Ashok Gupta's Retraining the Brain to improve Mental Health and Chronic Illness

The key factor was self awareness. Okay, now just to be very, very clear, I don't believe that chronic fatigue syndrome, or me or Long Covid, all these modern conditions, I don't believe that they are in the mind yet they are real physical illnesses. But at the same time, we have influence over our brain on just the subtle periphery of consciousness. So this isn't something we're generally aware of. But that was really the process is recognizing that conditioning as an idea is something that we all regularly experience. So conditioning is the idea that our brain is constantly learning new things. So if we learn to drive a car on our first driving lesson, we will have to manually move the steering wheel and press the gas and move the gear shift and try and figure it all out. But then after 10, 15 lessons, it becomes automated in the brain. And in a similar way, I understood that when it comes to physiological reactions to our environment, the brain can sometimes get trained, conditioned. It learns something as a response to a virus or bacteria, but then gets stuck in that learned response. And just like learning to drive a car, you then have to unlearn that response.

Welcome to the Mind Health 360 show. I'm Kirkland Newman, and if you, your loved ones or clients suffer from mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, insomnia, poor memory, poor attention, mood swings, exhaustion, etc. I interview the leading integrative mental health practitioners from around the world to help you understand the root causes of these symptoms, many of which may surprise you and suggest solutions to help you heal. If you like this interview, please do subscribe and forward to others who might find it helpful. If you want further information, Please go to www.mindheld360.com or find us on social media. Welcome Ashok Gupta to the Mind Health360 program. I'm so excited to have you here because for personal reasons, I myself have used your program. It was advised to Me by Dr. Neil Nathan when I was suffering from mold toxicity and a lot of nervous system dysregulation. He said, you must try this amazing program called the Gupta Program to sort of retrain your brain. And I had no idea what this was. I'd sort of heard about it, but I. So I actually did it myself. And it was so helpful for me in terms of my neurological symptoms and my anxiety and these constant sort of muscle twitching, fasciculations, tremors that I was getting due to this mold exposure. So I'm thrilled to have you on the show and I just want to thank you for everything that you've done for so many people and you know, we're in for a treat. So I just, before starting, I just wanted to give your introduction, which is that you're an internationally renowned speaker, filmmaker and health practitioner who have dedicated your life to supporting people through chronic illness and to achieving their potential. You yourself suffer from me or chronic fatigue syndrome around 25 years ago when you were studying at Cambridge University and through neurological research that you conducted, you managed to get yourself 100% better. You then set up a clinic to treat others and then published the well known recovery program, as we were saying, known as the Gupta program, in 2007. You've now published several medical papers and you're continually researching these conditions. So you have created a truly groundbreaking program to help people. Tell us a little bit about your story, how you got here and what this program is.

Well, yes, thank you, Kiki, for that wonderful introduction. Very honored to be here on your podcast. So, yeah, I guess with like most of us who are involved in this industry, we've come from our own pain, pain to purpose, as they, they often call it. And so my journey started in the mid to late 90s. So I was an undergrad at Cambridge and was studying and kind of burning the candle at both ends. You do. I was studying economics actually as an undergrad there, and I got some kind of mysterious virus and I didn't think much of it and the virus seemed to go away, but my health seemed to steadily decline and I got worse and worse and worse to the point at which I couldn't read the words on a textbook. I had no energy. And I describe it like my worst day of flu times five. So we all know what it feels like when you have flu. You're completely wiped out. You have no energy. You can't think. Now imagine that times five continuously. That's what I describe it like. And for a young man, it was like a brick wall in front of me. And 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. We have no diagnostic test for it. I, by the way, you might have this forever. Goodbye. And for me, that was just a complete brick wall. And in my worst moments, you know, I had to crawl to the bathroom, I couldn't go out, I couldn't do anything. And like I'd been precipitated into a 100-year-old man. I mean, it was crazy. And that started my lifelong quest. I mean, in my, in my worst moments, I was almost Suicidal. And I made an agreement with the universe, a contract. And I said, if I can just get myself 30% better, 60% better, ideally 100% better, I will dedicate the rest of my life to helping others with these conditions, because I'd met hundreds of others who also had it, who weren't getting help and support. And I finally got diagnosed with me or chronic fatigue syndrome. But really, that's a diagnosis that doesn't mean much. It just means we don't know what else is causing it. So we're going to diagnose you with this. And in that moment, I went into a bookstore in Cambridge, and I was looking at the health section, trying to find something that could help me with my condition. And there's a little book that was just jutting out of the shelf, and I can't explain it. I can't explain why it called out to me. And I picked that book off the shelf, and the COVID of it read, the Emotional Life of the Brain by Professor Joseph LeDoux, who at the time in the 90s, was the foremost expert on neurological conditioning processes, PTSD. And he'd done lots of studies, and it just called to me. So I just read that book, and I was astounded by that book. And I thought, this is the secret to what may be happening in chronic illnesses. And he's only working with animals, rats. But I think this whole underlying hypothesis is completely applicable to lots of other conditions. And so I got together a hypothesis. I understood what caused the condition, and in an ad hoc way, I believe it was in the brain. And I retrained my brain, got myself 100% well, and then set up a clinic to treat others with chronic fatigue syndrome at that time. And also published my medical hypothesis online in 1999 and then in the medical journal in 2002. And that's been my journey. So since then, I. We then published the first neuroplasticity program, brain retraining program, in 2007, which was a DVD program in those days, and have since then we've published six, six, seven medical studies and treated thousands of patients. So that's really been my journey, from my own pain to it creating my own purpose.

Amazing. What a great story. I mean, those are the most. You know, often the wounded healer is the most effective healer. Right. So that's beautiful in terms of the actual process. So you had chronic fatigue or me, which still is a slightly misunderstood concept, I think, in, you know, there's. In mainstream medicine. So tell us what you did in order to recover and, and how long did it take? And you know, presumably, you know, it must not have been a straight line. As we know, recovery never is. But what was the process of you coming to this theory or this hypothesis which then worked for you? How did this all work? And what were the sort of key factors in your healing?

I think the key factor was self awareness. Okay, now just to be very, very clear, I don't believe that chronic fatigue syndrome, or me or Long Covid, all these modern conditions, I don't believe that they are in the mind yet they are real physical illnesses. But at the same time, we have influence over our brain on just the subtle periphery of consciousness. So this isn't something we're generally aware of. But that was really the process is recognizing that conditioning as an idea is something that we all regularly experience. So conditioning is idea that our brain is constantly learning new things. So if we learn to drive a car on our first driving lesson, we will have to manually move the steering wheel and press the gas and move the gear shift and try and figure it all out. But then after 10, 15 lessons, it becomes automated in the brain. And in a similar way, I understood that when it comes to physiological reactions to our environment, the brain can sometimes get trained, conditioned. It learns something as a response to a virus or bacteria, but then gets stuck in that learned response. And just like learning to drive a car, you then have to unlearn that response. You've got to unlearn that. So some of us often we've got bad habits when we're driving. And if you meet a driving instructor, they'll say, well, oh, you've learned that habit. That's really bad. You need to unlearn that habit. So in a similar way, I believe a lot of chronic illnesses are when the brain in its protective response, learns to do something protective, overprotective, inappropriate. And we need to retrain the brain out of those responses. Actually, Kiki, to put that into context, it might help if I kind of go through the underlying hypothesis and then it will put into context how, how I healed myself. So I always like to. Yeah, so I always like to ask the biggest question of all. Why are we here now? Kiki, I'm sure we can have a, an amazing conversation for the next hour on the meaning of life and the purpose of life. But let's focus on the science. We are here as human beings because this brain, this nervous system, this immune system has evolved over millions of years. So our system, a nervous system, immune system, prioritizes survival over, well, being and that is a secret to these conditions. So we've evolved from plant life to single celled organisms to invertebrates, vertebrates, mammals, human beings, and we contain that lineage. So many people aren't aware that we contain a lot of the same DNA as that plant life and animal life. So we share 40% of the same DNA as a banana, which I think is a fascinating statistic. And so our systems are designed to survive, procreate, and pass on our genes to the next generation. So from a pure Darwinian scientific perspective, we're here to survive. And what's happened over the last few hundred years is we are now exposed to far more threats than we used to in human history. So now we live in a more toxic world in terms of food, toxins, environmental toxins. We have more stress that is around us, we have more pressures because we're aware of all the bad stuff that happens on the planet. And then to top it off, we're now spending most of our times living in boxes out of sunlight, staring at screens, which is increasing the threat detection levels in the brain. And so this is increasing how that threat system processes the world around us and keeping it on high alerts continuously, which is why we're suffering more anxiety, more depression, and more of these types of chronic illnesses. And so the way some of these chronic illnesses start, so autoimmune diseases, chronic inflammatory diseases, pain conditions, I believe they start because of three factors. Number one is a genetic inheritance. So there may be something in our genes that makes us more prone to this. But secondly, and most importantly, it is psychosocial stresses, our environmental stresses, et cetera, that build up the toxic load in our brains and our bodies that just requires one more thing to push us over the edge. And then along comes that third thing, a virus, bacteria, mold, exposure, toxin. And what happens is normally our immune system, when it detects a threat, it, it goes into the on position, fights off that virus or toxin, and then goes back to the off position. Yep, so far, so good. But if our system is compromised because of all the stress, and it's not just emotional stress, it's physical stress, as we said. We know from psychoneuroimmunology that our immune system's ability to fight is lowered. We are less immunoffective. So now the immune system takes a lot longer to fight off that virus. And let's give the example of COVID because we've all been through that. So imagine Covid comes along and our system now takes a lot longer to fight off that COVID virus. And in that moment, going back to our first jigsaw piece, the brain prioritizes survival over well being. So the brain thinks, you know what? I think I fought off the COVID virus, but what happens if it's still hiding in my system? Just to err on the side of caution, I'm going to continue that immune response, which is why we get that period of post viral fatigue after a very intense virus or infection. But then what happens? And this is the key learning piece, the brain erring on the side of caution, thinks that those symptoms in the body may be indicative of ongoing infection. So it detects those symptoms, those symptoms loop back to a hypersensitive, hyper vigilant brain. The brain thinks, oh, I can feel these symptoms in my body. Maybe that means the virus is still present or the mold is still present. Let me stimulate my immune system and nervous system. So now the immune system and nervous system triggers, creating a sympathetic overload, immune dysfunction, inflammation, which causes all the physical symptoms in the body, which then loop back to the hypersensitive brain that thinks we're under threat and under danger, and round and around we go. And that's what then turns an acute illness into, into a chronic illness. And I give an analogy which can really help people understand this, and this is when people really get it. Because as you can imagine, it's taken years to put this together. It's a very complex hypothesis. So imagine you are queen of your kingdom, all right, you're queen Kiki, and you have an army, which is your nervous system to protect the kingdom. And you have a navy, which is your immune system to protect, protect the kingdom. And they protect against invading armies. So far, so good. Now imagine there's a drought in a kingdom. So now your kingdom is weaker, your army and navy is weaker. Now along comes a threat over the hill. That threat could be biological. So it could be a virus, bacteria, toxin. It could be some other kinds of threat. Maybe it's over training. So as an example, athletes over training syndrome. People pushing their body too hard. Another threat could be a pain issue. So you may have had a car accident or some kind of localized pain. So these are all threats on the system. So the army comes over the hill, and your army and navy now fight valiantly to get you back to health, to get rid of this invader. And it manages to fight off the incoming invader. But it's not sure if that incoming invader is hiding in the jungle or hiding in the forest. What happens if it's still there? So the army And Navy generals are traumatized by the war. So they come to their weekly meeting with Queen Kiki, and they say, queen Kiki, we need all the resources of the kingdom. We need the water, the food, the metal, everything. Because if the kingdom falls, that is, the organism dies. Everything is lost. So everything should be prioritized to survival. So now that army and navy keep firing off their weapons of war, which is the inflammatory responses, the pain, all those types of responses, to try and deal with the threat. But some of those arrows and cannonballs start falling back into the kingdom, and that's when we get the autoimmune effects, the inflammatory effects affecting the body. And on top of that, we also now find that opportunistic spies in the kingdom. So that's opportunistic infections, opportunistic viruses, Lyme, etc. HV6, they all start flourishing in the body. Meaning there's now even more problems in. In the body, in the organism, in the kingdom. And this whole system now gets stuck in this response because the weaker and weaker the kingdom become, the more and more the army and navy keep firing off their weapons of war, trying to protect a weakened kingdom. And that's the new level of balance that the brain thinks is right, because it's just trying to protect you. And brain retraining is when they come to their weekly meeting with Queen Kiki, and they say, queen Kiki, we need all the resources. The kingdom's under threat. We're still in danger. And you say to them, my dear generals, you have done a wonderful job, but the war is over. You can stand down, and they won't believe you the first time or the second time or the third time. But the purpose of neuroplasticity is the power of repetition, creating new neural pathways in the brain to control the immune responses in the brain, to enable the brain to come back to balance. And the nearest analogy would be, let's say someone has a stroke and they lose control of an arm or a leg. They'll go to rehabilitation, and they will have to reimagine those neural networks. They'll have to imagine thinking about moving their arm, and they may be able to just move it slightly, but eventually, through repetition, creating new neural pathways, they regain control, maybe over speech or may a limb. And in a similar way, we figured out a way that we can regain control over an immune system and nervous system that is running riots. And that, in a nutshell, is the brain retraining.

That's fascinating.