Ashok Gupta explains how an overactive nervous system keeps your immune system on high alert even after the threat is gone, draining resources and causing chronic inflammation. Brain retraining teaches these defenses to stand down, addressing the root cause that diet and medication alone can't fix.
So imagine your body is like a kingdom, and you are the king or queen of that kingdom, and you have an army, which is your nervous system that defends the kingdom and the castle, and you have a navy, which is your immune system that defends the kingdom. And in comes an incoming invader. So in the case of neuroimmune conditions, that's often a virus or bacterial infection coming over the hill, attacking your kingdom. In the case of sensitivity reactions, that could be a food or it could be mould. And there can be many other different conditions that have some kind of external trigger. Could be pain, which then triggers fibromyalgia or pain syndrome, chronic pain. So they're all coming over the hill, or one of those things is coming over the hill, and your army and navy fight it off valiantly, and the kingdom returns to normal. But imagine now, you've had a drought in the kingdom. Now what happens? Well, your army and navy are weaker, aren't they? They're weaker in the kingdom. So once again, another invading army comes over the hill. But this time, your soldiers, your army and navy have to work a lot harder to fight off this incoming invader. They're fighting off valiantly, but they become traumatized, just like war veterans come back from war zones, and they're traumatized by the experience of war. And they come to you for their weekly meeting with you as the king or queen of your kingdom. And they say, dear queen, we fought valiantly, but we believe that the invaders may still be around. So we want all the resources of the kingdom now so we can keep firing off our weapons of war. So we want all the corn and the wheat and the metal and all the resources of the kingdom be channeled to the army and navy to help us defend the kingdom. And so they're defending the kingdom valiantly, but they're using up all the resources of the body, firing off their weapons. And that inflammation and that stimulation means that some of those arrows start falling back in the kingdom, which is why you then get the bodily inflammation and the brain inflammation. And then what happens is the spies in the kingdom, they are not fought off because normally there's some funding that goes to the secret service to get rid of spies. But now those spies can proliferate within the kingdom, and that are the opportunistic infections, opportunistic bacteria, other opportunistic things that are going on in the body. And so that starts making the symptoms worse and making the kingdom weaker. So we can see how the whole body can get in this dysregulated state where it's continuing to fire off these weapons of war, causing inflammation, causing these ongoing symptoms. And of course, you can change your diet, and those things are positive things, and you can take supplements and you can take medications, and they can all help your body deal with, with the effects of this inflammation in your gut and in your body, and they can be very beneficial. But until we get these soldiers to stand down, it's going to perpetuate, and many people will go on an elimination diet or take supplements, and this is all positive things. But then another stress comes in your life, and guess what? The symptoms all come back as well. So what we want to do is get the army and Navy to stand down. So the next time you have a meeting with the army and Navy generals, they'll come into your castle and they say, right, we need all the resources this week. You say, my dear generals, thank you for doing a sterling job of protecting our kingdom, but the war is over. You can stand down. And that is the brain retraining in a nutshell.
