Ashok Gupta explains how chronic conditions form using the story of Tina the ballerina. Early stress, birth trauma, and childhood experiences shape the amygdala and insula, priming them to overreact. When a trigger like COVID hits, this hypervigilant brain sustains an exaggerated immune response that loops back on itself, creating long COVID, fibromyalgia, and chronic fatigue. Retraining these brain regions can break the cycle.
This is the story of Tina the ballerina. So Tina the ballerina has a chronic condition. Now, how did this chronic condition start? Well, often our reactivity to our environment, the factory setting of our brain, is influenced in the womb. So, so if our mother was quite stressed or anxious during the gestation period, then that could influence our amygdalus, the parts of our brain that causes these anxious reactions, or the reactivity of our brain, and then even the birth experience itself. So Tina's birth experience was impacted by what happened during those few moments. Sometimes it can last for hours. And that could influence her brain and how reactive her brain is. And of course, the most influential time is the first five years of life. So how did Tina feel during those first five years of life, first five to 10 years? The Sands of consciousness are very soft during that period of time. So we create lots of channels, lots of grooves in the sand, which represent our personality traits and how we respond to our environment and at an emotional level and a physiological level. And it used to be thought that this only applied to our psychology, but of course, it also applies to our physiology as well. So our physiology is influenced by the first five to ten years of life. And depending on the experiences that Tina went through, did she experience a lack of nurture? And it can be along a scale that we're somewhere along that scale from a lack of nurture at one level right through to some kind of trauma with a small T and right through to trauma with a big T. And we can be anywhere along that scale in terms of what we may have experienced during our childhood. And that once again, influences the factory setting of the amygdala and also the insular parts of the brain. So these two parts of the brain that we believe get over triggered in these conditions, the amygdala is mainly responsible for your nervous system reactivity, and your insula is responsible for some of the immune system conditioning and learning and the overreactivity of your immune system. So as Tina grows up, her nervous system and immune system is primed to over defend. And not just over defend emotionally, but also physiologically and also the immune system. Because in modern medicine, we often differentiate these areas. If you go to a hospital, there'll be a separate immunology department over here, a separate psychology department over here. They're all separate, but the body and the brain make no differentiation. They simply say, what do we need to do to defend and survive and pass on our genes the next generation? And so her factory setting is affected by all of these different experiences. Now, once Tina becomes an adult, let's say she gets some kind of physical insult. In medical terms, that means some kind of physical injury or a biological threat that comes her way. Let's say it's Covid. So normally her immune system would switch on, it would fight off the COVID virus and then it would switch off and go back to standby and her full health then returns. But we know in many of these different conditions, what happens is we get some kind of physical illness. And the physical illness itself may dissipate, but it's left a legacy where we then have chronic symptoms that may last days, months, years. And so what has shifted and changed? Well, we believe that in Tina's brain, inside her amygdala and insula, because those parts of her brain are primed for over defending, inadvertently her brain starts over defending against those threats. Let's take the example of COVID We all know somebody who's got long Covid, for instance, if that person had a weakened immune system or nervous system, we know that stress reduces the effectiveness of our immune system, don't we? So imagine that virus comes along. Now it takes Tina a lot longer to fight off that virus, which means it lingers for a lot longer, which means that inside her brain, the amygdala and insula think what happens if those things are still dangerous? What happens if those symptoms in her body mean that the virus is still present? Well, we think survival is number one. So we're going to keep stimulating the immune system and nervous system. And guess what? She stimulates her nervous system and immune system, which causes physical symptoms in her body. But because her brain is now in this magnified threat response, those symptoms loop back to a hypersensitive, hypervigilant brain. And her brain says, I think I'm still in danger. And look at all these symptoms I'm experiencing. Perhaps I am still in danger. And then triggers her immune system and nervous system which creates the symptoms. The symptoms double back to a hypervigilant brain. And guess what? She's caught in that vicious cycle. So this is how we have the perpetuation of long Covid main and chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, pain syndromes, where the pain systems and pain networks have become hyper aroused. And this is also relevant for sensitivity reactions like food sensitivities, mold illness, mast cell activation. In a similar way, Tina's immune system and nervous system has reacted to those environmental toxins or those foods and has created that reactivity. And at some point in time, perhaps she did experience mold which was very dangerous at that point in time. So her brain learned this mould is dangerous. So 100% mold created 100% reaction. But because her brain is efficient now, just 5% of a mold exposure creates 100% reaction. The brain itself can become hyper reactive and defensive against even small amounts of what it previously perceived as dangerous. And so Tina thinks, gosh, this whole journey, now I see all the jigsaw pieces coming together of how my childhood is linked to the reactivity of my brain, and now how that's linked to getting chronic conditions. And we know that people who've had these past adverse childhood experiences are three to four times more likely to have this conditioning in the brain. And these types of conditions occur because it's all linked to the sensitivity of those brain structures. You might say, what do we do with that? Well, the good news is that our brains are inherently rewirable and neuroplastic. So the next stage is that Tina understands all of this, but recognizes and is empowered that she can heal. And so she then retrains her brain. She retrains these parts of her unconscious brain, the amygdala, the insula, that she isn't in that dangerous environment anymore and that we can stand down. She tells the soldiers to stand down, and then health returns. So that is the journey, and that is the very simple explanation of how these conditions occur and what brain retraining actually is.
