Why Are You Still Stuck? 5 Hidden Brain-Body Patterns & How to Retrain Them

Hello and a warm, warm welcome to our live event with myself, Ashok Gupta. I'm really glad that you could join us on this particular live event. And today we're going to be talking about some of the 5 hidden brain patterns that might be keeping you stuck with your condition. All right. And of course, as we go through this particular event, we'd love for you to share this on your social media, sure that you're sharing with friends, family, support groups, so that we can get more of this information out to people. And of course, please send us a like. You can like our channels and of course send a like for today's event as well. We always welcome that. So to give you a bit of background, my name is Ashok Gupta. I'm founder and CEO of the Gupta Program, and we've spent the last 20 years supporting people with chronic illnesses such as fibromyalgia, long COVID, mold illness, chronic fatigue syndrome, POTS, MCAS, all of these mysterious conditions that people find it difficult to treat in the mainstream. And what we've learned over the last 20 to 25 years is that these conditions are not in the mind. All right, so the first thing to say is that as we go through today's session, the number one thing is You may have been told, you may have gone from pillar to post, doctors, support groups, physicians, being told that there's no obvious reason for your condition or that it's in your head. But I want to give you that reassurance that actually this is something which is a real physical condition with real physical symptoms. And we believe that these conditions are caused and perpetuated in the unconscious brain. So the unconscious brain, that is where the action is. That's where we believe there's a conditioning effect. So let me describe what we're going to be doing in today's live session, what we're going to be going through, and how you can benefit from today's session. So firstly, what I'm going to do is talk about the overall hypothesis, like what causes these types of chronic illnesses, chronic conditions. But the main part of what we're going to talk about, what are these hidden brain patterns that are keeping us stuck? And this is relevant for people who have just recently got diagnosed and haven't really been doing any active brain retraining, right through to people who are doing brain retraining, doing a lot of the work that we talk about in our program, but are still finding that they're feeling stuck. And I want you to know that I've been where you are. I've been through my own chronic condition many, many years ago, so I know exactly how this condition feels and also what are the ways that we can heal and we can get through and get our lives back. Yeah, so this is such important information, so once again, please do share this with friends and family, support groups, so we can get the message out there about these patterns. So the first thing to say here is that When it comes to the brain, traditionally in medicine, we've looked at what we can physically measure. So medicine has talked about the muscles, the bones, the gut, things that we can physically measure. And the brain has always been this kind of black box. Yeah. And so therefore, most mainstream treatments involve things that may already have tried— pacing, supplements, You may have tried medications, yeah? And then you may have looked at things that actually support the brain, such as meditation, nervous system regulation, but still find that actually the symptoms may go away sometimes, come back, but there isn't a consistent long-term recovery path. And often when I speak to functional medicine doctors, naturopaths, nutritionists, they say a similar thing as well, that the condition never fully goes away. but then seems to kind of come back. And I think that chronic symptoms become persistent because of this training of the brain, this conditioning of the brain. And once again, this is a hypothesis and there's many different hypotheses as to what causes things like long COVID, chronic fatigue syndrome, et cetera. But this is all about what resonates with you. So we're going to look at that hypothesis, then look at some of these unconscious brain patterns that maybe magnifying this perpetuation of symptoms. And then we're going to do a little exercise together to help us identify what some of those patterns could be for you personally. So I want you to go away with some very practical tools that you can use straight away. Okay. So in terms of our hypothesis as to what causes these types of conditions, we call it the neuroimmune hypothesis or amygdala-insular Hypothesis. And what we believe is that the number one principle here is survival. So the brain is one big survival machine. It wants you to survive. That's based on evolutionary biology. So in terms of what keeps us alive, it is about these protection mechanisms. And our 2 main protection mechanisms are our nervous system and immune system. They're those two main systems, and when we have a threat, and the threat can be a physical threat, it can be a biological threat, it can be a toxic threat, can be a viral or bacterial threat. Our systems are designed to recognize that threat, then be able to adapt to that threat through responding to that threat. Yeah, threat detection. threat response. But imagine that if survival is the number one priority, you can see that if our system is weak, then those reactive systems or defense systems may get stuck in an over-response because they're over-defending, overprotecting your body to ensure survival. And so it's very easy. You know, we give that example of The brain cares more about your survival than it does your wellbeing. And that I think people can kind of resonate with and connect with that kind of principle. So brain cares more about your survival than it does your wellbeing. And so in terms of these protection loops, the brain, even after the original threat may have gone, it keeps deciding that the threat is still there. And we see this in pain as well. So even Pain syndromes, unexplained pain syndromes. Now this kind of model is being accepted more and more. So the brain keeps overstimulating the nervous system, overstimulating the immune system, which then causes lots of downstream issues in the body. And I want to just actually share with you a couple of slides if I can, because I think actually bringing this alive with something visual would really help here. So I'm just going to share with you. Okay, so hopefully you can see this slide here. So there tend to be these precipitating factors. So there may be a genetic predisposition to having your condition. There may be some lifestyle, psychosocial, environmental influences. And finally, at number 3, we have the the virus, the bacteria, the toxin, et cetera. So it's essentially your brain and its history combined with some kind of physical illness. And then what we find is as a result of these things, there's a maladaptive neuroimmune response in 2 brain structures, the amygdala and the insula at number 4. And don't worry too much about this hypothesis. It's online. You can kind of visit it. at a deeper level another time, but essentially, I'm just giving you the bare bones here. The combination of these 3 factors can mean there's a conditioning event in the brain. The brain learns to overreact, overrespond to ensure survival at number 4. And as a result of that, at number 5, it overstimulates your sympathetic nervous system. It has immune dysfunction. So the immune system now is inefficient because it's getting overstimulated unnecessarily at certain points. There's lots of other kind of mediating factors such as the hypothalamus pituitary adrenal axis that becomes abnormal, sometimes diagnosed as adrenal fatigue. But really, my view is that it's the system itself is under responsive. That causes the symptoms at number six. Then those symptoms that we often see in these conditions, so muscle dysfunction, pain, sleep issues, cognitive difficulties, feeling exhausted after any kind of exercise. Autonomic dysfunction, gut issues, immuno symptoms—the whole gamut—and also mitochondria dysfunction. So we know that the mitochondria may go into cell danger response and not function correctly, and those symptoms then loop back at number eight to a hypersensitive brain, and the brain thinks I'm still in danger. So the symptoms at number six become a proxy for the original. Illness, the virus, the bacteria. Now the brain is not only responding to the virus or bacteria; it's responding to any environmental happenstance that was there when the virus or bacteria is there. In this case, the symptoms in the body. So now the brain and body get stuck in a loop and start reacting and responding to each other. And that's this full neuroimmune hypothesis you can see on our website. And so, as a result of that, the brain gets stuck. It's over responding, and once it gets stuck into that loop, there's something called predictive processing where the brain now starts predicting that those symptoms will occur. And that's where the brain has now got trained. That's where neuroplasticity has gone in a way that we didn't want it to. And of course, once again reinforcing that it's not saying it's in the mind. but that it's in the unconscious brain. All right? So that's our hypothesis there, that the brain is stuck in an over-response, reacting to itself and overreacting to any future threats. Now, that process occurs unconsciously, without conscious intervention, without conscious awareness. All right? But there are certain things that are also happening unconsciously, which we can bring to conscious awareness, which may be magnifying that survival response. All right. And this is really the kind of core content we want to go through today. And I want you to reflect on, can you recognize any of these unconscious patterns? Once again, not in the mind, but a subtle clue as to what the unconscious brain is actually doing, the amygdala and insula. The first one is hypervigilance. So naturally, when the brain is in a survival response, it will monitor the environment to see, are we safe? And when we monitor how our body is doing, how are my legs feeling? Have I got a foggy head? Do I have energy? That hypervigilance is perfectly normal. But what that hypervigilance does is inform the amygdala and the insular parts of the brain that we're still in danger. So it reinforces that perceived threat that the brain has and can, without us realizing it, magnify this survival loop. All right? And once again, that's not our fault. It's happening unconsciously, but we can just become aware of that particular loop. And that's one loop that we can retrain, that hypervigilance on our physical body and our physical symptoms. It's almost like the brain finds it hard to divert itself to think about something else. It becomes fixated. And this also is part of the default mode network. So the default mode network actually gets hijacked by the amygdala, and therefore we can't just be still with our mind not thinking about anything. It starts reinforcing. The second one is when, as a result of that hypervigilance, when the brain is detecting symptoms in the body, unconsciously informs the rest of the brain that we are in danger. But the clue that we become aware of consciously is that catastrophizing, that feeling of dread when we sense that we have symptoms in our body. Yeah. Do we, do we notice that, that feeling of dread, that feeling of, oh no, not again, the symptoms are back and feeling a victim of those symptoms in our body. So that's a catastrophizing phase. And connected to catastrophizing is the eternalizing. Where the brain may unconsciously fear, when will this go away? Maybe we're going to have this forever, and then continues to once again overstimulate, keeps overstimulating the brain. So it gets another type of loop there. The 3rd loop that's reinforcing can be the boom-bust cycle. So many of our clients, what they notice is there'll be a certain phase where they're able to do a bit more. And naturally when we can do more, we then may easily overdo it. And that's once again, nobody's fault. It's just the process of overdoing things. And as a result of overdoing things, the brain then says, ah, we're in danger. Now, something very subtle here that's important. When we first got our condition or when you first got your condition, Can you remember that there may have been a period of prolonged stress combined with virus, bacteria, toxin, mold, chemicals, etc.? And that period of extended stress, notice, was there an element of pushing, overdoing? Yeah, and it doesn't have to be emotional. It can be Emotional stress, physiological stress, can be repeated infections, can be a whole host of different stresses that the brain perceives. And so the brain can then get stuck where it thinks anything that reminds me of overdoing it means that we're putting our life in danger because when I first got the condition, I was stressed and that stress reduced the effectiveness of my immune system. Therefore, Now, if any of those things come back or little clues about what was happening at that time, I must once again overstimulate the immune and nervous system. So the brain becomes very sensitive and it says anything that compromises immunity, anything that compromises survival, we must respond to. That's the maladaptive defense response. Therefore, we go through a boom-bust cycle where we do a certain amount of activity. The brain perceives it as dangerous and compromising our survival, and then overprotects once again with overstimulation of those two defense systems. So this is also a subtle pattern that we can recognize and think, how can I become more aware of when I'm overdoing it? Even if I perceive that it's not, where may my brain perceive that I'm pushing too hard, overdoing it, getting too stressed, which then may mean that it pulls me back. So that's another unconscious pattern. The 4th one is pressure around recovery. So often when we have chronic disease, a chronic inflammatory condition, it can really feel like I need to research my way out of this. How am I going to get out of this? That becomes the Number one priority. And that pressure means that we resist what is so right now. Now, why does the brain do this? The brain is going to throw up all kinds of emergency experiences or thoughts to get you to do something about the situation. So once again, nothing abnormal here. The brain is simply asking, There is this condition we are experiencing. There are symptoms. What are you going to do about it? You need to take action right now on this, which gives you then that feeling of resistance in the body. So sometimes we find it hard to just be and inhabit our bodies because our bodies are actually— we're trying to almost escape our bodies because of the uncomfortable feelings. We dissociate from our bodies. So that can increase the level of Urgency. It can increase the level of detective work. So we go onto the internet madly researching things, trying to figure it out. We're constantly frustrated trying to fix things. So that might mean we get overstressed by trying to fix this situation. And then that can yo-yo between pressure to heal and then a feeling of helplessness where I can't do it. I give up. We feel helpless with the condition. So it can yo-yo between those 2 experiences. So the unconscious pattern is that pressure to recover, that pressure to fix it right now. And that doesn't allow us to really be in our bodies and in the present moment, and there's a continual feeling of resistance. A final 5th pattern, and there are many patterns, but these are just a few that I wanted to share today. A hidden unconscious pattern can be regulating without retraining. So often we speak to people saying, oh yes, I'm doing the kind of things that you do in the Gupta Program. I'm doing some yoga, I'm meditating, I'm relaxing, I'm doing the things that we normally need to do. But this is differentiating nervous system regulation from brain retraining. Calming our overall nervous system can be very beneficial towards our health and well-being, but it doesn't necessarily change the unconscious learnt patterns that the brain has to protect us. And it's differentiating the two there. Finally, there is also patterns which are related to some of the deeper reasons behind our condition. Now, sometimes these conditions in their protective response are reflecting on something that happened in the 1 or 2 years before we got our condition. There can be a message to say there was a way that we were living our lives which was not conducive to our long-term well-being. It can be a protection mechanism. And whilst this might sound pseudoscientific, actually it's very natural. It's a scientific concept in the sense that if your brain perceives that you working too hard on a laptop compromises your immunity, then the brain can recognize that and say, ah, I'm going to give this person an immune and nervous system over-response when they go back on their laptop. So we had a patient of ours many years ago, and I give this example because I think many people can relate to it. He was recovering using our program. He got up to about 70-80% recovery and then was thinking about going back to work a few days a week. And he would have a very strange phenomenon he noticed where when he opened his laptop and was literally just working for a few minutes, He'd have this intense and huge return of the symptoms, and it couldn't have been anything related to just a few minutes on his laptop. And when we went deeper, we recognized that the intelligence of his body was looking back to when he first got the condition, when he was working 14 hours a day on a laptop. And so we can see that the brain in that intelligence is saying, ah, you working on a laptop. That is not good for our health and wellbeing. I'm going to shut this down, overprotect you. So that's another subtle unconscious pattern that will be unique to all of us. And it's for us to uncover what those patterns are. And that's a lot of the work that we do in the Gupta Program to unravel these systems of protection so that we can reset the nervous system, reset the immune system, and get health and recovery back to the body. Great, so that's kind of overview. So I'd like us to do a short exercise now, so I hope you can just get comfortable, make sure that you're not going to be interrupted. And by the way, once again, we'd love for you to share our particular stream today, so please share it on your social media, please like and comment, please like and subscribe to our channels. And we're going to be creating a lot more of this type of content over the coming weeks and months. So we'd love for you to be able to take advantage of it. And once again, myself and all our team here at the Gupta Program, we're all here for you. Yeah, we're all dedicated in our passion to supporting people healing from chronic conditions that the doctor says, well, not much more we can do. So once again, please do share this with others. Okay, so let's do a short exercise. So what I'd like you to do Is I'd like you to close your eyes, please. And let's take a slow, deep breath in from the stomach. And breathe out. Another energizing breath in. And let go. In keeping our eyes closed, just notice our brain's perception of our body and the condition. Which of these brain patterns that are normally unconscious do we notice? We tune into our intuition right now. So tuning into your gut, not consciously thinking about your answers. But just allowing your gut feel to come up. Do you have the pattern of hypervigilance on your body and your symptoms? Just noticing and acknowledging if that is part of your experience. When you notice the sensations in your body, do you notice a strong resistance to those signals and symptoms? Does your brain react to those symptoms? Eternalizing it, feeling like this is going on and on. Let's take a slow, deep breath in, and breathing out with a smile, just tuning back into our intuition. Do we notice? That boom-bust cycle where we have some respite from the condition, we do some activity, and then we notice almost like our brain sees activity as danger. And a threat to survival, and once again overstimulates the nervous and immune system. Just tune into your intuition about what your brain is doing. Taking another slow, deep breath in and breathing out. Do you observe any pressure that you feel about needing to recover from this condition? Do you notice that perfectionism, trying to fix yourself continually, that detective work? Is that an unconscious brain pattern you can now bring to awareness? And finally, is there any pattern around feeling that regulating your nervous system Is all you need to do versus the deeper work of retraining the brain. Is there any bias there? Finally, do you notice any other patterns? We can make a commitment going forward to become more aware of these types of brain patterns. That may be fueling and magnifying the defense systems, the nervous system and immune system. And through that awareness, we can gradually retrain some of these patterns for our health and our happiness. Inspiring ourselves today that no matter what a doctor may have said, or a support group, or anyone else, recovery is possible. Health is your birthright. To keep inspiring yourself each day with that hope and faith that you will recover. Let's take a slow, deep breath in. And breathe out. Another energizing breath in. And let go. And when you're ready, when you feel complete, you can just gently Open your eyes. Okay, welcome back, everybody. So hopefully that exercise was useful to just tune into these hidden unconscious brain-body patterns which might be magnifying some of these cycles, these loops in the brain that can contribute to this maladaptive system. And what I want to inspire you to think about is that The nervous system regulation that has become very common, very popular, is just our first step. You know, whether it's breathing, whether it's meditation, whether it's somatic work, they're all brilliant. And they're the first step of that preparation for the brain retraining. Because when our brain becomes more neuroplastic, we can retrain the brain and get to the core issue, which is our brain has learned something new. And we call it retraining. Strictly speaking, it's detraining. detraining the mind from that protective response. Okay, good. So what we're going to be doing now is I want to let you know, firstly, in terms of our program, there's lots of research in our programs. We now have 7 published clinical studies on our program and 40 across 14 different conditions, all showing that across many different conditions, we have between a 60 to 100% improvements in health and functioning after 3 months of using the Gupta Program. You can find this on our research page on our website. So I'd love for you to explore some of those studies. And the exciting thing is we've got those 7 studies, 5 randomized controlled trials. We have a couple of new randomized controlled trials coming out and some of the pre-publication data. So one is on long COVID showing that we're having really powerful results on long COVID and objective measures showing that we're reducing CRP levels and inflammatory markers in the body by 70 to 80%. reducing POTS symptoms by 70 to 80%, and really having a dramatic effect on the overall symptomatology of long COVID. So that's a new RCT that we published soon, and we look forward to sharing those results with you. And also with mold illness, we've just completed— or it's an independent study on mold illness— and that found, compared to a control group, that there was a 20 to 30% reduction in mold symptoms after 3 months. and close to a halving of symptoms after 6 months. So once again, just through brain retraining. So these are very exciting randomized controlled trials. They're finally putting even more science behind the work that we're doing, and I'll be sharing that over the next few months. And just to let you know, we'll be starting our next webinar series. So every few months we start a new webinar series, a 3-month structured program, what we call the 90-day program. And we're going to be starting that on Monday, the 21st of September. So now's a great time to have a look at our program, see if it's right for you. And we're gonna be going onto a Zoom call right now where I'm gonna be answering your questions in a more personal capacity. So please do join us for that. So our team will now put in the Zoom link into the chat, and hopefully you can join us for our next event on Zoom. And on that Q&A, we're going to be answering your questions about your experiences in relation to these brain patterns and your questions about how brain retraining can actually support you through to recovery. So I hope you can join us on that. It's been put into the chat, so you can click that link and that will take you to our live Zoom call. starting that about 10 minutes or so, a quarter to the hour. And once again, our 3-month program, our 90-day structured program has been very, very popular with people. So it's something where rather than us having to figure all of this stuff out, you can actually be given a certain amount of things to do each day. And when you do those things each day, it means that you don't need to think about it. you've got brain fog, you're not sure which things you need to be doing each day, the structured 90-day program has been incredibly popular amongst our clients, amongst people suffering from a range of different conditions. And that particular type of approach, I hope that you get to experience. So once again, more information on our website, guptaprogram.com. You can visit our website. And our program is a 1-year subscription and it comes with a 1-year money-back guarantee as well. So until we get the really, really large-scale trials, we offer a 1-year money-back guarantee, no questions asked. So, you know, we want to reduce the risk as much as possible. So encourage you to take that next step, take brain retraining and see where it leads for your health and happiness. Okay, so all that's left for me to do is we look forward to seeing you on the the Q&A. And please do click the Zoom link and we'll see you on that Q&A. And I wish you all the best with your health and happiness, with your recovery, and just that inspiration that whatever's happened in your life, you deserve that recovery. You can do it. So keep going. Thanks everyone. See you next time. Bye. Bye.