How to Upgrade Your Nervous System and Create Lasting Change

In this video, I want to break down the how and the why of unstucking your nervous system. First, let's start with why. Your nervous system makes up your core operating system, and in that core operating system, you have your default patterns, your language patterns, your belief patterns, your stories, your emotions, your energetic or emotional home base. You have your ancestral, uh, blueprints, what you believe about your self-worth, is all in your core operating system. So if you think of the human being and our nervous system, you have two major windows of peak neuroplasticity: 0 to 7, which is your most open season of life, and that's where the core blueprints are laid. Your views about money, your sense of safety, your sense of belonging in the world, your attachment, your core blueprints around trauma or what you want or need, where you feel unseen, you learn emotional safety or lack thereof, physical safety, scarcity, things like that are kind of laid in that 0 to 7 window. And then 16 to 24, another window opens. While it's not as significant in terms of the depth because you are no longer a blank slate, you've got some years behind you and you've got some experiences and memories and patterns, basically neuro grooves. You know, the further along in life we get, it's like the more highways and roadways are built in the nervous system, and it's hard to change a highway once it's been fully built. But 16 to 24, you have another window where change is happening rapidly and you're more open than normal. And in that window, you get identities or upgrades around, or beliefs around sex, sexuality, the opposite sex, your standing in the world. It's also, if you remember, it's also a very uncertain time period of life where you're trying to figure out, where do I stand in the order of life? All right, where's my role? Where's my place in the world? Where's my sense of belonging? If you, as you navigate that part of life, uh, you start kind of landing somewhere. And we're always searching and always growing and always adapting, but things get a little more firmly entrenched as we continue along into our 30s and 40s and 50s and beyond. So how do we upgrade if we, uh, let's say we went through a lot of trauma, let's say we had a lot of obstacles, let's say we grew up in a poor country or we grew up in poverty or we grew up with an abusive mom or stepdad or, or a neglectful mom or stepdad or whatever, or no parents, or we had some horrific things happen to us in those different dynamics, or we, we had just a normal chill life but we were meant for something more. We're longing and hungry for something more, but we have this undercurrent of old patterns, old stories, old memories that no longer serves where we want to go if we're exploring and curious. So how do we get there? How do we shift those things around? Well, it's an age-old question that guys like Napoleon Hill in Think and Grow Rich asked in writing his book and interviewing 500 of the world's most successful people. And as he wrote that book, commissioned by Andrew Carnegie, then he distilled down some of the biggest success principles, which was basically how does an ordinary person become extraordinary? Then you continue along and you got Earl Nightingale, who had this famous audiobook at the time, and the mid-1900s called The Strangest Secret, and it's all about what you think about is what you become. And then we journey along into the '80s and the '90s, and NLP and other modalities and positive psychology starts emerging because psychology had always been focused on abnormal psychology or disorders and things like that. So we started hearing about things like flow state psychology, peak performance psychology, positive psychology. Martin Seligman and others kind of popularized some of these things. Well, what they started finding out is we have— we thought our brain was pretty fixed. We thought our brains didn't make new brain cells. Turns out our brains always make new brain cells. And you can also reopen windows of neuroplasticity. You can basically create portals into creating lasting change, especially with the advent or the resurgence of psychedelic research. Substances like MDMA, LSD, psilocybin, even ibogaine and ayahuasca and others have started coming online and bringing this emergence of new brain science where we start getting brain images of your brain on this medicine, your brain on that medicine, your brain on placebo, and then start seeing things like psilocybin. Robin Carhart-Harris found that psilocybin connects all the mental lobes of your brain, so now your brain has more clear thinking, and you have more original thought and more decisiveness, and it kind of basically brushes off the cobwebs in many regards. Boost your IQ, boost your mental clarity. It helps reduce neurodegenerative diseases and actually slows aging in your brain. Other substances like MDMA flood your heart and your nervous system with empathy, which allows you to see others, see yourself differently, and reprocess traumatic or overwhelming memories. Not relive, but reprocess is the goal. So with advent of our rediscovery of psychedelics, now we can combine it with science-based tools like somatic experiencing, which is reclaiming safety in the body, healing basically stuck energy. You think of most trauma as, as our bodies reliving something that happened in the past and thinking we're still in danger. And now reclaiming safety. So with the use of psychedelics, now we can flood our mind, flood our nervous system with an alternate state that makes it easier, like basically reduces our activation around those things when guided by a proper guide, whether a trained therapist, psychologist, or a coach or facilitator in psychedelics or even in solo journeys. We can get some big breakthroughs of retraining our nervous system Back to our nervous system. Our nervous system is arguably the most powerful aspect of our operating system. It is our operating system, in essence. And according to Bruce Lipton, who wrote The Biology of Belief, and he was a Stanford cellular biologist, Dr. Lipton found that your subconscious mind processes 20 million bits of information a second versus your conscious mind 40 to 50 bits of information per second. Therefore, our subconscious mind is 500,000 to 1,000,000 times more powerful than our conscious mind. So all lasting change has to happen in our subconscious mind. So that's where these substances come into play. You get a beautiful opening that, when done properly and safely, allows us to step into that portal and change some of the programming, change some of the code in a loving and gentle way that is congruent, meaning updating the code. Like, you wouldn't want to be You know, if it's 2026, you wouldn't be using an iPhone from 2016 because that's a decade old. Well, sometimes our programs are built on decades old or even ancestral energy that could be 100 years old. I've seen clients where they've carried in ancestral energy traumas from the Holocaust and beyond. And Duke University, Yale University has shown that Holocaust survivors show different— their children and their grandchildren show different measures of cortisol that indicates that they suffered a severe trauma even though they were never alive in the Holocaust. So it's a very consistent data set across the, the descendants of Holocaust survivors. So things like that are really, really relevant to upgrading our nervous system. And at the end of the day, all lasting change has to happen in our subconscious mind or our nervous system, where Everything is running through all the default operating conditions, or the default mode is of our— basically how our bodies, how our minds work. Again, psychedelics create the opening, and then you have to work with these other tools to go in and shift things around, to update the code. I see amazing results in mental health and in relationships and in the peak performance side. I would argue that these tools, when properly used and combined together, create the biggest breakthrough in mental health and peak performance in human history. So again, if you want to upgrade your nervous system, then we've got to do a rich combination. We got to get access to the subconscious mind. Now you can get that— get there with breathwork, meditation, and other tools, and general visualization or hypnosis, but it's a lot slower and it's not nearly as deep and as effective when safely and properly using psychodelics. Now, there's also some challenges with psychedelics. They're not fully legal in most states or most countries around the world. Check with your individual jurisdictions to make sure you're abiding by local laws, or proceed at your own risk at the end of the day, right? Uh, secondly, um, when we have that opening, what are we going to do with that opening? And I would argue that 98% of psychedelic facilitators underutilize the opening. And underutilize the integration period or the, the windows of neuroplastic change or flexibility after their experience. So I want to encourage you, proceed wisely and examine and work with someone that's amazing, but they know what they're doing and that they're the proper person for you in this experience, because it can be life-changing, but you are working with some powerful tools. So Comment below if you want to learn more about this. I also have an application below if you're interested in working with someone in my network as well, or me myself, uh, or me or my team. So look forward to learning more about what your questions are around the nervous system as well.