Using the Mind to Change the Brain: Shaping Who We Are Becoming to Heal Neuroplastic Symptoms

Guest Blog by Christine Yarosh, PhD

Our brains have a built-in negativity bias. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense. The cost of overlooking something potentially threatening was far greater than the cost of overlooking something positive. Better to eat lunch than to be lunch.

We are the recipients of a nervous system that is nothing short of miraculous—and simultaneously not a great fit for the modern world. Wisdom traditions have long held that the mind takes the shape of what it rests upon. The neuroscience equivalent: neurons that fire together, wire together.

What we repeatedly attend to, think about, feel, perceive, and do becomes increasingly familiar to the brain. Repetition strengthens learning. Attention tells the brain what matters. Emotion and reward tell it what is important to remember.

This is a remarkable system for survival. It can also become problematic when the brain begins to assign too much significance to something that is not actually dangerous.

When Noise Becomes Signal

Neuroplastic symptoms can become self-reinforcing through increasingly narrowed attention and repeated activation of neural patterns associated with threat and symptoms. Noise gets elevated to signal.

A sensation captures our attention. Attention increases its salience. Salience increases monitoring. Hypervigilant monitoring generates fear and tension, which themselves produce additional sensations. Those sensations are then interpreted as further evidence that something is wrong. A vicious cycle ensues.

Consider what can happen in a matter of seconds when a neutral body sensation occurs:

“This is pain. The same pain I had yesterday.”

“Something really must be wrong.”

“What if it gets worse?”

“It's probably going to get worse.”

“I shouldn't be feeling this.”

“I need to figure out how to make it go away.”

The brain is doing more than experiencing the sensation. It is assigning meaning to it, comparing it with memories, predicting what might happen next, and determining what deserves attention. The brain doesn't simply register experience. It is learning from experience. Developing or strengthening neural networks for future use.

And when the same pattern is repeated often enough, the response can become increasingly automatic and efficient. This is neuroplasticity at work. It isn't the enemy. It is the mechanism of change. This is where the process of positive neuroplasticity, developed by Rick Hanson, PhD, becomes particularly useful.

Positive neuroplasticity is based on a simple but profound premise: we can use the mind to change the brain by intentionally cultivating beneficial experiences and helping those experiences become lasting internal resources.

In other words, rather than focusing on ridding ourselves of what we don't want. We can learn to deliberately grow what we do want. We can cultivate experiences of safety, confidence, agency, connection, pleasure, resilience, self-compassion, trust, and capability—and give the brain an opportunity to learn from them.

This is not about positive thinking. It is about positive learning.

From a State to a Trait

When a beneficial experience is sufficiently engaged, it becomes more than a fleeting moment. It becomes an opportunity for learning.

The brain changes through experience-dependent neuroplasticity. When patterns of neural activity repeatedly occur together, the connections supporting those patterns can become stronger and more efficient. Memory, attention, emotion, reward, bodily sensation, motivation, and self-referential processing all contribute to this process.

This is why the experience itself matters.

We aren't simply telling ourselves, “I am safe.”

We are giving the nervous system an opportunity to experience safety.

We aren't simply thinking, “I am capable.”

We are noticing the actual experience of capability and allowing it to register.

We aren't simply telling ourselves that movement is safe.

We are having experiences of moving, sensing, and discovering that our predictions of danger did not occur.

With repetition, these experiences can become increasingly familiar and accessible. What begins as a temporary state can contribute to the development of a more enduring trait or internal resource.

State becomes trait through a process of activation and integration.

Helping the Brain Learn from the Good

We have evolved a brain that is exceptionally good at learning from negative experiences. A frightening experience can command our attention immediately and remain in memory for a very long time. Positive experiences generally don't receive the same treatment.

If we’re lucky, we experience something wonderful and move on. We feel safe for a moment and immediately start thinking about the next thing. We have a successful movement and barely notice it. We experience pleasure but don't linger long enough to fully register it.

But mostly, we don’t register it at all. The negativity bias means that the brain may be doing a very good job of learning from the negative while rarely learning from the positive.

Rick Hanson's HEAL method offers a way of deliberately correcting that imbalance. The idea is not simply to have a beneficial experience, but to help the brain take it in and create lasting change.

We can increase the learning value of a beneficial experience by employing specific mental factors to engage it more fully. Dr. Hanson broadly defined this as “activation” and “integration”. These mental factors include Duration, Intensity, Multimodality, Novelty, Salience, Intentionality and Rewards.

These factors tell the brain that this experience matters. Remember this. Do more of this.

What is in Your Backpack?

I often think about this in terms of a camping trip. Imagine asking a client: “What's in your backpack?” What you need for a successful journey depends on different factors. Broadly speaking, what are the issues you might face and what are the resources you need to deal with those issues?

Some clients have been taking short day trips over relatively flat terrain with good weather. They may not need much more than some snacks and water for success. For these clients, education about pain reprocessing, somatic tracking, emotional processing, or other approaches may provide enough corrective experience to develop a new, useful resource.

But other clients have been heading into much more difficult terrain. Maybe the trail is steep and rocky. Maybe the weather is often stormy. Maybe they've been hiking deep in the backcountry for a long time. There are more issues, and they need more resources in their backpack.

And some clients arrive with backpacks already filled with rocks. Those rocks may represent fear, shame, hypervigilance, helplessness, self-criticism, trauma-related adaptations, or deeply learned beliefs about their bodies and their safety.

Importantly, these rocks served a purpose at some point. They may have helped the person survive or navigate an environment that was genuinely difficult. And we know that learned patterns, especially those that involve safety, remain long after the environment has changed.

The rocks aren't bad. They're just heavy. More issues, more resources.

Packing your Backpack

This is where cultivating beneficial experiences becomes particularly relevant for our clients. For some, reducing fear, changing their relationship with symptoms, processing emotions, and experiencing successful movement may be enough to create a new pattern.

For others—particularly when symptoms are longstanding or embedded within broader patterns of threat or trauma—it may be useful to deliberately develop additional internal resources such as: Agency, Self-compassion, Confidence, Connection, Resilience, Enjoyment or Curiosity.

The goal of positive neuroplasticity isn't to erase the old learning. The goal is to build something new and increasingly accessible that can compete with it. The more frequently the brain experiences and internalizes these beneficial states, the more available those new patterns become for use in responding to what life brings their way. Eventually, what once required deliberate effort can begin to feel more familiar.

The person who once told themselves, “I can’t handle this sensation,” cultivates acceptance and eventually finds that they are no longer tuning into every sensation as a problem to be solved.

The person who once believed that movement is not safe cultivates a ‘don’t know mind’ and begins to experience movement with curiosity instead of anticipation of danger.

The person who spent years scanning for what was wrong cultivates enjoyment and gradually becomes more capable of noticing what is pleasant even in the presence of pain.

This is not magic. It is learning. But something seemingly magic does begin to occur. As these beneficial resources grow and the nervous system adapts, the relationship to neuroplastic symptoms starts to change.

We are Always Becoming

I invite you to think about the last hour. The last day. The last week. The last month. And ask yourself: What has your mind been resting upon? What have you repeatedly attended to? What have you rehearsed? What have you emotionally reinforced? What has become salient? And how might those experiences be shaping your physical, emotional, social, and internal experience?

We are, in essence, always becoming.

Our brains are continuously being shaped by what we experience and what we repeatedly pay attention to. The question isn't whether that process is happening. The question is whether we know how to participate in it intentionally.

If neurons that fire together wire together, then every moment of safety, pleasure, connection, capability, and ease is an opportunity for learning if we know how to use it.

We can use the same remarkable neuroplastic machinery that helped create and maintain maladaptive patterns to develop something new.

We don't have to fight the brain.

We can teach it.

We don't have to erase every old pattern.

We can build stronger, more adaptive alternatives.

We can get on our own side.

And perhaps the question is not simply:

“How do I get rid of my symptoms?”

Perhaps another question is:

“What is my mind resting upon—and who am I becoming as a result?”

If you are interested in learning how to harness the brain's neuroplastic nature for the good of both yourself and your clients, please join me at the ATNS Conference in Dallas this October. I will be teaching the HEAL method, developed by Rick Hanson, PhD—a specific, research-based approach for cultivating beneficial internal resources.

We will explore how to identify the resources a particular client may need, how to deliberately cultivate and internalize beneficial experiences, and how this approach may be harnessed as another tool in the healing of neuroplastic symptoms. I hope you'll join me.