Overcome 14 Chronic Illnesses, with Ashok Gupta

The Gupta program was effective and significant for 14 different conditions like Lyme, mold, burnout, anxiety. As an example, long COVID, there was an 84% increase in health, functional health, so health capacity. Chronic fatigue syndrome, I think, was a 76% improvement in functioning. Mold, there was a 67% improvement. And that was before we had the app and before we have our daily events.

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I'm Dr. Wendy Trubo, and I'm Dr. Ed Levitan.

Welcome to the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast, where we empower you to live a vibrant and healthy life by optimizing your structural, chemical, emotional, social, and spiritual lives.

Hold on to your hats.

Hello and welcome to the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. We have a star sighting today. Ed's with us., and we have an amazing guest who we have literally been trying to schedule for 6 months. So I'm so excited that he's here. Ashok Gupta is an internationally renowned speaker, filmmaker, and health practitioner who has dedicated his life to supporting people through chronic illness and achieving their potential. Ashok, welcome. We're so psyched you're here.

Super excited myself too, to be here and glad we could get this done for sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We've been referring to your work for a while now, so And then we met you in person and Ed was like, "We met the guy who made the Gupta program." And I was like, "Cool." I, at that time, didn't have a lot of awareness of it. So I'm really psyched to keep talking about this. So I think the first question is, is this another packaged form of meditation or, well, how does it differ from a meditative practice when you're retraining the brain? What are you actually doing?

Yeah, it's a very good question. Not a silly question at all because sometimes these types of approaches get dismissed as, "Oh, I already do breathing techniques." you know, I already do meditation, I already do relaxation, that's all it is. And actually what we do, what brain retraining is, is very, very different. And let me give you an example. Let's say you want to learn to drive a car, right? Now you could sit on your first driving lesson and think, right, if it's CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, I'm gonna be super positive, I'm gonna let go of any negative beliefs about learning to drive a car. Or you could sit there in the car meditating and saying, I'm super calm, everything's going to be fine, I'm going to learn how to drive this car. But until you actually take those lessons of training your nervous system to move the steering wheel, press the gas, the gear shift— well, you guys in America don't have gear shift, but the gear shift— and the indicators, and then the mirrors, and then— and you're doing it all consciously, but eventually it becomes automatic and unconscious. That is where you're training your nervous system to perform a particular task automatically. Now, in a similar way, the techniques that we have start off with calming the nervous system first. So the first— we have 3 Rs of the program. So the first R is regulating your nervous system, because if you don't regulate your nervous system, your immune system, your nervous system, they are just dysregulated, and it's very difficult to retrain them. And the brain is not neuroplastic. So we want to calm the nervous system, and that is traditional breathwork, meditation, relaxation. We find whatever works for people. And those are quite unique as well. So people who say, oh, I can't meditate, I can't relax my mind, they suddenly miraculously are able to calm things down. But the core of it is the brain retraining. And that says, let's actually help a patient recognize on the periphery of consciousness when their immune system is about to trigger or is engaged. And you think, that's autonomic. How can that possibly be something we have control over? Think about when you have flu. How do you feel when you have flu?

Shitty.

Exactly. Now, that is a deliberate strategy from the brain that says, when someone is fighting off the flu virus, this is life-threatening. So we're going to make them deliberately feel depressed, down, demotivated. Because then what will happen is they won't go out and run a marathon. They will rest and do nothing. And that allows the body to heal. So do you see every physical reaction the body has has a mental and emotional component?. And we tap into those and we're able to then train the brain that we are not in a danger response. We do not need to keep triggering our defensive responses because the war is over. And so what we do is we have a special 7-step process, which is what we call on a mind map. So there's a big map you put on the floor and you step through 7 steps and each step helps you recognize those signals on the periphery of consciousness and send what we call safety signals to your unconscious brain repeatedly. And you might say, well, how do we tell the brain that we're safe from a virus or a bacteria? Actually, we are constantly in touch with our physical bodies autonomically. It's just that we don't know it. And I give an example of this that people love. So imagine that if I were to say to you two right now, I am going to be able to cause a physiological reaction in both of you even whilst you try to stop it and even though you know it's not real. Are you up for the challenge?

I'm already anxious, actually.

I'm like, OK, what's he going to do?

I'm already kind of ramped up.

It works then. Clearly it works. Right? So imagine— well, you could stop this by kind of putting your fingers in your ears. But imagine I take a slice of lemon, right? And I don't want you to salivate. This is the most important thing. You mustn't salivate, all right? I'm going to put that slice of lemon on your tongue, but you don't bite into that slice of lemon. It's very, very sour, very tangy, and you don't bite in, but those sour juices begin to kind of trickle into your mouth, into your saliva, and the saliva starts building up. And now you bite into that lemon. Oh gosh, it's really sour, it's very, very sour, and the saliva just starts churning around in your mouth as you feel those really sour, tangy lemon juices in your mouth. Okay, let's see how successful I was. So is there any saliva in your mouth right now as a result of that?

A little bit.

A little bit.

A little bit. Okay, had I continued the, uh, the attempt, then okay, we would have had some more saliva. But you had a little bit of saliva. There was a— I was able to create a physiological unconscious reaction in you that you normally don't have conscious control over. You knew that it wasn't real, and you tried to stop me from doing it.

Right?

So notice, if we can find the right key to the right lock, can we actually directly have impact over our immune system? Imagine if we found that key, then we could tap into that ability. So that's what we're doing in brain retraining, is saying, let's recognize those signals that tell us that we're about to react or we are in a danger response, create safety responses, calm them down, and then bring this— the body and the brain back to its balance and its health.

All right, controversial subject, which maybe you'll be comfortable with talking about, maybe you won't, so we'll see. Uh, psychedelic medicine, where does that fit into this? Because there's been a lot of studies with MDMA, ketamine has been producing great results. Um, they all work on neuroplasticity. How does that combine with this work that you're doing?

We are very open, so we want to do what works for patients and gets people well. That's our vision. And so when it comes to psychedelics, our hypothesis is that somehow it increases neuroplasticity. So when we're anxious, when we're stressed, the brain is much more fixed. It's not so flexible. And so people are taking psychedelics as a way of opening up possibilities, creating a temporary state of increased neuroplasticity where more open— what opportunities are available. Now, we know that's a double-edged sword because what— the reason in psychedelic research it's important to have supervision and therapy, etc., is because the brain doesn't make a judgment as to what you choose to be open about. So if you suddenly open up your brain and expose it to a horror movie, you're going to have some pretty horrendous effects on that brain because it's suddenly been open and more open to having new neuronal connections. But actually, if you open it up to healing and to love and to camaraderie, those type of positive experiences can then have a lasting effect on the brain. So that's why I think with psychedelic research we have to be very, very careful that people who already have a chronic disease are already highly anxious. How are they going to respond to something like this? Could it actually magnify these effects? So when it comes to psychedelics, we're hearing lots of great reports. I'm also— I don't know if you are, but I'm also hearing of people who are having quite difficult experiences and negative experiences as well. So it all depends on the level of supervision and how they're framed. So we are open to that. We'd love to do studies where we combine our brain retraining with microdosing, very small amounts of, uh, psychedelics, to see does that improve the patient outcomes. Because we're trying to do exactly that, we're trying to retrain the brain. And if the brain is a bit more neuroplastic, it could accelerate the process. So We are very open to looking at that type of research. But as you know, certainly in the current environment, getting money and getting resources for research is very tricky in this area. But I think that it could be something that is possible.

And I will say the one thing, as you said, the brain opens up and then what's stored in there can open up also. So it's super important to have professional work with you because you, you may not know what's stored in your brain that will open up and things come out, which is long-term a good thing as long as it's dealt with properly and professionally. So it's definitely not something to be taken lightly.

Yeah, and many people who choose to go along that pathway may have had a background of trauma with a small t right through to trauma with a big T, and we can't predict when we open up neuroplasticity what could actually occur, what's going to come out, and how you deal with that. Because it's almost like, actually, the reason for why trauma work or trauma therapy works quite well as a step-by-step process is because there's a, a slow pendulation, a gentle exposure step by step. If things open up and something comes out, how do we then help that person through that?

Yeah, Ashok, I have a question. It I'm just trying to map on things I already know and how does this work. So when you talk about neuroplasticity, when I'm mapping it on to how do I understand it, I'm thinking of it kind of like heart rate variability but in the brain. That the heart rate is variable, it's flexible, it's responsive, and that the brain is flexible and responsive but appropriately so as opposed to inappropriately so. Is that— Have I mapped it on properly or improperly?

There are some very interesting analogies with heart rate variability in the sense of when the brain is in a stimulated state, in a danger response, it is firing off continuously. So that's what is causing the fatigue, the exhaustion, the immune symptoms. And therefore, it's not open to new ways of thinking. So as an example, the example I always give is, let's say a husband and wife or two partners are coming home after a hard day's work. They're both stressed out, right? Now, they come home after work and they decide to have a discussion about something important. Is that a good time to have that discussion, right? When you're both triggered, you're both stimulated, you're both stressed out, you're not going to be open and flexible to each other's point of view. So you then look to calm everything down, relax, do some meditation, some relaxation,, and then your brain is more open because it's less stimulated. So yes, similarly as heart rate variability, rather than it being fixed and firing, you're relaxing your nervous system and immune system. You're relaxing your brain so it's more open to different points of view and therefore not so fixed. And what we want to go from is go from survival mode to thriving mode. The brain in a lot of these conditions is in survival mode because it thinks it's under threat. Because of what it's been through. And we want to calm it down. We want to retrain it that we are safe, and then it can then thrive, be more neuroplastic, more flexible, and ultimately be healthy.

So you said you've done studies. What kind of studies and what are the outcomes? What have you seen?

Yeah, we've now done 6 clinical studies, 5 of which were completely independent by independent universities. And we've done 4 randomized controlled trials. So I'll give you some highlights of some of these RCTs. So the first one, we did a study— I say We— it was a university. They did a study on fibromyalgia, and they compared our treatments to a relaxation and meditation and relaxation response program over 8 weeks. And they found after just 8 weeks, there was close to a 40% reduction in fibromyalgia scores in the active Gupta program group, 0% in the control. And we had a halving of depression, halving of anxiety, a halving of pain, and a 50% increase in functional capacity. And that was way before we had our app and our daily events and various things. And so that was obviously a great result, a groundbreaking result actually. We did a study on long COVID and we compared our program to a wellness program. So this wellness program had diet changes, supplements, sleep advice, pacing, exercise, the full gamut. And after 3 months, the Gupta program was 4 times more effective at reducing fatigue and exhaustion. And it's very rare in a clinical study you get a 400% result. So this is a published study, people can read it. And a lot of those patients were able to go back to work. A lot of them were, you know, 60% better, some 80% better, some 100% better. But a 4— it was 4 times more effective than the traditional things we might prescribe. And then we just did a clinical audit, an independent clinical audit of our patients on about 300 patients, and we found that The Gupta program was effective and significant for 14 different conditions like Lyme, mold, burnout, anxiety, Long COVID. And we measured the percentage improvement after 3 months of using the Gupta program. So as an example, Long COVID, there was an 84% increase in health— functional health, so health capacity. Uh, chronic fatigue syndrome, I think, was a 76% improvement in functioning. Mold, there was a 67% improvement. And that was before we had the app and before we have our daily events, something we call daily Gupta size. These are daily Zoom calls where we know that patients are stressed out, they're isolated, they're not feeling motivated. So we say, if you can't follow the program, just come onto our daily Zoom calls. So we have 40, 50 coaches around— we're 40 coaches around the world. And they present these daily Gupta Size events, live Zoom calls taking people through nervous system regulation and the brain retraining Monday to Friday every day. And that's been a game changer. It really, really has increased people's speed in which they are healing. So these studies were done before we had those components, and we're doing further studies now. So we're just completing a study on Long COVID where we also did objective markers, because one of the critiques of this program or this approach can be Well, what happens if it's just a subjective impact? People just feeling better because, you know, they're in community, etc.? Said no, we believe it's objective. So we measured heart rate variability and we measured CRP, and we have found that we have doubled heart rate variability almost. So a massive improvement compared to the control group. And then secondly, with CRP, we've almost halved CRP. So we know there are inflammatory reductions in the body compared to the control group and autonomic symptoms. So we're tracking these objective data and future studies will have objective parameters within them as well.

So the one thing I will say, the one thing listeners I think should know is that this, this reprogram requires work, right? It's not just come hang out or take a pill and you're done. You actually have to work, work the program. And it takes time. So can you talk about the time requirement or commitment or what it takes to actually win with your program?

Yes.

So we describe it as, as we mentioned earlier, learning to drive a car or learning a musical instrument. You'll get as much out as you put in in terms of creating those new neural pathways. So if you drive a car for 2 lessons, you'll be able to drive it, but pretty badly, right? And it's not going to have lasting effects. So in a similar way, we advise patients to have a minimum of 20 to 30 minutes a day. Yeah, now of course, the people who have a chronic illness, for them it's overwhelmed their lives, so they're prepared to put that investment of time in. And the more time that people put in, the better the consequences, the better the effects they're going to have. So we say a minimum 20-30 minutes a day and little exercises throughout the day which are very simple to incorporate into daily life. And generally patients find that within weeks they'll notice differences. And of course it's, it's not a linear line of improvement, it tends to be an up and down. And we say minimum 3 months, a minimum commitment of 3 months, 20 to 30 minutes a day, and you'll see the improvements. And people say, oh, that seems like a lot of investment, but actually improves the efficiency of your day. So not only are you going to overcome your chronic condition,, but your brain is going to be calmer. You're going to feel happier. You're going to feel more in charge of your day. So it pays itself back in efficiency savings in the way that you conduct your life in any case.

I just have one question because this, this is largely geared for people with some type of chronic issue. What, uh, have you seen at all people who, like, I don't, I don't experience myself as having a, a big history of trauma, And right now I feel good. I was sick all of last year, but now I feel good. And I was thinking, okay, I feel pretty good energy. And how, how do people who don't have major complaints, I'm assuming they're not motivated to do the program, but it seems like it would be beneficial for people in terms of brain plasticity, neuroplasticity to prevent chronic disease and memory loss and brain dysfunction. It seems like this would be a good practice. Is that— do you have any data on that, like people who just do it because they want to be better?

We do. So we've just completed a study on older adults who were essentially experiencing, let's say, mild depression, memory loss, you know, the suite of different symptoms that older adults in their 50s and 60s may experience. And in that particular study— and I'll just actually bring up the results so I can give you the accurate results on that— so it was comparing once again the Gupta program, to a, um, a control group. And what we actually found was there were significant improvements in depression and in memory. So there was a 37% decrease in depression, 56% improvement in sleep, 26% improvement in working memory. Yeah, so there we're actually having active effects on working memory and a 37% decrease in emotional dysregulation. And that was a 12-week randomized controlled trial. So we believe that the tools in this program can benefit anybody because it's a toolkit. And so, for instance, I mean, anxiety is something that is now so pervasive in our population. Sometimes we're not even aware that we're anxious or that our nervous system is revved up. We know that breathwork and meditation on its own is very beneficial because it improves neuroplasticity, it calms the brain, it can improve executive function, and of course reduce inflammation. And improve memory. But combined with then the brain retraining, where you're able to be more in control of the patterns of your brain. So most of us, to some extent, are, uh, reactive. If some situation happens in our life, we're reactive to that situation. We don't have control over how our brain is responding with the thoughts, the emotions, the intensity. This program enables you to gain more of a perspective, more of a control over it. And therefore, I think many people can benefit. And I don't know if you're finding this, but what I'm finding, certainly amongst our patients, but in life in general amongst people, because of various screens, social media, so many people are far more on the edge in terms of their nervous systems. They're far more just on the edge of burnout, just on the edge of, I'm coping, but just about managing. And something like this, investing in their own health, investing in their mental well-being, is, and learning the skill set, I think is paramount in our civilization now.

Yeah. How can people find you?

And we'll put this in the show notes, by the way.

What, because this is amazing work and this is an amazing program. How do people find you? How, what's the best way to connect to you or your program?

Yes. Well, of course, in your, in your show notes, you'll put a link to our website, uh, guptaprogram.com. Obviously go through your link and There you'll find lots of information and people can join the free trial. So there's lots of videos, lots of audios that people use. They never buy our program, they just go ahead and get a huge amount of benefit just for the free content that we provide. So we'd love for people to enjoy that content. Or people can go to the App Store or Play Store and download the app and start retraining their brain straight away and learning more about their condition. So that's how they can find us. And in our Daily Gupta Size— so right at the moment, the first part of Daily Gupta Size, which is the Nervous System Regulation, we offer for free to the planet so anybody can join and be guided each day with a different regulation exercise. Great.

Thank you.

All right, we'll put that in the show notes. Ashok Gupta, thank you for being here. This is awesome. Thanks for spending the time. And for the listeners, thanks for listening to this episode of the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. We hope this was valuable for you. And Ashok, thank you so much for educating us on this because this is great.

It's an amazing program.

Been a pleasure. Thank you.

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