What is Neuroplasticity?
The brain is not fixed. Repeated attention, thoughts, behaviours, and experiences can strengthen or create neural pathways and contribute to the formation of new ones.
According to John Assaraf, “The Brain Whisperer”, speaking at the December, 2023 Rewiring your Brain Summit, neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to create new connections. Assaraf describes this as being born with the neuroplasticity “switch” in the ON state, allowing us to learn and integrate what we see and hear during childhood, while creating new connections, whether positive or negative, that are reinforced through repetition.
The brain strengthens what we repeatedly practise. Patterns that are repeated can become automatic. As we mature, we don’t lose neuroplasticity, but learning and changing our established patterns becomes more deliberate.
The Connection Between the Brain and The Nervous System
We need the desire to learn new things and then begin to use them. Assaraf recommends becoming curious about what is and isn’t working for you and becoming mindful about your thoughts, without judgement. Through new ideas, talents, and experiences, our neural state changes.
The problem is that most of us have become comfortable with our belief patterns, even those that no longer serve us. By choosing something different, upgrading our knowledge and skills, on a daily basis, we can strengthen new neural patterns.
Our brain is highly adaptable, like a super computer. Neuroplasticity means that our brain can change in response to what we repeatedly experience, practise, and pay attention to. But what happens if we try to rewire it from the same place that created the way we currently approach our life?
For some, it is past traumas — big T or little t — that hold us back. For others, it is life events that we just can’t shake. For some, we continue to use defence or survival strategies that we developed to manage difficult experiences during childhood or simply to help us survive as kids.
We all have a basic need to feel safe. The strategies that helped us feel safe in the past may no longer serve us today. We may find ourselves responding from a place of fight, flight, or freeze.
Learning to calm and regulate the nervous system can help create a greater sense of inner safety. As we heal and reshape our neural patterns, we can begin to move towards different behaviours, greater emotional flexibility, and healthier relationships.
Practical Ways to Cultivate New Patterns
So how do we begin?
We need ways to build a sense of inner safety as we process old memories and experiences. There are many strategies and modalities that may help us reshape established patterns.
One technique, created by Dr. Joan Beattie, that I personally experienced and was later trained to use is called BEAM. During each session, vials specifically created to express different emotions were muscle tested to identify those the body was ready to address at that visit. For each emotion, the person was asked to close their eyes and think back to events associated with that emotion.
I worked with Dr. Beattie for years, peeling back the layers of the onion, for each memory. It didn’t erase the memories but changed how I responded to them.
Other modalities may include NLP, EFT (Tapping), meditation, yoga, Qigong, Tai Chi. It isn’t important which you choose. What matters is finding the approach(es) that are most helpful for you and being consistent. When working with significant trauma, it is important to work with an appropriately trained professional.
Whatever is consistently practised becomes a habit. We can influence our nervous system and reshape our neural patterns, changing behaviours and beliefs that may have become comfortable, but no longer serve us.
You don’t have to remain the person that your past experiences taught you to be.
As Tony Robbins says, you can “change your story”.
Dan Siegel, MD says “Where attention goes, neuro firing flows, and neuro connection grows”.
The mind is a learning machine. What we repeatedly focus on matters. Through mindfulness — becoming aware in each moment without judgement – we can learn to respond differently to thoughts, emotions, and memories that once automatically triggered us.
With practice, we may widen our “window of tolerance” – our ability to remain present with different emotions and memories without becoming overwhelmed or reactive. We can learn to “sit with” grief, discomfort, or experiences that once set us off.
In “Altered Traits”, Daniel Goleman and Richard J. Davidson explore how repeatedly cultivating particular mental states can produce lasting changes in the brain and, over time, contribute to changes in our traits.
Flow means movement, energy flow and information flow. Through our relationships, we share energy and information.
In Buddhism, we practise Metta (loving kindness). We begin with ourselves:
May I be happy
May I be peaceful
May I be free from suffering.
We then extend the same wishes to family, friends, neighbours, and acquaintances, completing the exercise by extending them to everyone throughout the world. With consistent practice, we can cultivate a more loving and compassionate way of being.
How Attention and Repetition Create Change
By connecting with others, becoming kinder to ourselves, we can begin to move from a contracted state of feeling unworthy, plagued by fear, anger, and judgement toward a state of balance, gratitude, and kindness.
Try smiling at strangers. Hold the door open for someone. Offer to help someone in need. Practise gratitude on a daily basis. Speak kindly to yourself and about yourself.
New behaviours, practised consistently and with intention, can become more natural. The brain strengthens whatever we repeatedly practise.
Anxiety, worry, self-criticism and avoidance can become well-established patterns in the same way as gratitude, calm, confidence and compassion. By performing a new behaviour mindfully, we bring attention and intention to a new thought or action, thus giving our brain a message: this matters.
The extraordinary promise of neuroplasticity? It is that although we may not be able to change what happened in the past, we can work toward changing our response to it. We can consistently choose to create something different; thereby rewiring our brain through small choices, repeated often.
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By Gilda Rovan, BA, RHN, ROHP, CHCP
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