Day 30. Celebrate the Power of One and Next Steps Congratulations for completing the Power of One Challenge. The next step is to build on your accomplishments to raise your set point and extend the period in which you live a happy, healthy life.
Set Point One
Please pause for long enough to celebrate, then move into a stage that will build on your success and, first make solid the changes you have made in this challenge, then raise your set point until you can say, “I have an abundance of of Sanctuary, Authenticity, Vibrancy, Integrity, Intimacy, Spirituality, and Freedom.
Often people ask how they will know when they are wired at One. Apart from being aware of having the seven rewards, these are the most common signs of a high set point. You have probably started to experience them in this challenge, but as you move through the advanced EBT courses, these characteristics will become dominant and more automatic.
The 8 Most Common Signs of Set Point One • You feel present and connected naturally. • When stressed, expressing one anger gets you to One. • You feel the reward center’s glow most of the time. • You have freedom from common excesses. • You take fewer medications yet your health is better. • You feel secure and loving in your relationships. • Your body and brain are at their vibrant best.
The advanced EBT courses will guide you in this process. Developed over the last 20 years, based on the experiences of thousands of participants, they anticipate your needs as you raise your set point. The tools work differently, your speed of change varies, and the rewards that matter to you evolve as you raise your set point. These courses factor in those differences and give you just what you need at each point in the journey. That guidance keeps the reptile at bay and makes EBT fun, deeply meaningful, and highly effective.
The Second 30 Days
Celebrate completing the Power of One Challenge Pause and acknowledge yourself for having learned these tools. Now you can have power over your stress level and transform wires that do not meet your needs. Celebrate your success in three ways:
Celebration #1. Honoring yourself Find a way to reward yourself for having learned these skills. This challenge course has been demanding. You have done the hard work to learn how to change your brain. At the very least, score a Joy Point!
My Power of One Celebration is to go out with my wife and have a natural pleasures evening of our own. Maybe we will make that a vibrancy habit!
I took a day off: no Check Ins, no spiraling up, no natural pleasures. I needed that!
I celebrated by buying myself scented candles and decorating a corner of my deck for Sanctuary Time.
I cleaned out my closet of all the clothes that I wore when I was at Brain State 5. I’m starting to experiment with a new Power of One look. I might even start designing Power of One clothes. Wahoo!
Celebration #2. Sharing EBT with one other person Most people have no idea that they can change their emotional brain or that it is the emotional brain in stress that is the problem. They need the power of positive plasticity, too. Share EBT with at least one other person.
My mother asked why I was so happy. She said it in her typical way: “Connie, you have always been so negative. What’s going on with you?” For a moment, I went to Brain State 5 and was tempted to say, “I don’t know. What has been going on with you to be so critical all these years?” Instead, I connected with my body and spiraled up to One. Then I said, “EBT. It’s tools to process emotions.” She said, “I could use some of that EBT.” She joined EBT the next day.
Celebration #3. Raising your set point Commit to launching the next phase of your EBT Practice, which is raising your set point. This includes the Second 30 Days Program to encode vibrancy and freedom from these four Stress Circuits in your long-term memory systems. By taking this step, the changes can become automatic, freeing up your mindspace to move forward in life and raise your set point.
I was trying to explain EBT to my co-worker and finally said, “You stop sweating the small stuff because your brain pathways have changed. I’ve stopped having headaches and I am in control. If something bothers me, I spiral up through my emotions and feel good – or great.”
I still get 5ish at times but have the choice to move through it. I trained my brain to use negative emotions to spiral me up to a natural high. I don’t overdrink anymore. I’m emotionally light and always about purpose. It’s all about the tools!
Key steps during the Second 30 Days You have primed your brain for tremendous success in raising your set point. The most important next step is to clear those Stress Circuits and wire into the brain the Vibrancy Habit.
Take five minutes four times daily for a Power Break to use your Grind Ins. Each wire is from a different domain of life. Rewiring all four of these major circuits will strengthen your secure base, so you can be present, aware, and connected.
Just the way a table is sturdier with four legs than three, be sure to transform all four of your circuits. The all-important connection for optimal functioning (neural integration) between your thinking brain and emotional brain can become more solid and jumpstart raising your set point.
Continue your personalized vibrancy plan. Consistently (but not perfectly) practice vibrancy for 30 days to change the basal ganglia (the brain’s habit center). Encode the Vibrancy Habit. Research has shown that even if we do not do it perfectly, the repeated use of a simple plan trains the brain to sustain lasting changes.
The Second 30 Days
• Make vibrancy a habit. • Clear away those Stress Circuits. • Prepare to raise your set point.
First, my Mood Circuit transformed, which makes me laugh. I was addicted to depression for how many years? I broke my attachment to depression, and now those mood states are annoying, but they pass. Both my marijuana wire and my distancing circuit are largely gone. The last one I transformed was my Work Circuit, which was procrastination. It was an intergenerational circuit from my father. I did about 15 Cycles on grieving the loss, primarily as my unconscious mind made me feel disloyal to my dad for clearing it away. I bonded with him over our shared procrastination circuit! Now that wire is not a problem and I’m ready for Advanced EBT, starting with the Sanctuary course, peace and power from within.
The opportunity to raise your set point How exciting that you are now in a position to raise your set point! The goal of EBT is to extend the span of our lives in which we are bright, passionate, vibrant, and productive. We address the root cause of health problems, rather than defaulting to having to rely excessively on medications, procedures, and devices. These approaches can help, but the brain is the controller of our health. What’s more, it’s joy that fulfills us, and joy does not come from a pill bottle, it comes from knowing how to connect easily and naturally to the deepest part of ourselves.
The main risk factor for disease is aging. The rate of aging varies widely. We may be advanced in years but be astonishingly young in terms of biologic age. It’s our biologic age that matters. Of all the markers that help us assess our biologic age, the most important one is our set point or allostatic load. If we were to limit ourselves to one biomarker of biologic aging, it would be the length of the ends of our chromosomes, our telomeres. They provide protective caps for preserving our genes and lengthening our lifespan.
What could extend our lifespan?
It’s no wonder that research on telomeres is among the most exciting in medicine. Stunning research on telomeres has been conducted by UCSF researchers, most particularly, Elizabeth Blackburn who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology of Medicine in 2009. She discovered the nature of telomeres and co-discovered telomerase, an enzyme that repairs and protects telomeres.
Sewing our genes back together These two factors – telomeres and telomerase – are related. Under the hood of our inner world, our genes are inherently unstable, so one of the main jobs of cells is to protect our genes. Without gene stability, we become sick and die, so the maintenance of telomeres is part of our biology. Each time there is a
in our DNA, it has to be replicated. The price of that replication is snipping off part of the protective ends of the genes (telomeres). If the enzyme telomerase is available, it patches up the telomere and the telomeres do not become shorter. If it is not, these caps at the ends of the genes become shorter. The shorter they become, the sooner they unravel and the sooner the cell dies. As cells die off prematurely, tissues and organs start to fail.
We become vulnerable to the age-related diseases that are the chief causes of death in adults – cancer, heart disease, and diabetes – and the diminishing of our lifespan. This is why our telomerase levels are so important! With high telomerase, we can repair those breaks in our DNA, including in our stem cells, the ones that can proliferate indefinitely, and form any kind of tissue needed. We can have more control over our health and lifespan.
Lifestyle and stress both matter We know that lifestyle impacts about 50 percent of early disease onset. Eating healthy, exercising 30 or more minutes daily, sleeping eight hours, and maintaining a healthy weight have a tremendous positive impact on disease. It turns out that they all have an impact on improving telomere length, too, a double benefit. Even losing weight – only keeping off for a year a 10 percent weight loss – actually lengthens telomeres, a perfect example of how to turn back the biologic clock.
However, apart from using a vibrant lifestyle to reverse our biologic age, what about reducing psychological stress, another way that stress enters our cells and radically changes our chemistry?
Psychological stress and lifespan
We know that stress creates hundreds of biological changes, including shortening telomere length. Most stress is not caused by metabolic or physical stress, the blood sugar low or the aching back, but by psychological stress. A glitch in the stress response blinds the hypothalamus (“stress switch�) to the cause of the threat. The hypothalamus assumes that all threats are physical, so it unleashes widespread deleterious changes in insulin, glucose, and other chemicals in response to psychological stress. Instead of being exposed to stress chemicals for brief periods to assist us in running away from a physical threat, the stress buzzer is stuck on chronically. This is the underlying cause of almost all emotional, behavioral, and physical health issues.
The importance of emotional well-being on health has become welldocumented in the last decade. Most particularly, in a landmark study of stressed-out caregivers, UCSF’s Elissa Epel, along with Elizabeth Blackburn and colleagues, showed that psychological stress is a major factor in the rate of biologic aging. Comparing mothers of chronically-ill children to mothers of healthy children, stress had a huge impact on the markers of aging. The higher stress group had shorter telomeres, the equivalent of advancing their
biologic age nine to 17 years, compared to the lower stress group. What’s more, those with higher psychological stress had 48 percent less telomerase than the group with lower psychological stress.
We can lower our psychological stress. In fact, EBT has been shown to protect against psychological stress in three studies, using the same measure of psychological stress used in Dr. Epel’s research. These studies were conducted by researchers at UCSF and the University of Kentucky and tracked changes in perceived stress among EBT participants, using the gold standard instrument of stress assessment, the Perceived Stress Scale. All three studies evaluated a seven-week introductory group program in EBT, which met once or twice weekly (see details of this and other EBT research in the cited publications and on the EBT website). In of these studies, the mean decreases in psychological stress of the EBT group were highly significant.
Other studies have shown promising results, including a UCSF study that at two-year follow-up of those averaging 18 sessions of EBT showed improved mood and relationships, deepened spirituality, higher work productivity, more responsible spending, and saving more money. In addition, participants showed maintained weight loss (86 percent), decreased blood pressure (69 percent), less substance use, defined as alcohol, tobacco, drugs, and overuse of medications (89 percent), and improved health and vitality (77 percent). More research is needed, however addressing the root cause of a broad range of problems by rewiring circuits and enhancing emotional resilience to deactivate the stress response gone rogue has become a major goal in healthcare. Leading the way in delivering improvements in stress is positive emotional plasticity – rewiring the Stress Circuits that cause disease and shorten our lifespans.
Psychological stress and lifespan
An efficient way to live your best life Most of us are time insufficient. The clock is always ticking, and the opportunity to escape for months on end to de-stress is not possible for most of us. EBT is designed to give us a way to weave the self-care of resiliency into our daily routine and to rewire Stress Circuits as we conduct our complicated and meaningful lives.
At EBT, we have methodically studied emotional resilience for more than 20 years, finetuning the tools you learned in this course, so that we can all spiral up out of stress in 30 seconds to four minutes, rather than using cognitive, mindfulness, and relaxation methods, which require 20 to 30 minutes to achieve stress relief.
Rewiring Stress Circuits has long been thought the purview of psychiatrists and psychologists and often requiring multiple medications. Our goal at EBT is for you to take all the medications you need, but to need fewer of them!
Numerous researchers, including NYU’s Emotional Brain Institute‘s Joseph LeDoux and Elizabeth Phelps. have elucidated the emotional pattern of experience needed to erase these circuits. We must briefly spark the same level of stress that we were in when it was encoded to unlock the circuit and change it. No stress – no erasure! Then we need to stay present to our emotions for just a few moments, allowing that wire to spill out key information that it has stored, often for decades. Then the brain reveals to our conscious mind the ridiculous expectation, that was unfortunately locked into our unconscious mind way back then, so that we can negate that false “truth” and encode an accurate, productive, and effective message.
The Stress Circuit can weaken and over time, fade away as the new Joy Circuit that makes us resiliency superstars takes hold. The Stress Circuit can stop shortening our telomeres and instead, with a comprehensive plan of vibrancy and neuroplasticity tools, lengthen them. That is the challenge in the coming months. It is to continue to deepen your EBT Practice to clear away circuits, raise your set point and experience the rewards of a connected, happy, healthy life.
You have learned the fundamental tools of EBT by completing this course. Your next step is to use these super-powered tools to improve the architecture of your brain, clearing away unwanted circuits and building new circuits of your choosing. You stay put in your own life and go about your day, but the background music of your mind is always aware of your body, your brain state, and unexpected opportunities to further raise your set point!
As you raise your set point, you will radiate your Power of One to others, doing your small but important part day by day to make your world and the world a better place. How do we change the world? We raise our own set point and others catch it from us whether they want to or not. Day by day our world becomes a better place because we have chosen to raise our own set point, embracing our natural power to change our own elusive and magical emotional brain.
Congratulations! You have completed the Power of One Challenge. Your Next Step. The Second 30 Days