Neurosculpting Institute

MYTH BUSTED: “Just think positive and you’ll rewire your brain.”

This idea gets tossed around like gospel in the self-help world — but it’s missing key ingredients.

🧠 Neuroplasticity requires more than thought.
Your brain needs context, safety, emotion, repetition, and integration to actually change.

According to research from Dr. Norman Doidge and others in the field of applied neuroplasticity, thoughts only rewire when:

👉They’re repeated with emotional charge

👉They’re paired with behavioral action

👉They’re believed as safe by the nervous system

👉They’re applied in real-world context

Otherwise, they get filtered out as irrelevant input.

If you’ve ever felt like your affirmations or mindset work weren’t sticking, it’s not your fault — you were missing the right scaffolding.

That’s where Neurosculpting® comes in: we pair cognitive reframes with somatic cues, limbic calming, and prefrontal activation to help your brain trust and retain the new pattern.

💬 Have you fallen for this myth before? What helped you break out of it?
Drop your story in the comments — we learn best when we share.

There’s a BIG difference between bypassing reality and building a better one.

Toxic positivity tells us to “just be grateful” and ignore discomfort.
That’s not regulation — it’s dissociation.

But positivity bias?

That’s a neuroplasticity powerhouse.
It acknowledges challenge and uses the brain’s natural capacity to focus on solution-based pathways. That’s how we rewire.

Here’s what the neuroscience says:

🧠 When we engage positivity bias, we activate the prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain responsible for future planning, emotional regulation, and conscious decision-making.

🧠 That activation leads to the release of dopamine, which enhances motivation and creates a reward loop for positive action.

🧠 Over time, this loop builds new neural pathways that shift us from reactivity to resilience.

Rewiring isn’t pretending life is good.
It’s deciding to build a brain that can find the good in the truth.

Notice it.
Practice it.
Teach it.

And always ask: Is this bypass… or brain upgrade?

It was a LONG few decades of total dissociation…the freeze stress response ruled my life.

I became a keen observer of people, a quality critic, and a very educated thinker….but I could not safely FEEL.

Embodied life was encoded as THREAT in my nervous system. I leaned to freeze more and more, better and better.

And I used my robust meditation practice to justify it all.

I hid behind the story of “I am not my body”. And while I believe that to be true at a deep level I never allowed for the other truth that I LIVE inside my body.

And then I found the gifts of neuroplasticity and applied that to rescripting my nervous system permissions.

I entrained myself to FEEL.

💫First, I created safety scripts I entrained to as a foundation
💫Next, I edited some sabotage instructions living deep inside of me
💫Then I worked on uncoupling my nervous system from the history I stored in my body’s memory.
💫Finally, I created new stories that I programmed in to habituation.

And it worked.
That was 20 years ago.

🙏I healed my seizures, I got out of freeze, I became an embodied mess and then eventually a much more graceful human.

I want that for you…I want that for the world.

And I don’t think that’s too much to ask.

Do you want that too?

Time to play the long game.

When your brain is in a tit-for-tat mode it’s easy to get lost in the story of getting even.

But when your brain is in the long game thinking of the legacy you want to leave, it’s a lot easier to choose love.

Let’s make love win.

To do right on the outside you have to get aligned on the inside.

Time to get congruent!

Join us at
💫CONGRUENCE ACTIVATION 💫
June 20-22
Colorado, USA

Link in bio or DM for info

Yes, you DO have influence over the pharmacy inside.

The more self-directed nervous system regulation you have, the less the world throws you around and the more you feel a sense of autonomy.

Dopamine is one of the players in that process.

If you are curious about your own mastery over this mind-body game then this is the place for you.

🧠Congruence Activation
🧠Colorado
🧠June 20-22

Link in bio

https://www.neurosculpting.com/congruence-a-weekend-activation-for-deep-transformation/

DM to learn more

Wouldn’t it be silly to hear an argument between a drop of water, the ocean, an ice berg, and a river debating the right way to be water?

Every single brain in a body believes the experience they live, with all of its stories and perceptions, is the truth.

This 1/8billionth sliver of reality then gets imposed onto others as the measuring stick of morals, ethics and behavior.

Can you give me a logical explanation for why any human has more understanding of humaning than all other humans?

Feeling the need to say this to you.
Please pass this on to someone else.

My 8th book (my 2nd Children’s book) will be released at month’s end🙏

I can’t imagine a more appropriate time to be teaching children about empathy and an orientation towards connection and inclusivity versus division.

The Story of Blue is a vehicle for just that!

It was inspired by my contemplations of The Book of Not Knowing by Peter Ralston who was also gracious enough to endorse the book!

Additionally, I have the honor of endorsements from Don Jose Ruiz whose shamanic teachings and lineage are helping our world rediscover self-acceptance and tolerance.

Comment and I will add you to a presale offer that will go out next week.

🙏🕷️🌊🌦️💧

The very platform you are reading this on would also have you believe that “influencers” somehow have life MORE figured out than you.

Reality check….no one does.

So, I’m on a mission to curate my own internal thoughts, patterns and behaviors in order to orient more strongly to the way in which I hope to show up in the world.

And that DOES NOT include silly polarizing influencers’ agendas! (Even my own 😂)

Cheers to reclaiming free thinking!

Want more sustained sense of reward, achievement, and motivation?

Um, yes please!

Turns out that dopamine is correlated to our ability to think outside the box, to see a bigger picture, and to engage with novelty.

So, it might be a step in the direction of greater reward to challenge those old definitions of who you are and how you have to be.

Here are my favorite ways to stimulate dopamine:
🧠Spend a few minutes a day thinking of the most novel experiences you’ve ever had
🧠Learn something entirely new like a language or hobby
🧠Do a daily Neurosculpting meditation (in my linktree)
🧠Try to encourage the most outlandish approaches to current problems as a thought experiment.

We have the pharmacy right inside…and it’s free!

Are you ready for sexy times 😂

But it’s actually true. When you have more access to nervous system regulation you have more access to your body and mind’s fuller expression.

Share this if you are ready to get your sexy back!

If you don’t yet believe you have the power to change the world from the inside out, then it’s time for you to learn more about neuroplasticity.

The more you think a thought the more your brain makes it easier to think it.

The easier it is to think it makes it easier to orient to it as a conscious and subconscious expectation.

The more you orient to it the more it guides your behavior.

The more it guides behavior the more you create external response to it.

The more external response the more your mind validates its importance.

The more importance you place on certain thought patterns the more they define the “truth” of your world.

Don’t let the thoughts think you.

Here’s my favorite dopamine boosting list.

💾 First, save this post

💫 Watch cute animal videos
💫 Learn a new hobby
💫 Check off items on my to do list
💫 Note your wins each day
💫 Exercise

What are your favorite dopamine boosting tips?

Join us for this brand new 3-week series.
No experience necessary.
Registration link in comments.

How do you determine reality?

In a recent study in BMC Neuroscience noted, “AI models have captured real-world social perception and inter-subject emotional responses by identifying neural patterns involving system-across brain networks, which goes far beyond the traditional model of behavior-brain activity associations.”

We love to get attached to knowing the REAL story of things…yet we live in layers upon layers of conceptual stories we love to call reality.

Tell me in the comments how you “know” what’s “real”.

In a riveting article in Frontiers from 2013 it was noted,

“We would like to suggest that the content of consciousness can change without sensorial inputs, as is the case in dreaming. Changes in memory involve continuous structural changes in the brain, both during wakefulness and during sleep.

This does not entail a dualistic approach to consciousness and brain but rather another aspect of the living brain as also suggested by Tononi, Sporns, and Edelman. We would like to suggest that top-down and bottom-up processes of consciousness and brain are two aspects of the same complex dynamic and plastic nervous system.”

What a fascinating time to live in when we are fully aware that our consciousness shapes the world…literally.

This is HARD to grasp because we identify so much with our lived past.

In fact, losing our precious memories is one of the most traumatic things we can experience.

BUT it’s important to consider that memory is fragmented and reconstructed with each retrieval, except it doesn’t quite come together perfectly so we sort of stitch it back together using our present-time lens to fabricate bits of cohesiveness.

Yes, EVERY re-membrance is slightly influenced/altered and then re-fragmented to be stored again.

So the next time you re-member that thing it is a remembrance of the latest version.

This is both exciting and scary because it means the very same thing: our pasts are not exactly what we think they are.

Does this idea excite you or worry you?