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Do you ever notice how one tiny little symptom can send your brain into a full blown worst case scenario spiral?
In this solo deep dive, Erin is getting into the neuroscience of chronic symptom loops and how you can start rewiring those patterns through self-directed neuroplasticity.
She talks about the brain's negativity bias, fear circuitry, and the way your nervous system can become SO hypervigilant that even a perfectly normal body sensation can get flagged as a threat.
Erin also shares about her own experiences with autoimmunity, and why similar patterns can show up with IBS, fibromyalgia, MCAS, chronic fatigue, chemical sensitivities, and chronic pain.
P.S. Join Erin for her first-ever LIVE 5 Day Nervous System Reset, beginning November 12! For $27, you'll get 5 days of guided practices, 2 live classes with Erin, and lifetime access inside the Manifest Your Health app.
In this episode:
What happens when fear, symptoms, and stress responses become your brain's default setting
Why Erin says it's actually a GOOD sign when rewiring feels slow and clunky in the beginning
What value tagging means, and why your brain might be putting little sticky notes on every symptom
How Erin went from practicing pattern interrupts 5-6 times a day to no longer needing them
Resources mentioned:
Sign up for Erin’s $27 LIVE 5 Day Nervous System Reset, beginning November 12th.
Manifest Your Health is the neuroscience-backed membership that helps you regulate your nervous system, integrate the parts of you that keep you stuck, and become the version of yourself your body can actually heal as.
Subscribe to her Substack where Erin shares the (raw & unfiltered) BTS of her own business & life – so you can steal what applies to yours. All things health, wealth, ambition & manifestation.
Episode 431: Endo Uncovered Part 5: The Connection Between MCAS, Histamine & Endometriosis
Want more of Erin?
Subscribe to her Substack where Erin shares the (raw & unfiltered) BTS of her own business & life – so you can steal what applies to yours. All things health, wealth, ambition & manifestation.
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We have the ability to change our filters, to change our perception, to change our lived reality. We have the power to interrupt this loop and rewire toward more of what we want to see. This is known as self-directed neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity means that we can rewire and change the brain. Self is you. You are the self in this. So So in order to rewire, you have to intentionally direct this. You have to do something different than what you are currently doing. Remember, neurons that fire together wire together.
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.
Hello, my friends.
I've got another solo deep dive episode for you. We're talking about how to rewire your way out of chronic inflammation or chronic symptoms. I feel like I'm returning to my roots lately with these deep dives. I'm like, shrinking attention spans be damned, we're going deep. This is gonna take some time. But I'm really, really excited about today's episode. And I think you might be too, if you're anything like me. So my mind can spiral, I can go from 0 to 60 pretty fast, I can turn every single molehill into a mountain pretty swiftly, I can get highly anxious, I can become hypervigilant, where I'm always scanning for the threat or the problem, I can catastrophize.
I basically have a PhD in catastrophizing, which is like imagining the worst possible outcome. And the vibe behind that is if you can imagine the worst possible outcome, then you can prepare for it, right? The nervous system is basically saying, I can stay on guard, I can stay ready. Nothing's gonna catch me off guard. Like, I'm ready for this. So if any of this sounds like you, If your brain works a little bit like mine, here's what I want you to know. This is super important. When you imagine the worst possible outcome or the worst possible scenario, your body is literally preparing for it. It starts to prepare for it.
I like how Bessel van der Kolk explains it. He says it plays out in the theater of visceral experience, which is just a very poetic way of saying what is happening in the brain. Mm-hmm. What is happening in the mind, what we are imagining, will play out through the body. And this used to show up for me a lot when I was dealing with autoimmunity. Many of you guys know, 11 years ago, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune condition, a pretty serious one, a pretty scary one, that definitely instigated a lot of fear in my mind and then in my body as well. I became very aware of body sensations. I became very aware.
And I became very anxious about those sensations, about those symptoms. I catastrophized them. I told myself very scary stories about what they meant, what they represented, which only served to reinforce the same symptoms that I was trying to get rid of. So it was like this loop that I could not get myself out of. And we can see this exact same pattern with anxiety disorders, with IBS, with multiple food sensitivities, sensitivities, with chronic pain, with other pain syndromes, with chronic fatigue syndrome, with fibromyalgia, with MCAS. We talked about that on last week's show. Basically any conditions with symptom loops that are hard to break. And I've said this before and I'll say it again, but conventional medicine really, really struggles with what to do with this cluster of conditions.
I mentioned it on a recent podcast. I call these the bucket syndromes because people are dropped into a bucket of, yeah, We're not really sure what to do with you. We're not really sure how to help. And while all of those are different conditions, in the brain, there's something similar going on with all of them. There are real neurochemical reasons for those ongoing symptoms that are associated with those conditions. And once you understand this, all of a sudden, there becomes a new and very effective way of helping yourself. Many of you know that I was able to put that autoimmune condition into complete remission and be free of symptoms. And today's episode is really a big part of how I was able to do that.
So if any of this sounds like you, today we're going to talk about how to rewire your way out of that, because it is 100% possible. You guys hear me say this all of the time. The brain is highly plastic. It can always reorganize and restructure itself. It can create new synapses and form new connections. So if there's a component of your symptoms or of your condition that is brain-based, it actually can be rewired. We can rewire the chronic inflammation. We can rewire the activation and the symptoms that are associated with it.
But first, before I tell you how to do that, I want to explain why the symptoms are there in the first place and why your body keeps recreating them. This why part, this explanation is really important for you to understand before you can understand how to rewire. Like I said earlier, it was like a loop that I couldn't get myself out of. If you do not become aware of this loop, you cannot exit it. So understanding and awareness is a crucial first step. You need to understand how it was wired and conditioned this way in the first place before you can begin to unwire it or rewire it. This is the exact approach that I take in Manifest Your Health™, and I do that very intentionally, and I want to explain why. First of all, if you're not familiar with all of the tools that we have here at The Funk’tional Nutritionist, we have our very own app, and it houses my neuroscience-backed brain-body healing program called Manifest Your Health™.
So this is the program that helped me and many others put chronic conditions into remission. And it's a 5-phase system to follow. And in each phase, there are education modules explaining how your nervous system works, how your brain works, how neuroplasticity works, how your subconscious mind works, how your emotional body works. And I take the time to explain all of that so that when I present the solutions for how to change it, you understand why they actually work, what they're actually doing for you and your Yeah. This is a huge part of the reason why it's such an effective program, and we hear this over and over and over again from our members. It is this cognitive understanding mixed with the experiential practices that actually makes the change. This is the difference between doing a 10-minute meditation or breathwork practice and feeling calm, and then putting a whole-ass condition with chronic symptoms into remission. So today I want to teach you about the brain nervous system component of chronic conditions and then teach you how to break that loop, how to rewire that loop, how to rewire those chronic symptoms.
But in order to do that, I want you to cognitively understand what's going on first. Before we get into today's conversation, a really quick announcement. I'll talk about it more at the end of the show, so stay tuned if you're interested, but I'm doing something I've never done before, and I am hosting a 5 Day Nervous System Reset. It's going to begin on November 12th. I am so excited. The practices in the reset will help you begin to rewire your nervous system and feel safe in your body. It's not going to be anything overwhelming. We're just doing one thing a day for 5 days, and that's going to include 2 live classes with me, and you will feel like a different person on the other side of it.
The reset is going to live inside the Manifest Your Health™ app, so it's going to be really easy for you to actually use the practices and carry them around with you. It's only $27. You'll have lifetime access. It's only 5 days. So legit, anybody could do this. So get yourself signed up for it if you're interested in the show notes.
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Okay, so let's tuck into this. And let us begin at the beginning. We are going to start by talking about the limbic system, which is a region, a part of your brain that interprets inputs coming in.
It gives meaning to experiences. It decides what we should retain as conscious thought, and what we should retain as memories. It helps us process emotion, and it is shaped in response to experience. And that is going to feel like a pretty familiar theme by the end of today's discussion, because your brain, in your nervous system, in your entire subconscious, is shaped by your experience. And when I'm talking about the subconscious, I am talking about stuff that's happening in your body below your level of conscious awareness. Okay, it can sound a little like mystical, but it's not. So all of this to say, if you've had some shitty experiences in the past, that is going to shape your brain, your nervous system, and your subconscious belief system in your present. But what is also true is that all of this is continuously being shaped and reshaped and remodeled in response to experience.
That's the good news. So if you create new experiences, you can build new circuitry in your brain. You can build a new nervous system, you can create new subconscious beliefs that can run the show. That's the rewiring part. You can build a new reality for yourself, you can build a new body of health for yourself that is available to everybody. And that's a little bit of a teaser of what's to come. So part of the limbic system is the amygdala, which we have talked about a ton before. The amygdala is often called or referred to as our fear center.
It identifies danger. It basically asks, is this incoming input relevant to our survival? It processes all emotional reactions, especially fear and anxiety. Any experience of danger will directly activate the amygdala, and it puts fear and learning together and creates response patterns to certain triggers. So easy example of this, if you touch a hot stove and you get burned once, chances are in the future you will not touch that hot stove again. And the amygdala protects us from danger by triggering a fight or flight response. It senses a threat, and then it sends an instant message to the hypothalamus that kicks off the whole HPA axis cascade, the fight or flight response in your whole body. And since the amygdala response is faster than the prefrontal cortex response, which is like our logical brain, it can decide on a threat even before we are consciously aware of the danger. So once again, this is happening subconsciously, before conscious awareness even sets in.
It happens on a subconscious level. We are not consciously directing the amygdala to fire. It happens automatically. And remember, it's shaped in response to past experience. What happened in the past will inform and direct how our amygdala responds in The present. Now, another part of the limbic system is the insula. And the insula takes in all incoming sensory data from the body and processes the information. It maps signals from organs like the heart, the lungs, the gut, the skin, the immune system, and it triggers a response in the body based off of its interpretation of those signals.
All day, every day, the nervous system is scanning your environment externally. So it's looking at what's happening outside of you, but also internally, what's happening inside of you, what's happening in your body. So we have exteroception, which is taking in cues from outside the world, external stimulus. And then we have interoception, which is listening to cues from inside our body. In your brain, specifically, the insula is constantly integrating these 2 things. So we have stimulus that comes in, The brain categorizes it, it defines it, it converts it into meaning, and then it signals out to the rest of the body. And if any of those signals coming in are deemed unsafe, our whole body will shift into a sympathetic activation state. Our bodies will physiologically react.
So the theory is, as it relates to chronic conditions and chronic symptoms, The amygdala and the insula together are involved in over-triggering the sympathetic activation state, that survival response. And when that survival response is chronically activated, that can go on to create and worsen actual physical symptoms associated with chronic conditions. This is what makes the symptoms chronic. We spoke about this in more detail on a recent episode, episode 429, How Your Nervous System Influences Your Health. So if you haven't listened to that one yet, I would definitely go back. Honestly, between this episode and that one, it's like a whole masterclass on your nervous system and brain's role in chronic conditions. So how things kick off, the condition itself might kick off with some type of stressor. It could be a psychological stressor, it could be a physical stressor.
Many times it is both. And when I say physical stressor, I mean a viral infection. So think long haulers, long COVID, Epstein-Barr virus, that could be a viral infection that is the original trigger. It can be a bacterial infection. We can see this with IBS or chronic Lyme. It can be an injury like a TBI or injury to other parts of your body. It could be toxicant exposure, so chemicals or even mold. And your body originally is obviously going to respond to that trigger or to that stressor.
If there's a bacterial infection, for example, that can elicit an immune response and an inflammatory response that can create actual symptoms. But once that initial trigger or infection is resolved, that inflammatory cascade should calm down. But in the case of these chronic ongoing conditions and symptoms, the amygdala and the insula learn to view the symptom as the threat. So it treats your body sensations as the trigger, which kicks off the amygdala response, the nervous system response, the immune response, the inflammatory response, and then we see more symptoms. And then the brain reacts to these symptoms as a threat and a trigger, and the beat goes on. This is the loop. The amygdala becomes hyperreactive and hyperdefensive, and it continues to register any body sensation, any symptom as a threat, and it continues to feed the loop. And if you have any history of trauma, your brain already has a propensity to work in this way.
So it's kind of like a double-down situation. Your nervous system, like we said before, is shaped by your history. So it's going to inform— your history is going to inform how your amygdala, your limbic system, your insula, your nervous system perceives all of the inputs that are coming in. We know that Unresolved trauma leads to a dysregulated limbic system. Trauma predisposes the amygdala to amplify. There's this amplification of the brain's alarm system. The responses are trained to basically err on the side of caution just to ensure survival. It's like that catastrophizing.
We're gonna stay on guard just so we're not caught off guard ever again. And so this very easily triggers the nervous system and the immune system. Essentially, your brain is conditioned to overprotect, to be over-defensive. This can make negative thoughts, fears, worries, reactivity more likely to happen over time. Like I said before, I'm basically a pro at turning a molehill into a mountain. That is what my brain has a propensity to want to do. There's a tendency to see things through a more fear-based lens. And whenever I talk about this, I always use the word unresolved when talking about trauma.
And I use that very intentionally, because I never want this to feel or to sound hopeless. Just because you may have experienced trauma in your life does not mean that you're going to have health challenges for the rest of your life. There are always ways to process what has happened to us. But if we don't, the body will eventually show evidence of what we have resisted, what we have hidden, and what we have pushed down. We know that Adults with high ACE scores tend to stay on high alert. So ACE stands for adverse childhood experiences, and these are potentially traumatic events that occur in childhood between the ages of 0 to 17 years. And this staying on high alert is a habit that they learned in childhood when you couldn't be sure when you'd face the next high-tension situation. It's this unpredictability of stressors, the not knowing, the waiting for the other shoe to drop.
That's what kind of leads to the catastrophizing. tendency. And of course, traumatic stress isn't just childhood trauma. It's any experience of helplessness, of powerlessness, or chronic overwhelm without enough of a chance to recover. It's too much, too fast without the appropriate resources. And so oftentimes, I actually will put chronic illness, navigating chronic illness, in the category of traumatic Stress. It's the unpredictability of symptoms. It's the not knowing what is going to trigger symptoms.
It's the medical gaslighting you might have experienced, not being believed about your symptoms, not having the resources or the answers or the support to help you. There is a legitimate fear that can be activated, like, is this going to be my forever? Will I always feel this way? And so with all of this, being on the lookout for danger, becomes your normal state. You stay on guard. This leads to more hypervigilance, a more hypervigilant nervous system where it's constantly scanning both outside and inside, looking for and expecting problems, danger, threat. And this isn't because people with chronic symptoms are crazy. This is because this is literally how The brain works. So like, maybe hit that 15-second button if you need to hear that again. If this is you, if I'm talking, you're like, everything she's saying sounds like she's describing me.
This isn't because you're crazy. And I am so sorry if people in your life, especially people in the positions of authority, have led you to believe that. This is just how the brain works. Emotionally intense experiences are better remembered. When emotionality is high, the amygdala activates, and the hippocampus, another part of the brain, prioritizes memory encoding. The brain holds onto trauma for a reason. It's for protection. It's trying to keep you safe.
It says, "If I encode this memory, I will stay safe. If I encode this memory, I won't." Forget it. I will never let it go, and I will be able to stay on guard and stay safe. But what happens when the amygdala mislabels too many things as a threat? Your felt sense of safety is not always tied to objective reality. So objectively, you could be looking around and you can see That you are actually safe. But it's your perception of safety. That is what becomes your lived reality. That is what becomes what your body is experiencing.
When your brain is perceiving a threat or lack of safety, it's going to continuously send signals down to the body, it's going to send stress chemistry down to the body. And that is how All of this can relate to health issues and can feed the symptom cycle. And I always like to make this part really easy to understand because modern medicine disconnects the mind from the body, which is a huge misstep. And I feel like I have to do so much reeducation to get people to understand that, nope, they're actually connected. Nope, that's not woo-woo. Nope, that's not pseudoscience. Yep, this is actually just part of having a mind and a brain and a body. We've all got 'em, so we should probably start to learn how interconnected they actually are.
So limbic system dysfunction, we've talked about the limbic system. Limbic system dysfunction, when the amygdala and the insula are sort of misfiring, that leads to chronic sympathetic activation of the nervous system that keeps the nervous system switched on fight or flight. That leads to a lower threshold of perceived danger, and so this whole system can get tripped Yeah. And activated super, super, super easily. So it's basically always in a state of overstimulation, and that overstimulation affects the whole brain. It keeps many brain circuits in a state of hyperarousal. The whole HPA axis is constantly kicked off, and when this is running and gunning for a long time, we can see it get exhausted over time. That leads to exhausted or burnt-out adrenals.
That can lead to compromised immune system. We We can see immune challenges and illness arise out of these conditions. Parts of the immune system might be inappropriately retriggered, and all of this overstimulation can lead to higher levels of oxidative stress and inflammation. Those 2 things go pretty much hand in hand, oxidative stress and inflammation. They can trigger one another, and it just leads to excessive inflammation throughout the body. And when we are chronically inflamed in the body, that can also impact the brain. We can see neuroinflammation. Yeah.
And this can of course lead to more problems and more symptoms— brain fog, fatigue, chronic fatigue, but also low mood. We have less of the feel-good chemicals in our brain. It can be harder for us to enjoy life. We can have a more negative outlook on things. And here's what's real: our brains already have a negativity bias. We give more weight, more attention, and more memory to negative experiences than to neutral or positive ones. And all of this gets worse. I want to talk about a concept known as value tagging for a second.
Value tagging is when the brain assigns a certain level of importance to every piece of information it's exposed to. We can assign a strong negative value to things that we fear or things that we feel are uncertain. So if we have this strong emotional fear-based reaction to our symptoms, that can really skew value tagging system, and it can make it value tag the symptoms and body reactions. It's kind of like putting a Post-it note on your symptoms and being like, you should pay attention to this. This matters. This is important. Come back to this. Don't forget about this.
Focus on this. We start looking at symptoms as the bad guy, and then the amygdala instantly restimulates the body systems, and it perpetuates the vicious cycle. So the symptoms themselves start to become the trigger. A perfect example of this is if you've ever dealt with anxiety or panic attacks, when you start to feel the physical sensations of anxiety, it tells the brain, hey, we're in danger. So the brain triggers more signals, which then triggers more anxiety, and this becomes a loop. The brain is a meaning-making prediction machine. It predicts what happens next. Based on what has repeatedly happened in the past.
So think about how this would play out with a history of chronic symptoms. And by the way, the definition of chronic can be as little as 3 months. So this loop can start to build itself in as little as 3 months. And again, that is especially true if you carry any history of trauma. Experiences that have been tagged repeatedly in the past, those things that have gotten those Post-it notes put on them, the brain will start to predict that. It's this concept in neuroscience, neurons that fire together wire together. When any type of experience happens, clusters of neurons fire, and when it happens repeatedly, these connections strengthen. And that's especially true when emotional intensity is present.
So when a circuit fires repeatedly, over time, it can become the default setting, the response most likely to occur. When the brain predicts something is coming, the body starts preparing for it. It's like, oh, we've been here before, let's go, let's get ready. So again, if you have a symptom of chronic symptoms, whether that is gut issues, stomach pain, food reactions, joint pain, headaches, whatever it might be, if that has been your default setting, it is more likely to continue to be. I always call these pathways like ice luges. They're like slippery and slidey, and we just shoot right down them. So let me give you some other examples, like chronic fatigue, for example. Exhaustion— you start to feel just a little bit tired, and that's going to tell the brain, hey, there's still an active infection here.
Alert, alert! We have to upregulate everything. That upregulation leads to more symptoms. Fibromyalgia— the pain tells the brain that there's still ongoing danger. So again, alert, get the amygdala activated, get the brain activated, get the whole body activated, more symptoms. Chemical sensitivities, same deal. You might walk into a house and smell a Glade plug-in and think, uh-oh, the amygdala fires saying this is not safe, and then you get symptoms. That used to be me. That used to be me big time.
IBS, food sensitivity, same thing. You feel some gut sensations that tells the brain, uh-oh, this food is dangerous, or the gut is about to react. Alert, alert, alert. More upregulation, more symptoms. So this is what I mean when I say the symptoms themselves start to become the trigger. But it's not just symptoms. Any body sensation can tripwire this activation because the brain is on such high alert. It's looking for any threat and it starts flagging and tagging things that might not actually be a threat.
As a threat. We can misinterpret symptoms, we can misinterpret body sensations. Our past experiences, chronic stress, trauma, chronic pain, chronic symptoms can influence our interoception accuracy. And so remember, interoception are the cues that come from inside our body, inside our organs, up to the brain. And we can see overactive interoception, where we can become hypersensitive to sensations in the body. We can fixate on them. There can be this hypervigilance. We can associate them with something negative, where we're telling ourselves a story that something bad is going to happen.
We can stay in an elevated state of constantly assessing for threats and overestimating the threats. This is a hallmark in IBS. It's known as visceral hypersensitivity, where folks with IBS Yes. So a lot of us will feel quote unquote normal sensations in the gut, the same sensations that everybody else has, but they perceive them as painful. Their brain decides this is bad, this is pain, and then they experience it as pain. So these sensations come up to the insula, which is part of our limbic system, which is linked to the fear circuitry, and it says, this is a problem. So please react as though it is a problem. And back to that concept of value tagging.
If this is you, if you've had ongoing symptoms, chances are you have value tagged these symptoms. And when you have value tagged these symptoms, your brain is like, oh, make sure we show her more of this. So you are bringing more of this into your awareness. And over time, you become more aware of the times that you're in discomfort and less aware of the times that you're not in discomfort. It's that almost like that overactive negativity bias. The brain learns to become hypersensitive to the symptoms when they occur, because the brain is registering it as proof positive that something is wrong. So even though the initial threat might be gone, the brain, and then therefore the body, is still reacting as though It is present. It recognizes body sensations as the threat, and it perceives symptoms in the body as dangerous.
So then it starts to overstimulate the nervous system, the stress response, the immune system, every single time you have a symptom, which then creates even more symptoms. And what is happening is that the brain is stuck in a loop. And in order to break out of the symptom cycle, this loop needs to be broken. And the only way to break this loop is to tell the brain something different.
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Okay, so now, now that we've set all of that up and you hopefully have a good understanding of why the symptom loops stay looping, how exactly do we break this cycle? How do we rewire ourselves out of chronic inflammation and out of these chronic symptoms? So of course, everything that we're talking about here today is happening at the mind, in the brain, level. And the good news is that both the mind and the brain can change. We have the ability to change our filters, to change our perception, to change our lived reality. We have the power to interrupt this loop and rewire toward more of what we want to see. This is known as self-directed neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity means that we can rewire and change the Self is you.
You are the self in this. So in order to rewire, you have to intentionally direct this. You have to do something different than what you are currently doing. Remember, neurons that fire together wire together. When a circuit fires repeatedly, it becomes the default setting, the response most likely to occur. So if you want to change that response, If you wanna change that default setting, you have to practice something new. We change it with both practice and repetition. So in Manifest Your Health, we have a very specific process called Epic Nicks.
But today I'm gonna walk you through some of the concepts here because you can apply them on your own anytime. And I'm telling you guys, these are so effective. So get the notes app section on your phone ready or get your journal out so you can write these down because I'm going to list them out for you in order. And it is crucial that you move in this very specific order. Number 1, the very first place to start is awareness. So all of the conditions I referenced earlier, chronic fatigue, long haulers, fibromyalgia, MCAS, all of them are real Physical conditions—they are not psychological; they are not all in your head. So let's not gaslight ourselves first and foremost. But the conditioning that we just talked about—that does happen in the brain.
The felt experience is in the body, but this conditioning is happening in the brain. But the conditioning is happening unconsciously, meaning you're not aware that it's happening. You don't realize that this is happening. It's unconscious. So we need to bring this conditioning. Conscious, we need to become aware of it. So that's why I started this whole show by explaining this whole process that's happening inside the body, so that you are aware of what's happening. And when you become aware of it, you can bring awareness when it's happening.
When the symptom loop or the spiral actually starts, when you know what's going on, you have the opportunity to pause in that moment and say, Oh, I know what's going on here. It's that tiny little pause, that tiny moment of awareness that initiates a pattern interrupt. And this is number 2. Do not, do not you dare discount the power of the pattern interrupt. It is everything. And it's really powerful for 2 primary reasons. One, When we interrupt the pattern, when we make the unconscious loop conscious, when we say, hey, wait a second, I know what's going on here, we interrupt the amygdala hijack. When we can pause and name what's happening, name what we're experiencing, maybe even name the emotion, which is what is known as affect labeling, it halts the amygdala from firing.
You interrupt the whole freaking cascade from the tippity top. When we interrupt the amygdala takeover, we give our logical, rational, reasonable brain a moment to step in. We can say, hey, wait a second, this is not actually a threat to survival. This is my brain stuck in a loop. And so this mindfulness or this awareness Helps us increase feelings of safety by deactivating the brain's fear circuits. This disrupts the pain-fear cycle and helps your brain interpret signals properly. The second thing a pattern interrupt does is interrupt the automaticity. So automaticity is a term in neuroscience.
It's when certain actions, responses, or behaviors become ingrained and performed instinctively without conscious or deliberate decision-making process. Mm-hmm. It happens when we repeat something so much that it becomes the automatic response, the default setting. So we don't have to bring a lot of cognitive effort or awareness online. It happens automatically. So a pattern interrupt interrupts this, and when it's no longer happening automatically, you introduce choice. And that is number 3, where you get the opportunity to choose new. Every choice you make is a commitment.
You are either recommitting to the old or committing to the new. So it's an opportunity to ask yourself, am I reinforcing what already exists or am I choosing something new? And this is where that self-directed neuroplasticity comes online. Neuroplasticity. Again, it means that the brain can reorganize itself to create new synapses and form new connections. But how it does so is based on the choice that you make here, right now, in that exact moment. The way you react either reinforces the sense of danger or allows you to create a sense of safety. The way that you react determines whether the danger signal is switched on or off. So you can react by reinforcing the fear circuitry, which is like the ice luge.
It's where the, the mind and the brain and the body wanna go because it's been there so many times before, so it knows what to do. Or you can introduce a new response, and this is the moment that we begin to rewire. Or re-pattern. So another opportunity here is number 4, which is moving into compassion, gratitude, or even forgiveness. We move into compassion because now we understand that the brain is just trying to keep you safe. We can move into gratitude. We can thank the brain. We can thank the part of you coming forward that wants to keep you safe.
When we feel any of these feelings, compassion, Grace, gratitude, forgiveness, love. These feelings can get us into a place of coherence, which offers a healing for the whole body. When our heart and our brain and our nervous system are synced up in working together coherently, that puts us into optimal healing mode. And then number 5, the final step here is to send yourself messages of safety. So this is where you can bring in some of the practices in Manifest Your Health, or just do them on your own, things like guided meditations, self-hypnosis, which is my personal favorite, physiological sigh, deep breathing like a box breath, EFT tapping, sound healing. You can work affirmations or mantras, things like, this is temporary, I'm going to be okay, I'm safe, my body is fine, my brain thinks I'm in danger, but that's just a false alarm. You can use any language that feels good to you or that you feel aligned The problem in why a lot of people don't think that this approach is successful is because this is where they start and end, this number 5 point. So they don't go through that whole entire process that I just outlined.
They just try, let's say, like a deep breathing practice, or they try a guided meditation, or they do EFT once, and they're like, yeah, my symptoms aren't gone. My symptoms aren't going anywhere. It's like, hey, I'm meditating, I'm doing all the nervous system practices, but it's not changing my symptoms. It's not How I feel. It's not changing my condition. I hear this all the time from folks. And in my experience, you really do have to go through this in a very specific sequence. This is actually what we call the trigger practice in Manifest Your Health.
And if you skip one step or one part of it, it just isn't as effective. And I wanna be super, super honest with you that in the beginning it might feel like a long process, and that is actually a good sign. Automaticity is really quick. Default setting is really quick. It's the ice luge. It's going to be the fastest response. So if you feel like, gosh, I'm like, this has taken a long time, that is good because your brain is learning something different. You are up against a very primitive biological instinct, so you have to be generous with yourself.
You have to be patient with yourself. But I promise you, the more you do it, the more easy and swift it becomes to redirect yourself. The more we pattern interrupt, the more we rewire. So the more often you do this, the faster it happens. Neurons that fire together wire together. Remember, you're wiring new pathways in your brain, in your body, and in your nervous system. And then eventually you don't have to do it at all because it becomes the new automatic, the new default I used to have to do this practice all of the time, sometimes like five or six times throughout the day. No joke, but it was that repetition that really helped me rewire and repattern.
And now I don't ever have to do this. I completely rewired myself away from chronic symptoms, and I literally don't know why more people aren't doing this because it is so effective. So that's why I want to invite you into my five-day nervous system reset this month, so we can actually do this together. We can practice. Yeah. And we can practice this together. You can put yourself into a little mini container to actually build out the reps to begin to rewire this. Because hear me out, what if the secret to putting your condition into remission wasn't another protocol, it wasn't another practitioner, it wasn't another supplement? What if it was going within? What if you held the keys to your own healing? Inside of you.
Because here's the secret: you do. This is what changed the game for me— recognizing that truth, owning that truth, claiming that truth for myself. So if you suspect your brain and your nervous system are playing a role in what you're experiencing, but you're not totally sure how to shift it, this reset was designed for you. The practices in the reset will help you begin to rewire your nervous system. You're going to interrupt this cycle that we just talked about, and you're going to begin to feel safe in your body. You're going to show your body what that feels like. You're going to begin to rewire toward that truth. There's nothing overwhelming.
We're just doing one thing a day for five days, and you will feel like a different person on the other side of it. So come join me five. days. $27. Anybody can do this, and I would love to see you there. You can join us using the link in the show notes. I love you guys, and I'll see 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. Bye.