Five Ways Your Brain Can Learn Something New
- 12 hours ago
- 7 min read
Written by Emma Toms, The Confident Wellness Coach
Emma Toms is an Integrated Wellness Coach, IEMT Practitioner, Reiki Master Teacher, and Certified SSP Provider. Drawing on her own healing journey through autoimmune illness, she empowers clients to restore balance, build resilience, and reconnect with their true nature.
When I was diagnosed with autoimmune disease at seventeen, nobody spoke to me about my brain. They spoke about my eyes, my immune system, and medication. They explained that my body was attacking itself, but nobody asked what my body had lived through. Nobody talked to me about chronic stress or explained that repeated emotional experiences could shape the nervous system, influence the way danger was perceived, and alter how the body responded to everyday life.
Nobody mentioned neuroplasticity. Maybe then it was little known. For many years, I believed that my body had simply gone wrong. I became incredibly knowledgeable about illness. I could understand diagnoses, symptoms, test results and treatment options, yet I knew very little about the extraordinary capacity of the brain and body to adapt.
It was only much later, through my own recovery, professional training and work with clients, that I discovered one of the most hopeful concepts in neuroscience. The brain can change. This capacity is called neuroplasticity, and it transformed the way I understood health, anxiety and healing.
What is neuroplasticity?
Neuroplasticity is the brain’s lifelong ability to reorganise, adapt and form new connections in response to experience.
The brain is not a rigid structure that finishes developing in childhood and then remains unchanged. It continues learning throughout life.
Our relationships shape it, our habits shape it. Repeated thoughts, emotional experiences and responses to stress shape it. The environments in which we live also influence what the brain learns to expect.
This capacity for adaptation is one of our greatest strengths. It allows us to learn new skills, respond to changing circumstances and recover some functions following injury.
However, the brain does not only learn patterns that feel helpful. It can also learn vigilance. It can learn to anticipate rejection, danger or failure. It can learn that rest is unsafe, that control is necessary, or that the world must constantly be monitored. The hopeful truth is that what has been learned can also be updated.
The wisdom behind our adaptations
When we experience prolonged stress, trauma or emotionally significant events, the brain and nervous system adapt to help us survive. Attention may become increasingly drawn towards potential danger. The body may remain prepared to react. Breathing may become shallower, muscles may remain tense, and the nervous system may become more easily activated. These responses are intelligent attempts to protect us.
The difficulty arises when the original circumstances have passed, but the protective pattern remains. The body can continue responding as though something is about to happen, even when the present moment is relatively safe. What we call anxiety, hypervigilance, perfectionism, people pleasing, or an inability to switch off may sometimes be connected to patterns that were once protective.
That does not mean every symptom is psychological, nor does it mean physical symptoms should be dismissed. Proper medical investigation and care remain essential. It means that alongside medical care, there may also be value in asking, What has my brain and body learned, and what might they now need to learn differently?
The experience that changed my direction
When I first experienced Integral Eye Movement Techniques, or IEMT, I was not searching for another therapy. I had already spent years reading, reflecting, and trying to understand myself. I had insight, and I knew much of my story. I could explain why certain situations affected me and where many of my emotional responses had begun. Yet understanding something intellectually did not always change the way my body responded. There were memories and reactions that seemed to exist beyond logic.
After my first IEMT session, I noticed that something felt different. There was an immediate shift, not catharsis, much softer than that. The memories were still there, but they no longer seemed to pull me into them in quite the same way. There was more distance, more perspective and less emotional charge.
In the weeks and months that followed, I noticed that I was no longer trying so hard to manage myself. I was analysing less. I wasn’t caught as frequently in cycles of anticipation and anxiety. Life began to feel different because I felt different within it.
That experience changed the direction of my work. It is one of the reasons I trained as an IEMT practitioner and why the approach has become an important part of how I support people today. I do not present it as a miracle cure or a substitute for appropriate medical or psychological care. I value it because I experienced what it can feel like when an old emotional response begins to lose its grip.
Five ways we can support the brain to learn something new
Neuroplastic change is not created by positive thinking. The brain learns through repeated, meaningful experience. Insight may open the door, but experience is often what helps us walk through it.
Here are five ways we can begin creating those experiences:
1. Create experiences of genuine safety
Telling ourselves that we are safe does not always make the body believe it. The nervous system learns safety through experience, predictable routines, supportive relationships, calm environments, appropriate boundaries, and moments in which nothing is being demanded of us.
Small experiences repeated consistently can be more influential than occasional grand gestures. Safety is often built quietly, a slower morning, a room where we can breathe, a person with whom we do not have to perform, a boundary that teaches the body we are now willing to protect ourselves.
2. Work with the body, not only the mind
Many people can explain their experiences clearly while still feeling overwhelmed by them. This is because emotional patterns are not held only as conscious thoughts. They can also be expressed through physical sensations, automatic responses, posture, breathing and nervous system activation.
Somatic practices, Yoga Nidra, appropriate breathwork and other body-based approaches may help us become more aware of these responses without immediately trying to suppress them. The aim is not to force the body into calmness. It is to build the capacity to remain present with ourselves.
3. Allow emotional memories to be experienced differently
Memory is not always like a video recording stored unchanged in the brain. The way a memory is experienced can shift over time. The facts may remain, while the emotional intensity associated with them becomes less immediate.
In my work, clients sometimes describe this change by saying:
“I still remember what happened. It just doesn’t feel as though it is happening now.”
That distinction matters. Healing does not require us to erase our history. It may mean being able to remember the past without repeatedly being pulled back inside it.
4. Repeat what you want the brain to learn
The brain learns through repetition. A single period of rest cannot always undo years of overwork. One boundary may not immediately remove a lifelong fear of disappointing others. One calm conversation may not erase an expectation of conflict.
New patterns need somewhere to take root. Each time we respond differently, pause before reacting, accept support or choose rest without earning it first, we offer the brain another piece of evidence. We begin to show it that the present does not have to be an exact continuation of the past.
5. Support the conditions in which change becomes possible
The brain does not exist separately from the body. Sleep, movement, nourishment, social connection, time outdoors, and reduced exposure to prolonged stress all contribute to the environment in which the nervous system functions.
This is why Lifestyle Medicine principles form an important part of my work. We can work internally with emotional patterns, but we must also look at the life surrounding the person.
Is there space to rest?
Are their relationships supportive?
Are they living beyond their capacity?
Do they feel able to say no?
Are they receiving the medical, emotional and practical support they need?
Healing cannot be reduced to personal effort. Sometimes the environment must change too.
Hope must remain grounded
Neuroplasticity is sometimes discussed as though the brain can be commanded to heal any condition through determination. That is neither accurate nor compassionate.
Neuroplasticity does not mean that every illness is caused by thought, that symptoms are imaginary or that people remain unwell because they have failed to think positively. It also does not remove the need for diagnosis, medical treatment or appropriate specialist support.
What it offers is not certainty but possibility. It helps us understand that the patterns we live with today are not necessarily fixed expressions of who we are. The brain and nervous system can continue responding to new experiences.
You are more than the patterns you learned
Whether I am working with IEMT, the Safe and Sound Protocol, coaching, Yoga Nidra, somatic practices, or Lifestyle Medicine, the underlying principle is similar. The brain changes through experience.
Every moment of genuine safety offers new information. Every healthy boundary teaches the nervous system that protection is possible. Every emotion that is acknowledged rather than avoided creates an opportunity for a different response. Every restorative pause challenges the belief that we must remain constantly vigilant. Every safe connection reminds us that we do not have to carry everything alone.
Perhaps this is neuroplasticity’s greatest gift. You are not fixed. You are not simply your diagnosis. You are not your anxiety. You are not the worst thing that has happened to you. Your brain has spent your entire life adapting to what you have experienced.
With time, support, and repeated experiences of something different, it can continue to adapt. For me, that is more than neuroscience. It is hope.
Read more from Emma Toms
Emma Toms, The Confident Wellness Coach
Emma Toms is an Integrated Wellness Coach, IEMT Practitioner, Reiki Master Teacher, and Certified SSP Provider. With more than 30 years of lived experience following an autoimmune diagnosis, she combines expertise in neuroscience, somatic practice, and energy work to deliver a comprehensive approach to wellness. Her background spans both healthcare and holistic settings, giving her a unique perspective on the intersection of science and spirituality. Having overcome her own challenges with Graves’ Disease and chronic stress, Emma now guides clients to restore balance, build resilience, and reconnect with their true nature.
