Tips For Brain Retraining & Limbic Resistance
What is limbic resistance?
When brain retraining, its very common to experience what’s called “limbic resistance”. This can present as feeling very resistant to doing your visualizations (or other retraining practices). For example: You really, really don’t want to do your brain retraining, even though you know its going to help you to do it. Feeling frustration or anger about doing your brain retraining can happen with limbic resistance.
Why does limbic resistance happen?
To put it very simply—our brains are resistant to change. It takes consistency and time to create new neural pathways in the brain. If you’re experiencing resistance, know that’s very normal and actually a good sign that you’re making progress with your rewiring efforts. In fact, I haven’t encountered a single person that didn’t experience some level of limbic resistance while rewiring their brain.
Tips for limbic resistance:
- Find an accountability buddy! This could be a family member, trusted friend, or someone found in a brain retraining support group.
- If your accountability buddy is also brain retraining, then check in with each other each day to make sure you’ve done your “practice”.
- If your accountability buddy is a family member/friend not retraining, ask them to check in with you and encourage you to do your brain retraining.
- Look for a supportive community, as this can be a game changer. Both the Gupta Program and the DNRS program have online communities and forums. Many of these people are going through similar things and can likely relate to what you’re experiencing.
- There are also several rewiring facebook groups such as:
- Put together a simple “reward system” such as a sticker chart. When you do your brain retraining, add a sticker to the chart each day. You might be surprised with how satisfying/fulfilling it can be!
- Switch up something about your practice/visualizations to keep it exciting. Ex. do them outside, laying down, or in the bath.
- Turn on your favorite song before starting your visualizations and sing it out loud or dance to the music. Elevating your state of emotion can be very helpful for limbic resistance!
- Record your visualizations and listen to them instead of saying them out loud when you’re feeling very resistant. I do this often, sometimes literally crying through the voice recording (but they still end up being helpful for me).
- Remind yourself of your “why” and how important it is for your healing that you do your brain retraining.
- Try not to be hard on yourself. Adopt Gupta’s motto of “do your best, and leave the rest”. If you miss a day, a week, a month, etc. that’s okay. Just start right back up again and do your best to be as consistent as possible. Remember, perfection isn’t required for healing.
- If you’re still really struggling with limbic resistance, you may want to consider finding a coach. Most brain retraining programs offer one-on-one and ground coaching services. This is something I don’t have personal experience with, but have heard great things about!
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