Lesson Summary

Now that you have an understanding of what's happening in your body and why, it's time to start taking action to reprogram your internal threat assessment systems. The first step is to truly believe that this is possible. Building an evidence list can help solidify this belief. Brain retraining has already been happening in this course, changing the way you think and react to things.

One brain training strategy is building an evidence list that shows unequivocally that your body is fine. Functional illnesses, like dysregulation of the autonomic nervous system and threat assessment hypersensitivity, do not involve structural damage. This explains why tests often come back normal.

It's normal to have doubts, especially if you've been chronically ill for a long time. The goal of this lesson is to address and work on those doubts. One piece of evidence is the variation in symptoms, having good days and bad days, or better days. This fluctuation suggests that the symptoms have a neuroplastic component, meaning they can change and be influenced by the environment.

For example, if you have a broken leg, it is always broken, not just on certain days. Having days where your leg feels fine is evidence that the symptoms are neurological in origin. Tests that show no structural abnormalities further support this evidence. The goal is to train the brain to reverse these hypersensitive threat assessment responses.

Your evidence for your body's physical condition right now includes the tests ruling out structural abnormalities. Although it may have been frustrating to be told you're fine when you feel so unwell, it's actually a good thing. It means there is likely a fixable solution to your symptoms.

Building an evidence list is an effective strategy to track your progress. Start by writing down all the things you can do on your good days or better days. This can include tasks like sitting up, standing up, climbing stairs, going for a walk, or reading a book. Keep the list somewhere visible and add to it regularly. If you can do these things on some days, your body is physically capable of doing them on all days.