A Unique Approach to Wellbeing and Trauma

“Trauma lives in the nervous system, not just the mind. While traditional therapies help you work through trauma by reframing and reflecting, the real transformation happens through neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to change. At NuroActiv, we work directly with the nervous system through movement-based neurology to help shift trauma responses, rebuild safety, and create lasting change. By updating your body’s predictive models, we help you move beyond coping strategies into real, functional healing.”

Introduction

At NuroActiv we take a different approach to helping you deal with the past and current stressors in your life. Thanks to modern neuroscience and especially to the huge leaps in the areas of pain neuroscience and the neurology of emotions, we now know that your brain and wider nervous system are involved in everything from the pain you experience to how you move to how you feel and experience life and those around you.

“Everything you are and everything you do is a product of your nervous system”

Although it can be challenging at first to get your head around and fully appreciate, once you embrace the fact that your nervous system is behind everything you are and everything you experience, it opens a whole new world of opportunity for coping with life.

I often get asked questions such as “but my pain is real – I can feel it! Are you saying it’s all in my head?” or “my anxiety is absolutely real, what have my nerves got to do with it?”. 

First and foremost, your pain, trauma, depression and everything else that you experience is absolutely real and no one should ever try to convince you otherwise. While these experiences may be a product of your brain and nervous system, they are certainly not “all in your head” in the way that many people often use that phrase. But, because your experiences are a product of your nervous system, it means that we can take a variety of different approaches to help you create space to cope better and to help make other therapies and methods you may be undertaking more effective. In essence, we can use a system of neural priming and threat reduction to allow the other things you are doing to work better.

Threat Reduction

Your brain is very good at creating physical outputs to help you cope with heightened threat levels in your life. These may at first seem like odd ways to help you cope: creating experiences of pain; anxiety; depression; autoimmune dysfunction; functional disability (where there is no physical injury or reason) and so on. But your brain’s number one job is your survival and it will do what it needs to in order to keep you alive even if that means the quality of your experiences are terrible, uncomfortable and/or debilitating. Why might this be?

The threats in your life come from many different places, and we can use an illustration adapted from Professor Lorimer Mosely’s pain neuromatrix model – renamed and updated to the threat neuromatrix (or more simply, The Threat Bucket) by Dr Eric Cobb – to help you visualise this:

Your nervous system is constantly on threat alert and as you can see from the Threat Bucket, the threats can come from diverse areas such as work and relationships to vision, hearing, movement quality, exercises (too little; too much; the unhelpful kind for you etc), nutrition and a whole lot more.

There is also a very large threat input from your interoceptive system. These are all your internal senses such as heart rate, temperature, thoughts, feelings and emotional experiences.

As these threats are assessed by your brain and wider nervous system, your threat bucket starts to full up. You can see that when the threat level reaches a certain point, undesirable and unhelpful outputs start to flow out as your brain tries to create more space in your bucket and move you away from what it regards as the priority threats. Although the image only shows pain as an output, other outputs include, but are not limited to, anxiety, depression, fatigue, low performance, autoimmune dysfunction, interoceptive dysfunction, poor movement and essentially the impairment of any (or part of any) external and internal sense. 

The additional challenge is that when any of these unhelpful outputs are being produced, they often create more threat to feed back into the bucket and this can lead to feelings of helplessness, demotivation and a further reduction in personal performance across all areas of your life.

The first step in our Space To Cope approach is to help you reduce some of the threats to create more space in the bucket so you can cope with the remaining threats better. That is, you reduce the overflow of threat and in turn reduce some of the unhelpful outputs. We also like to help you develop a bigger bucket so you have more capacity to handle a larger number of threats before reaching the point of overflow.

This extra space is what then allows you to reframe your pain and trauma, and provides an improved environment for your other methods and therapies to work more efficiently. 

Effectively, you can focus more on healing and less on the threats themselves.

Our primary focus is on the underlying neurology and either stimulating or inhibiting (sometimes both) specific brain areas to help reduce the threats you are experiencing. We predominantly do this through carefully designed and stacked movement based exercises and drills because movement is an incredibly powerful way to influence brain function.

These exercises and drills include simple exercises such as feet, ankle, hand and finger drills through to specific eye movements, balance drills, auditory exercises and individually designed stacks. We teach and use specific breathing techniques: for relaxation, performance, breathing efficiency and for targeted neuroplastic change.

We also make effective use of tools such as massage guns, laser guidance devices, resistance bands and our own take on a powerful focal muscle vibration device for improved balance, stability and strength where needed.

We also take time to listen where this is more appropriate, and help to guide a reframing of how you are experiencing life. You never need to disclose your traumatic experiences, and we create a safe environment for you to focus on moving well and feeling great.

Everything we do is non-invasive, safe and designed specifically for how you present at each session, tailored for both short and longer term progress.

Assessment

Following a free initial phone or video call to see whether our approach would suit you, we start our journey with you through a individually designed neuro assessment. The assessment is non-invasive and involves simple exercises that provide clues as to our starting point in helping you create space in your threat bucket. In most cases, we start addressing some of these areas at your assessment, and this provides great feedback as to how you react to certain exercises and drill stacks that you can then do in your own time. You can find more out about the assessment here.

The assessment usually takes between one and a half and two hours.

Next Steps

You can read some more on our approach to trauma in this section of the site.

If you feel that the NuroActiv approach may be right for you, please get in touch through our contact form here and we can discuss booking you in for a free initial telephone or video call and if you are ready, your assessment.

You can also use this contact form to ask any questions you have about my approach and how it may be of benefit to your specific situation: but remember you don’t need to disclose your specific situation at all.

I look forward to hearing from you and taking you through our Space To Cope approach.

Chris O’Brien
Founder
NuroActiv