Episode 412: The Neuroscience of Reality: Why Change Doesn’t Always Stick
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A physical transformation doesn’t automatically change the story you’re living inside. You can lose the weight, change the labs, clear the symptoms, hit the goal… and still feel like the same OG version of yourself. In this solo episode, Erin is talking about the “neuroscience of reality” – how your brain uses old beliefs, past experiences, and predictive patterns to construct what you see, how you feel, and what you think is possible for you.
This episode is all about self-sabotage. Erin explains how the brain filters millions of pieces of information down to a tiny fraction of conscious awareness, and how understanding this can create a massive amount of compassion for yourself in the healing process.
P.S. The Manifest Your Health app was built to support this exact process! Join today.
In this episode:
The question Erin asks when she looks at labs: what did this person have to sacrifice, silence, or over-function through to get here?
Why healing can start to feel like a hamster wheel when you’re only working with one “fractal” of yourself
How Erin’s eating disorder recovery and autoimmune diagnosis deepened her understanding of self-attack biology
Why the 1970 kitten study explains “behavioral blindness” and how your brain can filter out parts of reality
Resources mentioned:
Manifest Your Health is our neuroscience backed membership designed to help you reconnect with your body, regulate your nervous system, and finally break out of the symptom loop.
Subscribe to Erin’s Substack for a no-nonsense space about health, entrepreneurship, and manifestation.
Organifi Supplement Powder (save 20% on your order with code FUNK)
OneSkin (Use code FUNK for 15% off your first purchase)
Bon Charge (Use code FUNK to save 15%)
Qualia Creatine (get up to 50% off and an extra 15% off your first purchase with link + code FUNKS)
LMNT Electrolyte Replenishing Powder (Use code FUNK and get a free sample pack with any purchase!)
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We don't just passively perceive the world. We actively generate it. Perception is a process of informed guesswork. Perception, what you're perceiving is the brain's best guess at interpreting ambiguous sensory input. It's essentially a story our minds tell us. And in order to tell that story, the brain uses prior expectations. It's called predictive processing. Your brain is a prediction machine and it's constructing your reality in the moment based on what has happened in the past. So, no, you don't just observe reality. Your brain is actively constructing it. It's building it based on those predictions.
Welcome to The Funk'tional Nutrition Podcast, spelled with a K, because we do things a little differently around here. I'm your host, Erin Holt, and I've got 15 years of clinical experience as a functional nutritionist and mindset coach, creating a new model that I call intuitive functional medicine, where we combine root cause medicine with the innate intelligence of your body. This is where science meets self trust. Your body already knows how to heal, and this show is going to show you how. If you're looking for new ways of thinking about your health, be sure to follow and share with a friend, because you never know whose life you might change.
Hey, out there. How we doing? Happy June. Listen, I have received so much wonderful feedback from the past two conversations we've had here on the show, especially the one with Jen Jessica Brown. That was a doozy. I knew that talking about GLP1s would elicit some reactions and some feelings. Totally normal, totally understandable. I just didn't anticipate how much positive feedback I would get where people are really appreciating these conversations. And so I just love you guys.
And for those of you who have DM me, thank you. It's been really great to see your response to this conversation. And I want to make it crystal clear that I do not think everyone should be on a GLP1. Hopefully last week's episode really emphasized that point. They can be problematic. They can cause a ruckus with your physiology, but they can be a tool in some people's tool bag. And I think we just have to look at all of these things as tools. Whether it's a supplement or breath work or a pharmaceutical, there are tools in the tool bag.
And I am all for giving people more tools, not taking them away. Kind of my forever stance. Now. A line that I keep thinking about from the conversation that I had with Jessica, when I asked her why she wanted to write her new book, she said it was because, and I quote, she saw a Tsunami of people that were going to be going through a massive transformation. And that's really what I want to unpack today. It's not going to be another GLP1 episode, although if you are on a GLP1 or considering one great episode for you. But it's going to be a great episode for anybody looking to go through any type of transformation or any type of change. Because if someone has already gone through a transformation, why would they need support on the other side of it? If you're like, I want to lose weight and then you lose the weight, isn't the job done? The answer to that is no, not really.
And that's because a physical transformation, whether it's from a GLP1, a functional medicine protocol, a new diet, a new gym routine, or anything else, doesn't automatically transform the internal world that created the circumstances in the first place. So when I'm looking at someone's labs in practice, yeah, I'm looking at data points. But I'm also seeking to understand the identity and the belief system behind those labs, essentially the person they had to become in order to arrive at those lab data points. Whether that's high cortisol or low progesterone or a positive SIBO test or elevated thyroid antibodies. The questions that I'm asking in my head, what did you have to sacrifice to get here? Where did you have to betray your own boundaries? Where did you have to silence your needs in order to achieve love and belonging? Where did you have to go dark on yourself? Where did you have to over function to prove yourself worthy? Where did you choke back the words that you really needed to say? And if we don't understand that, we're going to see a lot of people change their bodies and still feel exactly the same on the inside. And if you feel exactly the same on the inside, then guess what? The external world always has a way of catching up. And that's exactly what we're going to talk about today, specifically through the lens of neuroscience, because I want to ground some of these esoteric concepts for you. If it sounds little out there, I want to bring it down and ground this conversation.
And science is oftentimes the language that helps us do that. So if you've ever done everything right, you followed the protocol, you've made the changes, you've even seen the results, but you still felt like something was missing. Or even worse, you kind of watched it all slip away. Today we're going to get into why that happens, what your brain is actually doing when it feels like Self sabotage. And how understanding the neuroscience of reality might be the missing piece in your healing journey. Now, if you're new here, welcome. If you found this podcast because of the GLP1 conversations, cool. If you're like, neuroscience of reality, what the fuck is she talking about? Totally get it.
Let me explain. This is a health podcast, but it's important to understand the way that I view health, and that is through multiple lenses. I look at health through the lens of the physical body, but also through the lens of the nervous system, through the lens of the mental body, your mind, and also through the lens of your emotional body. What you're feeling and how all of this influences your life and your reality, all of that makes up you and it makes up your health. And so if we're just looking at you as one fractal of that, which is what modern day healthcare does, it becomes a very incomplete picture. Because healing means to return to wholeness. It's kind of the definition of healing to return to. To wholeness.
So if we are approaching you in your health in fragments, in fractals, then true healing, returning to wholeness, becomes pretty much impossible. And that's when you get frustrated. That's when healing starts to feel like a hamster wheel. So we get to talk about all of that here on this show and in our practice. Now I have a membership called Manifest yout Health that meets all aspects of you. It's literally designed to. To meet all aspects of you. And Manifest your health is the system that I used to put autoimmunity into remission.
I combined it with functional medicine and this process and put a very, very scary autoimmune condition into remission. Okay, so now you're all coughed up. So the way that we approach it with Manifest your Health is that we change the beliefs, we change the programs, we change the identity constructs, we change the bars on our own reality. You're going to understand what that means in a minute. We change the bar on our own perception. We change the limits to what is possible for us. We change the story, we change the nervous system, predictive patterns, and that is what allows the physical body to change. The physical body catches up to all of the inner work.
This is how we see autoimmunity go into remission. Chronic illness like Lyme mold, sirs go into remission. MCAs get better. Chronic gut stuff can become a thing of the past. Anxiety, unhealthy behaviors, even body composition, all of that can shift with this approach because the physical body catches up to all of the inner work. But what happens when you use a tool to change the physical body first? And I think this is the question that really bubbled up to the surface for me during the GLP1 conversation with Jessica Brown. When you use a tool like a GLP one, for example, to change the physical body first will the beliefs, the values, the narratives, the stories about yourself and about the your place in the world, they're all still there. So here's an example of this.
I was listening to a podcast where the host talked about a time he had his biggest launch ever. It was the very thing he had been working hard at for years, the thing he told himself would change everything. Once I get this, once I achieve this, it will change everything. But when he hit that launch goal and he looked in his bank account and he saw the money there inside, he felt exactly the same. He still felt like a loser. He still felt like a failure. His words, not mine. External factors don't always change the way that you feel about yourself.
It's not always an outside in job. It's actually usually the other way around in neuroscience. Helps us understand why. And we're going to get into that in a moment. So listen, you can be healthier or you can be skinnier, or you can be richer, but still have the same old limiting beliefs. The labs might change, the condition might get better, but the person you had to become to arrive at those labs or at that condition is still the same. OG.
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You've heard me talk about One Skin before, and whether you're someone who tries every new skincare product that hits the market or you've been using the same one or two things for years, at some point most of us realize our skin just is isn't keeping up the way it used to. That's what One Skin changed for me. It didn't just make my existing routine better, it actually works differently than anything I've tried. Adding the daily moisturizer to my skin routine a year ago has made such a big difference that people even comment on how my skin has changed. As we age, things change. I don't have to tell you that. But one of those things is that skin cells stop functioning the way they used to. And that's actually what drive those visible signs of aging that we see on our skin. Fine lines, wrinkles, loss of firmness, even dullness. One Skin's OS1 peptide was specifically designed to address those things. Born from over a decade of longevity research, One Skin's OS1 peptide is proven to target the visible signs of aging, helping you unlock your healthiest skin now and as you age. For a limited time, try One Skin with 15% off using the code Funk at OneSkin.Co.FUNK. That's 15% off at OneSkin.Co with Code Funk. After you purchase, they'll ask where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them that we sent you back.
In my 20s, I recovered from a decade plus long struggle with eating disorders, anorexia and then bulimia.
So I completely recovered from those things, only to be diagnosed with an autoimmune disease a few short years later. So much of my youth, much of my early adulthood was hallmarked by self attack thoughts as I struggled with those eating disorders. My sense of worth was not innate. It was predicated on high performance and achieving unrealistic standards. My inner landscape and my inner narrative was one of inner criticism, judgment, self blame. I was a perfectionist with low self worth. At the root of all of it was shame. This omnipresent underlying belief that I am bad.
And even after I recovered from eating disorders, the shame and the hyper self criticism still ran rampant. My beliefs about myself, my beliefs about my place in the world were my true root causes. And they were insidious and they were subconscious, meaning I wasn't always aware of them. I wasn't aware of how they showed up, I wasn't aware of how they impacted my behavior. And so those beliefs really remanifested in other ways. And I want to explain to you that the subconscious mind and our brain work together to attempt to prove to us that our beliefs about ourselves are actually true. What I've consistently seen in myself and others is that we can make the external changes, but if the inner world hasn't changed, then hey, guess what? We are going to subconsciously, meaning we're not aware that we're doing it, we're not actively trying to do it, but we're going to subconsciously create another situation in our external reality reality to map into mirror the internal world. So if you're using a tool like a GLP one just to stick with that conversation and you're changing the external reality, you also have to do the internal work.
And that is also true if you're not on a GLP1. Let's say you're working with a functional medicine practitioner to change your health outcomes. If you're doing the external work. That is amazing and incredible, you guys. It's something to be celebrated for sure. The fact that you took any step forward is worthy of celebration, like good job. But you also want to do the internal work to match and to catch up to the external changes. And by the way, that's why all of our one to one clients in our functional medicine practice, get access to the Manifest yout Health app for this exact reason.
Otherwise, without this internal work, without this inner stuff. Otherwise, you can and you most likely will recalibrate back to the exact same situation or another unsavory situation. So how many people have lost weight only to then gain it back? How many people have felt better only then to start feeling shitty again? How many people have gone on a protocol, have seen success, but then their symptoms return? I've been saying it for years. Protocols can shift your physiology and your physiology can shift right back if you don't change your internal beliefs. But this is the part where we get really frustrated with ourselves. This is the part of the process that we label self sabotage. This is where we start to go to war with ourselves. And as the saying goes, when you go to war with yourself, who wins? So this is when we start saying, every time I take a step forward, I seem to take a step back.
Every time I try to change, I end up right back here. Or, why can't I just do the thing that I know I need to do? Why am I procrastinating? Why do I keep holding myself back? Why do I always derail the process? But something to understand is that what we label as self sabotage is actually, more often than not a protection mechanism. Our minds, our brains and our bodies are always pulling us back to the old familiar because that's what registers as safety. It's like, oh, we've been here before. We know we can survive this. Cool. Let's just keep doing this so it thinks it's working in your favor by keeping you safe. Our brains prioritize safety and survival over growth.
And once you understand this, it allows you to access so much more compassion for yourself and for the process. You guys, this is truly why I'm an educator at heart. I love to explain things to you because once we understand, like once we. We get it, we're like, oh, it's like a sigh of relief in our own bodies. So that's why in Manifest yout help, in addition to the meditations, the reprogramming tools, the somatic practices, I also include so much education and understanding of how the brain works. When you understand, oh, this is the brain just doing what it's designed to do. You stop viewing it as a design flaw. You stop viewing yourself as a design flaw.
What if you're not actually broken beyond repair? What if your mind, your brain and your body are doing exactly what they're designed to do. But you're just misinterpreting that and mislabeling that. And that's the thing that's keeping you stuck. Until we reprogram our minds, rewire our brains and recode our bodies, they will always try to pull us back to the old familiar by design. So like I said, I keep teasing this out. In a few minutes I'm going to explain the neuroscience of reality to you. Literally how your brain constructs and creates reality. Learning this and then applying this truly changed something for me.
Something really, really, really major. And I'm going to talk about it, like I said, more from a brain based perspective than a subconscious mind based perspective. Because I think sometimes when we talk about or we hear about subconscious, it can sound a little woo woo or a little flu. You don't truly understand how the brain operates. So much of what the brain and the nervous system is doing is really operating on a subconscious level. Candace Pert, who's one of my absolute favorites, she was a neuroscientist and a pharmacologist and she discovered the opioid receptor. She said that the body is the subconscious mind. And the way that I help to contextualize this for people, if the thought of unconscious or subconscious sounds a little too like therapy language or magical thinking language or woo woo, here's how to ground it down and explain it in a way that we can like all really sink our teeth into.
Think about what happens when you go to sleep. You are not conscious. When you're sleeping. You're not consciously aware, but your entire body knows what to do to keep you alive. You breathe, your heart pumps, your blood pumps, and all of your organs are working, all of the systems are working. That happens on a subconscious or unconscious level. Meaning it does not need to be consciously directed. Of course not, because you're asleep.
Okay, so if we can get behind that, if we can understand that, then when we start to talk about the subconscious as it relates to the body functions, I think it makes a little bit more sense when we talk about the brain in the nervous system. So much of what they are doing are happening subconsciously. And that's why I say the subconscious mind runs the show. The subconscious directs what we say, what we do, how we think, how we feel, how we behave, what we decide, and even what we see. It essentially projects onto and plays out on the screen in front of us. And we label that reality. It determines the bars on your reality. Back in 1970, Blakemore and Cooper did this study, did this experiment and they took Kittens from birth.
And from birth, those kittens were kept in darkness. When the kittens turned two weeks, they were placed in a cylinder for five hours a day for five months. Are you questioning the ethics of this? Yeah, me too. But the inner surface of the cylinder was covered with either horizontal or vertical black and white stripes. The kittens also wore a wide collar which prevented them from seeing beyond the world of stripes. What was observed was something called behavioral blindness. Kittens raised with vertical stripes did not see or respond to horizontal stripes, while horizontal raised kittens didn't see vertical lines. Essentially, their brains deleted half of reality, not because half of reality didn't exist, but because their brains were not wired to see it.
So neuroscience helps us understand that what we see isn't real. Reality isn't something that you see, it's something that your brain creates. Anil Seth, who's a British neuroscientist, says, we don't just passively perceive the world, we actively generate it. Perception is a process of informed guesswork. Perception, what you're perceiving is the brain's best guess at interpreting ambiguous sensory input. It's essentially a story our minds tell us. And in order to tell that story, the brain uses prior expectations. It's called predictive processing.
Your brain is a prediction machine, and it's constructing your reality in the moment based on what has happened in the past. So no, you don't just observe reality. Your brain is actively constructing it. It's building it based on those predictions. Anil says Instead of perception depending largely on signals coming into the brain from outside the world, it depends as much, if not more, on perceptual predictions flowing in the opposite direction from the inside out, based on your programming, based on your beliefs. The brain is also an evidence seeking machine, and it's constantly seeking evidence to prove itself right. This is how it connects your own beliefs to your physical reality. We have so much information coming at our brains and our bodies all day, every day.
We have so much stimuli coming in from our senses. Sight, sound, smell, touch. And it's coming at us every second of every day. We have 11 million bits of sensory information coming at us every second. Here's the crazy part. We can only consciously retain 40 to 50. Our mental capacity is limited, so we can only process a certain amount of information at any given time. We have a finite amount of conscious attention.
So to prevent overload, attention must be selective. We essentially have to take those 11 million bits and filter them down to about 50. And guess how we do that. We do that on a subconscious level we're not aware that we're doing this. It's just happening. And what gets through that filtration system, 11 million to 50. What gets through that filter is what we believe. It is what our current programs and beliefs tell us. So we are constantly reinforcing the bars of our own own reality.
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So let's contextualize this. Let's say you have a core belief that you are unlovable.
And this core belief got planted probably very early on, probably somewhere between the ages of 0 to 7. But let's say we're not going to unpack how core beliefs get planted, but let's just say it got implanted. So you are carrying around this belief that you are unlovable. And you think to yourself, well, once I lose weight, I will be more lovable. Once I change my body composition, I will be able to receive more love. Okay, that is your thought. Once the external changes, then the insides will change. And so then let's say you actually do lose weight.
That does not automatically change or update the belief that you are unlovable. That doesn't automatically change your brain's filtration system. So you will continue to collect more evidence of the belief, because that is what the brain is designed to do, collect more evidence of your own beliefs. And this is not because you are unlovable, of course, but because your brain is going to filter certain experiences out. You haven't wired your brain to see more evidence that people are showing you love. It's just like the kittens who couldn't see horizontal stripes. Horizontal stripes were still real. They were still out there.
They were still present. They were still happening. They just couldn't perceive them based on their brains wiring based on their programs. This is how what we perceive becomes our reality. That's what feels real to us. So you will continue to navigate the world as though you are unhappy, unlovable. You will make choices and decisions and actions and behaviors as though you are unlovable. You will continue to operate from that belief, from that program.
And this might look like maybe you gain the weight back, or this might look like something else entirely. But changing the external factors rarely automatically updates the internal programs. You know, even when I completely recovered from eating disorders, my belief system hadn't shifted that much. I still saw myself in a very negative light. I spoke to myself in a very negative way. I always looked for ways that I was falling short. That really drove my perfectionist tendencies. I never wanted to say no to things because I was terrified of letting people down.
I was terrified of disappointing people. I was terrified of feeling like a failure every time I Said yes to something. I had to perform at 125% or I felt like a failure. I over functioned in order to just feel normal inside. And of course because I had these beliefs, I kept collecting evidence that they were true. So that led to constant burnout, that led to constant nervous system dysregulation, that led to immune system dysfunction. The eating disorder behavior was completely gone. But the beliefs were still there.
Beliefs are the root causes of our behaviors. We act in accordance with our belief system. As we discussed, our beliefs inform our perception of reality. Our brain literally constructs our reality based on those beliefs. And our biology is really not separate from our belief. So once I understood all of this, I was not shocked that I ended up with autoimmune condition. Autoimmunity is what? Self attack. If you believe you are the bad thing, the body will follow suit.
That's how it works. Our beliefs become our biology. We cannot separate our story out from our body. Body. Here's the good news. I'm not going to hit you with all that depressing stuff and not also simultaneously offer up some really positive news. So neuroscience tells us that our reality is just really a projection based off of our perception. And this is based off of our beliefs, which are based off of our past experiences.
But neuroplasticity tells us we can change all of that. Neuroplasticity is like your superpower, my dude. It is like, like magic. So we can change our beliefs to be more in alignment with what we want to see. We can update that past programming. We can change the way that your brain sees in, filters the world. We absolutely, positively can update the bars of your reality. Your brain is always creating your reality in real time.
That means every second of every day creates a new opportunity for you to create a new reality. So when Jessica said I saw a tsunami of people that were going to be going through a massive transformation, here's the thing I want you to know. Transformation, it's always possible. You can grow, you can evolve, you can change. Are there some obstacles in the way? Sure. Some of the obstacles are in your mind. You are the mountain. So it is week.
But once you understand this, you can work with yourself and listen. Whether your transformation is starting from the outside in or the inside out, it doesn't matter. One is not good or bad. One is not right or wrong. If you are starting something, like I said, that is worthy of celebration. So whether your transformation is starting from the inside out or the outside in, either way, this work that we're talking about here Today is still so important. And I hope by now, if you've listened to this whole show, you really, really understand why. And this is the part where I extend an invitation for you to join us and Manifest yout Health.
It's a five phase framework. It's hosted within an app, so it's super easy access. You can plug in and listen 20 minutes a day. There are short education modules, kind of like you're listening to a podcast for me. And there are a lot of guided practices. There's meditations, breath work, energy healing, somatic practices, reprogramming techniques, journal prompts. Right now there are close to 200 people in there doing the same work. So you're not going it alone.
The inner work is only scary if you view yourself as something to be feared. You are not. Okay? You are not something to be feared. So dive in. The water's warm. I love you guys and I'll check you next week.
Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Funk'tional Nutrition Podcast. Please keep in mind this podcast is created for educational purposes only and should never be used as a replacement for medical diagnosis or treatment. If you got something from today's show, don't forget, subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend, and keep coming back for more. Take care of you.