Brain Retraining
Brain retraining is more than psychotherapy or psychoeducational interventions.
The threat identification system is powerful and distributed across several brain structures and is responsible for so many useful survival behaviours in humans. When that neural system misidentifies anything in the environment as a threat, the person will struggle with anxiety, phobias, and obsessive compulsive behaviours that really impair quality of life.
Eating disorders have a lot in common with phobias and obsessive compulsive behaviours. Neurons that fire together wire together and it is a training, or practice, to override the pattern of food avoidance with approach and consumption, similarly to how you might deal with a phobia of flying. It’s building out purposefully firing up neurons that quieten the threat identification system so that they wire strongly together and extinguish the mistaken neural pattern of food as threat.
Brain retraining is a foundational effort within the HDRM treatment protocol.
Brain retraining is a catchphrase these days for a myriad expensive online programs designed to realize miraculous cures for serious chronic conditions. Brain retraining as referenced here for recovery from eating disorders is not a miraculous cure and is a massive expenditure of cognitive energy to realize modest but appreciable shifts away from the misidentification of food as a threat. Nothing more, nothing less.
EDI Brain Retraining Long Format
The following entries are long format multi-part series and fairly dense reads. They are best suited to reading when the brain is energized and well nourished.
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Series underway on the state of eating disorder understanding and treatment in the world today: Read More.
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Three part series on the space between science and belief and what it might mean for how anyone would navigate improving quality of life with eating disorders or chronic conditions. Read More
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Six part series on how to develop a better sense of your own “terroir” (your complex personal ecosystem) and then how you might nudge it to meet the goals that you set. Read More.
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A re-evaluation of diagnoses and labels, and then ultimately a rejection of the deficit/strength model in favour of a more multi-faceted framework of editing, curation and protection. Read More.
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Most newly diagnosed with an eating disorder or chronic condition already know there is no going back. These days, those with underlying conditions face an increased need need to shift focus and begin to get things in order. This 10-part series explores why that is and what that might look like. Read More.
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Six part series focused on those feeling very much that today’s world is worsening their eating disorder. For all types of mental health conditions the same is currently true. It looks at improving and lessening symptoms if that is what you have determined needs to happen. Read More.
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This series will define set shifting, masking and emotional work as they are used in most workplaces and how their negative impacts affect many more people than those clinically diagnosed with neurodiverse conditions. Read More.
