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
If you hate how thoughts can get so detached from what events are occurring neuroplasticity is a good tool to integrate back into the moment. Lets say the thought of walking your dog turns into thoughts of a car accident. You say, I need to take the dog for a walk, and before you know it, your mind has created a whole story of your dog getting hit by a car. Even though it is a part of your morning routine and it has always occurred safely and your not even outside yet.
How does the mind get there, and how can we get the brain to go somewhere different?
The brain got there through years of unfair and unsafe life events. These events were with people in roles that should have loved me most. To keep you safe, your brain is preparing for life to be unsafe on this dog walk. It uses the neuropathways it has always used to keep me safe, and it continues to use these pathways because they were successful.
But you are no longer around those people or in those situations, and there is no longer the need for this level of survival thinking. I am not in a survival situation.
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 mantra process; with the dog walk example, start by asking if this is real. No, I’m not by the street, and when we cross the street, it is at intersections with stop signs. Remind yourself that I have never had an issue with people not stopping and know how to look for traffic coming.
Neuroplasticity and How to Use Mantras
The mantra comes from reassessing the information and can sound like, “My dog and I will be safe when I cross the street, and I know how to mitigate traffic risks to keep us safe.”
As you apply this process throughout the day and to repeated events like walking the dog, the brain’s neuroplasticity allows the creation of a new pathway. As you continue to practice these new thoughts around walking the dog, you are retraining the brain. The brain is developing a new pathway and a new physical structure to process the positive mantra thoughts.
Over time, thanks to neuroplasticity, your brain will no longer use the survival pathways but develop the thriving pathways. This proven ability of the brain shows that recovery from lifetimes of trauma or a traumatic event is possible.
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 of your dog getting hit by a car.
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
Here are a few of my favorites give them a follow. You will be glad you did.
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.
My bookstore also has a growing selection of books that have provided insights and tools to help healing.
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.
Leave a Reply