell the brain that we're in danger, and then we get stuck. And this is the key moment where an acute condition turns into a chronic condition. And this is, I mean, to me, I love geeking out on this stuff and it's so fascinating that actually if you think about probably 50% of the illnesses that someone goes to see a doctor for, it's when an acute experience, let's say it might be a localized rash, suddenly turns into dermatitis or something which is spreading. It's when a short-term immune response turns into a longer-term chronic immune response and then is causing these kind of symptoms. And we believe that is due to neurological learning in the amygdala and the insular parts of the brain. And those are the core structures where the rigidity actually lies. And, and obviously we can share, I can share some, some research around that. So in terms of the core principle of the mechanism, brain thinks we're in danger, overtriggers immune and nervous system responses. The body then creates symptoms as a result, and that obviously the, the mitochondria involved in that. That information gets aggregated into the brain. The brain thinks we're in danger, gets overwhelmed, and round and around we go. And once that system is set up, it's very difficult to break because it's a survival system. So you're almost like saying to your hand, imagine you've got a hot stove and you put your hand on the hot stove. You've gotta now tell your brain that it feels hot, but actually it's completely safe. Very, very difficult to do. But that's what we've now understood over 20 years of research, that actually we can target that maladaptive neurological response, the brain has learnt how to be ill. It can unlearn that process.

This is so fascinating. I'm so happy that we're able to geek out about this together because this is a conversation that has been long awaited for both of us. I would love to hear about some of the processes that occur or some of the patterns that you've noticed that happen pre- trigger that can cause the amygdala to become primed towards hypervigilance that people may have experienced in their past that have essentially put them in a position to feel like things that are objectively less threatening are more threatening to the individual. And this is where the real individual differences really start to show up. So Are there any patterns, any specific types of situations, traumatic events, things like that, that people may have experienced in the past that prime the amygdala accordingly?

Yes, absolutely. And we see this time and time again in, in clinical practice. And I think that's one of the advantages of seeing so many patients. We've helped over 40,000, 50,000 patients. We can see now very clearly that the patterns that emerge. So let's start with our starting point, which is that the factory setting of the amygdala. So it's almost like the, the setting that then continues from, let's say, late teenage years onwards into adult life is influenced by many factors. So the first factor is actually conception. So the stress state of the father and the mother at conception can impact on how, uh, reactive the amygdala is. We even know, of course, like intergenerational trauma. So in fact, your parents, your grandparents, the stresses that they went through can impact on the fact that settling hormones.

And that's actually, just to jump in there quickly, that's proven through epigenetic markers now that this is like 3 to 4 generations. You're able to see these epigenetic markers of activation occurring. So this is proven for sure.

Absolutely. So isn't it fascinating that our lives and how prone our brain is to learning these types of conditioned responses is influenced by so many different factors. And I find that really fascinating as well. So it's the conception, it's intergenerational and inherited trauma. It's then also, uh, the gestation period. So how stressed the mother was impacts, then the birth experience itself. So, you know, it's really sad. We take babies as soon as they're born and then start putting them into metal contraptions to weigh them and then doing this. And, and actually at that moment, that's so stressful for them that they need the warmth of the mother at that, at that particular point. And then the first 5 years of life, I believe, are the deepest grooves in the brain in terms of how nurtured and looked after the child feels. So we can obviously talk about adverse childhood experiences, pre-verbal trauma, verbal trauma, neglect, right through to full-on abuse. And then that first, you know, 10 years, first 5 to 10 years impacts on, once again, the amygdala's perception of the world around us. And traditionally we think of that as trauma in the psychological sense, but like we now know, we cannot treat conditions in a biomedical, uh, an isolationist way. In the sense that we, if you go to a hospital, you have the immunology department over here, the psychology department over here, endocrinology over here. That is not how the brain functions. The brain structures actually that are responsible for emotional responses are exactly the same ones involved in immune responses and physiological responses. And this is the mind-body connection. It's not even the mind-body, it's the brain-body connection. And so what this means is that the, um, the brain can then learn this type of hyper-response as a result of the emotional background that it has. So if it's more prone to seeing the world as dangerous emotionally, it's more prone to learning that the world is dangerous at a physiological level. So there's a really important line in the book from Professor Joseph LeDoux, which was the defining moment of my hypothesis, which is the amygdala, if it is overstimulated, is prone to learning new conditioned responses to otherwise meaningless events.

Sorry, repeat that one more time. I think this is such an important point.

The amygdala, if it is overstimulated consistently and chronically, is prone to learning new conditioned responses to otherwise meaningless events.

I love that. Yeah.

So in this situation, the meaning is the meaningless event is the symptoms in the physical body. But if the brain attributes a danger or threat to that, um, as a maladaptation, it will then start responding to that just to err on the side of caution, just to keep us safe. And that's what is the learning in the brain essentially. And once that occurs, then that will keep repeating. And people who have had ACEs or adverse childhood experiences or trauma, we know that they naturally dissociate from their physical bodies anyway. Um, because when you've had a lot of emotion, a lot of difficult emotions, you don't want to feel them. So you often numb out, dissociate. And in that way, we also then start dissociating and numbing out from our physical symptoms, which then means these vicious cycles that I'm talking about can actually magnify.

This explains the breakdown in interoception between brain and body and the inability to experience what's happening within the body as part of mental health conditions that so many people are suffering from and not realizing that the physical symptom has been literally frozen out or or filtered out from the brain being able to experience it effectively.

Yes. And I'd go even further, not only experience but process it. So if the brain, we, we are designed to process our physical sensations, process our emotions, cuz these are signals coming up to inform us of what may be wrong. But if we numb out and dissociate, then the body thinks, oh, this person is not processing the signaling that I'm giving it. Therefore, the vicious cycle just continues unconsciously without the the intervention of our, uh, kind of interoception of our kinesthetic sense of who we are. And that's what then happens. We've, we've numbed out and dissociated from an unconscious process that keeps us ill and, uh, and unwell. Of course, it's not in the mind, it's not anyone's fault, but it is some unique brain neurology that is occurring that's causing, we believe, potentially tens of or hundreds of different chronic diseases. And Nawaz, if we, if you like, uh, kind of geeking out on this stuff, there's, there's one, there's a few different research studies which now, back this up, and I think they're, they're really fascinating. So the first set of studies was, uh, Dr. Uh, Adder in the '80s and '90s, and actually then followed up by Dr. Pacheco López in the 2000s. What they would do in animal studies is they would give animals sweet water combined with an immunosuppressant, right? And of course, when you do that, the immune system of the rats goes down. They repeat that 5 cycles. Then they could give the rat just sweet water without the immunosuppressant., and guess what? The immune system would get lowered. And when they looked at the brain, the key con— the key brain structures that coordinated the conditioning pre, post, and during were the amygdala and the insula. The amygdala was required for the conditioning to occur, and the core immunocomconditioning was stored in the insular part of the brain.

Yeah.

And then the second set of studies by, um, uh, a group was looking at, uh, rats where they would give the rats deliberately an agitating agent to cause, uh, inflammatory bowel disease. So the rats got inflammatory bowel disease with an irritant. They would then measure the electrical signature in different parts of the brain, but specifically they measured it in the insular part of the brain. They brought these rats back to baseline and then they just stimulated that electrical signature in the insula, localized in the insula, and they were able to recreate the exact same inflammatory bowel disease in the gut of these rats. Now, I don't think the world realizes how groundbreaking a discovery that is, and it confirms stuff that we've been talking about for 20 years, which is that peripheral immune responses— so if your, if your leg has an immune response, your, uh, there's an immune response somewhere in your body, it's not just localized. The intelligence is not just stored locally. That information flows through the vagus nerve back to the brain via the insula, and the brain is so clever, it stores that signature that immune signature so that the next time you encounter that issue, your brain has learned and will be able to respond. The issue is that because of hyper-survival responses, the amygdala insula can then sometimes decide that I'm going to recreate that trigger to, to an otherwise meaningless event. And that is how the conditioning is occurring. So the, the insula is now retriggering this immune response and the nervous system response via the amygdala, which keeps us in this unhealthy state, lack of homeostasis. And so this is really fascinating to me because it means that we gotta rewrite the books that actually, um, if we can harness this, first of all, we can interrupt inflammatory diseases. We can potentially stop autoimmune diseases cuz I believe the same process informs autoimmune diseases and potentially even diseases like cancer where there's immunosuppression or potential immunosuppression or a lack of strength in the immune system. Could we regulate these systems so that we get back to optimal healing states, optimal immune response to be able to give the body the best fighting chance? So for me, neuroplasticity, brain retraining is, is so powerful. It's, you know, for me, the future of medicine and I'm excited to be part of it.

That's amazing. I'm interested in digging a little bit into this because I think where you mentioned that there, there are certain times when these stressors can occur on the timeline of, of development, right? So you mentioned the epigenetic markers that change from intergenerational through the gestational period, through the birth process, and then specific adverse childhood events that can occur. Are there situations or are there patterns that either you've identified or that you've seen in the research where people can create identities, they're, they're self-identify around the trauma or the experience of some sort of trauma that they experienced in their childhood that then inform that same pattern for the rest of their lives. And yes. Yeah. I'd love to hear this.

Yes. We've just now developed something very new called the trauma protection matrix. And what we've done based on our research, our clients, and then looking at the literature, we've been able to map which childhood need was not met and how that maps to personality traits and how that then maps to how the immune and nervous system responds.

That's phenomenal. I'm very excited to dig into this with you.

Yeah. And this is really, I mean, I mean, we, we did a lot of research. We didn't kind of see much literature on this or any specifics on this. So we thought, well, we want to develop this ourselves because for our clients, it's incredibly useful. So we've created this, this huge matrix. And what it does is it looks at which needs a client didn't have in their childhood. So often the core one is safety. And that's one that obviously people talk about in the trauma world.

And I'm sure, you know, the vagus nerve, the polyvagal, polyvagal, everything is around safety.

Yes. Yeah. But that is actually one component. It's only one component of the overall story. So people who have a sense of a lack of safety, and I can bring up the matrix so I can kind of share this, they will then feel that, of course, the world is a dangerous place. They're more likely to the emotional pattern of fear, anxiety, hypervigilance, and bodily dissociation. Then in terms of the life strategies, they're more likely to be what we call safety seekers, where life is a constant process of staying in the comfort zone or actually looking for safety through hypervigilance. And that could be controller patterns, um, and it could be achiever patterns. So they feel they have to overachieve in order to be safe. And that then is where there's reduced vagal flexibility, sympathetic overactivation., and we're more likely to get conditions like fatigue, irritable bowel, sensitivity reactions, chronic fatigue, long COVID, fibromyalgia. So that's kind of under that bucket of safety and protection. But there are 7 or 8 more needs that we've identified that then lead on to different types of patterns. So I, I, I won't go through all of them cuz that would be a whole nother podcast and maybe we should, we should do that. But as an example, we know in the literature that, um, when someone has, uh, the lack of expression of anger. That anger then gets repressed in the system and will have epigenetic effects in terms of how we interact with the world. So in our matrix here, and we've, uh, this is all kind of evidence-based and this is very high evidence on this. If somebody has not been able to express anger, there's a suppression of anger, which means they're more likely to be a people pleaser, an approval seeker in terms of some of the personality traits, but also have massive amounts of repressed anger, which then means that they have more sympathetic arousal, higher chance of higher blood pressure, muscle tension, and that can then lead to vascular stress. And the symptoms they're more likely to get are pain, migraines, blood pressure issues, and of course cardiovascular disease as a result of not having that need met as a child. And so on and so on. So we've got like other needs that are here, such as the expression of grief. If a child can't express grief, there's a certain type of response and certain cluster of symptoms they get. If someone didn't have emotional attunement where the parent didn't tune into how a child felt, they have a certain type of symptom. If a child didn't experience unconditional love and validation, they're more likely to get certain types of inflammatory and autoimmune conditions. If they didn't have power or agency, if they didn't have belonging, if they weren't able to be a child, then we see once again, a certain cluster of symptoms. And what I found really fascinating is that, you know, I was presenting at the IMM conference. The Integrative Mental Health Conference. And, uh, obviously Dr. Gabor Maté was speaking there and he was talking about some of the patterns. And I thought, wow, some of the patterns he was identifying are exactly the patterns that we see time and time again. And it's not that long COVID or fibromyalgia or anything are psychological, but we see the patterns that cause that amygdala hyperactivity also uniquely map to certain personality traits such as overachieving. So thinking that I'll be safer in the world if I overachieve and therefore get validation externally. Rescuing and helping others, approval seeking and people pleasing. So not speaking your mind, controlling environments and being the controller to reduce risk in our environment. Of course, uh, there's inner critic. So having a very violent, almost inner critic is a way of a self-survival strategy and so on, perfectionism, et cetera. So all of these traits, uh, can then become the problem themselves. So the, the traits are designed to make us feel safe and help us navigate the world based on our past. But ironically, those traits can be the very problem themselves because they push our system too hard, which then means that the system reacts at a biological level and then we get stuck, caught into illness. And we've identified in the trauma matrix 5 layers that occur in the unconscious, and we need to work through those 5 layers in order to be able to heal fully.

This is just fascinating stuff. And I'm very, very excited to dig into this with you and, and actually learn this matrix myself and be able to kind of dig into this because it really does clearly identify the psychological impacts that lead to biological, physiological symptoms that people then experience down the road. And it sounds very much like there's this common pattern of some sort of childhood unmet need that occurred. And depending on what that need was, whether it's the safety or the lack of ability to, like anger suppression, things like that, that were occurring, that we're going to have a certain style of symptomatic occurrence that could take place. This is great because now that we can identify these patterns and identify those potential cues that led to this, that self-identification in this area will show up in that therapeutic process and ideally be something that we can uncover. And change through creating those pattern interrupts. So let's dig into now, what do we do about it? How did this process of understanding that this loop that's now occurring, that we're in this loop of hyper-survival mode within the amygdala, the insular patterns that have been created and the inflammatory response that's been activated because we're in threat response mode. How do we break this cycle? What are those tools that you've developed within the Gupta program to the level that you're able to speak to them within 20, 30 minutes? How do we start to break that cycle?

Sure. Yes. And I think, uh, before I go into that, what's also really exciting about this is that these models not only explain those kind of chronic inflammatory conditions and autoimmune that we've been speaking about. But actually things that we are seeing increasing in the population, like food sensitivities. Yep. Burnout, severe anxiety, panic. These are all mushrooming in the population and it's, and people are often, they don't understand, like I'm resting, I'm, you know, I, I'm do not doing anything, but why is my system responding as if I'm under continual threat? We now know the brain learns this response and it can unlearn it. So in fact, we call it brain retraining. We call it neuroplasticity and brain retraining. Accurate level, it's detraining. It's detraining the brain from what it has learned to do as a survival, uh, response. So in terms of how we approach that, um, the way that I'd love people to, to understand this, cuz this is very kind of complex in the neurology and I wanna make it super simple. Imagine that there is a field and in that field a river is running through that field and that river represents the, the stimulus interpretation response model. So the stimulus is, could be anything, could be a situation, could be interoception and the hypervigilance on the body. The interpretation is we're in danger, this is really bad. And the response might be overstimulation of the sympathetic nervous system as an example, or the immune system. And that has become set. The river is just flowing continually and we want to redirect the river and dig a new river channel. So the river goes down the new river channel. Yep. Now how are we going to do that? How are we going to retrain the brain, retrain this river path? Now the problem is the ground is frozen. So if this ground is frozen, there is no way that the brain is gonna shift its new response. And the ground is frozen if the nervous system is still stimulated and we don't have a calm nervous system. So the starting point is to create more neuroplasticity in the system, we have to allow the ground to thaw and unfreeze. So that's where the, you know, the great work that you do as well around the kind of yogic techniques, the breathwork, the meditation, the deep relaxation, the relaxation response. All of that loosens up the soil so it's ready to be more neuroplastic and we can start shifting our patterns. And often people don't realize that actually breathwork and meditation is not just about being calm. It is delivering insights and awareness and the ability to stop longer-term conditioned, uh, responses in terms of emotional responses or physiological responses. And so that's where our first starting point is, let's calm the nervous system in whatever way we can do. Yeah. And we don't, we're not dogmatic, say it has to be this technique or that technique. It's whatever works for people to kind of calm the brain, trigger the parasympathetic response as much as possible by the vagus nerve. And then of course the body can loosen, but the brain loosens up as well. And we, there's an argument to say that even psychedelics essentially are fulfilling that role of loosening up the conditioned responses, creating more flexibility, more connectivity between brain structures, to allow the brain to learn new responses in that particular state. And so that's also essentially working through a neuroplastic response, and I'm sure we can geek out on that.

I imagine it's, it's an augmentation of that thawing process or accelerating that process when delivered in the right way with the right set and setting, obviously, when it comes to psychedelics. But I think this idea of, and this visual of a frozen riverbed in a frozen land, and it's not just about going and forcefully trying to crack that, that riverbed and change the direction of the flow, but rather to allow for the thawing to take place. And what that means is it takes a little time, so we may not notice things right away, but as that thawing occurs, the ground becomes more malleable and, and that malleability What's actually happening at the brain level, and we talk about this pretty often on the podcast, is we're shifting the immune cells of the brain. We're shifting the microglial cells. We're shifting the astrocytes. The astrocytes are going into a state where they can clear out toxins more effectively through, through the glymphatic branches. And the microglial cells are going into a state where synaptic connections can be remade because when the microglial cells are in more of an inflammatory state, those calcified patterns or those, those connections that are already built are the strongest ones and new patterns are not able to be created. It's literally that frozen riverbed idea, but occurring at massive scale within the brain in neuronal synaptic connections. So this is just a wonderful visual that I think needs to be understood. So Now you talked about that brain-body and breathwork and meditation playing massive beneficial roles in this. And how do we thaw that ground using breath, using meditation, using yogic practices, potentially vagus nerve stimulation, potentially psychedelic medications or tools as well. But that thawing process has to take place. You cannot shift that river flow. Without that thawing process taking place. And this is the embodiment of, or the visual of, our bodies cannot heal when we're stuck in a sympathetic state. Our bodies cannot, you can't redirect that flow when everything is frozen, period.

Absolutely. And, you know, to some extent, and I'm, you know, I'm a big fan of psychotherapy and therapy in general, but we know that talking therapies actually in terms of their success rates and that the length of time it's required. That is what it's talking to, is that if somebody is restimulating past traumas or re— talking about these things, they're not in the calmer state. Whereas we know that if people have been, are combining those talking therapies with relaxation, with hypnosis, with all of these different things, we can actually reach outcomes, I think, faster because we are thawing the ground ready for new synaptic connections, new ways of new possibilities of, of looking at things. So the first starting point is let's thaw the ground. But as you've correctly said, we have to be very careful because even with psychedelics, the problem is, you know, people can have psychotic breaks. They can actually feel worse. And I've, I know people who've been on these kind of retreats, whether it be ayahuasca or kind of psychedelics and mushrooms, and they feel worse or they've had depression because if it's not monitored, you may have made the brain more flexible, but you need to give it a new direction. And if actually past traumas are just coming up, you can then get lost in that even more, which is why you say the support system, the redirection is so important. So the next step is we've thawed the ground. How do we create new neural pathways? And there are 3 key principles that we create those neural pathways using our program. The first is repetition, and that's obvious that actually we need to keep repeating a new way that we want the body and the brain to behave in response to the stimulus. So the stimulus could be an external situation, could be a person, could be our interoception, the signals we're getting from our body. In this case, what we specialize in, that the brain then creates a new response, a new interpretation response, but repeatedly again and again and again. So it's not a maladaptive danger response, it's a, a kind of more appropriate response. So that is through the power of repetition. And we have a 7-step process that we teach patients to go through to be able to, to do that. And that is creating these new neural pathways. So the water now is beginning to go along the right-hand path. Digging a new channel again and again. The second is the intensity of the emotion. So we know that stronger pathways are created when there's very positive or very negative emotion, which is why when we think of our childhoods, we'll either have memories which are really happy and exciting or kind of really bad and, and almost traumatic. Those were the things that we remember because that creates deeper neural pathways in the brain. So repetition, emotional intensity, and the third one, which is often neglected, is self-compassion and reward. That if we start retraining, but we are hard on ourselves, negative on ourselves, actually the broad— the brain doesn't have the reward pathway to say that this is a positive way of being because I'm, I'm doing something, but then being chastised for it or being told that I'm not doing it fast enough or quick enough, or there's self-criticism. Therefore, why would I continue to do, you know, more of this? So that's, um, a third component, which is very powerful in the work that we do. And to dig that right-hand pathway, we have a number of unique techniques. The first one, the one I've mentioned, the 7-step process, which is each time a patient, and, and we teach a patient to recognize when their brain is about to go into that interpretation response mode, how they interrupt that flow. And there's a 7-step process on a big Twister board that they do. So it's kind of externalizing it and, uh, and kind of making it fun and interesting for people. The second technique, which is actually the first one we start with, is what we call somatic retraining, which is we're not only retraining at the cognitive restructuring level, but actually at the somatic level, we're teaching a person's body to be able to be, or teaching a person to be with their symptoms without the response. Yeah. So inhabiting their body. So normally people are vibrating up here. They're worried, they're anxious, they're out here. They're not embodied. And so gradually, step by step, they're embodying, embodying, embodying, getting more and more into their body. And then, but this is, but the way we teach it is we we actually go through a process of teaching a patient to create what we call a safe haven. So in time, inside their mind, they create a bubble of a safe haven. And that safe haven is, you know, with your representation of love, could be Jesus or Krishna or, uh, your dog or a beautiful nature scene combined with other things, a nature scene that helps you feel calm and relaxed. So you're in that safe haven and then a 4-step process to connect with the symptoms in your body again and again and again, to the point at which your brain says, Hey, I'm at peace with what is going on with my body, which then is that somatic retraining. Then we have another technique called the Accelerator Technique, which is people find very powerful to, especially with the conditioned responses to mold and, and, um, food. And those 3 or 4 different techniques, when they're combined, a person within weeks or months can retrain the brain and stop it having these conditioned maladaptive responses. And of course, lifestyle is important as well. So eating a good diet, uh, having good sleep, having sunlight, all of these things support the body in retraining. You know, there's no point, uh, retraining your brain and drinking 15 cups of coffee a day, right? The retraining is not gonna work because you've just frozen the ground through, through stimulating your nervous system. So all of these things are hopefully living the dream of holistic health and integrative health by targeting the physiology, the neurology, the emotional aspects, uh, somatics work all combined at the same time to create the maximum impact on the brain. We dig that right-hand path.. Now, as we're digging that right-hand path, the old path then stops having so much water flowing down it. So now more of the water's flowing down the right-hand path. But as we know, brain circuits never fully disappear necessarily. So if someone goes through stress and anxiety again, it is perfectly possible for the brain to go back into survival context and start putting water down the left-hand path, and that's where symptoms come, come, come back. So we train a lot of functional and integrative doctors, and their number one complaint is we do great work with the client. You know, we, we look at the supplements, we look at the diet, we look at lifestyle, we do medications, we get someone back to 89% recovery, but then they have a stress in their life and then a new set of symptoms come back, or it all comes flooding back. And then we have to work through a new pathway, a new set of protocols. And that is simply because the brain and the amygdala get overexcited and start going back along the left-hand path. And that's where the final stage of brain retraining is teaching a patient How are they going to maintain this health longer term? Not just get well, but stay well. Not only unlearn what they learned, but make sure they never relearn it again. And that's where the, the deeper parts work and parts coaching around our different personality traits, our different responses to the world around us. If people choose to go for trauma support, they can have that as well, but making sure that we no longer are overreacting to our environment. And this comes down to a deeper teaching within the work, which is that there can be a message that these illnesses are giving us. So this is kind of the deeper spiritual work. So it's working at the physical level, the emotional level, the mental level, and then the energetic level and the spiritual level, which is what have I learned from this experience? And so becoming aware of who we were before we got this condition, were we pushing our bodies too hard? Were we truly living an authentic life or a life that was conditioned by our past responses? And that work is so powerful to make sure that someone stays well for the rest of their lives.

This is just wonderful. I'm loving this conversation. The Vagus Protocol that I've created and work with my clients on mirrors what you're doing here. More biochemical, more functional medicine approach, but very much in the same realm. And in fact, the S component of the Vagus Protocol, it's an acronym. The S stands for sustain, and it's about creating sustainable patterns and habits such that we don't revert into old symptom patterns. So very, very aligned here. The somatic piece I quickly want to run back into, because I think it's, it's very easy for people in patterns of hypervigilance, hyper-inflammatory conditions to undermine the effect that somatic therapies can have. And by this, I mean, they tend to overthink and underfeel. And this is a very common pattern that people don't want to necessarily engage in physical movement or understand that utilizing body changes and feeling safe within those changes, something that you're very focused on creating that safe haven, almost like, I don't know if you've ever watched the Happy Gilmore movie, but Happy Gilmore's happy place where he goes to. When he's stressed out, when he's on the golf course.

I love, I love that movie. One of my favorite movies, actually. Hilarious.

But that idea of creating that safe space, even though you're experiencing emotions. And so a lot of these people, unfortunately, and a lot of my patients, myself a little bit here as well, is when we feel that emotional experience, it feels unsafe, right? And the body creates this lack of safety experience. And so the amygdala gets turned on. We go into threat response mode and we turn on these insular patterns of hypervigilance and immune hyperactivation. And this is where the somatic therapies, re-engaging back into your body, reconnecting back with your body, going for a walk in nature, right? Exercise. You, the use of these physical movement patterns of intense breathwork, for example, can help to break that pattern of disconnection between the mind or the brain and the body. And I think that's really huge here to, to outline, at least from my experience. Have you noticed that the engagement in physical experiences, not necessarily intense, like let's go do a HIIT training session or a hyper marathon run or something along those lines, but rather just creating this ability to feel safe again in your own body is of massive importance in this journey.

It is. Yes, absolutely. And it comes back to that point we made earlier, which is that when the body is creating an emotion, an emotion has two contexts. So it has the, the thought aspect. So we have an emotion, we'll have emotional thoughts. But also the physical sensations. So we will feel fear in the chest, we'll feel anger, you know, in the head, et cetera. Those are signals from the body that this is something to process, something to be aware of. But if we are dissociated, then those physical aspects of that emotion get stuck in those various layers. And depending on the tradition, you know, some people will say it's the energy centers, it's chakras where those emotions get stuck. Others will say actually emotions get stuck, um, in different parts of our body. So fear gets stuck in the guts, So where you'll see gut issues tend to be someone who's got unprocessed fear. If it's headaches and migraines, it's unprocessed anger, which is getting stuck in the head. And so what then is happening is that those particular sensations are not being processed. So that's that numbing out. And we can numb out in two ways. One is physically dissociating from our body, so we don't want to feel, yeah, or can be using external distractions to engage the mind. So that can be alcohol, drugs, sex. Shopping, whatever it may be. Those things then mean that we distract ourselves from those unresolved emotions or unresolved sensations in the body. So the embodiment is saying, I am safe in my body. I'm allowed to feel what's in my body, but it's step by step because if people have severe trauma, they can't suddenly be embodied because that's where their unsafe place was, the opposite of the happy place. And therefore it's step by step helping people learn the resources to be able to bring on board, to be able to fully embody. And that is a step by step process. And that's where we use whatever is the belief system of that particular client. So if someone has a particular religious belief or spiritual belief, or has a connection to love or connection to nature or their family, love conquers fear. And that experience can then help them embody even deeper, go into that kind of safe, happy place. And then as they get used to feeling that, they can then rewire. So I think there's, there's two steps. One is reducing the stimulation at the overall level of the nervous system. And then you are retraining specific conditioned responses, which is obviously then easier channeling the water down a, you know, a particular pathway. And I think that the, this embodiment, this idea of kind of coming back into the body is obviously widely now recognized. It didn't used to be, but it's, you know, we were doing it for many years and now it's becoming something which is very popular and, and obviously, you know, is, is very important. And any kind of physical activity that we do enables us to connect with our body. So if we're exercising or we are physically shaking or whatever, we're now attuned to our body. And that's where those physical movements, physical sensations can all make an impact and help us embody.

I love this. I want to shift gears a little bit and ask a little bit about if somebody is a parent, and this is very much a selfish question for me. I have two daughters. They are almost 9, I believe. Actually, this episode is coming out on my eldest daughter's 9th birthday, and, uh, 5 years old. And these girls are wonderful. They're— keep me on my toes. Pure chaos, but wonderful chaos. And as a parent, one of my goals is to help them build healthy patterns of stress response and to feel safe in their bodies, to feel engaged and to not ever suffer from chronic illness the way that past generations may have. And I would love to ask you if you have any insights into how parents can help their children develop these safe responses, these patterns of calm of somatic retraining and essentially to carve that river in the safest path preemptively. Mm.

Nivas, we could do a whole podcast on that one topic because we have a lot of children who also come to the program by their parents. So although we don't have a, well, teenagers generally can use our program, but if it's children, parents tend to interpret it and then work with them. Children using the technique. So we have a lot of experience in that, in that area. And we do a lot of research in terms of why levels of anxiety and depression and burnout are increasing amongst younger generations. So I can, but I can give you some, you know, some initial reflections. I think the first port of call is realizing that actually children from the age of 5, 6 onwards, they can meditate. If a structure is created and it's a family thing that you do together and it's a fun thing that you do together. Children can do yoga, of course, but they can also breathe and they can also meditate. And giving, uh, children just 5 or 10 minutes each day to understand what that feels like enables them to go inwards. So letting go of the constant stimulation of the outer world and just meditating just for 10 minutes a day as a family. We're just gonna go inwards, listen to some fun meditation. There's even ones for kids now, visualizations, but going inwards and experiencing that deep peace and stillness. That I think is, is number one.

I love that you said this because we are utilizing this with my kids. We have this sleep meditation playlist that we've gotten access to, and it's even on Spotify. It was completely free. And my kids engage in that for a few minutes and then it helps them fall asleep very, very easily, particularly on days where they're a little bit more ramped up. There's been too many activities that the family's been engaged in. So this is wonderful. And I think the idea of listening to a pattern or listening to a guided version is actually really beneficial. Not to say that you can't do it yourself, but when you're learning how to do it, when you do it in a guided way, that helps to dig out that riverbed a little bit more easily.

Absolutely. Absolutely. So I think that's the first port of call is you're developing these resiliency skills by teaching them how they can self-soothe. How they can regulate their nervous system through these little breathing techniques, meditation techniques. So when they're in trouble, they can access that and connect with that experience. And children can naturally connect to that because they haven't created such a complex cognitive ability at that, that age. And therefore they're naturally attuned to that. So yeah, yoga, breathwork, meditation. I think that is number one. Number two, and this might sound obvious, but I'm gonna be quite kind of like on screen time and social media. As we know, is reducing our children's resilience. It's actually meaning that our young folk are dissociating even more. And the reason is, is that when we had difficult emotions or difficult sensations, we would have to sit with them, right? A child would go and sit with their emotions, right? Because it wasn't constant stimulation. Television wasn't so developed when we were young, you know, and therefore there was ongoing interoception and awareness of what we needed to process. These days I see it in children and parents. The children, the moment they have a difficult, uncomfortable emotion, whether it be anger, boredom, fear, tiredness, whatever it is, they will reach for a stimulation. And that can be a screen, it can be a tablet, it can be a phone, it could be sweets, right? Because we, you know, we have now abundance of all these stimulants, right? And so the soothing is not coming from self-soothing, it's coming from external sources. And that is the number one thing that will reduce resilience in a child is using external ways of self-soothing. When emotions or difficult times come up, and then they won't have those resiliency skills later in life. So the screens is one thing that's reducing resilience. So it's once again reducing screens. So go ahead. You want to jump in?

I want to just say it's almost like screens have become the pacifiers for older children and they pacify and they make it so that you can't sit in there. And you said boredom as the second feeling that people, that the kids can't handle. And this is exactly what my eldest one comes to me and says, I'm bored and I don't know what to do. And that boredom is such a challenging thing for them to be in, is, is to not have some activity or something to engage in. This is a real issue for a lot of kids, for sure.

Absolutely. So they're used to the dopamine hits and boredom is good. It's good if your children get bored, let them be bored. Don't think you have to entertain them. Because in that boredom, first of all, become their resiliency to deal with non-stimulation and boredom. But secondly, boredom is the field of creativity. That creativity can only come when there is nothing else that is taking its place. And therefore the creativity, what shall I do now? What activity shall I engage in? What do I feel like doing? There is then self-awareness and creativity that's born from the field of boredom. So I think the screen time, then of course the social media, and we don't just go into that debate, um, in terms of Children are once again dissociating from their physical bodies by engaging in social media. And their sense of self is not inwards, it's external. How many likes did I get? Uh, what did I get more likes than my friend? How good do I look on camera? So restricting social media until I believe until 8, uh, 16, 16 years old, which, you know, is not the norm, but restricting, uh, uh, social media till 16 and actually restricting screen time as much as possible, you know, up till the age of 16. I mean, that's, you You have to be a pretty, pretty like intense parent to, to be able to even follow that because you're gonna see everyone around you doing something very different. And the fourth thing to develop that resiliency and that way of kind of connecting with one's thoughts is when a child is going through a challenge and that challenge could be an argument with a friend, it could be they didn't get a good mark in a school thing, or they're upset about something in that moment, it can be very very tempting to try and remove the trigger, right? To say, okay, all right, well, what we will do is we will make you not go to that friend's house anymore, or we're going to kind of stop that thing that's bothering you. And actually in that moment, what can we say to the child that helps them develop the resiliency to deal with that challenge versus removing the challenge itself or saying that you're going to take care of it?

Yeah.

So it's, and once again, I'm not a parenting expert, so I'm just, this is what I'm just seeing in clinics in terms of ramifications of this, then when someone is older, what we're doing is then allowing a child to have difficult times, have difficult challenges, but develop the resiliency to be able to handle them on their own. And I see this kind of new, new way of kind of parenting, which is that kind of gentle parenting, or it's a parenting from a place of, uh, you know, being almost over-compassionate where you are trying to help the child not experience difficult emotions because that's what you think the job of a parent. And actually it's allowing the parent, it's allowing the child to have those difficult emotions, but give them the tools to then experience them and move through them in their own time versus trying to stop them having the emotion. And in fact, that's one of the core needs of a child that is in the protection, trauma protection matrix, which is the ability to feel an emotion, work through it and express it versus a parent going, oh, I'm so sorry you're feeling like that. All right, stop it. Or actually, when a child is getting really angry, saying, stop being angry, not, you know, not good enough. You are then teaching a person to not dissociate into their bodies, not feel their emotions, and repress, which then causes the issues later in life. And those are just 3 or 4 that I'm starting with. And we can, I don't want to spend the rest of the podcast, but essentially there's so much more that we can kind of go through in terms of developing resilience, developing the child's ability to be with their emotions so that for the rest of their lives, they're not maladapted and therefore less likely to get anxiety, depression, panic. And this is a serious problem. Like I, we did a focus group with, uh, 20-somethings. 80% of those 20-somethings said that they were anxious or severely anxious regularly that interfered with their ability to handle normal life. And that this was their biggest challenge that they were facing. I thought, what kind of world and generation are we creating? That, that is the dominant experience. We, we've regressed as a society. If people are just finding it harder to just be peaceful and happy. Like, how did this happen?

80% plus, like, that is astounding to me. But considering like the world that we're living in right now and how sheltered kids are being brought up from experiencing and working through stressors and realizing that they have the capability to handle stressors and not just simply be kind of taken away from it or have the threat removed or that issue removed. It's such a massive issue, I think, for us going forward as a species, no doubt.

Yeah. And Jonathan Haidt, you know, in his amazing book, The Endless Generation, he talks about the idea of free play, risk-taking. You know, when we were younger, we were just told by our parents, right, go out and play and figure out the world. I'm not saying it has to be as extreme as that, but it has to be where the child is taking those risks, learning that kind of self-resilience, becoming stronger within so that later in life when the boss says, hey, you were rubbish today in that meeting, or this was really bad, or you need to do better, you then say, okay, all right, I have the resilience to handle that feedback and I'm going to be aware of that and take it on board. Whereas what I'm seeing employers telling me is that we're recruiting Gen Z and younger people and we're having to tiptoe around their emotions and how they're feeling. And once again, I don't wanna generalize, I'm, you know, sorry, I'll be very careful here. I'm not talking about everybody, but we're seeing a trend here. Lack of resilience of people in their 20s and 30s and their ability to handle feedback, criticism, pushback. And that's then causing more of these people to opt out of the workforce. So we know there's much higher levels of opt-out in those generations because of anxiety and depression and that kind of inability to handle those stressful situations. So developing that resilience in younger people is paramount.

I think the overarching theme of everything that I'm focused on is in the work that I do and in my parenting approach is this idea of resilience. Can we build this resilience? Because ultimately, as a parent, as a clinician, my job is to provide the tools, but it's not my job to do the work for you. And I tell every single one of my clients, my patients that come in to see me, that I'm providing you the resources. I'm giving you the guidance on how to make these things work, but you're doing 80% of the work. You're actually doing this and you have to reengage and do this process properly. And that I think is, is ideally, that's how I, I practice. I'm hoping that medicine and healthcare takes that shift towards building resilience rather than being the answer that people are looking for externally and that the answer actually lives internally within them. I want to lean into one final kind of area here, and that is explaining that everything that you've brought up today has real research behind it, has real data behind it. Nothing here is, is kind of woo-woo out there. No big deal. There is real research that you are doing internally within the Gupta program and that are, that you are sharing with phenomenal changes for so many people that are suffering from chronic illness. I'd love for you to kind of share some of the research that you're up to and some of the data you're seeing.

Yeah. So for us, it's so important that this is science-backed, that we do as many clinical studies as possible because we want longevity of these ideas. Like things can come and go, ideas and programs can come and go, but when there's solid evidence, then it can become integrated into healthcare systems and then become mainstream. And I want neuroplasticity and brain retraining to become a mainstream idea. So if you go to your doctor with long COVID or fibromyalgia or chronic pain, you are first prescribed a neuroplasticity approach rather than it being the last thing you discover 10 years later because everything else didn't work. And so the science is so important. So we've now completed 7 clinical studies, which as you can imagine, uh, you know, it's, it's, it's been a hard grind to do that because all the money goes channeled towards pharmaceuticals and reductionist approaches. And in those 7 clinical studies, 6 of which are independent studies, we've done 5 randomized controlled trials, and I can give you kind of some of the headlines, uh, here. So we've done now 2 clinical studies on fibromyalgia specifically, and those were RCTs where we compared the Gupta program to a wellness program or meditative program or whatever, similar number of hours. And we found that the Gupta program compared to control groups was incredibly powerful. So we, we see generally in these studies around a halving of pain, a halving of anxiety and depression. We're seeing anywhere, anything between 40 to 55% reduction in fibromyalgia after 3 months. And obviously ours is a 6-month program minimum, so we would see more results after, after 3 months. With long COVID, we compared the Gupta program to a wellness program that had diet, supplements, sleep, et cetera. And after 3 months, the Gupta program was 4 times more effective at reducing fatigue and exhaustion with a 97% reduction in fatigue and exhaustion in the active.

Group.

So that's a published independent RCT. And, uh, we did a study on, uh, 16 different conditions. So this was a clinical audit of our patients done by an external company that came in. And that was on 222 patients, a large population group. And across 14 different conditions, we were statistically significant. So seeing an improvement in health between 60 to 100% improvement in health across a range of different conditions like Lyme disease, burnout, chronic fatigue, uh, you know, mold, Lyme, uh, sorry, I would've mentioned Lyme, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, et cetera. So all of these 14 different conditions, and I think it's the first time that we've seen one intervention and have such a dramatic effect across so many different conditions. We've just done a mold study, which is pre-publication, and that is also showing similar results. So this is giving hope for people with mold and secondary kind of Lyme disease as well. We're looking at MS. Can we improve outcomes on MS as well? And then once again, with future studies, we look even to things like cancer because we're not saying that the biomechanism is the same, but if we can improve the efficiency of the immune system through neuroplasticity, making it super accurate, then there's no reason why we couldn't improve, uh, cancer outcomes as well. So we have some people interested in developing that and we have one study hopefully starting soon and another one. Larger study that we are, uh, looking at conducting. So for us, it's, it's super exciting to have this data so we can go to the mainstream medical profession and say, right, fund more studies, right? Because we've got such promising data. Give an example. Pregabalin is the, uh, obviously the medication prescribed for fibromyalgia and, and various other pain conditions. It's one of the only ones that's prescribed. And we compared Gupta's program to pregabalin, and after 3 months, the Gupta's program was 5 times more effective than pregabalin. At reducing symptoms, improving overall health, improving sleep. Now, it's very rare in a medical study that you get something which is 5 times more effective than, than a control group. And, you know, someone said to us, if your treatment was a pill, it would be having hundreds of millions of dollars being thrown at it right now because the, the effects are so dramatic. Yet because you're an intervention that involves an app and, uh, different behaviors, it's not something that fits the mainstream model. And it, and that's sad. And so therefore the bigger the studies, the larger the studies, the more we can fund these studies, the more we can prove this and have this embedded into mainstream medicine. It's neuroplasticity for me is the, you know, most, most exciting idea. So that's what we're looking for. We're looking for funding for more studies. We're looking for collaborators and, uh, you know, then I think in 5 years' time, 7 years' time, that's our vision. This becomes mainstream in primary care.

I love it. I think this is exactly it. We need to shift what the systemic mainstream is. Actually doing towards clearly effective therapeutic protocols that are built around empowering individuals to take back real control of their health and teaching them how to live healthy lives again. I think this has been one of my favorite conversations I think I've ever had. We got to geek out into the full neuroplasticity side of things. I got to learn about what I need to do with my kids. And this has just been a brilliant conversation, one that I know that the audience is going to absolutely love. I'd like to leave you with an opportunity to share one final thought, anything that you want to get off your chest, anything you want to share in terms of what the Gupta Program is built to do and how you're going to change the world.

Well, I would, I would just like to empower people in the sense that, you Your genes are not your destiny. Your childhood is not your destiny. It's simply what your brain learns. And that isn't through the DNA, even the epigenetic responses. It's what your brain learned to do. It learned how to be unwell. It learned how to be anxious. It learned how to be autoimmune. It learned how to be sensitive to certain foods, and it can unlearn it. That is the empowerment that we are the masters of our own brains. Once we have the right key the right lock. And so if we unlock the power of the brain, there's unlimited power that we can unlock, unlimited ways that we can train our brain to give us the responses we want, give us the happiness, the joy in life that we choose. And that is the empowerment that I want to give to everybody. So we'd love for people to come to the Gupta program, check it out, download the app. There's lots of free resources, free videos, free meditations, free stuff. And, uh, we'd love for people to experience the power of this.

I can attest to all of this. I've been on the website. I've, I've got a link in the show notes below in the episode information below. So make sure you click that link, go check out the Gupta program, sign up for any of the free resources. If this is something that speaks to you, I honestly think there is so much to this, and I'm sure very soon we will have you back so we can dig in deeper into the studies, the research, into the, the childhood side of things. How to improve things from the parental side of, uh, this approach. I have loved this conversation truly and thoroughly, and I honestly think anybody who got to this point needs to share this episode with at least 5 people who you think could utilize this information. Just click share on whichever app you're using to do this and click 5 names of people that you know are dealing with health conditions. These things are rampant, and if we can learn to retrain our brains on how we see these issues and adjust how we respond, we're going to be able to change people's experiences in their lives for the better. So this is a, a big one. I really, really want to share this information with everybody. So thank you, Ashok, for joining me today. This has been wonderful. We will have you back for sure. And thank you to everyone for listening. We will catch you all on the next one.