Thank you for signing up for!
Five Ways to Rewire your Brain
for Healing
Find purpose without their illness
For those that prefer to read than listen:
Here's the Transcription of the video above:
Hi there, Dr. Nicola Ducharme here. Thank you for downloading my guide, Five Ways to Rewire Your Brain for Healing.
Today I'm going to talk on five points, things that you can become aware of to start working on - rewiring your brain for your own health, for your healing, and to achieve whatever goals you want to achieve. There are so many ways to apply this information. So today is just a snapshot of five of my favorite things that I think will make a difference for you right away.
Step One: Take Charge of Your Life
The first thing is taking charge of your life. I want to tell you a little bit about this concept of being at cause. In life we can either be at cause or we can be in effect. I'll explain this a little bit more. When we are at cause we are taking responsibility for everything that happens in our life; when we are in effect, we are in victim mode, we are blaming something or somebody else for what happens in our life
The problem is when you are in effect, you do not have the power to control what happens in your life, or the perception of what happens in your life. Let's say, for example, you want to make some dietary changes, you want to make some changes to how you're eating to really help your body to heal and to reduce inflammation and all those good things. So being at cause would be, “I am going to learn the foods that nourish my body the best”. “I'm going to make the choices that nourish my body the best”. Being in effect might be, “I can't afford the good food” … “I'm never going to get better anyway, so why bother?” Or that food's too expensive or I don't know how to cook healthy food. Do you see the difference when you are at cause and you are taking responsibility for everything? Then you have the power to shift it.
It's such a powerful perspective to come from, rather than being in effect where you're just blaming something or someone else and always living as the victim - that is not an empowered state or a resourceful state to be in. So we all have our story and I know a lot of people with chronic illness have a huge, long story. And I'm not saying that that's not hard and I'm not saying it's not sad and it wasn't challenging and there were probably things there that were really, really unfair. And yet the longer you stay in your story, the more stuck you are in it.
Being in your story is being in effect. If you want to be at cause, put all of that behind you and look forward. I've had an experience so far, I'm going to put that behind me. Take it as learning lessons and look forward to the future. Being at cause is much more powerful.
Step Two: Focus on the Future and Not the Past
That brings me to the second point, which is to focus on the future and not the past. So there's some overlap with the first point, yes, but when I say this, what I'm referring to is that 95% of what we do, including like our actions, what we think our emotions, what we say, our behaviors; 95% is on autopilot from things that come from our past. They're either subconscious programs that were playing that may have been instilled when we were very young. Did you know that until you're seven years old, you don't really have a conscious mind, you're a hundred percent living in the subconscious and the subconscious mind doesn't have a filter?
evaluate that based on our conscious mind and something called our critical faculty, which is the gatekeeper between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind saying, “I don't know if I want to let this information in”. “I don't know if this makes sense. I don't know that this sounds right”. So we can filter things once we're older, but when we're young, we don't have that filter. That part of our brain simply isn't in place yet. And so all those messages we're given when we're young, they just go in and the subconscious takes them as true. That still happens over the years., we still get those messages. And then we have our behaviors too. We get up in the morning, we go to the bathroom, we take ourselves into the kitchen, we make our coffee, we go sit down at the computer, we check our email, whatever the thing is, we unconsciously or subconsciously do the same things.
We play out the same programs day in, day out. So if you want to change something in your life, you have to choose a different program and you have to do some rewiring on deep levels and you have to make some different choices about what you're going do when you get up in the morning. Are you going to grab your phone right away and see what's happening in the news or on social media? Or do you want to make a different choice and start grabbing a gratitude journal in the morning by your bed and writing down three things you're grateful for? Do you want to get up and take yourself just automatically to the coffee machine? Or do you want to sit on the floor and do a few stretches first? So it's all the little things day to day to day to day. But it's also the bigger programs, like why do we keep getting in the same relationship and swearing that we're never going to get in a relationship with that kind of person again? And then, there they are. And the classic one, we all swear we're not going be our parents and then here we are, right? So there's so many ways this plays out. It's really important that you are deliberate about your future, deliberate about even your future when you get up tomorrow morning. You have to make some different conscious choices in order to get different results in your life. And if you can, start working on clearing up some of those past programs and to some extent just bring them into your conscious awareness. Move them from the subconscious into the conscious. But that takes being a cause, doesn't it? Because then you've got to say, oh, I did that again. I need to take responsibility for that. Or I'm seeking out the same pattern, or I'm noticing the same cycle in my life.
If you were going to be in effect, which is the first thing I talked about, you'd be saying “that thing keeps happening to me”. If you're a cause you'll think “I'm somehow attracting that over and over again. Let me try and investigate what that's about”. Sometimes even just journaling or bringing those things out of the subconscious into the conscious mind then gives you some leverage to do something about it.
Step Three: Your Brain Believes What You Tell It (So Speak in the Positive)
The third point is that your brain believes everything you tell it. Your subconscious mind is always taking in information. It's the storehouse of every single memory in your life. You might think there's a lot you don't remember. It's actually the memories are there, maybe the recall that's a bit of a problem. But your subconscious mind holds everything. It also houses a blueprint of your body in perfect health. It knows what that is. It's in there. So the brain, the subconscious mind, believes everything; and it doesn't understand don't, or not - it doesn't understand negatives. So if I was to say to you right now, don't think of a blue tree.
What do you think of? You think of a blue tree because the subconscious mind doesn't hear a don't, it just hears, "blue tree". It's like when we tell the kids don't spill the milk, don't spill your drink. Their little subconscious mind doesn't understand the word “don’t”. What they’re hearing is spill the drink, spill the milk. It's true for us too, that we have to be very careful with our language and we want to, as much as possible, frame things in the positive of what you do want. Don't be framing things as in terms of what you don't want. I don't want to feel sick today. I don't want to have a headache. I don't want to go to bed tonight and not sleep.
No, focus on what you want. I want my head to be clear. I want a great night's sleep. Make sure you're giving your brain and your subconscious mind that positive language because that that way you can have it work for you. If you're feeding it negatives all the time, you're having it work against you. So make sure your statements, your thoughts, your conscious beliefs, all of it - are framed in language of the positive so that your subconscious mind can hear that positive and say, okay, I'm going to go to work and make that happen for you. The subconscious mind wants to serve you, it's there for you. We've just got to give it the right messages. Otherwise it gets confused.
Step Four: Shift Your Identity – Be Mindful of What You Say After “I Am”
The fourth point, and again it goes a little bit along with the previous (these things all tie together) is that the deepest level of our mind is our identity. One might say that you've got one level up from that might be our spirituality, our spirit, and you know what our purpose is in the world, but identity is pretty darn central to who we are. Identity is what we say after "I am" or "I am not".
What do you say after I am? Do you say I am a chronic illness sufferer? Do you say I am a hopeless case? Do you say I'm not going to get well? Or do you use more resourceful states like, I am healing every day, I am moving towards perfect health for me, I am in control of my health and my healing. Be very, very careful what you're saying after the words I am, because that is your identity and that is who you will be in the world if you use that language.
We've got to watch this with our kids too. So many people grow up saying, “I'm not good at math” because maybe they were told that they weren't when they were very young, or “I'm never going to be successful”. So we need to watch it in our children, but we need to watch it in ourselves too and start reminding ourselves to be more empowered, and give ourselves a more empowered identity.
If it's too much of a stretch to say something like, I am in full health, then put a bridge in there - I am becoming something or I am the kind of person who could do something, it's a little bit of an easier leap. If you are trying to claim something identity-wise that doesn't quite feel coherent for you or congruent for you, then use that bridge. And I would suggest sitting down and writing some of these out - things that you identify with that are resourceful and things that you identify with that are not resourceful for you.
Step Five: Get In the Alpha State Every Day to Prime Your Subconscious Mind
The fifth and final point for today is to get in the alpha state every day. So what do I mean by that? We all have brain wave frequencies. So our brain has electrical activity and it also has chemical messengers and chemical signals.
In the electrical activity, we have different frequency levels that represent different states of awareness. We have our beta brainwaves, which is alert thinking. If you were studying something, if you were reading a nice casual book, you'd probably be in like low beta; if you were in a class or trying to memorize information at a doctor's appointment, trying to tell them all the things you wanted to relay, you'd probably be in mid beta. And if you were really like anxious if you heard “there's going to be a test on this in 30 minutes”. Or literally if going to the doctor is so anxiety provoking to try and give all the right information and keep up, then you might be in high beta.
So you go down from high to mid to low beta, and then you go into alpha, and alpha is the brainwave state of daydreaming, of imagining, it's very calm, it's very peaceful and it's an awake state, awake and aware, but very, very calm and chill.
From the alpha state we go down into delta and theta which are more states of deep sleep. The reason the alpha state is so important is because when we're in the beta brainwave state, it's very conscious mind, it's the monkey mind. It's the very busy mind and the conscious mind at that point is running the show.
What we want to do to get to the deeper layers for helping to rewire our brain is to get to the subconscious mind. Remember I said the subconscious mind is where all those old programs and patterns and negative limiting beliefs and all the, all the junk is in the subconscious mind. So in order to start pruning that junk and clearing that junk, we have to access the subconscious mind. We have to tap into it, and one of the best ways to do that is to get into the alpha state because that's the state where you have more direct access.
By the way, when you are falling asleep at night, you're going from beta through alpha down into theta and delta for sleep. And when you wake up in the morning, you're going from delta, theta, up through alpha, up to beta. So you can see that when you're falling asleep at night and when you're waking up in the morning, you have this window of opportunity where it be easier to tap into the alpha state. And that's why when we do practices that promote alpha, when we're trying to tap into alpha, it's really nice to do them first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Because you've got that gateway open to you. So what are the modalities that we use to get into the alpha state and to take advantage of that and tap into the subconscious mind?
The first is meditation. There are many, many different types of meditation. There is meditation where you sit quietly trying to just relax and clear your thoughts, and find that gap between your thoughts, that sort of peaceful moment. I find that for me was the most challenging because my thoughts were just going and going, and it was really, really challenging. So I go more for guided meditations where at least you have something to help you focus. I personally love Dr. Joe Dispenza and I do his meditations daily, but there are lots of good meditations out there to help you calm the beta brain into the alpha state. Through meditation you also foster that nice parasympathetic nervous system response, where your nervous system goes into the rest and digest phase.
Because when you're in the sympathetic nervous system response, which is your fight or flight, go, go, go. That state pairs with beta brain waves, and healing doesn't happen in that state. Healing happens in the calm state where your parasympathetic nervous system has the chance to take dominance over the sympathetic, and meditation and getting into the alpha state is a brilliant way to do that.
The second tool that I love is hypnosis. Hypnosis and meditation do have some overlap. They're both practices that aim to get someone in a very calm, peaceful state and to get them into the alpha brainwave state. So they have those things in common , but where hypnosis varies a little is that through suggestion, the person who's running the hypnosis session (whether it's a practitioner in person or it's an audio files or pre-recorded hypnosis session) gives the person in the hypnotic state suggestions that speak directly to the subconscious mind.
The suggestions are always given in positive language as we talked about before. That's really, really important. And then the subconscious mind can take those suggestions in and start to shift and start to put them to work in that person.
It's a very powerful tool for breaking limiting beliefs, for instilling more empowering values, and for working on the level of identity. All those really deep subconscious levels in the body, hypnosis is amazing for.
We can also affect change on the conscious level by things I talked about earlier, by taking control of our thoughts, by taking control of our language, by taking control of our behaviors. We can reprogram the conscious mind through neuroplasticity and build up building up of new neural pathways and we strengthen those neural pathways by repeating and repeating and repeating.
The bottom line is we want to work at the conscious mind level, and we want to work at the subconscious mind level. There are modalities and tools and techniques for both of those.
Thank you for joining me.
I hope this was insightful for you. I will stress again and again for people who are suffering with chronic illness, this stuff is crucial. If the mind isn't wired correctly, the body will not be able to heal. It's as simple as that.
I hope you've learned something. Go ahead and put some of these things into practice and I'll see you again very soon.
