As the New Year invites us to discover what magic we can make during its 365 parcels of time, consider focusing on changing your brain.
The central nervous system is the controller of our lives. We all have a few circuits encoded when stress overloads, and they disrupt our natural state of joy – being in flow, feeling grounded, and loving our life, even the gritty parts of it.
If you start the New Year with a list of transformations you want to make, try achieving those goals not just the first few days of the year when good intentions rule, but for good. Choose a few changes you want to make and EBT them to erase the wire so you experience lasting and profound change.
The switch to a neuroplasticity-based approach to taking charge of our lives is quite simple. You slough off society's idea that it is normal to be stressed and choose to run with evolutionary biology: that joy is our natural state, and we are nearly always a brief stint of processing our emotions away to clear our stress and return to that biologically advantageous state.
Here's how you make the switch to focusing on joy as a simple, scientific way to kick off the happiest, healthiest year of your life:
Focus on feeling great, and rewire anything that blocks it.
Start your year by making it a practice when you awaken in the morning to say, "Hey, what am I doing with my day? I am creating joy in my life. The brain has a negativity bias, always searching for threats and problems, so use this practice to counter it.
Then, whenever you do not feel in joy – in a flow state, grounded, and in love with your life, even its gritty parts – reach for the EBT app and spiral up through the resilience pathways of your emotional brain, and return to your natural state of joy.
Joy insufficiency? It's biochemical.
Although this emphasis on joy might sound like the orientation of happiness training, the EBT method is not happiness training. It is based on physiology, using emotions to clear away toxic chemicals and activate health chemicals, making processing the "new natural medicine."
Whenever you have that "non-great" feeling, the toxic biochemicals are causing it, and that's worth the one to three minutes it takes to use EBT to clear them. As neuroscientist Antonio Damasio wrote, "Joyous states signify optimal physiology and the smooth workings of life."
Yet our joy and the biochemicals that block it are controlled by brain circuits. We only have two types: the ones that make us healthy and happy (with self-balancing homeostatic chemicals) and unhealthy and unhappy (with careening out-of-control allostatic chemicals).
Homeostasis is what you learned about in high school biology, the multi-layered process that keeps us running a tight ship in our physiology, and allostasis is the opposite, a flat-out extreme shipwreck of a state that causes most mental health problems and chronic diseases. Both still hold, and by using the EBT skills to switch off the self-damaging ones and transform them into self-healing ones, we stand the best chance of taking control of our health and quality of life.
Good things take time.
Thinking in terms of circuits takes time, and so does appreciating that you can use emotions innovatively to change the chemicals in every cell of your body. That's why EBT is more than an app; it takes using it over time and with others to sink in and become part of who you are on a cellular, natural, and automatic level.
Using EBT to change your life takes joining an EBT Support Group that meets weekly by telephone and is facilitated by a Certified EBT Provider for safety and effectiveness. That 30 minutes of meeting with five others on the fast track to raise their set point, too, is precisely what the emotional brain needs to love EBT and see better results faster.
Give yourself this year to establish the Joy Habit.
Count on settling into transforming your life with EBT for one year. Make your joy your top priority, and everything else in life – work, mood, relationships, spirituality, and health – will fall in line. You join an EBT Support Group to receive everything you need to rewire your brain and reset your life for optimal health.
To use EBT, you focus on your body, where you experience your emotional brain. Notice when you feel present, connected, and great. Enjoy it. When you do not feel great, 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, and by doing so, you can bask for a moment or more in those healing chemicals and also, know that you have 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 after making this "brain reset" with EBT? You will continue using EBT, but your brain will be so resilient that you minimize the harm of the big stressors, using those challenging experiences as "moments of opportunity" to rewire some latent wire that needed rewiring anyway!
Meanwhile, the minor stressors spontaneously find your brain's resilience pathways, and those pathways do the work for you. They transform stress into joy. The whole point of EBT is to rewire your brain to work for you instead of against you.
By erasing any leftover reactive circuits and replacing them with resilient ones, you become naturally happier, healthier – and more at peace with yourself and your life. Ultimately, rewiring the emotional brain is a pathway to inner peace.
"I feel great . . . just by switching my circuits!"
By using EBT, you will start noticing changes right from the start. Whether you begin the year with work issues, relationship problems, anxiety, depression, weight to lose, or addictive drives to rewire, you know that you do not have any problems. As we all do, you have a few errant wires, but this year is different. You are using techniques that erase the wires, so the effort you put into changing can produce lasting and profound results.
It takes a month or two to warm up to EBT and appreciate how much power we have to change our lives, which is why having a support group is so important. Instead of typical social situations in which 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 erase it.
A member in one of my EBT Support Groups, had used EBT to rewire her relationship circuit and her "I am not worthy" wire, among others. Also, she had a list of wires she planned to rewire as well. Then she went through 5 weeks of extreme stress: her toddler daughter was hospitalized while her husband was gone on an overseas work trip. She was in flat-out stress overload.
She said to me, "All the circuits I had rewired stuck. I realized they were not part of my life anymore. I had erased them! That helped in two ways: I coped better, and I'm more motivated to rewire the ones that are left."
By choosing the neuroplasticity route to optimal health, you can change your life in ways that are now beyond your wildest imagination. That is the magic of rewiring your own emotional brain.
The choice to rewire will transform your life.
Consider raising your set point the project of the year. Each wire you erase will raise your brain's "set point," or natural default stress level. Each time you use EBT to overcome a moment of stress – anxiety, depression, addiction, or just a feeling unrewarded or blah, it both returns you to your joy and strengthens your brain's joy habit.
As the New Year begins, take on the adventure of a lifetime. Learn how to rewire one circuit, then another, and another until your brain becomes wired for supreme resilience and profound joy. That's a goal worth setting! Join an EBT Support Group, and you will never look back.