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re-origin | Brain Retraining & Neuroplasticity

@reorigin_brainretraining

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➡️ Neuroplasticity & nervous system regulation
➡️ Anxiety, chronic pain, fatigue, long COVID & more
➡️ Program & Community
Start Healing👇

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Feeling scattered, overwhelmed, or like your brain just isn't cooperating? 🧠

This week, Kelsea and Natalie Rivans dive into ADHD, perimenopause, and why small changes can make a big difference.

🎧 Listen to the full episode! Link in bio.

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Not all pacing comes from the same place.

In this conversation, Natalie Rivans shares an important distinction between capacity-based pacing and fear-based pacing.

Capacity-based pacing asks:

“What can my body reasonably manage today, and how can I work with that?”

Fear-based pacing can sound more like:

“I can never cross this limit because something bad might happen.”

From the outside, they may look almost identical. Internally, they can be very different.

When symptoms fluctuate from one day to the next, a rigid recovery schedule may not reflect what your body actually has capacity for that day.

The goal isn’t to push through symptoms.

But it also isn’t to allow fear to permanently define your boundaries.

Meet your body where it is today, without assuming that’s where it will always be. 💚

🎙️ Hear the full conversation with Natalie Rivans on the Functionally Enlightened Podcast.

🌿 And if you’re looking for another place to begin reducing the stressors your body may be carrying, comment “DETOX” and I’ll send you my F.REE Detox Your Life: Home, Body & Mind guide.

Reduce the load. Support the body. Rebuild capacity.

#FunctionallyEnlightened #NatalieRivans #Pacing #Neuroplasticity #NervousSystemRegulation

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HAPPY VULVAR AWARENESS DAY. Education on vulvovaginal disorders is neglected even in the training of OB/GYNs.

Vulvodynia remains disturbingly understudied despite affecting a similar percentage of the population as prostatitis. The disparity is staggering: 1,300 PubMed hits for vulvodynia versus 311,000 for prostatitis.

Given these facts, it is logically impossible to claim that biomedical causes of pain are being ‘ruled out’ by the average practitioner. If physical pathology cannot be ruled out due to systemic medical neglect, then claiming the pain is ‘psychogenic’ or ‘neuroplastic’ is a mathematical fraud.

Promoting the ‘mind-body’ narrative under these conditions is not medicine; it is medical misogyny. Until 100% of gynecologists are trained in vulvar disorders and research and funding reaches parity with male-predominant conditions, any claim of ‘psychosomatic pain’ is simply a cover for ignorance.

#Neohysteria #Vulvodynia #MedicalMisogyny #MedicalGaslighting #mindbodysyndrome

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Chronic illness doesn’t always look like someone lying in bed.

That’s an important point our guest Natalie Rivans makes in this conversation.

For some people, symptoms become so severe that working, exercising, traveling, or socializing is no longer possible. Some may even become bedbound.

But for others, chronic illness can be almost invisible from the outside.

You’re still working.
Still caring for your family.
Still getting through the day.

But behind the scenes, everything takes more effort and there’s almost nothing left in reserve.

Natalie explains that the common thread she sees isn’t necessarily a specific diagnosis or level of severity. It’s that symptoms have begun restricting someone’s life.

And that’s where working with the brain and nervous system may become another piece of the puzzle, alongside appropriate medical care, not instead of it.

Because improving quality of life isn’t only about what others can see.

Sometimes it’s about slowly rebuilding the capacity to participate in the life you’ve been missing. 💚

🎙️ Hear more from Natalie on the Functionally Enlightened Podcast.

#FunctionallyEnlightened #NervousSystemRegulation #Neuroplasticity #ChronicIllness #InvisibleIllness #ChronicFatigue #ChronicPain #QualityOfLife #HealingJourney

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Sometimes the most powerful part of healing is realizing you’re not the only one going through it. 💚

When chronic symptoms or an unpredictable nervous system begin shrinking your world, the isolation can become its own burden.

Our next Functionally Enlightened Podcast guest, Natalie Rivans, shares how finding the re-origin community gave her something she desperately needed: connection, understanding, encouragement, and hope.

And importantly, she describes a community focused not on comparing symptoms or reinforcing fear, but on progress.

Natalie also explains why nervous system work doesn’t have to consume your entire day. Their approach asks members to practice techniques for about 30 minutes daily, which can be broken into smaller pieces throughout the day.

Because sometimes healing isn’t about doing more.

It’s about having the right tools, the right support, and knowing you don’t have to navigate it alone.

🎙️ Coming next on the Functionally Enlightened Podcast.

#FunctionallyEnlightened #NervousSystemRegulation #ChronicIllness #Neuroplasticity #HealingCommunity

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Ever feel like you’re studying or practicing for weeks with zero visible results? 🧠

That plateau isn't a lack of progress. It’s neuroplasticity at work behind the scenes. Before any breakthrough becomes visible, your brain is actively laying down insulation (myelination) and performing synaptic pruning to make neural pathways faster and stronger.

Progress is like an iceberg: 90% of the architecture is built underground before you ever see the tip.

💡 If you’re grinding through something difficult right now, keep going. You’re not stuck, you’re rooting.

#neuroscience #neuroplasticity #brainscience #ropanapodcast

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"There's nothing I can do for you." That's what the last doctor told Mo Pritzker after she'd already spent years and thousands of dollars chasing a cure for her Lyme disease, only to relapse worse than before. Then he threw a book across the desk. That book was about neuroplasticity, and it became the turning point in her healing.

#LymeDisease #Neuroplasticity #ChronicIllness

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When treatments that are supposed to help make you feel worse… what’s really happening?

Many people living with Lyme disease and other chronic illnesses notice something confusing: the longer they’ve been sick, the more sensitive they become to medications, supplements, detox protocols, and even gentle therapies.

Why does that happen?

In this clip, @benahrens, founder of @reorigin_brainretraining, explains one possible reason: a hypervigilant nervous system.

When the brain and nervous system have spent months or years in survival mode—navigating chronic infection, medical uncertainty, repeated setbacks, and the emotional toll of illness—they can become conditioned to constantly scan for danger.

Eventually, the brain may begin interpreting change itself as a threat. That means even treatments designed to help may trigger exaggerated responses because the nervous system is already overloaded.

This doesn’t mean your illness is “all in your head.” Ben’s message is the opposite. Your illness is real—but because the brain helps regulate the immune system and stress response, nervous system regulation may be an important piece of the recovery puzzle for some patients.

We first interviewed Ben nearly two years ago. We recently caught up with him in person at @_amykurtz’s But You Look Fine book launch to discuss why treatment sensitivity happens and how neuroplasticity may support healing.

Watch the full interview and explore hundreds of conversations with Lyme-literate doctors, researchers, and advocates at TickBootCamp.com.

👇 Have you ever become more reactive to treatments over time? What helped you move forward? 💚

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Tracking down some of the sources behind last week’s ridiculous @wired article on long Covid and pain reprocessing therapy. Why would COVID be unique among viruses and incapable of causing lasting biological damage? Why are PASC best explained by the patient’s feelings and behaviors, and not deserving of the same scientific rigor applied to other viruses ? @Curable @alantgordon #mindbodyhealing #mindbodymedicine #longcovid #painreprocessingtherapy #chronicillness

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So no matter what you do, it can be framed as you causing yourself pain. 😒 I call BS!

This video depicts a rhetorical strategy built on unfalsifiability in “neuroplastic pain,” “TMS,” and “pain reprocessing therapy” circles, where pain can always be framed as caused by the patient’s behavior and emotions; whether you talk about pain or don’t (repress it), your actions can be labeled as a cause of your suffering.

🌟 Also, neither claim—that repressed emotions directly cause physical pain, or that talking about pain makes it persist—is supported by established science.

In fact, research on emotional expression and social support suggests that expressing pain to a supportive listener can reduce stress physiology and emotional distress. 🤗🧑🏼‍❤️‍💋‍🧑🏾

❤️Fund the research. Educate providers. Improve healthcare access. Increase social support. Reduce stigma. Stop psychologizing chronic pain and illness.
#chronicpain #toxicpositivity #neuroplasticpain #drsarno #curable

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I am increasingly frustrated by the way pain in understudied and medically neglected conditions like hEDS and HSD is reduced to “central sensitization,” and then further simplified into rhetoric about “faulty alarms,” “your overprotective nervous system,” and “learned pain pathways.”

Central sensitization may occur in some patients and may contribute to symptom severity. What I object to is the stated belief from many providers that its presence (inherently speculative) would mean the underlying mechanical pathology is not “the real problem,” and that pain is really just being generated by a “mistaken nervous system” rather than a structurally compromised body. This ends up creating the rhetorical equivalent of the hysteria narrative.

If my joints are hyperextending, buckling, snapping, subluxating, and dislocating during ordinary activities like making my bed, opening a door, or eating an apple, then my nervous system is not overreacting to imagined danger. The danger is real.

I hear, “Your nervous system isn’t responding to damage anymore. It’s responding to the memory of damage.”

That may describe some situations. It does not automatically describe pain in hEDS/HSD.

Many people with hypermobility experience ongoing mechanical stress and injury every day. Their pain does not require an explanation based on “remembered danger” when physical stressors and damage are actually occurring.

Pain in hEDS does not need to be explained by “a brain that simply has not realized the body is safe.” Sometimes the body is not especially safe.

hEDS is a physiological condition, and in many cases you do not need central sensitization to explain why someone is in pain. The connective tissue and mechanical factors alone can account for a tremendous amount of issues.

Sometimes pain is not an overactive alarm.

Sometimes the alarm is functioning exactly as it was designed to function. #centralsensitization #hEDS #hypermobilityspectrumdisorder #chronicfightorflight #neohysteria

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