Ep 94 - What Is Neuroplasticity and How Does It Work?

Can you really rewire your brain to manage anxiety and stress? I’m Megan DeVito, and in this episode, we’ll uncover the remarkable science of neuroplasticity and how it can help you feel calmer and more in control of your life. You’ll learn how your brain, much like muscles in the gym, can be trained to form new neurons and synapses, offering a powerful tool for overcoming anxiety.

We’ll explore how habitual thoughts and behaviors carve lasting neural pathways in our brains, akin to sledding down the same hill over and over. By intentionally redirecting our thoughts and actions—whether it’s picking up a new hobby, shifting our focus from negative to positive, or even overcoming sensory loss—we can create new, beneficial pathways. I’ll share practical strategies to train your brain to respond differently to anxiety, including the importance of handwritten notes to reinforce positive thinking.

Finally, we’ll tackle the common pitfalls of anxiety, such as catastrophizing and all-or-nothing thinking, and how these habits keep us trapped in a cycle of stress. Drawing inspiration from Jen Sincero’s book "You Are a Badass," we’ll discuss how to shift your mental focus towards positive outcomes without falling into the trap of toxic positivity. Join our community, engage with these insights, and explore personal coaching opportunities to enhance your mental well-being journey.

Help others find this resource so they can calm, confident, and have more fun by leaving a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review wherever you listen.

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Transcript

Megan Devito: 0:04

Welcome to the More Than Anxiety Podcast. I'm Megan Devito and I help ambitious women break out of the anxiety cycle that keeps them frustrated and stuck. Get ready for a lighthearted approach that will change what you think, how you feel and what you believe about yourself. This podcast is full of simple steps, a lot of truth, talk and inspiration to take action, s o you walk away feeling confident, calm, and ready to live. Let's get to it. Hey there, welcome to episode 94 of the More Than Anxiety podcast. My name is Megan and I'm super excited to have you here with me today. I'm a life coach. I help people with anxiety and stress work through the feelings in their body and all of the thoughts that are in their head so that they can learn to feel anxious, calm down and let it go quickly and move on to what they'd really rather be doing than sitting around feeling anxious and stressed out. Today, I want to talk to you about neuroplasticity. This is a word that I see pop up on social media, at least for me. Maybe this is because I talk about it a lot, or I talk about anxiety a lot, but I see it popping up all over the place, it's in my newsfeeds, it's in posts that people make, and it's a concept that really helped me when I was feeling anxious to start to recover, because it's something that I don't think I had ever thought about and if I didn't know what it was, it could be pretty confusing. I mean, it's kind of a big word, right, neuroplasticity, and it's a concept that, once you understand what it is and you understand how it works, you can use it to your benefit. So if you've ever heard this before and you're like I have no idea what neuroplasticity means, it just means your brain's ability to change and adapt. And here's the thing about neuroplasticity your brain is doing it all the time. Whether you realize it or not, your brain is always changing and always adapting and it does this as a safety mechanism, b ecause, really, what your brain is supposed to do, it's supposed to keep you safe and alive and that's pretty much it. The thinking part is like bonus work more than anything. So, with neuroplasticity, as you experience different things in your life, your brain remembers those things and it starts to grow new neurons. And maybe you're like wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on a minute. What the heck is a neuron. So a neuron is basically a nerve cell and this is just one of the basic units of your nervous system and of your brain, and these are the cells that are really responsible for taking things in from the outside. So things that you see or smell, or taste, or touch or hear or learn. We take in these things that we see around us in this external world of ours and we create little commands for our muscles, like if a baseball is coming at your face, move. Or if you put your hand on a stove, move your hand. Or blink your eyes if the sun's too bright, squint, things like that. All of the stimulus that comes in, we create muscle responses for it, which is why so many of our memories and so many of the things that we do on habit are stored inside of our body and not necessarily in our brain, because, remember, the nervous system isn't just your brain, so those neurons are growing all throughout your body, but specifically in your brain, and this is really about relaying all of these electrical signals to get your body to do what you need to do to keep you again safe or alive.

Megan Devito: 3:17

Okay, so between these neurons there's this little space, and this little tiny space is called a synapse. I'm trying to make this like super basic and explain it to you in the way I would have explained it back when I was a teacher. So a synapse is just a little space between one neuron and the next neuron that lets the electricity jump across, kind of like when you almost stick your finger on the door handle but you've like dragged your socks across the carpet and the spark comes off. The little space in between that is a synapse, and the neurons basically transmit the information between one synapse and another. So if you have one hand, if you hold your fingers out and you have all of these neurons coming off, those could be your fingers, and then on the other side you have another neuron and you've got all of these fingers sticking out. That way the synapse would jump from one finger to the next with like an electrical spark. That's what's going on. So, because your brain is always doing this based on what's going on around you, it's either going to do it out of control or it's going to do it in a way that you get to be in control of. So let me give you an example of this. I want you to think about going to a gym and training your muscles. You want to train your biceps to get bigger. So you do something over and over on purpose and as you stress out your bicep muscle it gets bigger on purpose because you've told it to do that. Now you could still accidentally build muscle and you're always maintaining muscle when you move your arms around. If you lift the groceries, you carry them into the house, that's great, but if you want to actually make it bigger and stronger, you've got to lift some bigger weights.

Megan Devito: 4:49

The same is true when we talk about neuroplasticity, and we see this when we have maybe somebody who was in an accident or somebody who had a stroke and they go to maybe a physical therapist or an occupational therapist where they retrain muscles how to move. So if you're a stroke patient and you couldn't move your right hand and you started teaching your brain to recreate those neurons, those synapses and all of the things to reconnect to the muscles, so that as you thought about it more, it might start out like I can't move my hand at all, and then the more you think about it, the more you think about it, suddenly you can kind of twitch your fingers and we can regrow those synapses. By just imagining how to do that. The brain is incredibly powerful and this is such a fun activity that you can do in things like future pacing and mindfulness and all of that and I'm going to get to that in a minute.

Megan Devito: 5:37

But how does this relate to anxiety? The more often that you use a neural pathway, remember, the more often you use those neurons, the more your brain is going to want to repeat the same path because it's familiar, it knows it, it's kept you alive, it's kept you safe for a really long time and, remember, your brain's job is really just to keep you safe, alive, basically laying on the couch, eating junk food, storing up lots of fat in case you would have to use that to survive a really cold winter. It doesn't want you to get your feelings hurt. It doesn't want you to be kicked out of the group. It doesn't want you to be left alone. It doesn't want you to be obviously hit by a bus or any of those things and it's very dramatic and really fast. So, on accident, you can teach your brain never to do the thing that makes you feel anxious, because it feels anxious and your brain's first thought is don't do that, and it creates a memory, it creates a neuron and a synapse, or a neuron and another neuron. It fills in that synapse and it says, oh, that scared us, we didn't go. That means we stayed safe. And the more that you do that, the stronger that you're making that neural pathway. So if you check in with something, or you check in with someone every time you feel anxious to have them tell you no, you're doing it right. No, that's totally okay. No, one's going to be mad at you. No, I promise you're not sick and dying. If you're checking in with somebody every time anxiety pops up in your system, you are strengthening that neural pathway saying this is how we stay safe, this is how we survive. We ask someone else, we're going to outsource that power to somebody else. And your brain believes it because ta-da, you're still here, you're still alive and kicking. That's really all your brain wants. But when you learn how to feel anxious and actively choose a different response.

Megan Devito: 7:26

So let's say, for example, me, like back in the day when I was struggling with health anxiety, my first response was always call my mom. Call my mom, make sure that she doesn't think I'm dying, because she loves me. And if she thought I was dying, then obviously I was going to be fine because she would tell me to go to the hospital and that would work for a little while. But my brain formed a really strong habit and said when you feel this, you should definitely check in with your parents to make sure that you're not going to die. Useful at the time, for sure. But over the course of creating this pathway, I still noticed that anytime I have a thought about something that I think might be wrong with me, my first thought is I should call my mom, and I actively choose to avoid that, so that now it's like a split second where, like, I could call my mom, yeah, but or I could just get over it. That's really how far it's come, whereas, like back in the day, when this was a really huge problem for me, I really was calling my mom several times a day, so that became my most trodden path, if that makes sense.

Megan Devito: 8:26

If you imagine taking the same path through the hill, or I used to use this example a lot when you're sledding. I'm from northern Indiana, so in the winter we used to get not so much anymore, but we used to get a lot of snow, and if you've ever been sledding or if you've never been sledding. The first time you go down a hill with your sled, you don't get very far, it's kind of slow, and you have to pat the snow down. So the next time you might go a little bit further and a little bit faster, and then further and faster. The same is true for neurons. It's just like sledding down a hill. Once you get that path going, it's easy. You stay on the same path and you go faster and faster. The same thing is true with neurons, but what we want to do is we want to learn how to make your brain grow where we want it to grow, instead of taking the same route, that's getting faster and faster.

Megan Devito: 9:11

We want to create pathways that actually benefit you, that help you have less anxiety. So we're going to teach your brain a new way to think about how your body feels. Are you following me there? Remember, anxiety is a feeling inside your body feels. Are you following me there? Remember, anxiety is a feeling inside your body. How you think about it is a symptom of anxiety, if that makes sense. The feelings are the actual anxiousness. The thoughts are just you trying to come up with ways to solve a problem that may or may not actually exist. So let's talk about ways that you naturally have this happen every single day without thinking about it.

Megan Devito: 9:49

One of these ways is playing a new instrument. So let's say that you decided you want to learn how to play the guitar. You go, you get the guitar and you sit down on the first day and you learn one chord. I cannot play the guitar. I wouldn't even begin to know where to start with. That Piano could be another one. Let's say that you're going to learn how to speak Spanish, or you're going to learn how to speak German. The first day, maybe you learn hola and that's it, and you're like okay, I did it. I taught my brain one new word. And then, maybe the next day, you learn how to say bien or you say something like that, and you're slowly growing more neurons until you know. You get a year down the road and you can maybe fluently have a conversation with somebody, which is amazing, but you're doing it on purpose. You're teaching your brain how to do something on purpose. You've done

Megan Devito: 10:36

it

Megan Devito: 10:36

.

Megan Devito: 10:37

Okay

Megan Devito: 10:37

. This could also be something like if you were thinking, lose your sense of sight. We know that people who lose their sense of sight, their brain adapts and suddenly they can feel with their fingertips better. It engages a new sense in their brain. So that's great, right. If you can't see, you're going to want to learn how to read braille, and to do that, you're going to have to have more sensitive fingertips. Well, your brain will actually redirect the sense to your fingertips, which is amazing to me. But that's sort of accidental learning. You didn't teach your fingertips how to feel differently. Your brain did it on its own. The same thing if you're trying to learn to play an instrument or a language. You didn't say okay, brain, I need you to redirect this neuron. You just said, oh, I'm going to learn this language. Or oh, I'm going to try and feel these bumps on this

Megan Devito: 11:22

page so that I can read. e Another way could be forming a new habit. This could be when you consciously decide to take a new route to work and then one day your brain goes back to the old habit. You might notice there that you're like, oh, I'm working on forcing my brain to go this new way. This could be something like quitting smoking. It could be not Googling Again. Not Googling when you're anxious, or asking

Megan Devito: 11:45

your mom or your dad if you're okay, or your best friend, or your spouse, whoever, when you feel anxious. These are all ways that we've formed these habits, kind of on purpose. We've said, okay, this is kind of how we're actually growing our brains with intention. So when we do this with intention to learn a language, or our brain just starts naturally growing these new neurons, this is more like a habit that we have in our daily lives. So like, yes, we are actively trying to learn a new language, or actively trying to learn Braille, or actively trying to change, you know, quit smoking, whatever that is. So we're saying, okay, I want to do this on purpose, but you can also do this when you feel anxious or when you feel stressed and - this is what I really want to hit on today, because you have a choice about where you direct your attention, which is really what neuroplasticity is. You can let it happen where nobody's paying attention and you're constantly doing things on accident, like I'm accidentally, you know, trying to. I'm trying to not feel anxious. So I'm going to call my mom because that seems to help. Yes, I'm on purpose calling my

Megan Devito: 12:51

mom, but I'm accidentally teaching my brain a habit that I don't really want to have, or I'm stressed out and I don't want a cigarette, but I accidentally fall back into the same habit. This is your brain overriding the system. You have to choose to override your brain on purpose. Did I make that clear as mud? It felt very clear in my head, but also unclear as I'm explaining it to you, maybe. So let's talk about this, how to take control and how neuroplasticity can really help with stress and anxiety. So let's talk about the connection between negative thoughts and stress and anxiety. When you're feeling anxious, that feeling in your body, your brain is coming up with thoughts about why

Megan Devito: 13:30

you feel that way and most times, if we don't check in with our body first, your brain is going to come up with really scary stories about why you feel anxious, what could be wrong and give you really negative habits to choose from to feel better. So some people, when they feel stressed and anxious, their solution is to grab a cigarette, or to go get another glass of wine, or to grab the chocolate ice cream, or to run and ask their parents whatever it is for you, and we did that really to help ourselves. We did it to make the feeling go away because it was uncomfortable and we didn't like it.

Megan Devito: 14:07

You might also notice this that you just start thinking so maybe some people have an active habit where they're going to eat junk food when they feel anxious, and that's really common. We eat our feelings sometimes. I hate this feeling, so I'm going to eat some stuff to make me feel better. You get that boost of sugar. You've diverted your attention to something else and, oh, suddenly I don't feel so bad for a little while.

Megan Devito: 14:28

If you notice that you tend to be a thinker when you feel anxious, you might notice that you're always expecting the worst, like everything bad always happens to me. A lot of people will say things like I think this is an omen, because every time I feel this way, I'm almost sure something's bad going to happen. And then your brain is so focused on what it thinks could potentially happen that it will actually find a place in your life where that's going to happen Maybe not the exact same thing, but something that it can create an association with so that you can say see, I told you something bad was going to happen. It's catastrophizing, and a lot of people do that.

Megan Devito: 15:05

Seeing things as all or nothing is a way that you can do this. The connection between thinking negatively and saying, well, I have to get this exactly right or I'm going to get fired. If I screw this up, I'm done. My partner will leave me. If I don't have this, this, this or this done, that's very all or nothing thinking. This is also a little bit of the perfectionism coming out in some people, where if it's not perfect, it's a failure and if I fail I'm a failure. All of those thoughts are very all or nothing and they're connected to the feeling in your body, because I feel this feeling and I'm trying to explain why it's just your brain thinking without any guidance. We need that guidance. This could be things like everyone's out to get me. Nobody likes me. I always screw everything up.

Megan Devito: 15:53

Worrying is wishing for what you don't want. I always screw everything up. Worrying is wishing for what you don't want. And I really want to hit on this for a second because this was an important quote for me. I first heard this in the book you Are a Badass by Jen Sincero and one of the things that really stuck out to me. First of all, if you haven't heard this story before, I was taking a walk and I was listening to that book, not because I knew anything at all about manifestation or even necessarily believed in manifestation at that point. But I was just trying to be more of a badass. I guess I didn't want to be who I was anymore. I was sick of feeling anxious. I was very much still in an anxious place in my life. So I'm listening to this and she's talking about manifestation. I'm like, seriously, this is kind of crazy. I've never heard a lot about this before.

Megan Devito: 16:39

And then she said because worrying is wishing for what you don't want and this is really, to me, the way I took this quote was a idea of kind of it's kind of a neuroplasticity idea. If I'm always worrying, if I'm always focused on what could go wrong, what I'm failing at, who's you know who's mad at me? Am I sick? Is this bad thing going to happen? Am I broke? If I'm always worrying about all of these different things, whether it's finances or your health, or your job or your relationships, anything in between I'm focusing my brain on what I don't want to see. And because you told your brain to go there, it will in fact go there and it will find evidence for what you don't want. That's just what brains do. So when we talk about really neuroplasticity, that's your brain doing what you told it to do.

Megan Devito: 17:28

But you get to choose what you want your brain to do, and to do that, instead of focusing on everything that you're worried about, you have to make a shift to what is going well, and I want to make a disclaimer here. I am not talking about toxic positivity. There is a big difference between saying everything is perfect and nothing ever goes wrong in my life. That is not true. That is not true at all, and we all know it. We all know I am not saying that. I'm saying that when you are anxious and you notice that your brain's telling you all those people over there in the corner they're all talking about you. It's you consciously deciding to say, well, that's one thought. And you know what? I don't actually think that it's true. I don't think everybody is talking about me. I might be worried that they are, but that doesn't mean it's true, because I'll bet there's at least one person over there that's not talking badly about me. That's leading your brain back into the direction that you want it to go.

Megan Devito: 18:25

You didn't say everybody loves me and everything's wonderful, and you didn't say everybody in this room thinks I'm the greatest person here. You said. I might be afraid that everybody's talking about me, but there's a really good chance there's at least one person in this room who is not. We're pushing it back the direction that we want it to go. You have to actively choose to do this, because your brain is going to try to get you to leave that party and get the heck out of there if you feel anxious about it. This could be true whether you're socially anxious or because you just are like I'm new to town and I don't really know anyone so I feel shy. It could be that you're an introvert who's had a long day of meetings that your social battery has just spent. Whatever the reason is that you feel like you need to leave. In that moment, your brain will find evidence to try to make you leave. You can choose to stay and you can choose to find good things there. Again, we're not saying everything's perfect. We're not saying that you have a ton of energy and you're excited. We're just saying I can choose to shift my thoughts.

Megan Devito: 19:17

Okay, when you do that, when you actively force your brain to go where you want it to go, your brain starts to grow new neurons to connect to other synapses so that you can find more proof that. Oh wait, you know what. That person actually smiled at me. See, I knew not everybody here hated me. You know what? I stayed for a half hour. That wasn't so bad. That doesn't mean it was the greatest day of my whole life, it just means it wasn't so bad. I actually did that. You're growing new neural pathways on purpose.

Megan Devito: 19:50

This is neuroplasticity, and the more you focus intentionally on things that are going well in your life and I'm not kidding when I say sometimes you have to start with. I woke up today I'm not dead yet. I didn't have whatever it is that you have to focus on. I made it 15 minutes before I had to grab a cigarette today. Or I went to work and I saw three people smile at me and say hello.

Megan Devito: 20:19

If that's where you start, that's where you start, and what I would encourage you to do, as your coach, is to say, get on the notes app on your phone or, even better, get a piece of paper and a pen. These are the most underrated items in your house right now because everything is so digital, but there is a huge connection between actually writing things down with your hands on a piece of paper and being able to see it and read it, and use the tactile and use the visual. Do all of those things, and bonus points for you if you use colored pens by the way, I'm a huge fan of colored pens, but your brain remembers that better. It's the same thing If you are listening to this and you are taking a class and you're taking all of your notes on a laptop. I guarantee you that you will remember it better if you write it on a piece of paper. You just will. That's just the way brains work.

Megan Devito: 21:08

So, taking time to write down maybe two or three things in the morning as soon as you wake up, before you have anything to go off of, to really force your brain about like what am I looking forward to today? What's already going well? You know what? I got a cup of coffee in my kitchen and I have power and my dog's here. That's three things right away. You can write those same three things down every day for a month if you need to.

Megan Devito: 21:30

Your brain will start growing those new neural pathways and someday you'll wake up and you'll be like oh my God, did you hear that the birds are singing? That's crazy. I haven't heard that in the longest time, because you grew a new neuron and your brain's starting to notice the things you want it to notice, instead of everything on your to-do list, everything that's scaring the crap out of you, everything that makes you feel anxious. You're forcing it to do that and sure it takes time. It does, but is it worth the investment of time? Because if you keep telling yourself everything that could go wrong and shirking back and trying to hide and telling yourself, well, today's going to be awful too, because I already feel anxious and I haven't even done anything, still waiting for my coffee to brew and things are bad. My dog doesn't even like me today.

Megan Devito: 22:14

If you can for sure go that way and that might be your normal pathway right now, or you can choose to focus your brain where you want, but when you let it run wild and you let your thoughts go unfocused, it will go to the dark side and to the negative side, because your brain has a negativity bias. Holy smokes you guys, I can't talk today. So, yes, your brain will go to those negative thoughts and again, that's just your brain's of keeping you safe. It's like the software never got updated. Our brains are still stuck in this caveman mode or this lizard brain from so long ago that we don't have to worry about saber-toothed tigers. We don't have to worry about maybe some of the things that being shut out of the cave and starving because there's no berries on the shrubs. We don't have to worry about that. We have grocery stores. We have options that we didn't have when our brains were developing, but we have to actively choose to move away from those, and that is really a huge portion, like a gigantic portion, of what I do with my clients.

Megan Devito: 23:20

When we are working together, we specifically look at how does your body feel when you're thinking that thought oh, okay, feel. When you're thinking that thought oh okay, it feels. You know, whatever your anxiety symptoms are, describe it to me. I want to know exactly how it feels. Perfect, now that you know what your body feels like. Now we can say this is an anxious thought, because I have this anxious thought. What would you rather think about instead? Let's come up with a new habit, let's come up with a new way of looking at it. Let's talk about what's actually working well in this situation and what would you rather do. Do you want to stay home every day from work because you feel anxious. No, okay, cool, let's decide how we have to get you out the door. Let's make a plan so that you can deal with the feelings in your body and choose new ways of behaving. This is coaching. This is coaching. This is absolutely what I help my clients do, and I can help you do this.

Megan Devito: 24:15

It doesn't take that long for those neurons to start growing. People see huge differences in as little as some people six weeks, some people 12 weeks. But I'm telling you, by six months you're like yeah, I don't even know what I was afraid of. That was crazy. Six months, that is not very long. How long have you been sitting around being afraid of the same things over and over, repeating the same habits? Maybe it's trying to stop call your parents every time you're anxious. Maybe it's to stop grabbing ice cream every time you feel stressed out. If you've been doing that same habit for longer than three months, longer than four months, five months, you need to talk with me because I can help you stop and get to a point where you're like yeah, I do feel stressed out, but that's not my habit anymore. I know what I'm going to do instead, and you consciously override the system until that becomes a habit.

Megan Devito: 25:02

Now let me be clear. This doesn't mean you're never going to have the urge to grab the ice cream anymore. You will. It's just that it won't happen without you thinking about it. You will be making a conscious choice. Like I told you before, every time I get anxious I still have this thing that says better call your mom. But I'm like, wait, no, that was old, that was old programming. It's still there, but it gets pruned back. So those neurons in your hand like if you have your hands, you know they will start to prune off and you'll be like, okay, well, now I only have two prongs left instead of five and I can say, okay, well, I'm just going to use those two to say no, no, I mean, they're still hanging on here just in case I need them. But I don't have to choose them anymore. And the strength is not there because it doesn't have all five of them reaching out. Your brain will prune those neurons back and it will strengthen the ones that makes you choose to go outside and look at the sunshine, get a drink of water, journal in your journal, take a few deep breaths, go on a walk. Whatever it is that you choose and you get to decide what works best for you.

Megan Devito: 26:03

I'm not going to tell you this is exactly what you have to do. I'm not going to say listen up, linda, you need to go run five miles every time you feel this? Absolutely not. If you're not a runner, you're not going to run, and if you hate Brussels sprouts, you're not going to swap out your ice cream for Brussels sprouts. We don't want to make this hard. We want to make it easy. We want your brain to like it, so that you can feel proud of yourself and have more energy. I want you to feel confident in being able to say what you need to say and to mean it, and to know that not everybody hates you, even though you said what you needed to say.

Megan Devito: 26:33

If this sounds amazing, if you're ready to roll, all you have to do is message me. You can find me on Instagram, you can find me on Facebook, you can find me on LinkedIn, you can find me right here on YouTube and you can tell me. Hey, megan, I really want to talk to you about how we can do this, because I'm sick to death of doing the same things over and over again and I'm ready to change. Let's talk. It's very easy and it's a lot of fun Like. One of the best things that I can tell you is that when I'm working with my clients, we make sure to have fun, because fun is the opposite of anxious it's excited, and they feel exactly the same in your body.

Megan Devito: 27:04

I hope this really cleared up what neuroplasticity is for you. If you've been wondering what it is and how it works, and if you have more questions, don't be shy about asking. I'm always happy to answer them and interact with you. So while you're here, be sure to like, subscribe, leave a review, invite your friends, do all the things so that other people can learn about how they can feel better, how they can change their habits and how they can start doing all the things that they've been missing out on as well. All right, if I don't talk to you before, I will be back next week. Take care. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the More Than Anxiety podcast. Before you go, be sure to subscribe and leave a review so others can easily find this resource as well. And, of course, if you're ready to feel calm, to stop overthinking and have a lot more fun, you can go to the show notes, click the link and talk to me about coaching. I'll talk to you soon.