The IMPACT of Creating Neuroplasticity in our lives | CPTSD and Mental Health Podcast

JONATHAN LE - HOW TO REWIRE YOUR BRAIN AFTER TRAUMA

Michael: And I would love for you to dive into neuroplasticity about rewiring our brains, our neural pathways and how to really take ownership over your life?

Jonathan: Yeah. I'm so glad you brought that up too, because that is a huge thing that I talk about so frequently with my clients, day after day, right? This idea of neuroplasticity, the simple principle that we have the ability and capacity to rewire the neural pathways in our brains. So, to oversimplify a difficult concept, just to make it a little bit easier to understand there's this region of our brain called the ventral strain, it's essentially where the pleasure center of our brains are. So, as human beings, we are wired to prioritize the things that bring us pleasure and joy at the end of the day. So, all the things that people prioritize, money, sex, family, all the different activities and things that we put first in our lives. We base a lot of our lifestyle habits and rhythms and patterns based on pleasure.

So, one of the key ways to rewire the neural pathways in our brains is to invite opportunities to experience the joy and the pleasure and the satisfaction and gratification of a new, healthier habit and behavior. And over time, the pairing and the association between the stimulus and the dopamine that gets released in our brains in response to the pleasure that we receive is what helps unconsciously rewire and retrain our brains to then accommodate for new healthier habits and patterns.

It's something that I talk about all the time. I do a lot of couples counseling myself, and one way that Neuroplasticity plays out is even in how we relate to other people, right? We, in relationships to other people experience so much conflict and tension as a society, whether there's anger, bitterness, frustration, disappointment that interferes with our ability to connect with and relate to other people, but one way to rewire how we connect with and to become more intimate and more deep and have more meaningful relationships is to invite pockets and windows of opportunity to really experience pleasure and joy in how we connect with others. And one of the ways we do that is through holistic health and wellness. So that's part of why from my perspective, as a counselor, one thing I talk about very frequently is the bio psychosocial model just this idea that in order to maximize our capacity for being able to be as healthy and well-rounded as we can be, we have to look out for four areas of our health and wellness, our biological, our psychological, our social, and our spiritual health and wellness. So, in a lot of the things that I encourage and invite my clients to practice their pockets and windows of opportunity in each of these four categories to on a daily basis, continually practice, healthy habits that rewire their neural pathways and challenge them to experience joy and pleasure in the new healthier lifestyle patterns that they're living into day by day.

Michael: Let's go into that a little bit deeper because I think that one of the things, we could do here is set a precedent and a baseline for people to understand the science of actually what's happening in those moments, in those pockets of joy. Cause even this morning, I'll give you a great example. Normally my mornings is like I wake up meditate journal, go to the gym, get into the show. And this morning I woke up and I thought to myself, actually, you know what I wanna do, I'm gonna drive out to red rocks here in Denver, I'm gonna climb all the stairs as my workout, and I'm gonna sit there for half an hour and just absorb and be present and experience the world and let that thing soak in. And for me, like I recognize, I understand what happens in those moments where you're leveraging the thing that brings you pleasure in your life. But can you talk about, and breakdown for someone listening right now. What is actually happening in the brain when you're stepping into creating joy in your life? 

Jonathan: Yeah. So, let's take one specific example, right? Emotional processing. I think as a society, we have a tendency of devaluing and minimizing the significance and importance of simply just being a present with negative emotions. So, one exercise and activity, I encourage my and invite my clients to practice is emotional check-ins.

So, I have this feeling where it's checklist that I give to a lot of my clients where it has a list of over a hundred emotionally adjectival works to describe your internal state of being, right? It's broken down into seven different columns, mad, sad, glad, afraid, ashamed, lonely the list goes on and the intensity of that emotion becomes greater and greater as you go further down the column in each of those sections, when you're processing whatever emotion, it is.  I'm so glad you brought up the importance of mindfulness, because this is also an opportunity to practice, being present and aware with everything that's going on with yourself. So, in addition to the neuroscience of our brains and what's going on, we're also primed to learn in a multi-sensory type of way. And so, in order for us to really latch onto and soak in whatever thing we're trying to learn, we have to integrate as many of our five senses as we possibly can. So, for something as simple as emotional processing, when it comes to difficult or negative emotions, being able to sit in the moment, setting an alarm on your phone for any time of the day, right?

It could be 12:30 during the lunch hour, it could be 6:45 in the evening, it could be early morning once you get up, 10 to 15 minutes, stop what you're doing. Take a moment to look at that feeling where it's checklist, pick a word that resonates with you in that given moment. And sit with that feeling, whatever that emotion or whatever that feeling is in that given moment, simply just sitting with it and being present in the moment. And as you're paying attention to that emotion and that feeling, you're paying attention to everything that's going on with you somatically. And what I mean by that is, where are you sensing the emotion and the feeling in your body. Sometimes we minimize and we diminish the significance of how emotions physiologically, manifest in our bodies, whether we get tension in our shoulders or jaws or neck or upper back area. So, what ends up happening is when we take a moment just to observe and to sit back and learn from those emotions, we start to experience this sense of relief, cuz we're like, wow, I didn't even realize that this was what was happening.

So, this region of our brain that I was describing, the ventral strum, what ends up happening is from a neurological level there's dopamine that gets relief least. And there's this association, this cognitive association that your brain creates once the pleasure and the joy is then received and experienced by you. So, from that experience, even integrating something multi-sensory, as I'm gonna pay attention to my body rhythms, I'm going to focus on my breathing, I'm going to focus on how I feel right now I'm going to verbalize it and speak it out loud, so it's auditory as well, be able to integrate multiple senses, gives you the opportunity to really soak in that experience and go, wow, okay, in this moment, I'm learning about all these different things that are going on with me. Let me continue to do this, cuz this kind of feels good and there's this sense of relief that comes with being able to release some of that negative energy, being aware of it, being present with it, not ignoring it, not distracting from it, but just being there in that moment.

MELANIE YATES EFT NEURO COACH - THE PROCESS OF TAPPING AROUND TRAUMATIC EVENTS 

Michael: One of the things that I really want to dive into here, is this idea about emotions because I agree with you. We do have the ability to retrain our brain. We know about neuroplasticity. We know about this idea of repetitive usage in the language that we have. We know about all these things that happen, but sometimes people really leverage emotions to be the thing that often becomes a scapegoat for possibility in their life. One of the things I'm curious about and you've said this before, is that emotions, they are good or bad and that feelings are signals. What do you mean by that?

Melanie: Well, our brain naturally doesn't want to feel bad. So when we say pain is our motivator, we're trying to get it motivates me to drink and eat and go shopping. So I don't have to think about it. I like to run away from those feelings that I consider bad and our brain literally categorizes everything into good and bad, it's like I lose my job, that's bad, I get a raise that's good. And the thing is all things work together for our good and you can see how now you can see that your past is actually helping millions of people, your goal is to reach the whole, internationally around the world, you have big goals of using what appeared to be horrible and painful and what we would categorize as that's bad and you've made good out of it. And so I believe all of us have the opportunity to make every single thing that happens work for us, and I believe the Universe is for us.

So even when it's seemingly and that's the key word there seemingly because our brain is programmed, you know fight or flight or rest, and it's programmed that way and so if we can look at emotions as signals that my emotion needs something instead of just being closed to this is bad, I need to run, this is okay. I'm gonna relax, we can actually dive deeper, and acknowledge. I'm feeling angry right now, and usually, I feel angry because I don't get my way. So anything that happens during the day that didn't go the way I planned. When I look at that and think, okay, I feel irked because I didn't get my way and my way is the best way, right? So I think that's the way it should go, but then when it doesn’t, it's when I take a look at what is my anger telling me? It's like, my anger is telling me I want to be acknowledged. My anger is telling me; I like it my way. What can I do next time when I don't get my way that would still be a way to acknowledge and honor the way I feel, because I think what happens is the other thing as men when I think you're taught, you know, don't cry and it's okay to be angry, but for a woman it's not a ladylike to be angry so that we have that to where society tells us; this is okay for you to feel, this isn't okay for you to feel? And so that adds to and my doing something, right, and it doesn't have to be right or wrong, it's a signal what does it mean? Kind of using like a question patterning of like what is this signal of being angry telling me? And what do I want to do with it next time or how am I going to honor my anger? Is there something I can do?

I remember this coach had me. Break bottles because I was angry and we came up. Well, what would feel good to my anger and it just came to me that breaking glass would feel good, and so I found a way to safely break some bottles that I could clean up. And it felt good, and it was like, it's just a way, it usually our emotions need to be released. And so EFT is another way to release them without, breaking glass, because I told myself I would never do that again because I did not like cleaning it up, so tapping is easier for me.

Michael: Yeah, and what a great analogy for life, right? We have to clean up the glasses that we break. And I think what's really fascinating about this is understanding. Yes, you can make meaning of the emotions that come once you get. I think a little bit closer into understanding who you are, understanding the emotional capacity, having a coach, having therapy, doing the work, the whole nine because if you would have told me what you just said 15 years ago, I'd be like you're out of your mind, like that makes no sense to me, right?  And I think there is a process for this to make a lot of sense you do have to do a bit of work around it. I think that's because trauma these events that have happened and the trauma that comes along with it, you know, those are triggers that are trapped in entangled inside of our emotions, right? How do you manage that? Where on the one hand, yes, you're like, okay. I can reframe this. I can create a change in the way that I process and make meaning of these things but I still feel so trapped or entangled inside of those traumatic events and experiences. How do you navigate that? How do you like start to reframe around that?

Melanie: So those events become almost a part of us. We have events it kind of runs a program in our brain, so what happens is you have a traumatic event and your brain is now programmed with this event, and so when I think of something, I run it through my broken thinking because that's what happened to me and the program was instilled in my thinking and so it's natural for me to run my program of I'm afraid, you know, if I leave my full-time job and start my own business, I'm afraid. I'm going to be a loser without any money and it's because of past trauma experiences that are instilled in my brain that when I get a thought or a fear, it runs the program of my broken thinking. And so we literally, we have to rewire it to different thinking and that's why we get help because a lot of times we can't see our own broken thinking and that's why we can't do it alone. I don't know anyone who has been able to reprogram their broken thinking alone. We need each other and that's one of the reasons, I'm so passionate about being a coach, I want to pass on when someone passed on me, I want to teach what tools worked better than anything else and I want to help people, I want to get the information out there and that's what I think you're doing with your podcast, and your life is that you really want people to know there is a solution, there is hope.

PHILIPPE DOUYON - HOW TO BECOME THE LEADER YOUR BRAINS

Michael: One of the things I'm curious about and that you mentioned is making your brain, the leader, and like – there's this weird thing that I don't think people understand that they actually have this huge amount of control over their brain. Can you talk about any kind of framework of what it actually means to be the leader of your own brain?

Dr. Philippe: Yes. I see people all the time where their brains are leading them and what I mean by that is to think about this. When you have, let's say a bad moment in the day like – your friend upset you for whatever reason, right? It's not just that you're upset now at your friend, then you start thinking about how rough your life is and you become upset with yourself then you start thinking about how bad the world is and you know really upset with the world. And it just takes you down this negative sort of spiral and so, the reason that the brain does that is, that first and foremost, its job is to help you to survive, it needs to protect you. And so, it's always looking out for those negative things. Right? Which is not always in our best interest, and so, being the leader that our brain needs mean that essentially using our experiences to influence the way that we think and the way that we act.

And so everything that we do every single day, influences our brain's evolution. Our thoughts influence, our brain's evolutions, the actions we take do so, the people that we surround ourselves with the experiences that we have, and it's really about teaching people to make really conscious decisions daily. So that their brains don't go down this negative route and instead focus on the positive because when we focus on the positive, that also has this tremendous healing impact, not just on our brains, but also on our bodies and as well as on our lives.

Michael: What causes that? Because you hear this all the time where people talk about having control over your thoughts, being positive thinking like this, but why does that actually work? Like – what is happening in that moment and in those processes that lead to this place where actually has impact?

Dr. Philippe: Yeah, so when you think about what's going on in your brain, so when you're having a lot of negative thoughts, right? So the brain, sort of goes into, you really turn on sort of your sympathetic nervous system, your brain goes into fight-flight or freeze mode, right? So, you're operating from a place of really chronic stress and trauma and so you get chemicals like cortisol, which are being secreted and over a long period of time, have a really negative impact, not just on your brain, but also on your body, right?

So a lot of people who are chronically stressed will come to me and say, look, you know, I can't make new memories, I'm having memory problems and that's because something like – cortisol actually causes the neurons, the cells in the part of the brain responsible for making new memories, it causes those cells to die off, right? So, that's a really negative consequence of having negative thoughts.

Now, when you have positive thoughts, right? That causes the release of endorphins, a lot of the feel-good sort of hormones. And so you start really thinking about your life in a completely different way, you start searching for the positive and things and those feel-good hormones not they don't just allow you to feel good, but they help reduce your blood pressure, they help reduce the levels of chronic stress, that way, you're not having that negative impact on your brain and body and it really promotes healing physically emotionally mentally as well as neurologically.

Michael: Can I challenge you on something? Because I'm really curious, I've worked with a lot of people throughout my career and even have these moments myself, where I go, there's absolutely nothing positive in my life right now, right? When and so my challenge to you in this is how if someone has that thought process. Do you navigate helping them find positivity in their life when it feels so not even necessarily only melancholic but depressive and painful, sad and hurtful? You know, how do you help someone navigate into this place where they can associate or even create something positive in their thought process?

Dr. Philippe: Yeah, so I'll give you a personal example. So for me, I was diagnosed with COVID back in January and I was hospitalized for two weeks, right? And as a doctor of watching your oxygen saturation, go down is not a fun thing at all, and there were certainly days where I thought that I was not going to make it but covid, took its toll on my kidneys, it just completely wrecked the kidney function that I had left and I needed to do dialysis. Dialysis was the thing that I feared the most, everything that I did was to avoid dialysis up until that point. And so when they told me that I needed to do, dialysis, I cried because that's not what I wanted to do. And so I allowed myself to feel those feelings, but then I told myself, okay, I can do dialysis, the way that I've seen patients, who do it before in the hospital, but it almost seems like they were waiting for death or I can decide to do dialysis in a completely different way. And so I went from feeling really depressed about my life like – this sucks, this is not what I wanted, I'm tired of having to face my mortality to be like, I've got to overcome this challenge, I've got to think about it very differently. And so when I was doing dialysis, there were times where I was working on a lot of personal development stuff, I was reading during dialysis, I was practicing French, I was doing interviews with news organizations and taking builds business meetings.

I remember one time, you know, I was playing basketball with my sons and my son said something about me being sick and I was like, what are you talking about? I'm not sick, I'm sitting here beating you in basketball, you know, so part of it, it's about changing the way that you think about things but to help you change the way that you think you also have to take completely different actions, you need new experiences, right? And I see people who every day do the same exact thing and somehow expect that their lives are going to change, they think the same thoughts, they have the same routines, and think that their lives are going to change. So sometimes you have to do things differently and you also have to be very mindful of who you're surrounding yourself with. So I didn't surround myself with, you know, I didn't hang out with other kidney disease patients, right? Because a lot of times when you're hanging out with other patients, everybody sorts of down and they just talked about all the negatives and that's where their focus is on. I hung around with people who saw that I was going through a difficult time in my life and acknowledge that and appreciated, but also who saw the greatness and the opportunity that I had the opportunity to connect with other people, right? To help people who are in similar situations and maybe who don't have the same kind of resources that I have and that when I say resources it's the mental and neurological resources that I have. So I think it's really about changing the way that you think about things, having completely new experiences, taking different actions, and making sure that you surround yourself with people that are going to help you through these tough moments.

ELISABETH KRISTOF - UNDERSTANDING THE FUNCTIONAL NEUROLOGY OF WELL-BEING AFTER TRAUMA

Michael: So if you are in this place where it would be a benefit to stepping into a modality, like this, how do you even notice it? How do you even put yourself in a position of being curious enough to step into the idea that this could be beneficial?

Elisabeth: Well, I think the best thing to do is to sometimes see if you recognize the feeling of being driven by something other than the thoughts that you are aware of. I remember always feeling in my life like I was being pushed by something out of my control. There was just this frantic sense of running from life and I don't know how to describe it other than I was thrashing around, I would harm myself, I would be destructive and relationships, I would binge eat, I would do these things that it felt like some kind of autopilot that I didn't have control over was taking hold of my body and what I know now is it was on autopilot. It was my nervous system and it was my fight and flight response, or it was my frees, my shutdown response, and those are ancient survival mechanisms that are hardwired into our body but we don't understand that. Yes, I want to make different decisions, I want to react differently, but at a very baseline level, we can't until we do the work of healing. Our nervous system as simple as may be practicing breathwork or finding a few drills that work for you or just taking some time, trying to read the internal signals that your body is giving you, even just those little small steps, will help your nervous system start to move more into a parasympathetic state, a common response state and then you can take different actions. But if you have that feeling that you are being driven by something beyond your control, it is likely your nervous system is stuck in a state that no longer is serving you.

Michael: Yeah. Exactly. Fight or flight is so real and so informative of where we are in our life. And you know, it's really fascinating as even now after doing all this work for over a decade and reading all the books and going all the seminars and doing all the things it's still there, right? And it will still for most of us, I would assume always be there, but you build these tools, you build these systems to be able to notice a coat, but navigate through it right? Because there are days in yesterday's, a perfect example. I remember, I literally settle down, like I don't feel present in my body, right? And so that led me to this moment was like, oh okay, what I need to do is I need to go to my journal, I need to meditate, I need to get back into my body because the one, we live in a very toxic and stressful time. So you parlay these two things on top of COVID, on top of, you know, elections, on top of all these things and It's no wonder we are all out of sorts at this moment, right? And I think about this journey in this place of being willing to step into healing right? Often, and look, I recognize, this isn't always the case scenario, but it is way more comfortable to be within the context of the chaos of what I called The Vortex that place where you're not showing up, where you're hurting yourself, where you're binging, where my scenario being overweight and smoking two packs of cigarettes a day is Is way easier than pushing yourself into being better. So how do you do that, right? You come from this place of understanding the abuse has laid down the tracks that put you in this position of depression and self-harm and all these other things. How do you push yourself into healing? Because I do think that there is a little bit of centrifugal force that is necessary to get you there.

Elisabeth: Yes, so couple of things I've listened to your podcast and I know you're a big boy fever in the morning routine. And I am the same, I feel like it is something that I have to commit to. So that, I so that my life doesn't kill me, kind of like you said, like the stakes are high, right? So I need to do that and then I make that morning routine, something that focuses not just on my cognitive thoughts but something that focuses on bringing me back to my body and so it includes a little bit of healing movement, it includes what I call neuro somatic meditation, which basically just means taking at least one minute to sit still and think about what do I feel in the bottom of my belly? What do I feel in the center of my chest? What do I feel in my throat? Can I feel the sensations on my hands? Can I feel the big bottom of my foot? Can I feel like the foot the space that my foot takes up in space and just spending a minute coming into my body so that I'm starting to develop a skill of interception which is just your brain's ability to read the signals that your body is sending you and that those signals are given to you by one of your most important nerves which is your vagus nerve, which is a really important nerve in self-regulation and getting you out of high, reactive, emotional state? It sets all of the autonomic functions of your body like your heart rate, your breathing, your digestion, and so just taking a minute to try to feel as many sensations as you can on the inside of your body, is actually training for your vagus nerve. You're actually making that nerve stronger and upregulating it, and then that is going to overtime have huge benefits because that nerve is so important in controlling our automatic responses.

So for me, I think a minimum effective dose is really important, like, how much will I set up in my morning routine that I will actually do and so finding that sweet spot of the right amount of work in the morning to not be so overwhelming that it only lasts for a week or two but something that's really sustainable and then gradually building on that over time. You know, maybe I start with 1 minute and then I take it to two minutes and then three months later, I take it to 5 minutes so that I'm starting to see some of the benefits from the work as well as I'm gradually increasing that amount of time of training my nervous system but it keeps me wanting to do it.

Michael: Yeah. And I think that is a really important key point because so often we are measuring ourselves against, do the yoga, do the meditation, do the journaling, do the visualization, do the no coffee, only the tea, and then don't do anything, and then blah, blah and you're like, okay, hold the fuck up. Let me just do what I need to do to take care of myself at this moment, but there's lead up to that, right? So, what's the lead-up for you, Elisabeth? Because I think that it's really easy to when you be it for a while. Kind of go, yes, this is my routine, this is what I do, I have an understanding of it, but in the infancy for lack of a better term of your healing journey and getting to this place that you are now, what was that like because my reflection on it was being very difficult and tedious at times and really needing to double down on the idea that I knew there was a light at the end of this tunnel of some sorts?

Elisabeth: Yeah, I think that is a really great question and some of the things that I did to help get me here are; One, I invested in myself and I got some help with other coaches or therapists or you know joining a group that is working on healing together. I think that it's important to get help and support where you need it until you can make these things more baked in because I don't think I could have done it alone. I don't think I could have done it just relying on my community is really important to me and so was one of the ways that I began to cultivate this routine was doing it with others and then I also think that it's really important to assess and reassess everything that you do because everybody's nervous system is very different and everybody responds differently to different things, and we have different trauma in our past.

So as I was embarking on this journey and trying to see what would work for me. I did, I worked with a bunch of different people. I took a bunch of different applied neurotic, neurotic oasis, and applied different things to myself, and I will always have tested. Do I feel better or do I feel worse after doing this? And I kept notes about it? And I started to really see what are my most high payoff activities, is it these certain drills? Is it a respiration activity? Is it taking a bath?  Is it going for a walk? Like, what really helps me because sometimes sitting in meditation with your eyes closed, when you're in a state of hyper-vigilance just pushes you into more panicked, not everybody responds, the same to everything. And so if you feel all of this internal resistance to doing something. Maybe listen to that and maybe that's not the thing that you're supposed to do, maybe your body's telling you, it wants something else entirely, and so beginning to trust my body a little bit and trust my instincts and ask it, what do you need a body? Like, sometimes I will really sit there and put my hand on my chest and close my eyes and asked my body. How do you want me to be with you right now? And look for the answers there, because nobody knows better than you do.