Hello everyone, today I want to share with you this amazing conversation that I had with Joey Rameny.
She's a vestibular audiologist and a Neuroplasticity specialist,
and we spoke for over an hour about how you can rewire the brain to heal from disorders
like tinnitus and vertigo and these are disorders that doctors have basically said were untreatable
but she's developed this research-backed process that's basically the same process
for working with anxiety and other disorders. Now I just want to give you a short snippet, a
neuroplasticity nugget, if you will, on how you are the ceo of your brain and like me, Joey talks about
the brain as if it was another person, so this makes me smile real big because I do that too.
The full interview is on my podcast, by the way I have a podcast, it's called Therapy in a Nutshell
and you can check that out and Joey's got a book detailing her step-by-step process with a bunch of
free resources on her website and again the link to that is in the description. Okay so real quick,
here's Joey. We're basically the ceo of our inner world like you know we're telling our brain what's
important, what's not important, you know which which guys and girls are spunky and sexy and you
know like we're on the lookout all the time and this is part of our survival mechanisms as human
beings and a and anxiety is actually what's kept us safe and it's protected us from say tigers and
violence, so it has a healthy place, but what we need to do when we take control and take power back
of our inner world we need to actually teach the brain that those tinnitus noises or those
sadness feelings or those vertigo and dizziness feelings or anxiety feelings, they're all normal
and safe, they're false alarms, they're not true, life-threatening situations or triggers and
when we're resisting and fighting them, I'll just use the example of tinnitus,
the same goes for dizziness, if I wake up every day and like 'oh my god is it there, is it there
is it there, okay I've got to take my pill, I've got to use my device, I've got to talk about it
I've got to tell my friends, I've got to go to a doctor, I've got to book another appointment.'
All of those behaviors and thoughts and words are telling the brain this is super
abnormal, it's a problem right. Your brain doesn't actually speak English, so all the brain gets is
'Joey wants to focus on this, she loves her tinnitus, I'm going to help her out and put
more neural power there and make it louder so she can hear it better because she's really into this
tinnitus, it's like all she's thinking about, so if Joey wants to hear it, I'll help her, more neural
allocation over there let's make it louder'. So, my brain helps me to focus on it by making more of it.
When we resist something and put emotional allocation into it, which is often fear and hatred,
the brain responds by going 'you're super into that, so I'll give it more neural energy', and if we reverse
that to 'it's no big deal, whatever, I'm super neutral about it, I have no emotion attached to
it', the brain's like 'yeah she's not interested so I'm not going to put more neural activity there'.
'I'll put more neural activity to where Joey's focusing', which might be connecting to her friends
and creating a new band. 'She wants to make a new band, so I'm going to start putting all my neural
emphasis onto finding musicians'. So its like we teach our brain what to emphasize and what to make louder.
Because we're looking at making conscious, healing neuroplasticity changes, the kind of
emotions we're looking for is: celebration, self- reassurance, self-acceptance, self-compassion, we
want those emotions to be just blissing out. (Okay) That means we've got more dopamine, more oxytocin,
more of that yummy, juicy brain chemistry that gives us more bang for our buck right. (Yeah yeah)
So but basically your neurons communicate kind of like fingertips and two arms they're passing
messages, I've got my baby's little toy here. Neurotransmitter chemicals are moving from one
neuron to the next, they're captured by receptors and if there's enough of that message it will
carry on to the next neuron and you'll have messages moving up and down your body all day long
with these little chemicals passing between them. The more neurons pass messages, the better they
get at it and, so for my clients who don't feel normal anymore and they feel completely abnormal
and sick and dizzy and full of tinnitus, they need to rebuild normal neural networks by teaching the
neurons to pass the normal feeling neurochemicals from neuron to neuron with more synchronicity,
with more frequency, with more intensity, with more duration, so they can hardwire it and then
that new normal becomes their automated resting state, they no longer need to put effort in right,
and you might say 'what does that look like?' Well, instead of focusing on getting rid of the
dizziness, tinnitus or anxiety etc., they first of all, step one, would be identify what you want to
feel, what are your desired sensations to feel normal? Not what you don't want to feel which
you know it's easy, but that'll keep you stuck. So common ones, that you feel calm, relaxed, confident,
adventurous, enthusiastic, like people often lose their vigor for life, they're like I just
it yeah, I want to feel like I wake up in the day and I'm actually excited about what's going
to happen. That's, for them, might be feeling normal, so they have to figure out how to get
those excitement neurons going so their therapy practice or their rock steady toolkit would be
'what things could I do to help me feel genuinely excited, to release those neural messages?' right.
So then that becomes their home practice and with time, frequency, repetition and with all of these
emotional regulation tools to make sure they don't kind of go backwards into the old, chronic
loops, they return to normal and neuroplasticity is something we are born with. The human brain has
billions of neurons, trillions of synaptic connections, so much adaptability, redundancy and
robustness. I think most people, myself included, we don't realize how powerful we are, we don't
realize how much we can co-create the inner world we're living in enough perception of the world
and we often just sit back with a status quo and be the person we think we should be and kind of
live this numbed out life of good enough or 'am I good enough' question mark and I think
neuroplasticity enables us to really understand 'who am I authentically on this planet?' 'what are my
values?', 'how can I align to those?', 'how can I be the best version of me on the planet?', connect to
community and have great cascade impact on this earth? It's like really going beyond the individual
and into the collective and I think a lot of my clients start feeling victims of their sensations
and come out the other side really wanting to give back to the planet. It's quite amazing, it's quite
remarkable. That's really cool! I love that. In the rest of the interview we talk about how focusing
on what you do want, what's most valuable to you that starts that pathway to healing and that fires
up neuroplasticity and how using a body scan and gentle compassion and openness without judgment
toward your unpleasant sensations, like tinnitus or anxiety, how those processes can help your brain
rewire and heal and I'm working on two videos right now to go into a lot more detail
into that process of letting go of the struggle with anxiety and opening up to those uncomfortable
sensations of anxiety because I really think if there was only one skill that I could teach you,
it would be that one. So stay tuned to this channel, watch for those upcoming videos
and if you'd like to learn more about Joey, please check out the links in the description.
I'd also like to thank Better Help for sponsoring this video they offer
professional, licensed counseling at a very affordable rate around $65 dollars a week and
you can interact with these counselors on your phone through messaging, through video
sessions and other other ways of contacting them, so check out the link in the description
and I hope you all have a wonderful day. Thank you for watching and take care.