Aubree Felderhoff | Mold Fr... when your body is stuck in fight or flight, it cannot prioritize healing. Neuroplasticity will give us a way to intentionally move out of that state and into rest and digest where repair can actually happen. you are sprinting away from a tiger, running for your life, the last thing that your body is thinking about is digesting the ham sandwich you had 10 minutes ago, or sitting by the pool of water and getting a small sip of water and a nap, okay? Our bodies are not meant to be sprinting and running on cortisol and incredibly stressed out. And also prioritizing healing instead. It's going to prioritize stress that fight-or-flight response
Aubree Felderhoff: Welcome to Mold Free Mom, where we cut the confusion and break down what it really takes to heal from mold illness. Whether you're dealing with unexplained symptoms and no real answers, or you know mold is your problem, you've done everything right, and yet you're still not better. This podcast is for you. I'm Aubrey, and I spent 12 years struggling with mold toxicity. before finally learning why nothing was working. Mold wasn't my only problem. Not knowing how to heal from it was. This is where guessing ends and real healing begins. Let's get started. Aubree Felderhoff | Mold Fr... Welcome back to Mold Free Mom. I'm Aubrey, your host, and if we haven't met yet, I want to welcome you to the show. Today's episode is covering the topic of neuroplasticity And what in the world that actually is as well as why it might matter for you If you are someone that struggles with chronic illness mold symptoms or just mystery symptoms such as constant fatigue All day long and i'm going to give you guys at the end of the episode a few practical tips that you can take away right now in order to start using neuroplasticity in your life. we're gonna start today's episode debunking a common myth, something that I had fallen prey to for a long time. And that is the idea that once you turn about 25, 26 years old, your brain is fully developed. We often say, or I often say that to my boys, your brain will be fully developed by the time you're 25 or 26 years old. And that is You can rent a car without paying extra for the liability insurance But actually what we've learned in today's times is that the brain Is always capable of growing it is always capable of changing. We are not set in stone with a non-mobile brain that can never grow or learn again And know it sounds crazy, but that really wasn't long ago when scientists believed that the knowledge that you had in your head and the capacity that you had in your brain is what you had. And there was nothing you could do about it. we now know that the brain can actually rewire itself from birth all the way to death. Thankfully, it is not set in stone and it actually has the ability to grow new pathways, new responses, and new patterns And that is where neuroplasticity comes into play. Neuroplasticity is the brain's ability to form new neural connections throughout life. It is the literal pruning and physical rewiring of your brain's circuitry and neural pathways. And it's actually built in biology. It is not woo woo. It is not a state of mind of seeing things with rose colored glasses. There is actual science, actual biology behind this process. Now let's talk a little bit about who needs Anyone that has been sick, anyone that's been stressed, exhausted, but especially if you have been living in survival mode for far too long, dealing with mold illness, chronic illness, mystery symptoms, high stress, or maybe just a body that doesn't seem to heal no matter what you do. Those are all great indicators that you would be a wonderful candidate when your body is stuck in fight or flight, it cannot prioritize healing. Neuroplasticity will give us a way to intentionally move out of that state and into rest and digest where repair can actually happen. I've said it many times, but I'm gonna say it again. If you are sprinting away from a tiger, a saber-toothed tiger, running for your life, the last thing that your body is thinking about is digesting the ham sandwich you had 10 minutes ago, or sitting by the pool of water and getting a small sip of water and a nap, okay? Our bodies are not meant to be sprinting and running on cortisol and incredibly stressed out. And also prioritizing healing instead. It's going to prioritize stress right that fight-or-flight response Now I came into neuroplasticity After I had literally tried everything else I had been sick at that point for almost nine years I had found out that mold was behind my mystery illness and all of the 100 plus symptoms that I had We ended up fixing our home and then moving because I still wasn't getting well. I thought the answer was to get in fresh home, but it wasn't. I got sicker. I was on a protocol at the time that had me aggressively binding and trying to kill off pathogens and mold. It didn't do a lot to open up my drainage pathways, which is big no-no. And most importantly, It didn't look at my nervous system and if I was regulated, if my body was in a state where I could repair. Now didn't know this at the time because obviously my doctor did not discuss this with me. I don't think the doctor had any idea about neuroplasticity training and one weekend out of complete desperation I remember Mitch my husband was out of town. He was at a work conference I was sitting at the counter and I was just bawling it had been a year and a half since we had moved I was in this new clean home without mold. I was not getting better. I felt worse We were neck-deep in medical bills for this practitioner that was out of state that I was seeing who supposedly specialized in mold and I was desperate. I at that point had decided that this was all in my head and that maybe mold really wasn't it. Maybe that was just the scapegoat and maybe I really was just crazy or maybe I wasn't meant to get well. I mean I was really not doing well. And really by chance at the time, but I now understand that this was, you know, God's divine help in this situation. I came across a comment in a messenger board, like a lot of you probably are on if you've been sick for a long time, you get on the internet or you search everywhere you can looking for other people who might sound like you because you're so quote unquote uncommon and doctors never see it. So you're looking for other people like you to start getting answers. And I was on a board at the time for people that are chronically ill. with mold and I came across a post about neuroplasticity training and a program that was available and I started looking into it And to be honest, as I read through the post and looked at it, I judged it. I'm ashamed to say, I thought those are people that want to get better. And so they tell themselves that they're better, but they're not actually doing anything. Like I need the hardcore stuff. I need the binders. I need the drugs. I need the supplements. I need all of these things. I'm so toxic and filled up with toxins in my body that, you know, it's been a year and a half and I'm getting worse instead of better. I must have been really bad. There's no way that something like this would help. But I started reading the reviews, and I started reading the testimonials, and I started watching the YouTube videos, and I couldn't get it out of my mind. All of the people in these videos, and in these reviews, and in these testimonials were just like me. They had the same stories of years long of desperation, and suffering, and chronic illness, and running from this chemical, and this home, and this food, and not getting better, and getting worse. And a lot of them had ended up homeless. And as I continued to read and read and read, I felt for the first time in a long time that maybe this was the missing link. Maybe this was it. As in my head, woo woo as it sounded, as unscientific as it sounded to retrain my brain, I couldn't get past at the time the thousands of testimonials that I scoured as I was searching for this answer. It was really breathtaking. And so I decided I'm going to go ahead and try this. I don't believe in it, but what does it hurt? There's no supplements involved. There's no medication. There's no side effects. So I'm not going to have any side effects. I'm really at my rope's end and I really don't have anything else to try. at the time I was seeing a shoemaker practitioner. and so I called him and I quit the program and it had been almost two years. We were so high in medical bills and it was not healthy. whatsoever. In fact, my whole family was much worse. So I ended up quitting on the spot and signing up for this program. at this time, it was 2019 or 2020. I didn't see a lot of programs that were similar to this. It was called DNRS. And because it was during COVID, they actually didn't have any in-person seminars. And so she had created a course that you could do from your home. And I did it. And I taught myself how to do neuroplasticity in order to heal from chronic illness. And I began diving in and pouring my heart into this program for the next year and a half to heal. And guess what guys, it worked. I went from incredibly sick, very sick. On a scale of 1 to 10, I was probably at a 9 as far as how horrible I felt. Down to about a 3. So I was about 60 to 70 % functioning. And by the way, I got off all the supplements and all the medications the day that I quit the Shoemaker protocol and started the DNRS neural retraining program. And so this was all just done with neuroplasticity. So I'm really excited to share with you guys. some practical tips that I have learned along the way. And since then, I've done other programs. There's another great one that I'm a huge believer in. It's called Primal Trust. And it's a little bit of a different look and different practices than DNRS. But all in all, the underlying message is the same. You can retrain your brain, and you can heal using that practice. And so I want to give you guys some practical things that I have learned using both of these different programs in order for you to get started today. It's something you can do for free. You don't need a doctor. You don't need to go anywhere. You don't have to take anything. There are zero side effects. And so in my mind, it's a win-win for everybody. Regardless of if you have mold, plenty of people have healed from this without having a diagnosis plenty of people have healed from this when it's not old but maybe it's chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia or POTS or food allergies or mass cell activation syndrome. So a lot of different diagnoses, a lot of different dysfunctions in our health can be healed just through the power of neuroplasticity. So let's get into it. The first thing I wanna teach you about neuroplasticity, brain retraining is another word that is often used for this, is that your brain's ultimate goal, okay, our ultimate goal of our brain is to protect us because... If your brain dies, what happens? You die, right? If your brain is dead, if you are considered brain dead, then you are dead. So obviously the ultimate goal is not to make you feel good. It's not to make you look good or have a joyful day. The ultimate goal of the brain is to protect you, to continue living, to continue that organ needs to continue to live for you to live. Now, when we get stuck, an extreme stress and it's not always illness. It's not always mold, but it could be something from childhood. If you've had a very rough upbringing, if you had a lot of trauma in childhood, if something happened to you growing up, it doesn't even have to be the whole childhood. If something happened to you you've had trauma, that can tip off a brain that is then moving towards protecting you. So it could be childhood. It could be trauma either in childhood or later. It could be illness. It could be chemical. trauma or toxic trauma such as mold or illnesses like infections, Lyme, that sort of thing. But our ultimate goal of our brain is going to be to focus on how to protect us and to keep us alive. Now to do that, The brain is going to learn, especially if you've had some of the things that I talked about, childhood trauma or illness or mold or chronic infections, it's going to learn to be extremely diligent, to be constantly scanning for danger, right? Because the goal of the brain, again, is to keep you alive. And if you have, over the past few years, developed symptoms, illnesses, constant sickness, then you know how hard that is to not be constantly worried about what these new developing symptoms or this continued illness that seems to be getting worse. You know how hard that is to not consider that scary. Now here are some signs that you may need brain retraining or neuroplasticity training. Hypervigilance, as we've already discussed. Ruminations. When your brain gets stuck, if you're someone that can't stop ruminating, if something happens and you have to go over it and over it and over it in your brain, Sometimes we describe someone with this type of behavior as an over-thinker. Hi, that's me. I've always been a ruminator and an over-thinker, but that's a good indication that you're scanning. Another thing is an incessant need to figure things out. that happens a lot when we're sick. We're constantly trying to figure out what this symptom means. We're constantly trying to find the perfect protocol and what is the cause of all of these things and this pattern in our health, right? Another sign is if you tend to need a lot of control, if you feel... that you might have a personality that's controlling. That's not a diss on you. That means that you are stuck in trying to protect yourself, right? Because if we feel like we are in control, which let's be honest, are we ever really in control? No. Thankfully, no. God is. But if we feel like we are in control, then that helps to relieve our brain of that stress of thinking we're not safe. So those are some mental signs. There's also some physical signs that you might be a good candidate for neuroplasticity. Some of the signs are headaches, fatigue, dizziness, rapid heartbeat, insomnia, inability to relax, jumpy, that was me all the time, I was constantly jumpy, irritable. Someone that seems to have an extreme sensitivity to sound or light, okay, those are all signs that your nervous system is dysregulated and that it is out of whack and it's hypervigilant. It is in the extreme right now. It is definitely not in a spot of rest and digest where healing happens. Now. if any of this sounds like you. And you're thinking, okay, yeah, I probably would be someone that would benefit from this. You're probably wondering, okay, but what does that look like? And if you looked on the internet there now, now in this day and age, there are many different programs for neuroplasticity and brain retraining. When I had gone through it, like I said, there weren't as many and there's, there really weren't as many that were geared towards helping people with chronic illness heal. But now there are a little bit more. So let's talk about some of the basics of what neuroplasticity looks like and what you can start to incorporate right now at home without doing anything else. One of the big basics that you need to understand when you are working on retraining your brain is that neurons that fire together, fire together. neurons are those teeny tiny little parts of our brain that hold a thought and. When neurons, when all these teeny tiny parts of our brain come together, they create a thought that then passes on what I like to say is a road, also known as a synapse, over to another neuron and they connect. We cannot learn anything without connecting a new piece of information to an old piece of information. Isn't that interesting? Because our brains are actually giant pattern recognition organs. That's all they are. Our brains are... Meant to conserve energy. Like I said from the beginning they are meant to protect us and to keep us alive Well, if they're spending all of our energy on every single thing that we do every day Wasting energy trying to figure out what comes next that would not be very efficient as an organ So they actually are incredible at preserving energy and the way that they do that is by creating patterns in our brain It's a pattern recognition organ now these patterns also look like roads in our brain little little ditches and as we have a thought or behavior the impulse then shoots across the synapse to another neuron and it creates this road and the more that we travel this road The deeper these thoughts become entrenched in our brain, and the less that we travel this road, the less the rut becomes entrenched in our brain. Makes sense, right? And so if you think about things in your life that you do in autopilot, I think we've all had that time where we got in our car and We showed up at our kids school and we're going whoa, how did I get here? I didn't even think about it, right? That was a pattern. That was a pattern that your brain set up It had the neuroplasticity embedded into your brain you had the little ruts little roads that were created from your neurons firing together and Connecting to another neuron and you didn't have to think you conserved energy Another good example of this is every morning when you get up and you brush your teeth You don't think about it or I don't I just get out of my bed, I walk over to my toothbrush, I brush my teeth, I put it away. I don't have to think through every step and every procedure. Okay, so these are just automatic patterns that our brain has created to make us more efficient and to require less work. So you can imagine that if your brain is able to do that with things that you want it to do, right? Brushing your teeth, kids or ourselves, even memorizing the ABCs, that was pattern recognition, learning a new language, recovering the use of your hand after a stroke. These are all patterns that are created. If we're able to do those things, we're also able to use our brain and our brain's able to create patterns for us that maybe are not super helpful for us, right? So if I am a highly stressed person that is constantly thinking something bad is going to happen to me, what do think my brain eventually creates a rut of to make myself more efficient? Yeah, I'm gonna become and we've all been around those people. That think everyone is out to get them. That think everything bad is going to happen in our life. They're just a steaming pot of negativity. Well, the same thing can happen when we're hypervigilant and concerned about illness or symptoms. We begin to focus, and that kind of takes us to point number two. use it or lose it because what you focus on grows. This is a really important thing to remember, especially if you're using neuroplasticity as you're recovering from chronic illness. When I was in the middle of neuroplasticity training, I got better pretty quick. I noticed a real difference, honestly, within just a few days, and it continued to build from there. Now, granted, I was making sure that I wasn't losing it, so I was practicing and practicing and practicing. I was allowing my brain to be consumed with built-in new neural pathways and pruning the old negative ones, the old sickly pathways constantly. But one thing that I found is as I continued to improve and my energy began to come back and my sleep began to happen again, finally after almost a decade of having horrific insomnia, I began to notice I was sleeping and I still remember the day I woke up and told Mitch, I just had a dream. I didn't even realize that I didn't have of a dream for almost a decade because my sleep was basically non-existent. I was getting no deep sleep. I was tossing and turning all night. was feeling all sorts of pain and dizziness and all sorts of horrible things all throughout the night, sweats. And the first time pretty quickly after I started neuroplasticity that I had a dream, I remember waking up thinking, my gosh, I didn't even know I wasn't dreaming. It was incredible. But back to the story, as I was doing neuroplasticity, one thing that I noticed is my energy began to return. For many years, I had... lost my ability to exercise and if I did exercise it was called exercise intolerance, which doesn't that sound horrible? But if I did exercise I would basically be flatlined for sometimes weeks. I just I could not function. I could not get through any sort of exercise without needing to throw up or the world spinning and then I had no energy for days after and so eventually it got to where I did Less and less intense exercise and mind you I owned at the time a boot camp and personal training business so I was a very very very fit and active and it went from that all the way over the course of a decade all the way down to I would only be able to walk a minute or two with my hands on the treadmill at a 1.0 and then I'd have to lay down but I never wanted to let go of exercise but anyways back to I'm getting off on a tangent back to the points When my energy began to return, I realized it was time to start exercising, which is something I had dreamed of, but also thought maybe was never gonna happen for me again. And I started off slow, but as soon as I started to pick up a little bit of steam and start to lift some weights and add a little bit of intensity, I noticed I started having some of my symptoms, some intolerance symptoms again. And what I didn't realize at the time, and I had to do a lot of research in, is that oftentimes, your brain because it is a pattern recognition organ. I think y'all are going to walk away from this podcast with that drilled in your head. That's my goal, but it is a pattern recognition organ. So because it's a pattern recognition organ, I had done enough healing to where I was able to do more intense exercising again. But the old pattern, the old ruts were still there in my brain and I needed to rewire those too. I needed to work through those and rewire those to tell my brain Hey, it's safe this feeling of a raised heart rate this feeling of sweat coming out this feeling of My heart pounding these are all feelings of safety and it's safe for me to exercise. It's not unsafe. I don't need to shut down And once I did that, once I did neuroplasticity around that, I never had another problem again with any sort of exercise intolerance. So it just goes to speak to how powerful this therapy is, how powerful the use of neuroplasticity is on the brain. It doesn't judge us. doesn't care if I exercise or if I don't exercise. It only cares about conserving energy and keeping me alive. That's all it's not working off emotion. It's really just working on biology. and that biology had not yet changed. And once I changed that, everything changed for me. All right, the last little nugget of neuroplasticity that I want to leave you. Is that there is something that I learned that is called finding your dose chemicals and that stands for dopamine oxytocin serotonin and endorphins and those help to replace that stress-driven state with a feeling of pleasure and joy and oftentimes when we're stuck in chronic illness when we're stuck in chronic Stress or just not feeling as if we can ever catch up for a long period of time we no longer feel it safe to feel pleasure, to feel joy, to feel comfort, to feel love. Nothing feels safe because we're in that hypervigilance, which is just a state of us trying to protect ourselves. But one thing that we did a lot of when I went through neuroplasticity training was working on giving yourself a daily dose of these dose D-O-S-E, the chemicals I stated earlier, of these dose chemicals. And one of the easiest ways to do that is if you are in the middle of panic or stress or having a symptom or telling yourself a story about my gosh I'm feeling dizzy I must have gotten into whatever xyz You simply stop the pattern. You stop the story and you say stop or cancel or no, no, no. And then you take yourself to a memory. And it can be a very recent memory. could be a memory from childhood. It can be anywhere in between. Honestly, guys, it can even be a made up memory because did you know that your brain doesn't know the difference between a made up memory and a real memory? Wow. Crazy, right? Again, it goes back to patterns. So take yourself to a memory made up if you can't think of a good one or not and immerse yourself in the sights and the sounds and the smells, what you felt on your skin, allow yourself, and it doesn't take long, it can be just a few minutes, but really allow yourself to go through all of the different senses in that time and in that memory. And you'll begin to feel this beautiful trickle of joy and happiness and calm. And it immediately, it immediately interrupts that pattern of stress. And if you just can continue to do that one simple thing throughout the day, It is so much better than worrying about your illness and your symptoms But be it's one of the foundational pieces of beginning to rewire your nervous system, right? Because you're now feeling joy. You're feeling calm. You're feeling presence. Maybe love Those are the feelings that we need to have if we're really wanting to begin to rest and digest Do we feel any of those if we are running from a predator? No So obviously, you're going to want to start focusing on replacing any time that you feel panic, any time that you feel fear, canceling that story, stopping that momentum, stopping that rut, that pattern that's going in your brain, and immediately redirect to a dose, a dose of dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins. And you'll be amazed at just what that does to help you. All right, so I know I gave you a ton This is probably a little bit more sciencey than my normal episodes But I think it's really important especially if you're someone that's been sick for a really long time To understand the science behind it because for so long I really didn't believe and let me tell you I didn't believe and I still got better on it So that's powerful, but I didn't believe that this was science that this was a physical transformation in your brain I really in the beginning of of my process working on my neuroplasticity of my brain, I really just thought it was my mind was super negative and I just needed to retrain it to be more positive and that's not at all what it is. So I hope that this helped you to begin to understand what neuroplasticity is. And if you're curious about more about the two specific programs that I have done. Send me an email or shoot me a DM and ask me. I'd love to help you find The right program for you. I have both of the programs that I use linked on my products section of my webpage I'll link it at the bottom of the show notes for you to look at and that way you can explore both of the programs And I also have a coupon code that I can share with friends and family for Primal Trust. And so if you're interested in that, you guys are all, I consider, my friends and my family. So email me or send me a message and I'm happy to share that coupon code with you so that you can get 10 % off of Primal Trust. Alright guys, as always, I hope that this episode has been super helpful and inspiring and I look forward to seeing you next time on Mold Free Mom.
Aubree: Thanks for listening to Mold Free Mom. If this episode has helped you make sense of some of your symptoms, diagnoses, or why nothing has worked in the past, please make sure to follow the show and leave a quick review so others who are struggling can find it quicker. If this episode brought someone struggling with unexplained sickness or mold to mind, please share it so they don't have to waste years of their life chasing the wrong answers like I did. Remember, you're not broken. You can get your life back. You just need to be shown how.
