Brain Retraining & Chronic Illness: Rewiring the Nervous System to Heal

Opening on chronic illness and brain-based healing 0:00

So this is really interesting because in our hypothesis, what we believe is when the brain goes through an experience, a threat, so that could be a virus, could be a bacteria, could be a traumatic event, the brain is designed to adapt to that experience, create all the defensive responses, fight off that particular threat. So if it's a virus, it'll fight off the threat of the immune system. If it's a threat from a person or a situation, the anxiety will come to give us the resources to fight it off. And the system is supposed to come back to balance. It says, right, I dealt with situation, let me come back to balance. But why is it that it goes into a chronic state and then causes these chronic illnesses? And those can be chronic mental health conditions, physiological conditions, chronic inflammatory diseases that we're seeing so much long COVID and fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue. Mold illness, we're seeing so many environmental illnesses. Mass cell activation, Lyme disease. These are all increasing in the population. And I believe it's because our system is constantly under threat now. to Take Back My Brain with Lori Hammer, where real healing starts in the brain. I'm Lori, a functional nutritionist and mom who's walked the path from anxiety and burnout to clarity and calm.

Each week, we're going to dive into brain-based tools like amino acid therapy, gut health, fasting, and faith to help you reclaim your energy, emotions, and sense of self. Hello everyone, welcome back to Take Back My Brain and I'm your host, Laurie Hammer. And today I have a very special guest. His name is Ashok Gupta and he is a renowned speaker, filmmaker and health practitioner who has dedicated his entire life to supporting people through chronic illness and achieving their true potential. So he's gonna tell us all about his story and how he came to this, but he is most well known for... neuroplasticity and limbic retraining recovery system called the GUPTA program since 2007. So I'm very, very excited. As you know, I love to dive into this topic. So Ashok, thank you for joining us today. Thank you so much,

Introducing Ashok Gupta and his recovery journey 2:12

Laurie, for inviting me. I'm delighted to be here. Yeah, it's great to have you. So how on earth did you get involved in like limbic retraining and neuroplasticity? Sure. So my journey actually started, dare I say, like the Five to 30 years ago, in fact. So I was studying as an undergrad at Cambridge University in the late nineties. Now in the late nineties, as we know, you in those days, these illnesses weren't really recognized. know, like chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, they were seen as perhaps someone's just making it up or it's all in the mind or it's depression or whatever. And so I studying as an undergrad and I had some virus and I didn't know what the virus was. Didn't think much of it. And the virus seemed to kind of go in terms of the flu symptoms, but I became worse and worse and worse to the point at which I would open up a textbook and I couldn't read the words on the page. Like it just wouldn't go in. I was so exhausted. had to, you know, crawl around at home. couldn't necessarily walk sometimes, although that wasn't all the time. And I would just feel completely exhausted, no energy. And I would go from doctor to doctor and they would say, you know, we don't know what you have. We don't know what to call it. Maybe it's chronic fatigue syndrome.

We'd have no treatment for it. You're on your own. Goodbye. And you might have this for the rest of your life. And you can imagine for a young man that is like, yeah, exactly. You know, not even any hope, but we don't have anything for you. You might have it forever. And that started my lifelong quest to try and understand these conditions. I, in my worst moments, I made a pact with the universe. And I said, if I can just get myself 30 % better, 50 % better, a hundred percent better, ideally. I will dedicate the rest of my life to helping others with these conditions because there's untold suffering that's occurring from these types of mental, physical, emotional, kind of chronic conditions and the types that you treat as well. And there's one point at a moment where I was in a bookstore in Cambridge and there was one book jutting off the shelf and it just called to me and I picked that book off the shelf and I read that book cover to cover and it was called The Emotional Life of the Brain by Professor Joseph Ledoux.

And that gave me lots of insights into what was potentially going on in the brain in chronic disease. And I mapped out a complete hypothesis, published that in 2002, got myself a hundred percent well through an ad hoc way retraining my brain and then set up the first neuroplasticity program. And then we launched that in 2007 as a DVD program. And since then we've done seven clinical studies. We now have an app. So it's been a 30 year journey to now as being able to help. amazing. Yeah, I love it. So. Tell the people what neuroplasticity is for those who don't know. neuroplasticity is this idea that our brain is far more flexible and rewirable and changeable than we first thought. So it was first thought, well, you know, we have our personality developed over the first five to 10 years of life, teenage years, but then pretty much our personality is pretty fixed. Our physiological responses to our environment is pretty much fixed. You know, that is our destiny. And then actually neuroplasticity came along in the eighties and nineties, now in 2000s. And we realized the brain is constantly changing. It's constantly rewiring. We are not fixed entities. And that's incredibly empowering because what it means is that both our personality, but also being prone to certain types of illnesses, that is not our destiny. Our genes are not our destiny. Our upbringing is not our destiny.

What neuroplasticity means 5:36

We can actually take charge and be empowered to have good health. love it. Cause yeah, we used to think that. Everything was just, sorry, you're stuck. is who you are. Yeah. They used to think that our genes were our destiny, that 80 % of our illnesses were down to our genes. And actually now we know it's about 20%, 20, 30 % maximum on average. And now we used to think, oh, well, it makes us trauma. It's our backgrounds that infer our personality, our anxiety. Now we realize actually the greatest reward we can overcome anxiety and depression and these types of conditions. Yeah. And I feel like it's taken a while to catch on, but people are understanding that more and more. I know I see in my office a lot, you know, just had a beautiful woman in yesterday and she could barely walk because, you know, she had so much neurological trauma, viral issues, you know, all those kinds of things. And she, like you were describing earlier, she'd been a doctor to doctor to doctor, you know, nobody had a good solution for it. And we just did a few different nutrients, not even much in this first appointment. of amino acid therapy. And she was able to sit up and look me in the eye when she came in, she wasn't able to, and walk out of my house where she couldn't walk in by herself. And so a lot of this time, she's like, so this can actually work? I said, yeah, wait until we do more. This is going to be really, really exciting. And I love that you really dive into the breath work. You dive into meditation. You dive into just really calming that neurology.

in the body, but then it's so much more than that. And I would love for you to dive into

How chronic stress drives illness 7:18

that because underneath all of the nutritional supplementation, the amino acids that I do, whatever it might be, there's still a deeper level. Right? So I feel like that kind of gets us to, oh now we can go deeper and you're like going the deeper, deeper. So I would love to hear how you do that. Absolutely. So yeah, we work in combination and in complement with certainly nutritionists, naturopaths, functional doctors, because it's all about bringing all of these pieces together and living that dream of holistic medicine. And so I'd like to kind of describe what we do. I always like to ask the biggest question of all, why are we here?

Now we can have a lovely philosophical discussion about the meaning of life, but from a scientific perspective, we are here because this brain, this nervous system in this body has evolved over actually millions of years. to allow us to adapt to our environment and survive. So we are survival machines and this gives us a clue as to why these chronic diseases occur. Like what turns an acute experience into a chronic illness? So what turns, let's say some kind of stomach bug into irritable bowel or inflammatory bowel, what turns sadness into depression?

What turns short amounts of fear into anxiety? So this is really interesting because in our hypothesis, what we believe is When the brain goes through an experience, a threat, so that could be a virus, could be a bacteria, could be a traumatic event, the brain is designed to adapt to that experience, create all the defensive responses, fight off that particular threat. So if it's a virus, it'll fight off the threat with the immune system. If it's a threat from a person or a situation, the anxiety will come to give us the resources to fight it off. And then the system is supposed to come back to balance. That says, right, I dealt with situation, let me come back to balance. But why is it that it goes into a chronic state and then causes these chronic illnesses? And those can be chronic mental health conditions, chronic physiological conditions, chronic inflammatory diseases that we're seeing so much long COVID and fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue. Mold illness, we're seeing so many environmental illnesses, mass selectivation, Lyme disease. These are all increasing in the population. And I believe it's because our system. is constantly under threat now. So before, when we lived according to our genetic inheritance, we'd be living cleaner lives. We'd be in community, in villages, exposed to sunlight. And now the last 50 years or so, we live in boxes. We are sedentary.

We're eating toxic foods, toxic water, toxic environments, and they're watching toxic things on screens. So we're just addicted to our screens and comparing ourselves to others and getting stressed. So our system... now feels like it's constantly being bombarded with threats and therefore it's prying to over respond. And so I like to use the, the fairy tale analogy to describe what may be going on in a lot of these different illnesses, like what causes a cube to go to chronic. So let's take the example of, let's imagine you are Queen Laurie of your kingdom. That has a nice ring to it. Queen Laurie. We'll do that. Well, you're Queen Laurie of your kingdom. So you are the calm, you are the rational mind, conscious rational mind, and your body represents the kingdom. And imagine you have an army and a Navy. Your army is your nervous system that sends all the information around that protects your body. And you have your immune system that protects you from viral threats, toxic threats, et cetera. So you have two defenders, army and Navy. And they fight off anything that invades your kingdom. And they're brilliant at doing that. But now imagine there's a drought in your kingdom. So now because there's a drought, the army and Navy are weaker. The kingdom is weaker. It can't defend itself as well. And we know, and I'm sure you've seen this in clinic, that people who get go on to go in chronic conditions, whether they're mental health conditions or physical conditions, there tends to be a period of chronic stress in the one or two years in the run up to the condition.

we even see this in conditions like cancer and heart disease. We can see that there's been an intense period of chronic stress. So for some reason, there's a drought in the kingdom, there's weakness in the kingdom because of the chronic stress. And that could be emotional stress, could be physiological stress. Then imagine an invader comes over the hill. Now that invader could be a virus, could be a bacteria, could be toxin, could be mold, or could be an emotional experience of trauma. Any of those triggers. Now normally the army and navy can galvanize, get rid of the threat and come back to baseline. But because they are now weaker, it takes them a lot longer to fight off that virus. In the example of COVID or a lot longer to deal with the pain that may be going on in the body, whatever the trigger might be. And so the army and Navy become what we call traumatized in the sense that they think, I'm not sure if we fought off that threat because our number one survival, number one principle here or raison d'etre is survival. We have to defend the kingdom. at all costs. What happens if the virus is hiding behind the mountain or hiding in the forest? So the army and navy come up with a great plan, which is let's keep firing off our weapons of war, because just in case the threat is still present, we need to keep ready. We need to defend the kingdom, because if the kingdom falls, that's it, game over. So they keep firing off their weapons of war.

that's why we see, even in depression, see 50 % of, 60 % of depression cases are probably actually due to over inflammation. So the army and navy keep firing off their weapons of war, but some of those arrows and cannonballs and missiles fall back into the kingdom. So you now start getting inflammation in the brain, inflammation in the body, inflammation in the gut. The gut can't then digest foods correctly, not getting the right nutrients. And then there's a brain that acts as the gut tells the brain that we're in danger. So more and more danger

Brain retraining and the three R's 13:24

signals. And the more and more we do, the army and Navy do that, the weaker and weaker the system becomes until this becomes its now default state. So in the case of inflammatory diseases, the army and Navy are now firing off their weapons of war against an imaginary threat, but they feel that they have to. And that can cause irritable bowel syndrome, inflammatory bowel, challenges, long COVID, fibromyalgia. In the case of pain. The system may, the pain system and networks themselves may over respond in terms of pain. when it comes to anxiety and depression, actually, anxiety and depression are defensive responses. It's the brain and the body doing what they think they need to do in order to warn you of an ongoing threat. Even depression is there is something wrong, you need to do something about a situation. sometimes because the army and Navy have got stuck in their defensive response, the threat is no longer there, but they've got conditioned and trained to keep over responding. And we believe this happens in two brain structures, the amygdala parts of the brain and the insula parts of the brain. So those two brain structures.

And once that happens, you can see how the weaker and weaker that the kingdom gets from all this inflammation, the more threatens the army and Navy field. So the more they fire off their weapons of war and we get into a vicious cycle where the brain says we're weak, we're not doing well. Fire off defensive systems that creates inflammation in the body, which has a whole set of secondary issues like gut problems, inflammation, mitochondria not functioning correctly, which then feeds the back to the brain that we're under threat through the vagus nerve. The brain stimulates the body and around and around we go and we go from an acute illness to a chronic illness. Yes. Your brain runs the show. So don't let toxins run it ragged. God designed our bodies to heal when we remove the interference. and ZeoCharge from Zeolite Labs helps me do just that. This detox magnet targets heavy metals, mold, and other toxins while sparing your essential minerals. It is clean, third-party tested, and so easy to use. So I want you to take back your brain today with ZeoCharge. Get it now at zeolitelabs.com. That is z-e-o-l-i-t-e labs.com. And once that cycle is in place, it's so frustrating for many practitioners because then they're seeing that this person's body is obviously it dysregulated and it's, you know, it's obviously there's amazing work that can be done with supplements and diet changes and obviously the great work that you do with amino acids. All of these things can definitely be improved. And what we find is when we add the extra piece of brain retraining and nervous system regulation, but especially the brain retraining piece that in our humble view gets also to that kind of root cause and really shifts why the body is in this danger response. And then that can really support and magnify some of those good outcomes. And so brain retraining is that next meeting that you as Queen Laurie have with your army and navy generals. In fact, in my webinars, actually use, there we go, the army and navy generals, there they are. They're of the army and the navy, the frogmen and the soldier there. When they come to the weekly meeting with you and they say, Hey, we still need all the resources of the kingdom. The kingdom's under threat. We need to keep firing off the missiles. Give us all the wheat and the corn and the water, all the resources of the body. You say to these guys, my dear generals, you've done a wonderful job at defending the kingdom, but the war is over. You can stand down. And they won't believe you the first time or the second time or the third time, because they're conditioned to do what they want. But now. neuroplasticity and repetition, we can train the nervous system and immune system that we are no longer under threat, which can then ramp down and tamp down the inflammatory responses, get the body back into a virtuous circle of recovery, and eventually get back to health. And that's what we do in the brain retraining. It just seems so simple, but it's so complicated. You know, when people think about it, they're like, I just don't understand. I've condensed our 30 years of neurology and brain reset. Very simple. Yeah, that's all you have to do. Right. But there are, mean, really though, there are simple techniques that you treat, that you teach people that has a profound effect. That's a complicated effect, but it's simple to do. I love, I think in just your, and this will be in the show notes too for everyone, but you have, is it a 14 or 28 day free trial?

That's right. have a 28 day free trial, no credit card required. So people can come and watch videos, listen to some audios and get a feel as to whether this is right for them and get this kind of explanation as well. Because the first thing is just understanding what is going on. Why have I got mold illness? Why have I got fatigued? Why have I got all of these different symptoms that doctors don't seem to be able to kind of explain? Why is my system dysregulated? And what we realized is a perfectly normal reason. The body's just thinking it's doing the right thing. And this is the reason why. Then that just helps us relax. Okay. It's not that I'm being attacked. This is my system's mal-response and I can train that and back to health. Which is so encouraging because you, you know, we have like six people in a room and everybody gets a bit by the same tick. So everybody has the same, you know, Lyme exposure. And then you're the one person who, you know, can't get out of bed for six years. Right. And. So what I'm hearing you saying is, no, we can retrain the brain and then you're going to get out of bed and you're going to function just like the other five people in this room. It's just your brain needs to be retrained. Absolutely. Yes. saw in Lyme disease, funny enough, you mentioned that we did recently did an audit of our patients and people with Lyme disease had a hundred percent improvement in their health and functioning after three months. So if they were at 40 % functioning after months of using our program, they were now functioning at 80%.

So we have really good results with Lyme disease. Right. What other conditions are you seeing good results with? So the inflammatory disease is like long COVID, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia. We're seeing great results with them. Anything around the kind of 80, 85 % improvement in health and functioning after three months. That's what our clinical studies have shown. And then another area is pain. So pain syndromes, unexplained pain. Another area is environmental illnesses, so mold illness, activation, and then obviously Lyme disease.

And then when it comes to anxiety, panic, burnout, those are also conditions that we get really good results with as well. Now in terms of depression, we have to be very careful because we don't formally recommend our program for depression. And the reason is, that of course, if someone

Conditions helped by the Gupta Program 20:30

has depression, that's something that's, very important to be working with a practitioner and have that one-on-one support. At the same time in our clinical studies, we have seen a halving of depression after three months with our program. Yeah, I love to hear that. When you're in your program, I know you talk about the three R components. Can you explain what those are for people? first R for neuroplasticity is regulating our nervous system, relaxing our mind. Because if the nervous system is dysregulated, it's much harder for the brain to create a new neural pathway if it's already hyper aroused. I would give the analogy, let's say a husband and wife or two partners are coming home after a day's work, they're both really, really stressed out, right? And they want to hear each other's story or each other's side of an argument.

You are not going to be open to what that person is going to say at that point in time. That is very true. Yeah. Because your nervous system is dysregulated, you're stressed out. You're the person trying to explain, you can't see their point of view. But the moment you take some time out, you rest, have some dinner, relax in the evening, then you're more open to a conversation where you can be more neuroplastic and flexible to different points of view. So regulating the nervous system is the first R of the program. The second, and that's where we use lots of relaxation techniques, breathing and meditation, but specifically designed for an anxious mind. But that's not the core of it. That's just preparation. The core of our program is we use these specialized brain retraining techniques. So one of them is what we call somatic retraining, which is retraining the brain at a bodily level. And then the main technique is something we call the seven step process, which is a seven step process of each time a patient learns to recognize when their brain is about to go into a response, an inflammatory response. teach them a different way of sending safety signals to the brain that they are no longer under threat. And it's through that repetition because neuroplasticity needs repetition to create these new neural pathways and emotional intensity. So those are two key principles, repetition and emotional intensity. through leveraging those two principles, a person is then able to train their brain that they are no longer under threat. it's persuading the army and navy generals that the war is over and we don't need to keep firing off. And that then brings people back to normal. And the third hour of the program is what we call re-engaging with joy. Now what this means is that we teach people to recognize their stress reactions because it's one thing to get well. And I'm sure you see this, Laurie, that you can get people well and they get back into their lives. But the moment another stressful situation happens or they're moving home or something happens, wham, all the symptoms can come flooding back again. hours, once again, the system has got dysregulated. And so we help a patient recognize their stress triggers, some of their personality traits, which might be magnifying these stressful responses and learn to self-regulate so that they can not only get well, but stay well for the rest of their lives and then reconnect to that inner joy. That's what we call re-engaging with joy. So those are the three R's of the Bipto-Programme. That's huge. So I know some people are going to think, Is this like limbic retraining? Is this similar to those types of things or is it something that feels a little bit different? Yeah. So this phrase limbic retraining actually started doing the rounds. so we were the first, what we call neuroplastic brain retraining program we first saw in 2007. And since then there have been other programs that have come along and this idea of limbic retraining has become popularized. We do do the limbic retraining, but we think it's the wrong phrase. And the reason is, is because the amygdala, which we feel is a core part of this issue, does sit in the limbic system of

When healing gets stuck 24:24

the brain, the two almond shaped structures behind our eyes that determine whether we're under threat. But the insular part of the brain, which we actually think is where the action is going on, that part of the brain does not sit in the limbic. It actually sits in the cortex and it's sometimes known as the insular cortex. And that part of our brain is the part that takes in all the incoming information from our body. it understands what's our heart rate, what's our blood pressure, what's our temperature, what's the nature of our immune responses. Takes in that incoming information, gathers that information with what the amygdala is telling it to what the rest of the brain is telling it. And then decides what is the appropriate autonomic response, nervous system response and immune response that ensures homeostasis and survive. And that part of the brain we now know from a lot of research is the part of the brain where our immune responses and inflammatory responses may be stored. And so that's why, although it's been popularized as limbic retraining, we call it brain retraining because actually there's a limbic part and there's a cortex, a cortical part of retraining as well. So good to distinguish. Yeah. What happens when somebody is feeling stuck? They feel like their brain, you know, they're doing the breathing techniques, they're doing, you know, all the right things, but they're just, they're just stuck and they can't kind of go past this one point and they aren't getting any better. are many different reasons that someone could get stuck. Now it could be that actually there are things going on in their lives right now that they need support with in terms of emotional challenges. Or it could be that actually there are some deeper reasons behind the condition. Because we believe healing happens at many levels.

So there's a physiological component of healing. There's an emotional component of healing. There's a mental component of healing and there's a spiritual component of And we find that for long-term health, it's addressing it at all of these levels. So someone might be physiologically doing all the right things, but actually there could be something mentally in terms of their thought patterns or in terms of their personality traits, which may be keeping the nervous system supercharged. Or there could be some unresolved emotions from the past that they haven't addressed or dealt with that actually could be the reason that the nervous system is still tight. But at a spiritual level, it could be because they've not reconnected with themselves. They're feeling very isolated from themselves. They're not living an authentic life. They're not living a heartfelt life. And that there is a lot of self-criticism or putting oneself down on. And it's about then looking at some of deeper spiritual reasons. So we believe that sometimes illness, not always, but sometimes illness can be a message or a course correction in life where we have been going down a particular pathway, but actually that isn't an authentic life. And an illness comes along because we haven't been living according to what our heart's desire is. And therefore there's a shift. And for me, you know, I had a lot of personality traits of being an approval seeker, a people pleaser, an overachiever. And I could see that I was on a trajectory to burning myself completely out. Me too. So, yeah, so a lot of us have those traits, especially like traditions. And this was a wake-up call to say, you can't continue living life in that way.

This is your pre-programmed from childhood. This is your conditioned past. And actually being aware of that and shifting that will allow you to lead a better life. you know, I give this analogy of the bowling ball. So I used to always go bowling with my nephews who were like, if you have, you have this in America where kids, when you're bowling the ball down the bowling out the lane, there are these little bumpers that can go up at the side. So children put those bumpers up. So when they bowl the bowling ball, it will hit the side so it doesn't go into the gutter. So I would pick up the bowling ball and I'm very competitive with my nephews, even though they're like five. And I'll bowl the bowling ball. And it will go straight into the gutter. Oh gosh. And then they will put the bowling ball on that little ramp thing.

will go down the ramp, slowly, slowly, slowly go down the lane and they'll get a strike and they'll say, ha ha ha, we're beating you, we're beating you. I'm thinking, God, get those things. So we use this analogy is because it's a bit like the bowling ball hitting the bumper at the side that the bumper represents. We often say I bumped up against something in life. We hit the bump. And had we not hit the bumper, we would have got into the gutter. You might've got an addiction or some crazy kind of mental health challenge that wasn't right for us. So we come up against the bumper to say, actually, we need to course correct.

I sometimes require something like a brick wall to really say, we need a course correct in life to, to see what's going on. And sometimes we don't recognize that. So as you're saying, there can be certain blocks people come up against and our clinicians and the work that we do,

Hope through recovery stories 29:30

we help people understand. pick apart what might be going on in the unconscious that is stopping us from fully healing. And that could be a physiological thing. Maybe there's just nutrients that someone requires. Or it could be an emotional thing. There's an emotion stuck. Or it could be a mental thing where our emotional patterns are stuck, mental patterns. Or it could be a spiritual kind of crisis that someone's going through. Yeah. Do you think if people were to address all they needed to address that Even if they were in a moldy environment, they could still live in that environment. Like their body would know how to function. Does that make sense?

Yes. Now this is a very interesting thing because we often come up against this. We encourage people to do practically what is possible. So obviously mold remediation, removing yourself from moldy environments. But of course we have to live life at a normal level. can't avoid mold. Mold is everywhere. Right. So what we say is. Actually, if you do the brain retraining, we can get people back to normal where they can be in those environments, remediated environments, and they can still function normally. Because you can have a household where there could be five people living in that household, but only one person is responding to them all.

Now you could say it's because they're not detoxifying and they've got mold, mycotoxin buildup. But at the same time, a lot of that occurs when your nervous and immune system is overreacting. Because when it's overreacting. detoxification systems are not functioning correctly. And so when we, when we get these back to balance, we often find that then people can be in those environments without having the reactivity. Yeah, that makes sense. Do you ever feel like there's somebody that's too far gone? Like you just can't help them? You know, we always like to give people hope because we, we, when we went clinical studies, we found that 92 % of people had an improvement by using our brain retraining program. So we think the vast majority of people. ill. Of course, nothing's ever 100%. There might be some people who, it may not be the right time for them or whatever, but on the whole, we see it in the majority of cases. I'll give you an example. We had this one case study of someone in New Zealand who's an 84-year-old man. Now, when someone's 84 years old, it's very difficult to decipher what is chronic illness versus what is the effects of old age. He had had fibromyalgia and Lyme disease and gut issues for like 30 years and hadn't been able to live a good life. And he went through the brain retrain and we thought, well, let's see what happens. He was able to retrain his brain. got to 80, 90 % recovery after three, four months. we were just astounded. We thought, wow, this shows you if somebody in a brain that we might perceive as less neuroplastic can heal, there's hope for all of us. And I said to him, what are you going to do with your life now? And he said, cause I thought, well, he's going to retire and relax. I I'm going to travel the world. I'm going do all the things. That's awesome. that I haven't been able to do in the last 30 years. I'm going to do all of these. I'm going to travel the world. I'm going to see the sights because I've got my life back. it's such a beautiful, memorable story that he can do it. We can all do it. Yes. Yo, that is so encouraging. At least I hope it's encouraging. It's encouraging to me. That's fantastic. And that's just so do the mindset.

Like when you retrain that brain and the neurology of your body is calmer, your mindset shifts, you know, all those things, the possibility. of what your life can look like is really endless. And isn't that what we all want? We want that endless possibilities, the way that we were created to live and thrive and all those things and to help out the rest of humanity. So it's a beautiful way to look at that. That's fantastic. What's another really amazing story that you can think of? Long COVID. Now, as we know, are now millions of people around the world suffering from the after-effects. COVID and this happened to a lady, literally she'd had long Cove for about six to nine months and could not function. She really was literally on the couch, couldn't do anything. And she took on our program and even we were astounded to see within 10 days, having intensely retrained her brain because she hadn't had it for so long. She was able to get like 90 % well. She was suddenly was able to do everything that she wants to do.

And she herself was astounded that. How could, you when you have long COVID, you're physically exhausted. You can't think clearly. You clearly think that the COVID virus is still in your body. You clearly think that, you know, there's something attacking me. When you suddenly realize I just need to retrain my brain, it's so bizarre that you can then get your health back. And there was another guy we had in his fifties. He was a marathon runner and he was super fit and he got COVID and was once again, flat on the couch, couldn't do anything. And his story is actually on our website. And he used the brain retraining and now he's able to, we said to him, look, what's important is that you pay yourself back. So you don't start going running marathons, but you gently pay back. Now he's running half marathons. He's cycling 50 kilometers a day. He's got his energy back. so all of these stories show is that as bizarre as the symptoms feel and as overwhelming, whatever symptoms you might be experiencing, when you recognize that it's just your own system producing it, then that gives you that empowerment and that hope. And people might say, what, you know, what's the proof of this or whatever. Let's take the example of flu. So we've all experienced flu influenza and when it happens, how do we feel? We feel exhausted, tired, brain fog, demotivated, don't have any energy, can't do anything. All of those symptoms are caused by our own immune system. Fighting off the flu virus. Right.

And so we can see that if that's the case, what happens if our brain gets a bit stuck? and it still thinks the virus is there, we can still recreate all of those symptoms of a flu ourselves without the flu virus being present. And if we think about COVID during our, you know, the horrible COVID time, who was it who passed away from COVID? People didn't die of COVID. They died of the cytokine storm and the over-inflammation of the lungs, which then narrowed the airwaves and meant we couldn't breathe. And that was the reason. So we can see there is precedent.

for our own immune system, because of the crazy signals that we give our bodies these days,

Where to find the Gupta Program 35:48

getting stuck in that fight or flight response and this overimmune inflammatory response that then can go on to cause so many diseases. Wow. This is such an amazing conversation. Hopefully this is giving people so much hope because I, I mean, I study this stuff all the time and I'm just so excited listening to you. I'm like, yes, this is so true. And it makes me want to, I mean, I've taken part of your course. So I'm gonna finish taking it and I can't wait to do it, because we all have things that we need to work on in our bodies, right? We all have things where, whether it's the physical, the emotional, the mental, the spiritual, there's all things that we can work on. And our bodies are so amazing and we have so much power insight.

We have a lot of power, we have love, we have sound mind, we have all those things in us, we just don't know how to use it well, right? I really like your program. love your message and all the work you've been doing for the last, you know, over three decades. So thank you so much for all that you're doing. I really appreciate you and admire you. Thank you, Laurie. Very, very sweet words. Thank you so much. Yeah. Well, thank you everyone for listening. Tell everyone where they can find you. Yeah. So they can go to our website, which is GuptaProgram.com.

G-U-P-T-A, GuptaProgram.com. And there they can sign up for our free trial. can watch lots of videos, et cetera. Or you can go to the app store or play store and just download the free app. It's good to program once again, you can download there and find lots of free content. And I think, you know, what's important for people to realize is that this isn't just, you know, there's so many different things you can see online about, Hey, we can help you with this. We can help you with that. All of our work is backed by scientific studies. So we've now done seven clinical studies. five independent randomized controlled trials, all showing really good results with a lot of these different conditions. So we'd encourage people to also look at the science and see for themselves as well. That's awesome. Well, thank you so much. And thank you everyone for listening. Make sure you like, subscribe and share this interview because I know that you know somebody who needs to hear this. If it's not you, you know someone. So make sure you're sharing this out to everyone you know. God bless you and I will see you in the next episode. Thanks for listening to Take Back My Brain. If today's episode helped you connect with hope or direction, I want you to follow the show, leave us a review, and share it with someone who needs it. And if you're ready to start your own healing journey, explore our courses and our coaching programs at lorihammer.com backslash store. So until next time, remember you cannot medicate away a nutrient deficiency and healing your brain isn't just possible, it's powerful.