3 Brain-Based Therapy Techniques 🧠

As the relationship between neuroscience and psychotherapy continues to evolve, the understanding of neuroplasticity has taken on a very important role in enhancing the positive results from therapy. Here is where brain-based therapy comes in. This approach incorporates knowledge from neuroscience and combines it with aspects of attachment theory to help people wire their brains, improve their moods, and effectively change their behaviors. Welcome back to the Kwik Brain Podcast. I'm your coach and your host, Jim Kwik. I'm here as always to help you learn quickly and build better, brighter brains. Brain-based therapy has become one of the fastest growing areas in the field of psychological health because of its promise to address issues that can take talk therapy potentially years to be able to recover and heal. In this episode, we will discuss This emerging therapy approach and some of its forms more closely, leaving you with new tools that you may wish to bring up in your next therapy session as a suggestion to explore. So what is brain-based therapy? Many people go to therapy to get support with depression, anxiety, obsessive thoughts, maybe grief. Others seek support to deal with sometimes long-lasting effects of trauma. Psychological distress can also affect our brain, among other things, because the distress we are feeling during the previously mentioned conditions is held in the networks of your brain and your nervous system. For example, if your brain has developed strong pathways for anxiety, depression, or trauma response, you may be left feeling like most things are outta your control. In addition to the already existing feelings of sadness and even overwhelm. Again, with all our episodes, this episode is not intended to diagnose or treat any kind of psychological or medical condition. Definitely talk to your qualified health practitioner. Now, the brain-based perspective recognizes that the brain has neuroplasticity. We've talked about that a lot in our courses and in this podcast. As a reminder, neuroplasticity is the ability of neural networks to change through growth and organization, reorganization, if you will. It happens when the brain is wired to function in some way that differs from how it previously functioned. Some examples include learning a new skill, learning a language, some kind of new information, environmental influences, or something more serious, like recovering from a traumatic brain injury. Brain-based therapy is particularly helpful for trauma-related issues and can be useful for treating anxiety, depression, attachment issues. It has been reported that brain-based techniques generally provide more rapid and long-lasting results in combination with talk therapy or as a standalone treatment. EMDR is one of the most researched and effective methods that show this outcome. EMDR not only reduces the symptoms, but can also potentially eliminate symptoms of trauma, depression, and anxiety. Now that we have a brief understanding of what brain-based therapy is built around, let's now look At some of the therapies more closely. Brainspotting. Let's start with defining what it is. Brainspotting is a therapeutic tool that locates the points in your visual field that help to assess unprocessed trauma. And a brain spot is a specific point in your visual field that is associated with a particular emotion or experience. This therapy style was discovered in 2003 by David Grand, PhD, who discovered that where you look affects how you feel and that it is the brain activity, especially in the subcortical brain, that organizes itself around that eye position. This form of therapy is particularly effective with trauma-based situations and helping to heal anxiety, depression, and other behavioral conditions. That are underlying. In some cases, it can even be used to enhance performance, creativity, and to find and strengthen our natural resources and resilience. Brainspotting makes use of this natural brain function through the application of relevant eye positions by helping us to locate, focus, process, and release a wide range of emotional and body-based conditions. During the session, your therapist looks to see in what position and where your eyes blinks and dilates. Once the spot has been found, they can then focus on working through the feelings. The goal is to bypass the conscious thinking processes of the neocortex and get to the deeper, more emotional body-based processes From the subcortex part of the brain. Reliving the trauma is one of the most uncomfortable parts of therapy and can be very vivid and even painful for some people. This is where Brainspotting can potentially help. It has been reported that the person does not need to relive the trauma in order to facilitate its release from the body and mind During the session, Brainspotting unlocks the brain's natural healing mechanisms, tuning its ability to self-scan and heal by gaining direct access to the parts of the brain where traumatic experience is stored. If you don't already have a therapist of your own who can help you navigate this new tool, a good place to start is to browse the official Brainspotting website. There are currently 13,000 trained therapists in the United States and the rest of the world, and some of these have been listed on the site. The next therapy is Eye Movement Desensitization and Processing Therapy, otherwise known as EMDR. It is widely assumed that intense traumatic experiences require a long time to heal. However, this assumption might now be overturned as repeated studies have shown that EMDR therapy can provide the same benefits as psychotherapy, potentially even faster. EMDR relies on the Adaptive Information Processing model, AIP. It's a theory about how your brain stores memories. This theory was developed by Francine Shapiro, PhD, who also developed EMDR. According to her theory, our brains store normal and traumatic memories differently. Often our brain stores trauma memories in a way that doesn't allow for normal healing, and the trauma ends up being like a wound that our brain hasn't had the chance to heal. Which in turn creates an error in delivering a message of safety to our brain. Essentially, our brain is left to think that we are still in danger. EMDR itself is a form of psychotherapy that enables people to heal from symptoms and emotional distress that were caused by disturbing life experiences that continue to cause distress because the memory was not adequately processed. It is believed that these unprocessed memories contain the same emotions, thoughts, beliefs, and even physical sensations that occurred at the time of the event. Very simply put, EMDR therapy consists of moving your eyes in a specific way while you process traumatic memories. The patient is required to recall an emotionally disturbing memory. Maybe it's a feeling or a situation in brief sequences while simultaneously focusing on an external stimulus, such as lateral eye movements directed by the therapist, hand tapping, or listening to an audio. As this happens, internal associations arise and the patient begins to process the memory. It is believed that these associations happen because of the biological mechanisms involved in rapid eye movement or REM sleep. In successful EMDR therapy, the meaning of painful events is transformed on an emotional level. The next form of therapy I want to introduce to you is polyvagal theory. We walk around every day reading thousands of social cues in our environment. We pick up things like facial expressions, tones of voice, and body language, just to name a few. All of this helps us to learn who and what we can trust and who and what feels dangerous to us. As you might imagine, all of this incoming information can also be very highly activating to our nervous system. In order to understand the polyvagal theory, it's important to understand how our nervous system is set up. To keep it quick, quote unquote, we will only look at the autonomic nervous system and the vagus nerve. And we've done podcast episodes about this. The autonomic nervous system helps us to scan, interpret, and respond to the danger cues That we're constantly scanning for in our daily life. There are 2 more systems at work within the autonomic one, the sympathetic system, which is responsible for initiating action and producing adrenaline when needed, and the parasympathetic system, which we've talked a lot about in our podcast. This is our rest and our digest system that helps us calm our body and conserve energy. Now, one of the most important and biggest nerves in our body is the vagus nerve, which consists of the ventral side that supports feelings of physical and emotional safety and the dorsal side that responds to cues of danger and pulls us away from connection. According to the polyvagal theory, the way our nervous system perceives threats impacts our brain and our body, and our body will respond to any situation. And it focuses on the autonomic nervous system and the vagus nerve specifically. The theory is based around us being either immobilized or mobilized, otherwise known as fight, flight, Or freeze, with the end goal to achieve a state of healthy social engagement. When someone has experienced trauma, particularly in experiences where they were left immobilized or frozen, their ability to scan their environment for danger cues can sometimes be skewed. Meaning that our bodies enter the freeze state at the slightest cue of danger, And being in a mobilized state might not seem like an option for them. This can cause confusion in people who have experienced trauma and are not aware how a healthy response mechanism is supposed to function in our day-to-day interactions. Now, based on polyvagal theory, practitioners work with exercises that help patients calm The vagus nerve. One of the most effective ways to calm the vagus nerve is through something physical, such as meditation, exercise, breathwork. However, psychotherapy might also be helpful, especially if your nervous system is overactive due to past trauma. To bring everything together, brain-based therapies like brain spotting, EMDR, and insights from polyvagal theory offer promising new ways to help people heal from trauma, anxiety, depression. By tapping into the brain's natural neuroplasticity and its ability to rewire itself, these therapies can potentially provide faster, more lasting relief than talk therapy alone. If you or someone you know is struggling with unresolved trauma, I encourage you to look into these brain-based approaches, do your own research, make your own good decisions, seek qualified health practitioners, and see if incorporating them into your therapeutic process can be beneficial. Of course, always remember to work with qualified, trained professionals in these modalities. I hope this episode has given you a helpful overview of some of the brain-based therapies and inspire you to keep exploring the amazing capacities of your most vital organ, your brain. As always, you can find more ways to fuel your brain's potential on our YouTube channel, where we post the extended version of these episodes, including other content like me on stage. Definitely connect with us on social media at Jim Kwik, K-W-I-K. And remember, make sure you hit the subscribe button because if you miss an episode, you know you miss a lot. Leave a comment under this episode. If you're consuming this on YouTube, please share it because I feel like when you share it, you get to learn it twice. And let us know which of these brain-based therapies that you maybe have already explored or you want to try. This is your brain coach, Jim Kwik. Until next time, remember to be limitless.