The Science
The simplicity of EBT is remarkable. Most health problems and suffering are caused by ineffective brain circuits that promote stress overload.
The EBT method has codified a way to identify these ineffective circuits and rewire them without drugs or procedures. By rewiring more and more of these ineffective circuits, we can improve our health in all domains of life. This is why early iterations of the EBT were known as "The Solution."
An epidemic of stress-induced health problems
Stress reactivity and chronic stress are the modifiable root causes of up to 90 percent of health problems. The epidemics of emotional and behavioral health problems, chronic diseases, accidents, and suicides in the U.S. can be traced to excessive stress.
Now 60 percent of Americans have at least one chronic disease. Nearly 12 percent of the U.S. population has diabetes, and 35 percent of all adults have metabolic syndrome (a combination of obesity, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, and poor lipid profiles). Mental illness and substance abuse affect 20 percent of Americans, and deaths by suicide have increased by about 30 percent since 1999. Despite spending double what other wealthy countries spend per person on healthcare, including the highest per-capita pharmaceutical expense in the world, the U.S. ranks last in life expectancy among the 12 wealthiest industrialized nations.
Traditional stress-reduction methods have fallen short
The traditional methods of treating stress, including psychotherapy, medications, and healthy habits, have not prevented the explosive growth of stress-induced health problems. Until now, we have relied primarily on one-on-one psychotherapy and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). The workforce of psychotherapists cannot keep up with the rapidly increasing demand. What's more, CBT, the foundation of traditional care, is reliant on a high-functioning neocortex. Neuroscience research has shown cognitive methods are effective at lower levels of stress and can give us an illusion that we are effectively treating our stress symptoms. But in the high levels of stress so prevalent in modern life, when individuals are stress reactive rather than stress resilient, research confirms that cognitive methods may often "fail the stress test."
We can use emotions in new ways to rapidly reduce stress
Advances in neuroscience have led to a growing awareness that the root cause of stress problems is the circuitry in the emotional brain. Given that it is not feasible to apply traditional psychotherapy to the prevention and treatment of the explosive growth of stress-related problems, and with concerns about excessive reliance on cognitive methods, new solutions are needed. What we need is a form of self-therapy, a way for ordinary people to have a therapist "in their pocket," a scalable, brain-based way to process their intense negative emotions, switch off strong emotional drives for common excesses, rewire trauma, and recover from stress overload whenever it occurs.
Low-stress emotions do not cause stress problems
Most people find processing emotions to be relatively easy in low-stress states. These emotions are "homeostatic," and change rapidly, giving us an accurate way to identify what we need. These emotions, such as sadness, anger, fear, hunger, tiredness, or tension, are signs of the activation of a homeostatic or self-correcting circuit. These circuits are negative feedback loops like an air conditioner and a heater, so they buffer our emotions and help us meet our needs with relatively little stress.
Deficits in processing high-stress emotions are the problem
It is in the high-stress emotional states, which are "allostatic" and become stuck "on," that we need a self-help way to switch off extreme emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. These emotions, such as hostility, depression, panic, and numbness, do not guide us to identify and meet our needs. They are faulty messengers that activate strong drives for common excesses and maladaptive states. They create a self-reinforcing, positive feedback loop, so that we are not able to self-correct, but instead activate a body-brain loop of stress that causes stress levels (and emotions, behaviors, and thoughts) to careen out of control. The brain reflexively repeats old ineffective responses of maladaptive behavior, which contribute to a broad range of health problems and promote needless personal suffering. By processing our allostatic emotions into homeostatic ones, we switch off the circuits that cause stress reactivity and activate the circuits that cause stress resilience. Once we return to a homeostatic state, our emotions naturally direct us to meet our needs in healthier, more adaptive ways. Rather than fighting the stress response, we process our emotions and tame it.
The EBT 5-Point System empowers people to process their high-stress emotions back to joy
Dr. Laurel Mellin, a health psychologist, developed a structured system for processing allostatic emotions into homeostatic ones, using simple tools to change our physiology and responses in daily life. This method is Emotional Brain Training (EBT). She conceptualized the brain's emotional states in terms of five stress levels, mirroring the parallel discoveries of psychiatrist Bruce Perry. Instead of monitoring emotions ("How do I feel?"), individuals identified their "number," or physiologic stress state, on a scale of one to five ("What number am I?"). As emotional processing techniques vary with stress level, there is one emotional technique for each of five levels of stress. As the emotional brain is the survival brain, the inspiration for the tools was the optimal dyadic emotional processing associated with a responsive parenting style and a secure attachment. This EBT 5-Point System of Emotional and Behavioral Regulation provides a unifying system for processing emotional stress and promoting optimal physiologic responses to daily life.
With her collaborators at UCSF, EBT Scientific Director Igor Mitrovic, MD, EBT Clinical Research Director, Lynda Frassetto, MD, and EBT Clinical Scholar, Lindsey Fish, MD, Dr. Mellin conceptualized a new paradigm in healthcare in which people could control their circuits, which control their physiology, emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. EBT integrates the research of many scientists, including UCSF's Michael Merzenich (neuroplasticity), Stanford's Robert Sapolsky (stress), University of Rockefeller's Bruce McEwen (allostatic load), Feinberg School of Medicine's Bruce Perry (physiologic brain states), NYU's Joseph LeDoux and Harvard's Elizabeth Phelps (emotional memories), UCSF's Robert Lustig (stress and reward endocrinology), and previous director of NIMH, Thomas Insel (neural circuitry).
Technology makes learning and using EBT scalable
The aspect of EBT that was essential for scalability was a technology platform. In a high-stress state, technology could enhance the user's effectiveness in being aware of their stress levels and applying the corresponding emotional tools to change them in real-time. Technology designer Joseph Mellin conceptualized the technology for EBT, including the first mobile app for "the five-point system" and EBT Chief Technology Officer, Dev Singh, is the lead programmer who has built the more advanced EBT mobile app that offers three options for using the method: Spiral Up #1 for an instant boost of healing chemicals in about one minute, Spiral Up #2 for access to the full 5-Point System, and Spiral Up #3, for deep work to rewire trauma. As the emotional brain is the social brain and changes more rapidly when used with others, he led the programming for the EBT Connect site to provide a way to access a peer-to-peer "connection" system featuring private five-minute telephone calls to practice the tools and weekly telegroups for learning and support. The groups and individual coaching are facilitated by health professionals who are certified in the method. These professionals train participants in using "Precision EBT," to experience lasting changes in their circuits and their brain's set point, the best predictor of health.
It is the right time for a new paradigm to emerge
The fundamental conceptual basis of EBT is that, as individuals, we have the power to access tools to switch off and reprogram the emotional circuitry that can trigger stress reactivity and promote the onset and exacerbation of a broad range of health problems. By using a simple, structured technology-based system of emotional resiliency, more people can privately and quickly take charge of their stress, and with it, their unwanted emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. They can take on more of the role of being their own "therapist," moving from stress reactivity to stress resiliency. This could ease the crushing demand on the mental health workforce and perhaps even decrease the need for medications, procedures, and devices.
The transition to EBT will take time, but training the brain for resilience will be likely to prevail. It's a rapid and easy way to change our physiology. Current methods have often lost their physiologic roots, and as our stress circuitry controls our physiology, this approach could improve individual control over our chemical, electrical, and organ response to stress. As we continue to learn about Emotional Brain Training, the approach will become easier and even more scalable. Studies that support the method's effectiveness have been conducted at UCSF, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the University of Kentucky, and more research is needed to build our knowledge.
A new golden age of preventing and treating stress-induced problems
As most diseases of modern life are caused or exacerbated by physiologic stress, we are in a new age of healthcare: finding innovative and scalable ways for our population to move from stress reactivity to stress resilience. Up until 1900, most human medical problems were infectious diseases. This led to the golden age of bacteriology, in which methods of eradicating "germs" with antibiotics rapidly reduced the epidemics of infectious diseases. During the next 100 years, medicine flourished and made remarkable advances, but often only treated symptoms and managed diseases rather than curing them. What may be emerging is a growing awareness that we are at the start of another golden age, this time of neuroplasticity, rewiring the self-regulatory circuitry and stress habit (set point) of the brain.
With growing recognition that the brain is the central organ of stress reactivity and a root cause of most health problems, the nature of healthcare is likely to change. Episodes of stress reactivity can occur at any time. A fundamental need is to have continuous, self-directed control of stress. Although the pre-brain-based healthcare model was based on weekly appointments with a health professional, the intervention needed is continuous stress resiliency treatment. EBT is designed to deliver that. Medications can decrease the stress caused by disease and heal the brain enough from trauma that the prefrontal cortex can effectively use resiliency tools, but they come with serious side effects. EBT is designed to switch off the stress-activated cascade of harmful chemicals and activate a cascade of healing ones. That simple switch from states of high stress and negative emotions to low stress and positive emotions uses our endogenous chemicals effectively. The activation of a broad range of healing brain chemicals and the deactivation of harmful chemicals is something that the use of medication alone cannot do.
The healthcare of the future will emphasize the use of the transformative power of our amazing brain for emotional regulation and positive emotional neuroplasticity. Rather than relying excessively on medications, procedures, and devices, we can rely more on self-care and peer support, people helping themselves and others. By using the tools day by day to train our brains for optimal resilience, we stand our best chance of turning around the epidemic of stress-induced problems and ensuring the health and well-being of our citizens.