Charles A Simpkins – Neuroscience for Clinicians: Brain Change for Stress, Anxiety, Trauma, Moods and Substance Abuse

Outline

• Tour through the Brain: What clinicians need to know from neurons to structures, to pathways, to networks
  • See brain structures in 3-D
  • How the brain processes top-down, bottom-up, and horizontal
  • The interplay of mental health and key nervous system structures, functions, and pathways
  • Work with implicit and explicit memories
  • How key pathways inform clinical interventions:
    • Pain Pathway
    • Reward Pathway
    • Fear-Stress Pathway
• Nervous System Networks and the Social Brain: We are wired for attunement
  • Default Mode (DMN) and Task Mode Networks (TMN)
  • Healing attachment
  • Activate mirror neurons bottom-up
• Neuroplasticity and Neurogenesis: How the brain can change
  • Three timeframes for change
  • Neuroplasticity at the synapse
  • How to foster neuroplasticity in clients
  • Neuroplasticity in action: Exercise your brain!
• Practice Interventions for Healing: Bottom-up, top-down, and horizontal
  • Sensory Awareness
  • Meditation and Mindfulness
  • Body Work
  • Unconscious and the DMN
  • The Mind-Body Link
• Integrate the Brain into Treatments
  • Stress
    • How stress alters the nervous system
    • Calm the stress/fear pathway
    • Develop alert/relaxed attention for better coping
  • Trauma
    • Foster confidence with yoga
    • Malleability of memories and clinical implications for treating trauma
    • Reconsolidate implicit memories
  • Anxiety
    • The anxious brain reaction
    • Work top down/ bottom up/ horizontally
    • Calm the limbic system bottom up with movement
    • Soothe the insula through meditative sensory awareness
    • Deconstruct sensations mindfully
  • Substance Abuse
    • Brain areas involved in addictions
    • Rewire the reward pathway
    • Detach from pleasure and pain
    • Prefrontal connections and judgment
  • Depression
  • The depressed brain pattern
  • Effects of yoga and meditation on the nervous system
  • Regulate the limbic system: the prefrontal cortex, cingulate gyrus and mindfulness
  • Unify real and ideal
  • Foster joyful relationship through mirror neurons
  • Develop compassion and gratitude

• 6 Principles for Incorporating the Brain into your Therapy