A short transcript excerpt of a talk by Ashok Gupta explaining why people with chronic illness experience cycles of improvement and sudden 'dips'. Gupta frames the condition as driven by the brain's over-defensive responses (a reversible "software" problem rather than fixed tissue damage) that can be retrained; temporary dips after improvement are expected and manageable within the program.
Right. This is a very interesting neurological quandary. When we actually get better, and it could be for a whole host of different reasons, the brain begins to calm down and think we're no longer in danger. I can now calm down the immune system, nervous system, and allow the body to come back to its normal homeostasis, which is the definition of then the healing. Suddenly there can be one or two triggers that we may not be consciously aware of that can trigger the brain to go back into its over defensive state again. Which is why we can suddenly feel better for a while, but suddenly have a dip. And the good news here is that it's a software problem, not a hardware problem. Because if it was a hardware problem, then your, your system would just be broken all the time, or it would just have some physiological damage. If you break your leg, you break your leg. But we know that this condition is a program of cycle of ups and downs. So we have good days, bad days, good weeks, bad weeks. And if you think about it, that makes total sense because the brain is getting over defensive. It over defends, over defends, triggers this relapse. Gradually we get better because we are able to calm down that defensive response. But if the brain detects any other potential dangers, and we often don't know what those are, totally unconscious, then it can trigger the physiology to then put us back into that state. But as we say with the program, even with the program, once you've retrained, if you have a dip, we don't call them relapses, but if you have a dip, it's okay that retrading hasn't been lost. You will be able to gradually get yourself back to where you were.
