Gareth Kelly
Gareth Kelly is the co-owner of Rewire Neuro Performance Therapy. Their mission is to help chronic pain & anxiety sufferers manage and reduce their symptoms by eliminating sensory ...
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How does nervous system training work?
So the way you function, everything is brilliant activity, hurt your knee, brilliant activity, feel happy, braint activity, feel depressed, brilliant activity. The reason most people have issues showing up in their body or their emotions and moods is because the quality of the information going into the brain isn't great. Either there's a dysfunction in the systems picking up that information, or they just can't process that information well. So what nervous system training does really is it takes that input, that information in, improves its quality and its process and speed. So the brain can make a decision, it can integrate that information and generate a good motor output or an emotional output. So basically we just improve the quality of the stuff going in so that the stuff coming out makes you function better, makes you feel better, makes you move better.
What is chronic pain?
Chronic pain is officially defined as pain that lasts for three months or more. Chronic pain is generally still hanging around after the injury itself is healed, so the injury is long gone, but the pain is still there because you're stuck in a negative feedback loop. So your brain is triggering those protection mechanisms long after the injury is gone because it does not yet feel safe again, letting you move the way you used to because it doesn't trust that you're going to be able to handle the forces involved and then you're going to hurt yourself again. So it costs your brain less calories just to keep you in pain.
Is nervous system training a new thing?
So nervous system training in itself isn't a new thing. It's been used for many years in places like the States and Canada, mostly by high performance sports teams, the military, things like that, as well as in a rehab setting. But here in the UK and in most of Europe, it's still relatively new and it's only really filtering down from the mainstream, sort of Premier League sports teams, Olympic coaches nowadays into more of a rehab performance set.