As the New Year invites us to discover what magic we can create in its 365 periods, consider focusing on changing your brain.
The central nervous system controls our lives. We all have a few circuits that are coded when stress becomes overloaded, and they disrupt our natural state of joy—being in flow, feeling grounded, and loving our life, even the difficult parts of it.
If you start the new year with a list of changes you want to make, try to achieve these goals not just in the first few days of the year, when good intentions prevail, but forever. Select a few changes you want to make and make them through EBT to remove the wire so you experience lasting and profound change.
Switching to a neuroplasticity-based approach to taking control of our lives is easy. They break away from society’s idea that it’s normal to be stressed and embrace evolutionary biology: that joy is our natural state and we almost always need a short break to process our feelings, to relieve our stress and to return to our biologically advantageous state.
Here’s how to make the switch to joy as a simple, scientific way to start the happiest, healthiest year of your life:
Focus on feeling great and rewire anything that’s blocking it.
Start your year by making it a habit to wake up in the morning and say, “Hey, what am I doing with my day?” I create joy in my life.” The brain is prone to negativity and is always on the lookout for threats and problems. So use this approach to counteract this.
Then, whenever you don’t feel joyful—in a flowing state, grounded, and in love with your life, even its difficult parts—grab the EBT app and spiral up through the resilience pathways of your emotional brain and return Your life back to its natural state of joy.
Lack of joy? It’s biochemical.
Although this emphasis on joy may sound like the focus of happiness training, the EBT method is not happiness training. It is based on physiology and uses emotions to eliminate toxic chemicals and activate health chemicals, making processing the “new natural medicine.”
Whenever you feel that “not great” feeling, it’s the toxic biochemicals that are causing it, and that’s worth the one to three minutes it takes to eliminate them with EBT. As neuroscientist Antonio Damasio wrote, “States of joy signify optimal physiology and the smooth flow of life.”
But our joy and the biochemicals that block it are controlled by brain circuits. We only have two types: those that make us healthy and happy (with self-balancing homeostatic chemicals) and those that make us unhealthy and unhappy (with out-of-control allostatic chemicals).
Homeostasis is what you learned in high school biology, the multifaceted process that keeps us going in our physiology, and allostasis is the opposite, an absolute extreme shipwreck of a condition that causes most psychological and chronic problems diseases. Both still apply, and by using EBT skills to eliminate the self-damaging diseases and transform them into self-healing diseases, we have the best chance of taking control of our health and quality of life.
Good things take time.
Thinking in circuits takes time, as does realizing that you can use emotions in innovative ways to change the chemicals in every cell in your body. That’s why EBT is more than an app; It requires using it over time and with others to internalize and become a part of who you are on a cellular, natural and automatic level.
To transform your life with EBT, you must join an EBT support group that meets weekly by telephone and is facilitated by a certified EBT provider to ensure safety and effectiveness. Those 30 minutes of meeting with five others in the fast lane to increase their target value as well is exactly what the emotional brain needs to love EBT and see better results, faster.
This year, give yourself time to establish the habit of joy.
Count on EBT to transform your life for a year. Make your joy your top priority, and everything else in life—work, mood, relationships, spirituality, and health—will fall in line. You’ll join an EBT support group to get everything you need to rewire your brain and align your life for optimal health.
To use EBT, focus on your body, where you experience your emotional brain. Notice when you feel present, connected, and amazing. Enjoy it. If you don’t feel well, that’s not a problem. You have the skills! You know how to return to joy. Just use the EBT app to feel great again. This way, you can bask in these healing chemicals for a moment or more while knowing you’ve made a small but important improvement in your brain’s wiring! Two for one!
How does it feel to have the joy habit?
What happens to EBT after this “brain reset”? You will continue to use EBT, but your brain will be resilient enough to minimize the damage from the major stressors and use these challenging experiences as “moments of opportunity” to rewire a latent wire that needed to be rewired anyway!
Meanwhile, the smaller stressors spontaneously find your brain’s resilience pathways, and those pathways do the work for you. They transform stress into joy. The purpose of EBT is to reprogram your brain to work for you rather than against you.
By deleting any remaining reactive circuits and replacing them with resilient ones, you will naturally become happier, healthier—and more satisfied with yourself and your life. Ultimately, rewiring the emotional brain is a path to inner peace.
“I feel great… just by switching my circuits!”
By using EBT, you will notice changes right from the start. Whether you start the year with work problems, relationship problems, anxiety, depression, weight loss, or the need to reset, know that you are not in trouble. Like all of us, you have a few faulty wires, but this year is different. They use techniques that clear the wires so that the effort you put into change can produce lasting and profound results.
It takes a month or two to become comfortable with EBT and realize how much power we have to transform our lives. That’s why it’s so important to have a support group. Instead of typical social situations where people list their problems and track their behavior, the neuroscientific way to live a great life is to find the circuit that is causing the problem and delete it.
A member of one of my EBT support groups had used EBT to rewire her relationship cycle and her “I’m not worthy” connection, among other things. She also had a list of cables that she wanted to rewire as well. Then she experienced five weeks of extreme stress: her young daughter was hospitalized while her husband was on a business trip abroad. She was completely overloaded.
She told me, “All the circuits I rewired were stuck. I realized that they were no longer part of my life and that they were the ones left.”
When you choose the neuroplasticity path to optimal health, you can transform your life in ways beyond your wildest imagination. This is the magic of rewiring your own emotional brain.
Choosing to rewire will change your life.
Consider increasing your Project of the Year goal. Every wire you delete increases your brain’s “set point,” or natural default stress level. Every time you use EBT to overcome a moment of stress – anxiety, depression, addiction, or just a feeling of unrewarding or stupidity – it brings you back to your joy and strengthens your brain’s habit of joy.
As the new year begins, embark on the adventure of a lifetime. Learn how to rewire one circuit, then another, and another until your brain is primed for peak resilience and deep joy. That’s a goal worth setting! Join an EBT support group and you will never look back.
