Neuroplasticity & The Brain
It was once thought that our brains were hardwired and body symptoms like pain & fatigue were impossible to change.
We now know through modern neuroscience that actually the brain continues to change, depending on how it is being used. By retraining the brain to process information differently we can actually reduce symptoms and massively improve our health and wellbeing.
The Lightning Process® Core Concepts
When people get stuck with an illness or issue, they often don’t understand how or why they can’t change or get well. On the course we look at exactly this and how the two core elements of the Lightning Process, the Physical Emergency Response (PER) and Neuroplasticity, maintain these unconscious limiting patterns that keep us stuck.
Physical Emergency Response
The PER is the flight or fight response – it’s our body’s natural reaction to any threat and provides amazing bursts of strength and speed, changing our body’s hormones and fuel usage and so on – and is ideal for escaping a tiger in the wild – this ability to manage our body’s system depending on what we need is called Allostasis. The PER is generally a good thing, but it’s really designed to be activated only for very short periods of time.
Unfortunately, the ‘threats’ we find ourselves under, such as illness, chronic infections, pollution, relationships, jobs, exams or paying the mortgage, tend to last for longer periods of time. And research shows that long-term activation of these changes as a result of the PER is really bad for us – creating havoc with our sleep, healing and immune system, digestion, clear thinking and general mood – this is called Allostatic Load and has been shown to be linked to chronic illness, including heart disease, abdominal obesity, hypertension, diabetes, migraines and pain, asthma and CFS.
Reducing allostatic load is considered vital for improving chronic health conditions; the Lightning Process does this by teaching you how to spot when the PER is happening and how you can calm this response down, allowing your body to re-balance itself.
Neuroplasticity
Neuroplasticity is the brain’s amazing ability to rapidly change in response to how it’s being used. Our brain forms strong neural pathways for things we repeatedly do in order to become more efficient, so we no longer need to consciously think about them. Like when learning to drive a car you need to concentrate a lot, but with practice the experience becomes automatic, so much so that you end up at your destination without thinking twice!
This is a very useful function of our clever brain, however if what we are repeating and automating is damaging to us, we can get stuck in negative unconscious patterns that contribute to chronic illness or difficult mental and emotional issues.
The exciting news is that our brains are continually rewiring and changing quickly, and so we can use the power of neuroplasticity to create transformational change.
The Lightning Process teaches you how to recognise the destructive unconscious patterns and how to retrain them into new life-enhancing patterns instead. With practice these will become the dominant brain pathways, changing the body’s automatic response which leads to powerful and lasting change.
Interested to know a bit more about the studies and research supporting this work?
The Lighting Process UK website has links to more information on the established scientific theories that underpin the Lightning Process.
You can also find links to the growing body of research into the Lightning Process.
This information is all very interesting – but the Lighting Process is actually about teaching you how to apply this knowledge to make change for yourself.