Brain Retraining and Recovery from Chronic Fatigue and Anxiety: The Power of #Neuroplasticity

Hi, and welcome to how humans heal. I'm Dr. Donny Wilson. In this episode, I'm really excited to introduce you to Ashok. He is the founder of the Gupta Program, and he's been researching and teaching about limbic retraining for, I don't know, decades. So I'm so excited that he's here with us today because his work is helping people with chronic conditions, both emotional and physical. Chronic conditions from anxiety to chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, long Covid. These are conditions that people are suffering with for a lot of their life and looking for answers and solutions. And Ashok has identified and developed a solution that he actually offers through an app that you can use on your phone. Thank you so much for joining us today, Ashok. I'm so glad you're here.

Yeah. Thank you, Donny, for the invitation. I'm super excited for this conversation.

Absolutely. I mean, I. This is so needed. Your work and your app is so needed in our world today. And so thank you, first of all, for all of your work of doing this. And it's my understanding is it's based on your own healing experience that you figured this out. Tell us more, like, how you even. Because this is not like you're doing something that someone else really already created. You're doing something you figured out.

Yes. And like many of us who've come into this healing profession, we're doing it because we've been through our own challenges and our own healing journeys and wanting to share that with others. So my journey started in the mid-90s. So I was studying as an undergrad at Cambridge, and I had some kind of virus, and the virus seemed to go away, but I felt worse and worse, and I seemed to go downhill with my health to the point at which I was exhausted. I couldn't even walk to the bathroom. I couldn't read the words on a page. Everything just seemed to be shutting down. And I went from doctor to doctor. And remember, in the mid-90s, these conditions weren't really recognized. It was all seen as, oh, that's just depression. It's yuppie flu. It's, you know, it's something that's just in your head. And they would. The doctors would tell me, we don't know what you have. We don't really know what to call it. You might have this for the rest of your life. We have no treatment. Goodbye. And we call it ME Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. But that's really a label, and we really don't know. And that started my lifelong quest to try and understand these conditions. And I'd met hundreds of others and I made a contract with the universe and I said, if I can just get myself, Even if it's 50% well, 80% well, I will dedicate the rest of my life to helping others with these conditions because they are debilitating, they're life threatening in the sense of your quality of life. And I then managed to, in an ad hoc way, retrain my brain. So I discovered a lot of brain neurology, understood what was going on for me, retrained my brain, and got 100% well, this is in the mid-90s. And then set up a clinic to treat others. And then since then, we published randomized controlled trials, clinical audits, and now have an app. So it's been a real journey over the last 30 years or so to get to where we are.

Amazing, really amazing. And such dedication. And to. And two, I know what you mean. When you feel better, you just want to share it with others. You're like, why should anyone else have to suffer and struggle when, as you mentioned, the standard approach kind of leaves people with no answers other than maybe medications for pain or anxiety or, you know, stimulants for energy. Those are not real solutions in terms of being able to solve what's really going on. So tell us a little more. So. So everyone understands, like, what is the concept? Like you mentioned the nervous system and neuroplasticity. Tell us more. Like, how is it that healing the nervous system can have such an impact on these chronic conditions?

Yes, well, to answer that question, I'd like to start with the biggest question of all in the universe. Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? And Donny, I'm sure we can have a wonderful conversation about that at some future point from a philosophical and spiritual perspective. But let's take the science of it. Why are we here? We're here because over millions of years of evolution, our nervous system, our immune system, those are our two main systems have evolved from plant life to single cell organisms, to invertebrates, vertebrates, mammals, human beings. We contain that DNA. And an amazing fact I learned recently, we contain 40% of the same DNA as a banana. Which is incredible, really, isn't it? As a statistic. What it shows is that our systems are designed to adapt to our environment, survive, procreate, and pass on our genes to the next generation. We really are like survival machines, if you want to call it that. That gives us the first clue to why these illnesses occur. Whether they're emotional illnesses or physical Illnesses, the brain cares more about your survival than it does your well being. Wellbeing is not so important. That doesn't necessarily mean that's going to influence whether you pass on your genes or not. But survival, that's really super important. So that gives us a clue. And so the way that these illnesses often start is that when we go through some kind of illness or attack. So that could be a virus, bacterial infection, mold exposure, chemical exposure, those are the main ones we have. Our bodies and our immune systems fight back. So they get triggered, they fight off that particular infection, and the whole system goes back to balance. But now imagine that the system is weak, weaker than normal because of ongoing stress or infections or whatever it may be. Then something crazy happens, which is the brain errs on the side of caution and starts over defending and to bring this really to life. Donnie, I'd love to give a great example here, the fairy tale analogy that we use. Right. So are you a fan of fairy tales? I'm sure everyone is. So imagine you are Queen, Donnie, of your kingdom, okay? And your kingdom represents your body.

And your body has an army, which is your nervous system, and a navy, which is your immune system. And your army and navy work together to protect this wonderful kingdom, this wonderful body. But now imagine that there is a drought in the kingdom. So because of the drought, obviously the army and navy are weaker. The whole kingdom is weaker as a result. And in comes an invading army over the hill again. Now, this time, the army and navy fight valiantly. They try to defend the kingdom, and they managed to fight off the invading army, but it takes a lot longer than it might normally because the soldiers are weak. And now the army and navy generals are a bit traumatized by that war. And they think, what happens if we didn't get rid of the invader? What happens if they're hiding in the forest or hiding behind a mountain? We should keep ourselves on red alert just in case they're around. So they come to you, Queen Donny, and they say, queen Donny, we need all the resources of the kingdom now because the kingdom nearly fell because we're weak. So give us all the clean water, the food, the metal, everything, channel it towards us. And they keep firing off their weapons of war, which is the inflammation, the, you know, the nervous system being overstimulated to defend the kingdom in case the threat is still present. But some of those arrows start falling back in the kingdom. And that's when we get the stress induced effects. So the oxidative stress, the autoimmune Effects, the inflammatory effects, the exhaustion, the fatigue, the gut dysbiosis, all of this is occurring because our army and navy are firing off their weapons of war too much and trying to hyper defend the kingdom. So you can see now already we've got a state of a lack of balance in the system and exhaustion, fatigue, stress, et cetera. But not only that. Now opportunistic infections start flourishing in the kingdom because we can't detoxify as well, we can't fight off these infections. So now that causes secondary problems. And so the whole system is now exhausted, fatigued, autoimmune effects, inflammatory effects, and this is why we see so many common symptoms amongst all these different illnesses. And of course, the generals keep coming to their weekly meeting with Queen Donnie, and you naturally tell them, yes, keep defending, keep defending. The whole system becomes chronic, where the brain stimulates the nervous system and immune system, which circles and creates the symptoms in our body and the gut dysbiosis that then circles back to the hypervigilant brain, which then thinks we're still in danger, triggers, causes the symptoms in the body, and around and around we go, creating the cycle of chronic illness. This can be relevant for a number of different illnesses. So neuroimmune illnesses, so long Covid, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, but then also pain. So pain syndromes often occur because this whole system has got out of balance and we're now in danger mode. Then autoimmune illnesses and sensitivity reactions, so MCAs, so mass cell activation, mold illness, all those sensitivity and environmental illnesses we believe are all caused by this overstimulation in the brain and brain retraining and neuroplasticity says, when those army and navy generals come to their next meeting with Queen Donnie, you say to them, my dear generals, you have done a wonderful job at defending the kingdom, but the war is over. Please stand down. Now, of course, the first time you say that to the army generals, they'll think this is a trick. We are in danger, the kingdom's going to fall. We have to defend. But through neuroplasticity, which is the idea of repetition, again and again and again, we create new neural pathways and networks that eventually train the brain that we are safe. Yeah. And that is a tricky thing because. Not a tricky thing, it's. It's a repetitive thing because your brain is defending against a danger that could potentially be life threatening. So it's that repetition that makes it work. So that, in a nutshell, is both why our nervous system and immune system become dysregulated. And then how we can re regulate them back to health.

Oh, such a great explanation. I love that analogy of, you know, thinking about it from that perspective of army and Navy and, and how our system is, as you're saying. I talk about this too in my work. Like, you know, we have a built in stress response system and it's going to want to do its job and we can't just, you know, this is why sometimes like oh, just reduce your stress or be stress free. It's not going to work because our system is going to want, our system's going to want to protect us. Survival is the ultimate job, you know, of our systems that we live in. So finding ways to, how do we retrain it, how do we help it so that we can live in harmony in our system, you know. Yes, have it ready to protect us when necessary, but not protect us all the time so that it becomes something that causes chronic illness. Right. I think that's what you're describing exactly right.

You've hit it on the nail there that really our systems are finely tuned to protect us from dangers. But because of so many different factors, and we can talk about those factors because of so many factors from our childhood and all the things we're being attacked by in our normal environments, these systems, these refined systems have become over triggered, trigger happy, overstimulated, which is now causing the pandemic, the new pandemic of anxiety and stress and depression in the modern world. It's because as we said, that core principle, your brain cares more about your survival than it does your happiness and wellness. And that ultimately is what it comes down to.

Absolutely, absolutely. And so neuroplasticity is a relatively new concept. You know, we used to think that our nervous system was set in stone and couldn't change. And I'm sure that people may have even been told that by their practitioners, you know, that there's. And for a long time we thought it was all genetics. And to your point, now we know, based on the banana story, it's not just all about genetics. It's not set in stone. It's not like a predetermined thing. We can actually take steps through, like you're saying, repetition to retrain, to shift these neurological pathways so that we can erase the effects of stress from the past and be able to move forward. And if you don't mind, would you be able to just describe a little bit about what are those exercises? What are those techniques that you guide people through that that helps retrain the nervous System.

Sure. So our program does not use any invasive devices, any vagus nerve stimulators, et cetera. This is all done through the power of the brain. And the reason we do that is because we want this to be long lasting. Because sometimes if you use an external device, you're still reliant on, on that thing. And so our program essentially has three hours of the program. And we call this the wings of a dove. So how does a dove fly? A dove needs two wings and it needs a tail feathers. So the two wings, the first wing is relaxing the nervous system, regulating the nervous system. Because our brains are not flexible when they're stressed. So imagine, you know, a couple come together, husband or wife or whatever, come together after a hard, stressful day at work. And when they come together, they're both stressed out. Now, do you think they're going to be flexible to understand each other's point of view in that moment? No.

Oh, no. It's just gonna get tighter and tighter.

Exactly. Because we're not flexible, we're stressed. Right. And so we need to calm our minds down before we're ready to be flexible and neuroplastic. So our first port of call is let's relax the nervous system. And we use lots of different tools and techniques like somatic work, breath work, meditation, visualization, and we find the tools that fit for each client. Then the second wing of the dove is retraining the brain. And that's the unique aspect of our program. So we have a specialized seven step process that incorporates self awareness, repetition, imagination, self coaching parts work, all of these things integrated into a very slick seven step process that we believe models human design and human change, essentially. So that's another technique, and we use somatic retraining as well that we've developed and a whole host of different techniques to train the brain that we are safe, that we are not in the same danger that we were at the beginning of the condition. And an example of this is, let's take mold illness. Lots of people now are suffering from mold illness. What happens is at one point in time in our lives, we had no sensitivity to mold. And remember, mold is endemic. Most properties in the US have mold in them to some degree. And we didn't react to that, but we suddenly had an exposure, and that might be what we call 100% exposure, where the brain perceived that as dangerous because it was a high level of toxicity. Our brain then makes a decision, mold is dangerous. We must react to mold through this allergic response. But then what happens is, because the brain is efficient the next time it's in an exposure. Now even a 5% exposure of the original exposure creates 100% reaction. So the brain gets trained to over defend. And so with our seven step process and all these different retraining tools, we're training the brain not to forget about it, but just have a normal level of sensitivity, a normal level of response to those pathogens, whether it's viruses or our own symptoms in our body, or even mold or environmental toxins. So that's really what retraining is about, is normalizing all of that.

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And the third tail feather of the dove is what we call re engaging with joy, which is for someone to get well and stay well. We can become aware of our stress patterns. What are the things that cause us stress and trigger our stress? What do we trigger happy towards? And we use a lot of parts coaching there and also the great tools and mindfulness to support people that for the rest of your life. Now being on top of your stress is super important and these are the tools and this is the lifestyle that matter. We even call it the Gupta lifestyle that you live for the rest of your life. And another tool, Donnie, that's been a game changer, has been something called daily Gupta SAIS so the secret of neuroplasticity is repetition. It's a bit like if you meditate, if you meditate once a week, that's great, but it's not going to be anything like meditating every day. That's super important. So in a similar way, brain retraining is more powerful and it's done every day. So we know that patients are isolated and alone. So we have daily sessions on Zoom for nervous system regulation and brain retraining run by our coaches. And that has been a game changer. Like we have 200 people a day coming on that, experiencing the exercises, lots more people listening to the recordings. And that gives people motivation, a sense of community, and of course the woo aspect. If you have 200 people with that collective intention, healing together in a room, meditating, the depth of that experience is far more powerful than us meditating on our own. So that's another key feature of the program, as well as weekly webinars with myself. So there's a whole ecosystem of support and community for people healing that's really.

Beautiful and amazing and that you've been able to bring in so many of these healing modalities into a usable form because as you're saying, these are things that people can access from anywhere in the world because they can be coming on the Zoom session, they can be coming on to do the goop decides together or listening to a recording and they can use the app. Is it like that where people start? Like they start at the beginning and they work their way through and they start to work in the community and, and what do you find? Like when do people start to usually report a difference? Like at what point in that process?

Yeah, so people use the app and in the app we've hopefully structured it super simple for people that they just follow each video session and they even have a checklist of things that they work through. And of course people have to take it at their own pace. So we deal with people who are bedbound, you know, who have very little energy. So they just start with some gentle breath work and self awareness techniques and build themselves up. And of course we have at the other scale, people are working almost full time and for some patients they put the program into practice and within days they can start noticing the results and starting seeing the improvements. Others it takes weeks, others it takes months. And so it really is how long is a piece of string. But generally we like to say within a few months people will start seeing that recovery and that improvement. And that's where repetition comes in because it is the number one issue we face is complacency. The people retrain their brain, they start healing and they think, yeah, I'm at 80% great. I've got rid of that illness, now I'm going to be on this upward trajectory. But of course, they become complacent with their stress levels and then dips can happen. So it's super important that people continue and make it part of their lifestyle. And it is a bit like whether you are looking at, you know, getting to your optimal body figure or you're looking to have a new regime at the gym, you can't just go in and say you're going to do it for a month and that's it. It's an ongoing maintenance, an ongoing process of making it part of your lifestyle.

Yeah, I love to hear you talk about this because it, it amazingly completely aligns with what I've seen over the past couple decades of helping patients heal and what I also write about in my book, the Mastery of Stress Reset yout Health book. I talk about starting with phase one of calming phase, getting out of that stress mode, stress response, just the same way you just spoke about. And then phase two of, like, the retraining, the rebalancing, the recovering, and then the phase three, which is what I refer to as resiliency, what you're talking about as one of the things we then integrate in our day to day to maintain. Because of course we're going to have other stresses come in, whether it's a virus or life, stress is going to happen. But we want to use these tools now to help us protect ourselves and recover in the moment instead of having it set us right back where we started from again. And this is like, really helps me to see how well the Gupta program aligns with the work that I do and makes me so excited because I wanted to announce to everyone that Ashok and I are making it possible for you to use both of our work together. So you're going to be able to access the Gupta program as, as a patient of mine through the patient portal and being able to then access his, the whole Gupta program that he just described. Of course, you can also access. And I'll have links for you. You can access the Gupta program directly. If you'd like to go directly and work with Ashok, you can do that, but we're making it. I thank you so much, Ashok, for sharing your work to the world to say, hey, let's make, make this easily accessible to patients by giving access to the App and the program through practitioners.

Yes, absolutely. Because we want to work in partnership. You know, it's not a dogmatic approach, which is, hey, just only do the brain retraining. We know that people have great results from supplements and diet changes and medications and all the other things that can support people through their healing. And we see this as an important piece of the jigsaw puzzle. And therefore we want to work in partnership with clinicians like yourself to say, let's bring all of these pieces together. Let's live that vision of truly integrative healthcare, holistic healthcare. And I think for a lot of practitioners, they really welcome this because this isn't something necessarily that there's their expertise, but because we've got the clinical research and we've been doing it so many years, it fits perfectly and tessellates with the work that they're doing.

What did your research show, by the way? Like, if you might just. I know there's a lot of it, but if there's anything that was really, like, super exciting so that people can see, like, yes, this works, right? Because people might be like, this sounds good, but does it really work? Is it really going to work?

For me, yeah, the science is super important, you know, because, I mean, you can go on to Instagram, Facebook and see a thousand and one cures for so many different things. But what matters is what's the objective science saying about this? You know, the randomized control trials is obviously the gold standard. So that's been important to us. So we've run several medical trials. So for instance, we did a clinical audit and that showed that 90% of our patients made an improvement and 2/3 of our patients made an 80 to 100% recovery within a year. So pretty much full recovery, 2/3 of patients. Then we've done three randomized controlled trials and two of them have been done recently. So one on fibromyalgia, that one showed that after just eight weeks, which is a relatively short amount of time, after eight weeks, there was close to a 40% reduction in fibromyalgia in the active group, in the Gupta program group, but zero effects in the control group. And we had a halving of anxiety, a halving of depression, halving of pain, 50% increase in functional capacity, but very low scores in the control. These are all showing you that on an objective level. And this was an independent study by an independent university.

And that was published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine. Then recently, another independent clinical trial, we compared our program to a wellness program. This was really Attempting to compare apples with apples. That wellness program had diet, supplements, sleep, activity. They compared our programs with long Covid. And after three months, the Gupta program was four times more effective at reducing fatigue and exhaustion and twice as effective at increasing levels of energy. On average, a 97% increase in energy levels. So that was a fantastic result as well. And that's a published independent clinical study. And recently we just published a clinical audit. So this was an independent clinical audit by an organization that sent forms to our patients and they filled them in and they assessed it independently. And that study showed that across 14 different conditions, there was between, I think between 50 to 100% improvement in function scores after three months of using the GUPS program. And that's incredible because we've obviously started, we started with chronic fatigue and those types of illnesses, but now we're finding, you know, whether it's POTS or mold or Lyme disease, so many of these unexplained syndromes, we're able to heal and support through our program. And that's been really eye opening.

That's amazing. Oh my gosh. It's really. I'm so grateful for your work and your research and your diligence with this and sharing it and, and how powerful, you know, to be able to offer a solution where you're seeing 50% or 80% improvement in conditions that likely people have been told there's nothing they can do or, you know, there's. They've been suffering for years. And as you mentioned, and I don't know if there is any particular case addition like I know you shared your case, but is there cases you must hear about every day of people who are going from not being able to function to being able to function?

Oh, that's what we live for. That's why we do this type of work is just the gratitude that we feel when we see people go from along that journey and get their lives back.

Because with a lot of these illnesses, the level of someone's life experiences is similar to final stage cancer in terms of the debilitation that they experience. And therefore we hear these stories every day. And one of my favorite stories is a gentleman we had in New Zealand who was using our program and he was 82. So at the age of 82, what is your fatigue coming from? It can be difficult to know. And he had had fibromyalgia for 30 years. He'd had mold, he'd had pots, he'd had a whole bunch of different conditions that was very debilitating. And he used our program. And after three months, he was up to about 85% recovery. And I was, wow, that's incredible. Someone at that age where you think perhaps their brains are not as neuroplastic. But this is all he did. He just did our program. And I said to him, what will you do with your life now? And he said, I'm going to travel the world. I'm going to do all the things I haven't done in the last 30 years. I'm going to make the most of the rest of my life. And I thought, what an inspiring story that if someone at 82 can retrain their brain, get their lives back and enjoy life, then it's possible for not necessarily all of us, but the vast majority of us to also be able to do this and get our lives back.

Isn't that something? Oh my gosh. Thank you so much for sharing that. What an inspiration.

Right?

And to see like, yeah, because ultimately that's the thing you started us off talking about. Why are we here anyway? You know, you know, we're, we're here with this built in survival mechanism and yet ultimately we're here to also live our passion and our purpose. And it's very difficult to live your passion and purpose when you don't feel good. So to be able to give people that back, that the ability to choose if they want to travel, choose if they want to do whatever they want to do, but hang be able to do it without being in emotional and physical pain. Right.

Of course, that's the key part of it is, you know, people can't live their best lives when all they're focusing on is their health or they're focusing is on their pain. So it's healing that part. And I even have another spiritual self development program that they then move on to. So once they've moved through and healed, then we have another program called the Meaning of Life Experiment, which is essentially, now you've healed. What's the next phase? How you discover your meaning, the deeper gift that you're here to give to humanity. And that's the next phase. It.

Ah, wonderful. Oh my gosh. Thank you so much for, for the Gupta program and for coming to tell us all about it Today. I'm going to be sharing links down below in the episode notes. So anyone who's interested in learning more, definitely look for the link and click through. Because you're going to be able to learn more from Ashok and, and find out more about how to sign up for the program and start benefiting from it. Because this is also something that people can access, I would say, in a cost effective way, because I think sometimes people worry like, is this going to be something that's going to be too expensive for me to be able to access? Because already we took away. You can access it from anywhere in the world. You can go your own pace.

These things that might stop us don't have to stop us from.

Exactly right, yeah. And also something that we have as a feature until we get large scale phase two and phase three trials, we offer a one year money back guarantee on our treatment. So it's a one year subscription with all the support. We talk daily sessions, weekly sessions, plus after six months, if you notice no improvement, you can return the program, no questions asked, get your money back. So in that way it reduces the risk that people may perceive about taking on some new treatment like this.

Yeah, yeah, thank you. That really helps because, yeah, there is, like you said, there's that fear mechanism is so, so working so hard. We have to be able to get past that fear to actually access the healing. And so I love that you're helping us get past that fear to say, hey, I'm going to believe enough that this is possible that I'm going to start going through the motions and see what happens.

Exactly right. And that's the inspiration I want to give to everyone that no matter what your support group has said or what a physician has said or whatever it may be, if they've said, look, you can't heal, these are unhealthy, let that go. I believe that health is our birthright, that we all have the ability to retrain and improve our health. And that's the hope that I want to give everybody.

Ah, thank you so much. That's. I believe that too. And I'm just so glad to be able to be friends with you and connect with you and to be working together to, to bring this to more and more people. Thanks again so much for joining us today. Ashraka, is there anything else you wanted to share? I love that message you just gave us.

Well, look, I think, you know, you're also doing fantastic work in this area and you know, I think we're all have that vision of health for the planet and I think this is such important work. This is why we need to spread this type of work. Because there are so many people who are experiencing anxiety, stress, and as a result of that, the physical illnesses that come with that. So instead of relying on traditional medicine to heal us, to come up with some magic pill, now it's up to all of us to take responsibility for our mental, physical and emotional health and make it a priority in our lives. And the programs like that you provide, that we provide, are all part of that journey for all of us. So yeah, my inspiration, everyone, is make sure you have that self care regime every day. Super important. Get your health and the wealth and everything else in your life will take care of itself.

I love it. All right, well, thanks again for joining us. And thanks everyone for listening in. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss the next episode of How Humans Heal. And thanks all. I'm so glad you joined us today. I'll talk to you soon.

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