You are Capable of Healing
You can heal so much that you can physically change your brain structure. Your brain will recover to the point of changing its molecular structure. This is what neuroplasticity indicates about the level of healing that is possible. The sections below break down how you can achieve this type of healing.
Neuroplasticity and Mental Health Stigmas
Neuroplasticity Exercises to Heal
The field of neuroscience has made exceptionally large steps in the last ten years—and even in the last five years. New machines can detect brain waves to control computer graphics and the function of prosthetic hands. With all this progress, I’m surprised to still come across people who have not heard of neuroplasticity and are unaware of the level of healing they are capable of because of neuroplasticity.
One of the most daunting feelings of addressing trauma is the perception that things will never get better. This post will cover the high-level basics of mental health and brain function.
Neuroplasticity means you can change the brain’s pathways that process thoughts. In trauma healing, this more specifically means you can move away from using default survival thinking pathways. By developing and using thriving pathways, which are more supportive and encouraging thoughts. Most importantly, you can do this at any age.
Neuroplasticity and Mental Health Stigmas
Until the late 1900s, having mental illness meant that your brain was broken. That your brain could never be healed and that you, in general, were not a properly functioning human that could be trusted.
This was believed strongly and to the point of someone’s ability to be employable. Certain jobs that interface with large amounts of people still hold some stigma with regard to mental capacity. This scrutiny is in very specific roles entrusted with hundreds of people’s safety.
However, in the early 2000s, there was a shift in discussing mental health. This shift started with the topic of depression and how medication could make this manageable.
Now, into the 2020s, there has been another shift from the progress made in neuroscience. More specifically, there is proof of neuroplasticity and how the brain develops given thought. This new ability of the brain to change even after we are children should inspire your thoughts about healing. With this new understanding, neuroscience can now be used to help empower trauma healing and what is possible for physical brain recovery.
Consider Where Your Brain Structure Started
As we grow, a lot happens in brain development, but to stay focused on neuroplasticity, we’ll focus on the relationships and thought impacts of brain development. As a child, you used the information you had to form decisions about events happening around or to you. These decisions were made with the limited information from your experiences as a child and with complete trust.
Especially when we are young, we learn a lot from our families and are pretty isolated. There are no comparison points for what life with other families is like, so there is no reason not to trust these information sources. We build beliefs about life without question and create the neural pathways to go with them.
Developing Trauma Responses
This is true for all types of events, good and bad. In abusive or traumatic situations, as minor or extreme as they may be, the brain starts to develop thought pathways. In traumatic situations, these pathways address how to handle dangerous situations, and as they occur repeatedly, the pathways become stronger and stronger. To keep us safe, the brain uses what it knows has worked before and uses the same path developed during trauma situations.
If these events happen frequently enough, for long enough, or the event meaningful enough. These pathways get so strong that the brain predicts this behavior and runs what-if scenarios.
The brain builds the pathway to accommodate the large amount of thought traffic. This thought traffic is electrical and chemical in nature. Like the substances electricity and water, thoughts default to following the path of least resistance, which in this case is the well-developed neural pathway.
Neuroplasticity Exercises – Using Neuroplasticity to Heal
Neuroplasticity means the brain has the ability to heal, adapt, and evolve.
With PTSD, recent research has been able to measure and quantify brain function following traumatized events by mapping thought patterns and imaging brain function. This research confirmed that healthy brain function can change following a traumatic event. A lot of people learned about this following an incident at Ariana Grande’s concert and her sharing brain scans and speaking on the topic of PTSD. Here is one link that shows the brain scans and a video of Ariana on the subject.
It is not a big jump to understand that a trauma-oriented brain (a brain that is really just keeping you safe) can then change in the other direction and transition to thought patterns of love and support instead of survival and threats. But how can you get there?
Cognitive Awareness for Neuroplasticity
Recognizing the energetic patterns shaped by trauma is a foundational step in sovereign healing. Therapeutic frameworks — including structured assessments informed by trauma research — can offer useful mirrors for identifying survival strategies still woven into daily life.
Yet recognition is not an ending.
It is a threshold.
Each pattern seen becomes an invitation: to choose a new pathway, to reclaim energetic sovereignty, and to transmute the old imprints into conscious presence. Practitioners trained in modalities such as EMDR can support this unfolding, helping to anchor emotional clarity and reawaken the innate wisdom of the body and soul.
How does the mind get there, and how can we get the brain to go somewhere different?
The brain learns survival pathways through repeated experiences of instability, betrayal, or danger — often at the hands of those who should have been sources of love and protection.
In response, the nervous system adapts: preparing for unsafe conditions even when no immediate threat exists. These survival pathways are not mistakes. They are evidence of profound intelligence — strategies the body and mind used successfully to preserve life.
Yet survival patterns, once protective, can become prisons when life circumstances change. Today, those same survival responses may activate in safe environments — during a simple walk, a conversation, or an ordinary day — not because danger is present, but because the body remembers how to stay alive.
Healing invites a new recognition:
The original threat is no longer here.
The body can learn to trust the present.
The mind can build new pathways grounded in sovereignty, not fear.
How do you use neuroplasticity?
First, use cognitive awareness and become aware of the thought. This gets easier with practice. When starting, you’ll be halfway through a story and already getting upset, but with practice, you’ll start to notice your body’s responses.
By seeing this correlation of thoughts with physical tension, you will learn to catch the survival thoughts faster.
Cognitive awareness is the start to using neuroplasticity for healing. Cognitive awareness is basically living throughout the day with the intention of being aware of your thoughts. What works is to focus on the truth of the situation and instill this truth in a mantra. Runaway thoughts that can occur and in PTSD can be gruesome and heavy, so the mantra needs to be something that you really believe.
Reality Check
Second, employ a conscious mantra process to reorient the nervous system toward present-time reality.
When survival responses activate unnecessarily — such as feeling hyper-alert in an otherwise safe environment — gently ask:
“Is there an immediate danger present now?”
Affirm the facts of the moment:
The environment is calm.
Crossings happen at designated safe points.
Situational awareness remains intact.
By naming the reality of the present, the mind and body are reminded that they are no longer trapped in the old survival landscape.
This practice gradually retrains the nervous system to trust grounded awareness instead of reacting from outdated fear pathways.
Neuroplasticity and How to Use Mantras
As part of conscious healing, the mind can be gently guided to reassess information and create new sovereign pathways.
A mantra drawn from present truth might sound like:
“The path ahead is clear. I am grounded, aware, and safe.”
Repeating conscious affirmations throughout repeated daily experiences — such as navigating familiar routes or environments — activates the brain’s neuroplastic capacity to build new internal structures.
Each time a new thought pattern is chosen intentionally, the brain physically rewires: moving away from survival pathways and toward thriving pathways rooted in presence and trust.
Over time, these new pathways strengthen, and the old reflexes of fear lose their dominance.
Neuroplasticity is sacred evidence that lifetimes of trauma — whether singular or ancestral — can be transmuted.
Healing is not only possible; it is woven into the very design of life.
Thought Habits
People refer to these as thought habits. Practicing new thoughts often, reprograms crossing safely at a stop sign as a thought habit. This positive thought habit replaces the negative one.
Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to create new thought habits, which means that with awareness and consistency, healing trauma is possible.
Neuroplasticity is also Available Later in Life
Another important aspect of neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to restructure throughout life. Some plots show that this plasticity slows or gets harder as we age, but it is still possible.
No matter what age, your brain can heal from trauma and improve your mental health.
Cultivating a Healing Neuroplastic Environment
Conscious consumption goes beyond what someone eats. Consumption is also what thoughts they pay attention to (consume), which can be applied to neuroplasticity and healing trauma. Suppose you are around people who hold onto old beliefs about mental health and cannot remove them from your life. In that case, you can cultivate your healing environment by following neuroscientists on Instagram.
These scientists post information on brain function and help connect the research to everyday possibilities. You can follow them to help fill your environment with accurate information on brain function to support healing. A process you believe in is more likely to work than one you do not. This is usually because it will be the one you keep practicing, which is key to successfully using neuroplasticity to heal the brain.
Neuroscience Feeds
Scott Robinson FCMA (@the.brain.guy) • Instagram photos and videos
Alex ML (@itsalexml) • Instagram photos and videos
Dr Joe Dispenza (@drjoedispenza) • Instagram photos and videos
Dr Alex George (@dralexgeorge) • Instagram photos and videos
Doctor Tara (@drtaraswart) • Instagram photos and videos
She also has a book, The Source, that combines Eastern-style practices and neurological explanations. You can learn more about her research at her website. As well as a specific Instagram feed on neuroplasticity and Vedic medicine.
“The Source” is available on Amazon and in multiple languages.
Resources
If that wasn’t enough to develop a new perspective on healing, here are a few more resources on neuroplasticity. If faith (a belief) can move mountains, knowing (something proven and concrete) can change the world or your mind.
