What if there was a way to change your body by rewiring your brain? 

As futuristic as this sounds, scientists around the world are making significant breakthroughs in learning about the brain and body connection.

By taking just a few moments every day to focus on your brain health and thought patterns, you can improve your mood, establish positive habits, and even reduce symptoms of chronic illness. 

There’s still a lot we have to learn about how to rewire your brain. But there is significant evidence to show that neuroplasticity is the medicine of the future. Even better, it can be totally free.

What Is Neuroplasticity?

Neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s ability to reorganize information and adapt to different circumstances.

Neuro refers to the neurons in your brain that form certain pathways that help you adapt to your surroundings and anticipate future situations. While plasticity speaks to your brain’s ability to change and interrupt those pathways — influenced by both positive and negative experiences.

For example, trauma (with a capital or little “t”) has a big impact on your brain function. Trauma can drastically alter your neurological pathways — triggering your brain to turn on fight or flight, even in an environment where your body is safe. 

Similarly, positive reinforcement and joyful meditation can alter the landscape of your brain, creating new neurological pathways that are trauma-free.

What is the Limbic System?

The limbic system plays an essential role in neuroplasticity. It contains the hippocampus, the hypothalamus, and the amygdala — all responsible for memories, emotions, and regulating stress.

Even if a memory isn’t at the forefront of your mind, the limbic system stores it for you and uses it as a guide for future decision-making. 

When exposed to physical or environmental trauma, the limbic system may kick into high gear and trigger the fight or flight response in order to protect you. So rewiring certain thought patterns or trigger reactions often involves calming the limbic system and letting your brain know you’re safe. 

Neuroplasticity in Real Life

Neuroplasticity is particularly relevant to today’s world, as society and technology are changing at rapid rates. We may have adapted on the outside by learning how to type, browse the internet, and work an office job, but our brains are still very much programmed for survival in a pre-modern world.

For instance, performing a stressful presentation at work isn’t life-threatening. But your brain hasn’t adapted to recognize that yet. Instead, your anxiety kicks fight or flight into full gear and channels all your energy into the presentation.

This would be an incredible benefit if you were hunting food or being chased by a bear. But these coping mechanisms often cause more harm than good in today’s modern world. 

High-stress reactions to relatively low-stress situations are common as our brains are still working to adapt to this new way of living. 

The good news is, you have all the tools within you to regulate your limbic system, use neuroplasticity to rewire your brain, and reverse unwanted symptoms of distress.

If you’re experiencing any of the following symptoms, it may be time to rewire your brain:

• Brain fog
• Chronic stress
• Anxiety
• Depression
• Chronic unhealthy habits
• Chronic fatigue
• Unexplained symptoms
• Hormone imbalances
• Long COVID
• Chronic inflammation
• Unexplained food sensitivities
  

Neuroplasticity Exercises for Better Health

By incorporating just a few neuroplasticity exercises into your lifestyle, you can improve your brain function, reduce inflammation, and reverse mental distress. 

It’s normal for brain work to feel overwhelming at first, so start by adding or changing just a few habits. Once you’re comfortable and feeling better, you can add more as time goes on.

Distract Your Brain

One of the best ways to rewire your brain is to distract it. When you find yourself caught in a mental loop of self-sabotage, start singing one of your favorite songs out loud. If you have extra time, you can immerse yourself in a meditative practice or begin working on an art project. 

Just make sure you find something that reroutes your thoughts and creates a new neurological pathway that isn’t caused by stress. That means no negative distractions like violent TV or video games, or eating junk food.

Choose Low Impact Exercise

High-intensity exercises have their place, but if you want to rewire your brain, it may be time to take a break from them. Intense workouts can put your body into a state of chronic stress — since your body can’t discern whether you’re running for fun or from a wild animal.

Replace running, HIIT, and CrossFit with calmer exercises. Yoga, pilates, hiking, swimming, or cycling are all great ways to get your workout in without setting off your limbic system.

Decrease Stress Levels

When chronic stress hormones reach your brain, your limbic system will send a signal to your body that all is not well. Unexplained symptoms and high levels of inflammation can come out of nowhere — that’s why it’s essential to honestly evaluate your stress levels. 

If things are getting out of hand, choose to set boundaries at your job, at home, and even with the people you love if they are constantly adding to your stress levels. Nothing you’re doing right now is worth sacrificing your health for.

Practice Gratitude

If this feels like an uncomfortable practice — that’s how you know you need it. Writing in a gratitude journal or listing things you’re grateful for throughout the day is a great way to create new neurological pathways and lead your brain into a more peaceful and contented state. (This can be a simple 2-5 minute practice before you go to bed each night or right after waking up.)

Rearrange Your House

You read that correctly: changing the environment around you is an easy way to send new messages to your brain. By rearranging the furniture in your house or redecorating your walls, you’re opening up your neurological pathways to receive something new.

Let your creativity take over by creating a vision board, or posting photos of happy memories and people you love. And a new cheerful paint color can go a long way! 

Inner Child Work/Reparenting

If you experienced trauma as a child, it may be beneficial to go all the way back and rewire your brain from the beginning. It’s surprising how much our early childhood memories continue to have a huge impact on our day-to-day life. 

Next time you remember a traumatic event from your childhood, take time to meditate. Talk directly to your younger self and offer them the love and attention you craved during that moment. This will create new neurological pathways in your brain and work to heal past trauma.

You can even find free guided meditations that help you rewire these trauma patterns on YouTube.

Press Pause on Crime Documentaries

Who doesn’t love a good crime documentary?

An adrenaline high brought on by crime documentaries or emotionally intense TV shows can put your body into fight or flight. Since your body doesn’t know how to differentiate types of stress, these forms of entertainment can be harmful if your body is already in distress. 

If you’re looking to rewire your brain, press pause on crime documentaries just for a while — until your brain heals and you have more awareness around your stress patterns.

Embrace Your Creative Side

Creative practices like painting, writing, reading, and crafting automatically put your body in a relaxed state. If you’re not taking time out of your day to do the things you love, your body is definitely in distress. Choose any creative practice that makes you feel at peace and commit to working on it three times a week.

Get Adequate Sleep

Putting all the effort into retraining your brain when you’re not focused on getting enough sleep is counter-intuitive. Your body needs sleep in order to rejuvenate and reinforce the positive changes you’re making throughout the day. Studies even suggest that sleep helps to detox your body from unwanted toxins.

Neuroplasticity Therapy

For those experiencing extreme limbic system distress, a neuroplasticity therapy program may be something to consider. Programs like DNRS and Gupta take a deep dive into brain retraining and neuroplasticity recovery. They are believed to help heal symptoms of chronic illness caused by POTS, Lyme Disease, Post COVID Syndrome, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia, and environmentally acquired illnesses like mold toxicity.

Between increasing work hours, financial and debt pressure, climate degradation, some of the most politically and socially challenging times we’ve ever experienced, and now a worldwide pandemic, it’s no wonder the demand for mental health services has increased dramatically. It’s safe to say we live our daily lives under a lot of stress.

But, the key to tackling any problem is first understanding how it works, so today we’ll discuss an overview of the stress response, the stress hormones, common causes and symptoms of stress, and ways to relieve it.

Key Takeaways: 

• The deterioration of cell membranes can be attributed to memory loss
• PC has been shown to support a healthy cell membrane, and in turn better brain functioning as we age*
• PC serves as a reservoir for the choline needed to make the neurotransmitter Acetylcholine

Some captivating movies have been made about people whose memory loss takes them on curious meanderings. These episodes of amnesia, usually the result of some kind of physical, emotional or psychological trauma, are short-lived on the silver screen and almost always resolve themselves to a sigh of relief. In real life, memory loss can range from a mere annoyance or a serious impediment. Occasional forgetfulness, such as entering a room and wondering why you went there or misplacing your car keys for the second time today, becomes increasingly common with age. In most cases, that’s no cause for alarm, at least not unless it interferes with everyday activities.  

Memory loss can be caused by a litany of triggers. Medications, including antidepressants, antihistamines, anti-anxiety medications, muscle relaxants, tranquilizers and pain medicines are a major cause of memory debilitation. Alcohol and drugs do the same, as may tobacco, which reduces the amount of oxygen that gets to the brain. Sleep deprivation, depression, stroke, head injury, and nutritional deficiency affect memory as well. The hormone imbalances that plague women near and at menopause wreak havoc on memory function in varying degrees. If you find that you are increasingly forgetful, you might want to talk with your doctor to determine the cause. Then you can pursue a line of treatment if one is deemed necessary. The efficacy of different treatments available will surprise you.  

Diseases and Memory Loss 

The two kinds of serious memory fault that people face are Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia, the latter distinguished from the former by sudden onset instigated by small strokes or changes in blood supply to the brain. In the former, memory loss begins slowly and worsens over time. Prevention, interruption of disease progress, and treatment are legitimate topics of discussion within the medical community.

Hippocampus and Memory Loss 

Besides being a mythological creature with a horse’s front hooves and the tail of a fish, the hippocampus is a major component of the brain that plays a vital role in the formation of memories, particularly moving them from short-term to long-term. It also serves as a guide for spatial memory, which is responsible for realizing one’s whereabouts and the relationship to them.  Learning, reasoning and comprehension develop from this point and work to process information gathered by the senses. The decline in memory associated with hippocampus dereliction accounts for the inability to retain newly acquired data. 

The Source of Memory Degradation 

Ever wonder why it seems Grandpa can only talk about the past? One condition that helps to explain this is the deterioration of cellular membranes—in this case, those of the neurons. If phosphatidylcholine (PC), the major structural and functional phospholipid of a cell membrane, is absent or in meager supply, noticeable memory shortfall will appear (Crespo, 2004)*. Long-term, sustained use of a PC supplement helps to prevent memory deficits that accompany old age (Teather, 2006)*.  

How Does Phosphatidylcholine Help Memory?

PC can also have a positive effect on some of the mechanisms involved in the manufacture of acetylcholine (a chemical found throughout the nervous system). Acetylcholine is liberated at nerve endings as a neurotransmitter, wherein it sends messages from one nerve cell to another and plays a prominent role in nervous system function by enhancing sensory perception. Alzheimer’s disease involves damage to the cells in the brain that manufacture acetylcholine. The damage to these all important cells also affects the manner of electrical movement across the synapse. Thus it influences the stages of memory function—encoding (making) of a memory, creation of a long-term memory from a short-term memory (consolidation), and recall (retrieval) of a memory. Acetylcholine has a more profound effect on encoding than on the other two actions. PC serves as a reservoir for the choline needed to make the neurotransmitter, so it doesn’t go directly to its manufacture. Instead, it goes directly to the maintenance and support of the cell membrane, thereby allowing the free travel of nutrients and energy into the cell and the passage of waste and debris out.  

Not all PC (Phosphatidylcholine) is Created Equal

PC may be extracted from egg yolks, but that contains an overload of saturated fat that encourages rancidity.  Commercial PC comes from soybeans instead. However, very few true phospholipid PC products are available. Most commercial phosphatidylcholine products consist of triple lecithin, getting the pseudo-PC designation because it contains PC as a major constituent, but at a fraction of the amount in true phosphatidylcholine. The remaining fraction includes ancillary fats and impedimentary nutrients that stop the authentic phospholipid from traveling past the digestive system. It never reaches the cell membranes and hence defeats the entire purpose of taking PC.  True phospholipid PC maintains its integrity as a liposome, allowing it to reach and take up residence in the cell membrane and therefore improve memory.

If you need further proof of the efficacy of PC, deficiencies as early as utero can lead to lifelong cognitive deficiencies.  The bottom line of PC intake entails DNA methylation, gene expression and changes in stem cell proliferation and differentiation (Zeisel, 2006)*.  Hippocampus development appears to depend on it*.  

If supplementation for cerebral support is in the near future, we need to understand choline is not the same thing as phosphatidylcholine.  Though held to be a required nutrient, choline, whether from an animal source, from greens, or otherwise, has been implicated in cardiovascular issues.  It is not a phospholipid and cannot restore, support and maintain the cell membrane, whose orderly function animates the whole person.