Dr. Aditi Nerurkar and Dave Asprey discuss how neuroplasticity lets you rewire your brain to handle stress better. They cover behavioral changes that build resilience and how your brain recovers from stress through science-backed methods.
There's been other probably more stressful times of famine and pestilence and plagues and wars throughout history, and we tend to survive. What happens to people who go through profound long term stress? Are they. Do they recover fully? Does it stick with them for life? What are the implications?
It's a case by case basis. So how you handle stress biologically, psychologically, emotionally and even spiritually depends on many factors. So of course your biology, but also environmental factors, genetics, your upbringing. There are so many factors. We know that the brain, because of this idea of neuroplasticity, which is a fancy scientific word that simply means that your brain is a muscle and responds to external stimuli. So it's not like the old scientific thinking, which was like the brain you got for life is. Is the brain you're going to have forever. It's the brain that you had at birth. It's like a real grab bag. Now we're learning through this science of neuroplasticity that your brain changes and evolves based on stimuli. And so a lot of my work has focused on this idea of neuroplasticity, that you have the ability to change your brain through your behaviors.
Wow.
And so even if you may have had a difficult time in childhood, early. We know that early childhood trauma, adverse effects that happen in childhood, can of course influence your stress response later in life. And yes, it is important to normalize and validate those difficult experiences if you have them, to seek therapy, trauma, informed care, and all of that. But also to understand that you can, over time, with patience, practice and perseverance, help rewire your brain for less stress and more resilience through the mechanism of neuroplasticity.
It was a huge honor for me to interview Dr. Eric Kandel, who won the Nobel Prize for his work documenting neuroplasticity. And then to be on Dr. Daniel Amen's board of directors now for Amen Clinics, where he's got more than half a million brain scans. And it proves beyond a reasonable doubt that your brain will change when you change the environment around you, when you change your stress exposure and change your stress response. So this is something we can do. And in my. The book that I haven't published yet, the one I'm in the middle of writing now, I'm going through all the different ways we know of that allows you to rewire the brain more quickly, more effectively.
