My Journey
I’ve been searching for answers since I was a child as to why I never felt well and seemed to only get increasingly unwell over time. Over my lifetime I’ve seen countless doctors and alternative medicine practitioners and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to figure out what was wrong with me. My life consisted of jumping from specialist to specialist, chasing my symptoms, all seemingly unrelated to each other.
After decades of researching, completely changing the way I lived my life, and trying every treatment made available to me without much relief, I finally realized I was spending all my time and energy on doctors, treatments, supplements, eating the right food, etc and I was ignoring the root cause - that I had a limbic system impairment (also known as a maladapted stress response).
What is a limbic system impairment you ask? The limbic system is a set of structures in the brain that help us detect threats to our safety and wellbeing. Chronic stressors, such as infections, trauma, toxic exposures, extreme emotional or psychological stress can negatively impact brain function by activating the limbic system. This is the brain’s inherent response to stress and trauma, however, in some cases the brain’s limbic system can get stuck in a chronic fight, flight or freeze response and become impaired. In a healthy person, the limbic system responds properly to acute threats, and can quickly return back to a calm state once the event has passed. However, in the case of chronic illness, we can end up with a limbic system that remains on high alert, even if the initial threat or trauma is no longer present. Chronic stressors flip the switch on our limbic system, telling our body that it is in danger and we must always be on the lookout for threats to our health. Over time, this can cause a maladapted stress response and our body starts to react inappropriately to non-threatening things, such as foods, supplements, environmental pollutants, smells, lights, sounds, and other triggers.
This is where brain retraining comes in!
Brain retraining is also known as self directed neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity allows our brain to rewire associations and change our response to symptoms. It calms down an overactive limbic system and prunes away old unhelpful neural pathways and creates new, healthy pathways that support optimal function in all systems of the body. It shifts the brain and body from chronic fight or flight into a calm state where healing can start to take place.
After learning all of this, I dedicated myself to brain retraining every single day - interrupting patterns of unhelpful thoughts and behaviors, becoming present with my body and emotions, elevating my emotional state, and learning to self regulate. I decided to create a tool that would help me review all the brain retraining topics that I had learned in a way where I could digest them in bite sized pieces every day.
I made these daily practice cards for myself originally, to keep myself engaged with my practice and to help me implement the brain retraining principles into my daily life. When deciding what to put on each card I thought to myself, what would be valuable to review every day? What should they say to provide guidance in a moment where I might need it? How could each card reinforce ways I can change my emotional state, thoughts and behaviors? How could these cards prompt me in different ways and keep me focused on a certain elevated emotion throughout the day?
So that's a little bit about my healing journey and the cards. If you'd like to follow my story I share my healing journey and things I've been learning along the way on my Instagram page.
Happy retraining!
