Ashok Gupta explains how childhood stress rewires the brain's threat detection system. People with adverse childhood experiences are three to four times more likely to develop chronic conditions, but the brain can be retrained through repeated practice to recreate safety.
Three to four times more likely.
This is the essence of a lot of healing. And you know, they even talk about this in the, you know, the 12 step process in terms of overcoming addictions as well. This idea that we surrender to the higher power, as we've talked about before, this doesn't mean you have to have any sense of belief in God, religion necessarily. If you do, that's great, and if you don't, doesn't matter. What matters is that we surrender to this idea of love in the sense that we are being looked after, everything's going to be okay. And even when we're in the midst of those worst symptoms, that surrender is this, that letting go. And therefore we incorporate that we talked about at step two and step six, having that sense of okay, I don't need to worry about this. It's being taken care of. I just imagine health. I let go of the need to worry about this. I surrender it to the power of love and let go. And that is the safety response, the sense of being taken care of. And that comes with practice and imagination. So we incorporate that trusting with gratitude that I'm being taken care of, that the process will work for me and I don't need to keep questioning and worrying. But it is the analytical mind and the stress that makes us keep questioning and analyzing. Is it working? What's going on now? So we get into the analysis paralysis. And a lot of people who get these conditions, as we've said before, tend to be very intelligent, sharp, conscientious overthinkers. And none of those are judgmental words, they're just what it is. And sometimes, and you might say, well, how does that connect to what we call adverse childhood experiences? Some very interesting neurology here. The factory setting of our amygdalas and, and perhaps our insulas, but there's no research on that. But certainly our amygdalas, the factory setting of that is determined by how much stress our mother experienced during pregnancy with us. The birth process itself, the amount of bonding we had mainly with our mother in the first one to two years of life, in fact, the first five years of life, many ways. Any adverse childhood experiences in the first 10 to 15 years of life, but more in the first 10 years of life, they generally determine the factory setting of our amygdala, of that part of our brain. And then after that, and so a lot of that is related to the sense of safety that we may have felt. And after that, our amygdalas give us an artificial representation of the world around us, our bodies, the sensations in our bodies based upon just those experiences that created the factory setting of our amygdala. So all these patterns and worries that are thrown up are not actually to do with the present day situation. They are to do with our past. And that's why people who get these types of conditions tend to have been more likely to have those adverse childhood experiences. Because when you have adverse childhood experiences as a child, your brain becomes wired to analyze situations more, to create safety. Because your sense of safety depends on it. Yeah. Is this making sense to people that the brain, if you feel you're in danger, your brain has to analyze situations more, read people's faces and moods to analyze whether you're going to be looked after, recognize danger if you see it somewhere, and we become hyper vigilant on the external world and the internal world. Then later in life, when we experience exposure to something we're sensitive to, like mold, or we experience a virus or a bacterial infection or whatever triggered your condition or Covid, then the brain has already been pre wired to be more sensitive to those particular situations because of that danger response and therefore is more likely for this conditioning effect to happen in the brain. Which is why people who've had adverse childhood experiences are three to four times more likely to develop chronic conditions later in life. And there's lots of research on that. Now the good news is your past is not your destiny. You are not your past, you are not what happened to you. This is where the retraining comes in. And having that trust and faith in your ability and your power to retrain your brain and create more of that sense of safety in your brain, that's what we're all here to do. And so people are asking me, what are adverse childhood experiences? Yeah. So those are things like trauma, bullying, any abuse. But it doesn't have to be those things. It can simply be just a perception of a lack of nurture or lack of nurture itself. It can be experiences at school. It can be if somebody, let's say, had a condition that wasn't recognized when they were younger, such as dyslexia and then being bullied for that and not being taken seriously. These are all kind of adverse childhood experiences that can influence our sense of safety in the world around us. And so once again, it's that one concept of don't believe how your brain makes you feel. It may be making you feel like the world's a dangerous place, or I don't feel safe, or I've got this condition, how will I cope? But it's creating this artificial atmosphere of a lack of safety. And when we retrain it, you know, it's amazing. People can retrain and suddenly the next day they can feel like, oh, I feel so calm and I feel really connected to the world around me. Has the world suddenly changed in 24 hours? No, we've just created a different state of mind. State of being, yeah. Is this making sense? Give me a thumbs up if this is making sense. And so this is why we're so hot on this idea of commitment and keeping going again, again, again.
