Dr Tala Andoni, a former NHS physician turned functional medicine doctor, describes integrating brain retraining and neuroplasticity into her consultations and clinical practice. She praises the Gupta program for combining breathwork, meditation, coaching and chunked learning, and reports observing objective symptom improvements (MSQ scores) in patients without supplements or tests, attributing change to reframing and long-term habit-building.
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I'm Dr. Tala Andoni. I started off my career doing NHS medicine for around 10 years and now I'm a full time functional medicine doctor. Honestly, I start all my consultations talking about brain retraining and neuroplasticity. I think it is the foundation for everything that you just mentioned because it's the creation of new habits, it's understanding yourself for the possibility who you can be, what, how you can align your habits with your identity. So I think brain retraining is the very foundation of it and just understanding how that works lays the foundation for everything to come. So my journey with brain retraining started around the same time I became a functional medicine doctor to deepen my understanding of myself and humans in general. What I found really helpful with brain retraining is instead of, if you think of a pendulum, instead of just being at the bottom of the pendulum, just swinging around with the emotions, I'm more capable of just being at the top of the pendulum just as a, as an observer. And how that's translated into my life is I still react in a similar way but for me it's more about before it used to take me this long to recover and now it just takes me shorter to recover. So for me brain retraining has been really helpful in understanding myself better where it came from. A lot of the inner child and the parts work specifically as well as taking care of my ventral vagal nervous system and taking care of just building those habits in the moment of calm to help me in moments of crisis or tension or stress. And I think there's so many methods available out there. And what I liked about the Gupta program is that it combines a lot of them in terms of the breath work, the meditation in a way that is digestible and easy to follow through. I think that's because we can all google or find a handout or something. But with the one to one coaching sessions, with the that ongoing support and the chunking, I feel like that is also in line with theories of learning theory, behavior change and that is more sustainable for long term change versus building on motivation or momentum. It's about the long term habits. At every follow up consultation, what I generally ask for is a physical symptoms questionnaire, the medical symptoms questionnaire and it looks at mood and then it gives me a score. And honestly I usually dedicate the first two or three sessions to body mind work and I and recommend the Gupta program. So what's been interesting is that without any doing any supplements or recommending any specific exercise regimens I see those physical symptoms improve. I see that score, the MSQ, go down in some cases pretty dramatically, from 90 to 50, without even recommending anything, without doing any tests, just by offering that reframe, but just by offering the patient a different perspective to their own story, one that is more compassionate and understanding.
