Healing with Dr Helena

Today’s Brain Booster is: Improve your mind by being kind. Being kind to YOURSELF lowers stress hormones, and lights up the brain’s reward centres to improve brain function and overall well-being. The brain’s reward system is a network of brain structures designed to ensure our survival. When we do something beneficial — like exercising, socialising, or practising self-kindness — this network is activated, and releases neurotransmitters that improve the workings of our brain. For example, one of the neurotransmitters that plays a key role in the reward system is dopamine. Apart from motivating us to do pleasurable things, dopamine acts as an internal spotlight. It signals to your prefrontal cortex (your decision-making and planning centre) that your current activity is highly valuable. This clears away mental fog, and helps you focus intensely on the task at hand. Dopamine also instructs the hippocampus (our learning hub) to ‘save this file.’ This means the connections between brain cells are strengthened,…

Today’s Brain Booster is: Visualise to actualise your healing. Have you ever imagined something so vividly that your body responded as if it were real? You imagine your child falling off their bike, and your heart skips a beat.You picture success, and your posture lifts. You visualise biting into a lemon, and your lips pucker. Nothing has happened, but your brain activates the same neural circuits that it does when you’re having the experience in real life. Brain scans show that your motor cortex, planning networks, and co-ordination pathways are all active when you visualise moving. How is this relevant to healing? Several studies on stroke patients found that when the person repeatedly visualised moving a paralysed limb, they improved their ability to function, reach, and use the affected limb. The same goes for people unable to move because of chronic pain. When they visualised, they actualised healing. * * * * * Today’s Health Headline is: Pain is your friend, not your foe. There’s an extremely rare…

Today’s Brain Booster is: Calm your fear, and pain will disappear. Last week I did a deep dive into pain, and the key points were that there are two types of pain, classified by their cause: Physical pain — caused by being punched in the nose (or some other kind of injury). Neuroplastic pain — caused by an over-protective brain circuit. There’s no physical damage, no broken nose, and no pulled muscle, but your brain generates pain because it thinks you’re under some kind of threat. Following on from this, I’m going to answer some important whether questions from Peter. How do I know whether my pain is physical or neuroplastic? Last week you provided a comprehensive list of conditions — such as fibromyalgia, tension headaches and IBS — that were classified as neuroplastic, because there was no physical damage to a person’s muscles or head. This I can understand. But you also gave chronic neck, shoulder and back pain as examples of neuroplastic pain. I’ve had chronic lower back pain for more than one year, and…

Today’s Brain Booster is: Retrain your brain to release chronic pain. Since starting my podcast I’ve received a lot of questions about how to manage chronic pain, including back, neck and shoulder pain, migraines, fibromyalgia and RSI (repetitive strain injury). This is not surprising because chronic pain is one of the biggest public health challenges globally. Worldwide, 1 in 5 adults live with chronic pain. In Australia, 5.5 million adults have chronic pain, and in the US, it’s 50 million people. That’s a lot of people in a lot of pain. But do not fear, a solution is here! That’s what today’s podcast episode is about. Don’t believe anyone who tells you that nothing can be done for your chronic pain. When a health professional says ‘there’s nothing we can do’, what they mean is, there’s nothing THEY can do. But there’s plenty YOU can do. If you’ve had constant or intermittent pain for over three months, it’s highly likely you have what’s known as neuroplastic pain. This is pain generated by the brain in the…

Today’s Brain Booster was prompted by a whether question from Maya: My doctor said that the shingles vaccine can reduce the risk of dementia. I’d like to know whether this is true, and if so, why? Yes — there is strong and growing real-world evidence from major epidemiological studies showing that the shingles vaccine is linked to a significant reduction in dementia risk. Shingles is a painful, blistering viral infection caused by re-activation of the chicken pox virus. That means you can only get shingles if you’ve had chicken pox. The virus infects cells around the spinal cord, and even after your chicken pox clears, the virus stays dormant in your nerve tissue. In many people, the virus stays asleep for their entire life and never gives them any trouble. However, if your immunity declines for any number of reasons, you can get re-activation, and the second time around, it doesn’t cause chicken pox, it causes shingles. So today’s Brain Booster is: do what you can to Shun Shingles. And getting the shingles…

Today’s Brain Booster is Elevate your expectations! Last week I spoke about how our beliefs become our biology — especially how negative ageist stereotypes actually drive how we age. Today we’re going to build on that and discover how our mind can mend our maladies. When you let go of limiting labels and assumptions about symptoms, pain and disease, you boost your brain’s ability to activate healing. And the most direct way to do that is to elevate your expectations. In every situation you find yourself in, ask yourself, ‘What would be the best possible outcome?’ And imagine it happening to you — because it could. You’re not trying to convince yourself that the best possible outcome will happen. You’re entertaining the possibility that it might happen. Even a small glimmer of hope can significantly boost physical healing by reducing stress, and changing how your brain processes pain and illness. * * * * * Today’s HEALTH HEADLINE is placebos prove that our body holds a latent natural power — an innate ability…

Today’s Brain Booster is Think bolder, not older — because our beliefs influence our biology. In fact, our beliefs BECOME our biology. In the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, people holding negative beliefs about ageing demonstrated significantly worse memory performance after 38 years than those subscribing to less negative age stereotypes — and this was after adjusting for education, depression, chronic illness, and other variables that could affect a person’s powers of recall. The decline in memory performance for those aged 60+ was 30.2% greater for those holding the most negative age stereotypes compared with those who had the most positive attitude to ageing. The first step to ageing better is to feel better about ageing. When an older person forgets where they parked their car in a big shopping centre carpark, they immediately call it a ‘senior moment’ and fear they’re getting Alzheimer’s. When a young person forgets where they parked their car, they immediately call it a ‘junior moment’. Of…

Today’s Brain Booster is: Yearn to learn. In order to powerfully boost your brain through learning, look for something that fulfils the following criteria: It’s something you genuinely love doing, it keeps you intrinsically motivated, and it makes you lose track of time. It requires effort, and pushes you to learn new rules, acquire new skills, or continuously stretch your abilities. It takes you to new environments — whether that’s a natural wilderness, historical site, art gallery, museum, mathematical landscape or creative mind frame. Anything from mastering a foreign language, playing a musical instrument, birdwatching, digital photography, quilting, or navigating the intricacies of astronomy, will help you build cognitive reserve and lower your risk of dementia. (This is by no means an exhaustive list.) * * * * * Today’s Health Headline is: Your brain has the power to heal, recover and improve after a concussion, traumatic brain injury, stroke or diagnosis of ADHD, Parkinson’s or dementia. Don’t believe…

Last week I finished with the question: what drugs, other than antibiotics, disrupt our gut microbiota — the trillions of micro-organisms that live in our digestive tract? An obvious contender is antacids — also known as heartburn medications — which are drugs that reduce stomach acid production to treat reflux. Decades of research have established a strong link between acid suppression, gastrointestinal changes, and depression — especially in relation to the class of drugs known as proton pump inhibitors (PPIs). Healthy stomach acid acts as a sterile shield that kills ingested pathogens and bacteria. When the environment becomes less acidic, bacteria from the mouth and upper respiratory tract survive the journey downward and can trigger what’s known as small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO). Symptoms of SIBO include (but are not limited to) bloating, abdominal cramping, excessive gas (especially after eating carbohydrates), altered bowel habits, chronic fatigue, brain fog, and joint or muscle pain.…

Today’s Health Headline is: Microbes mess with our genes! (The Brain Booster will come later.) Did you know that you have a gene called ‘The Guardian Gene?’ It’s official name is TP53, and it encodes a protein called p53. The reason for its colloquial name is that this protein protects our DNA, spots damage in our cells, and stops mutations in their tracks. These processes help to shield us from cancer and autoimmune diseases including type 1 diabetes. And it turns out that our microbes interact with this gene and influence how it behaves through a process called epigenetics. Epigenetics refers to the ability of our genes to be turned on or off by factors in our environment (including our microbes and our diet) without there being any changes to our underlying DNA. And The Guardian Gene is not the only gene affected by our microbes. Our microbes mess with many of our genes. However, in relation to this particular gene, when mice are given antibiotics within the first six weeks of their life, they lose the…

Last week’s Brain Booster was Go with your gut — a deep dive into all things gut health. It was another very long segment so I ended it after the Health Headline. That means if you haven’t watched or listened to last week’s episode, I strongly recommend you do so before you listen to this one because last week I explained the rationale for what I’m talking about today. When it comes to gut health, What’s Missing from Modern Medicine is a nuanced, personalised approach. No two people have the same microorganisms living in their gut or on their bodies — not even identical twins. Everyone has a unique microbial identity, just as we have a unique fingerprint. This has led to crime scene investigators using not only fingerprints, but also bacterial prints — referred to as ‘touch microbial forensics’ — to track down criminals. Your bacterial inhabitants are uniquely yours, and when you touch something, you leave some of them behind. Our unique microbial signature is also why manufactured probiotic supplements…

Today’s Brain Booster is: Go with your Gut. Is your gut sensitive, irritable, leaky or inflamed? Are you into: Prebiotics Probiotics Postbiotics Synbiotics Psychobiotics Pharmabiotics Antibiotics Penbiotics Or Panbiotics?! (I will explain all those terms over the next few episodes.) Why does it matter? For most of modern medicine, the brain and gut were treated as separate organs, with separate problems. If you had indigestion, you saw a gastroenterologist. If you had memory loss, you saw a neurologist. Today, that division is fast disappearing: what happens in our gut, doesn’t stay in our gut. Scientists now recognise that our gut and our brain are in constant communication through what’s known as the gut-brain-microbiome axis. Signals travel back and forth, every second, via nerves, hormones, immune pathways, and chemical messengers that are produced by the trillions of micro-organisms that live in our intestines. The estimated number of microbes in our gut is about 40 trillion, with a combined total…

Today’s podcast episode was prompted by a Whether question. So I’ll give you the question first, and then I’ll answer it in the context of a Brain Booster, Health Headline, and What’s Missing from Modern Medicine? "Can you tell me WHETHER it’s better to tackle high blood pressure with western medicine or alternative medicine? I have never smoked, do not drink alcohol, I weigh 73kg at height of 1.78cm (so not obese) and I exercise six out of seven days a week, for a minimum of one hour per day with fit-cross, swimming, running and cycling. My blood pressure sometimes spikes to 160/85 with low pulse (ranging between 40-60). I appreciate you being genuine and open to everything." This question is relevant to everyone because chronically sustained high blood pressure — known as hypertension — acts as a constant, silent, physical strain on your entire circulatory system: heart, blood vessels and lymphatics. Over time, this excess force damages blood vessels and organs, including your brain, and becomes a primary…

Last week’s Brain Booster was Turn up the heat! — a deep dive into how using a sauna more than 4 times a week can reduce the risk of dementia by over 60%! Given that this is a very bold claim, I spoke for longer than I’d anticipated, in order to explain the mechanisms by which heat exposure brings about health benefits. So I decided to end the episode after the Health Headline because the feedback I’ve received from you is that you prefer my episodes to be under one hour long. That means if you haven’t watched or listened to last week’s episode, I strongly recommend you do so before listening to this one because last week I explained the rationale for what I’m talking about today. Hence we’re launching straight into What’s Missing from Modern Medicine? What’s Missing from Modern Medicine is doctors prescribing heat therapy as part of standard medical care for: High blood pressure Heart failure Depression Insomnia Chronic pain Dementia-prevention Respiratory conditions Overall better health But how should…

Today’s Brain Booster is: Turn up the heat! For thousands of years, humans have deliberately exposed themselves to heat: Roman baths, Turkish hammans, Finnish saunas, indigenous sweat lodges, and Japanese onsen (natural hot springs). And it turns out that sweating it out in a sauna on a regular basis: Lowers blood pressure Improves overall heart health and blood vessel function Reduces the risk of a heart attack, stroke and dementia Helps with blood sugar regulation Brings down inflammation Decreases depression and anxiety Improves mood Induces better sleep And prolongs your life! How could doing something so effortless and relaxing enhance your health to such an incredible extent? It sounded too good to be true, so I did a deep dive into the science of saunas. Tune in to find out what I uncovered. * * * * * Today’s Health Headline is: Our decisions — determine our destiny. A remarkable study published in Nature Medicine in 2025 — challenges one of the most fatalistic assumptions in medicine: that our genes…

For today’s episode, I’m sharing an interview I had with the dynamic and inspiring Sarah Rusbatch on her podcast Stronger Bolder Wiser. Sarah is an accredited Grey Area Drinking Coach and the author of the best-selling book Beyond Booze — How to create a life you love, alcohol-free. Sarah and I immediately clicked because her approach to alcohol is the same as my approach to healthy eating in my book NeuroSlimming. Sarah’s philosophy is that ‘the goal isn’t to be sober; the goal is to love yourself so much, you don’t need a drink.’ I feel exactly the same way about food: the goal isn’t to quit ultraprocessed food; the goal is to love yourself so much, you don’t need to numb your emotions with food. Sarah is also a multi award-winning Health and Wellbeing Coach, a Menopause Accredited Coach, and a passionate ambassador for helping women live their best lives. Most importantly, Sarah lives everything she speaks, and she glows from the inside out. So although the interview doesn’t technically follow my usual…

Today’s Brain Booster is: Appreciate to elevate your thinking, and recognise that gratitude is more than a platitude. It’s really unfortunate that in today’s hashtag world, the notion of practising gratitude, and appreciating our blessings, has become hackneyed and superficial. Yet behind the cliches, appreciation and gratitude boost our brain in profound and distinct ways. So today’s episode will be a fascinating exploration of the difference between appreciation and gratitude, and how they can help us build a better brain. We live in a world that constantly trains our attention toward what’s wrong. Turn on the news — conflict. Scroll social media — it’s easy to jump to negative comparisons. Check your inbox — problems to solve. Without realising it, our brain becomes exquisitely skilled at spotting flaws, threats and mistakes. From an evolutionary perspective, this is a survival feature. Our ancestors did not survive by admiring sunsets; they survived by spotting snakes. So our brain is wired to scan for…

Today’s Brain Booster is: Purge yourself of plastic! Why? And what do I mean by that? Plastics have become ubiquitous in modern life. Over time, larger plastic items degrade into smaller particles — micro and nanoplastics (MNPs) — and these MNPs can infiltrate air, water, soil, food chains, and ultimately the human body. While the environmental impacts of microplastics are well-documented, human health consequences are only just beginning to be understood. A 2024 study at the University of New Mexico found triple the amount of MNPs in the brains of people with dementia compared to the brains of people without. At this stage, we don’t know if the plastics caused the dementia, or if a person with dementia has an impaired blood brain barrier, which makes their brain more likely to absorb plastics after they already have the disease. Either way, my suspicion is that plastics in the brain are not a good thing. We can’t escape plastics entering our bodies altogether, but we can try to minimise our exposure in…

Today’s Brain Booster is: Train your brain to reframe. Have you ever put your foot in it and unintentionally offended someone? Or received notification that your job interview was unsuccessful? Before you know it, your mood has plummeted. Even though physically nothing has happened to you, your heart rate and blood pressure rise, your muscles tighten, and you start replaying the event in your mind. Why couldn’t I just have kept my mouth shut? Now that person’s going to hate me. I’m hopeless at interviews. I’m never going to get a job. But all of that is just my interpretation. The person I unintentionally offended might have forgotten about the incident, or not been as offended as I thought. And the job might have had hundreds of applicants and I did well to get to the interview stage. So it’s not the event that’s inherently mood-dampening; it’s what I’m telling myself about the event. It’s the meaning I attach to my experiences that determines their impact. And that’s where a powerful brain skill can come…

I’m not going to reveal today’s Brain Booster because at the start of the episode I give you a clue and ask you to guess what the Brain Booster might be. So let’s launch straight into today’s Health Headline: People are more powerful than pills. Study after study has shown that supportive relationships are the number one way to improve our health, happiness and longevity. And it took me a long time to get my head around that. Nurturing relationships in midlife are a greater predictor of good health as we age than cholesterol level and obesity. Stop and think about that. We’re obsessed with losing weight and keeping our cholesterol down, yet we’d improve our health and longevity to a greater extent if we improved the quality and quantity of our relationships. That’s mind-blowing. All those years in medical school I spent learning about blood tests and medications and surgical procedures — and it turns out the best medical advice I can give you is to spend more quality time with the people you love. If you…

Today’s Brain Booster is: Skip the sugary sip — because every soft drink is a bullet to your brain! A landmark study found that people who regularly consumed sugary drinks — including soft drinks, energy drinks, sports drinks, sweetened tea and fruit juices — had smaller brain volumes and scored worse in tests of recent memory. A large review of US adults aged 60 years and older showed that increased consumption of the above-listed beverages was significantly linked to worsening cognitive function. And an investigation of more than 177 000 UK residents who were followed for an average of nine and a half years revealed that those who drank two or more soft drinks a day had a significantly higher risk of developing dementia — whether or not they carried genes that increased their risk of Alzheimer’s. In other words, having good genes does not protect you from dementia if you drink sugary drinks. So the message is clear: the more you drink, the more you shrink your brain and its ability to function. But how do…

Today’s Health Headline is: Sitting is the new smoking — literally! I know we usually start with a Brain Booster but for today’s Brain Booster to make sense we have to dive into the Health Headline first. Now I suspect this is not the first time you’ve heard the statement that sitting is the new smoking. But have you stopped to reflect on what it actually means? Or do you think it doesn’t apply to you because you go to the gym every day? Imagine you own a smooth-running car with a powerful engine, beautifully polished body, and not a scratch on its shiny coat. And every morning you take it on a short spin around the block. But for the rest of the day, the car just sits in your garage. Day after day. Eventually, what happens? The tyres develop flat spots, the battery weakens, and parts begin to seize — not because it wasn’t driven at all, but because it wasn’t driven enough. It sat around in the garage for too many hours a day. Our bodies work like that car. How many hours did you spend sitting yesterday — in…

Welcome to my podcast, ‘Healing with Dr Helena’, where I challenge the limiting way we currently view disease, and offer a new paradigm for vibrant health and true healing. If modern medicine isn’t providing you with enough answers, and you want to come alive and thrive, rather than merely survive, this podcast is for you. It’s also for people who want to boost their brain to perform at their peak, avoid Alzheimer’s and other dementias, and live longer, stronger, healthier and happier. Each episode comprises four parts: A Brain Booster A Health Headline An Exploration of What’s Missing from Modern Medicine A Whether Report where I answer your whether questions eg ‘I’d like to know whether you can explain how …’ Here’s a glimpse of episode 4. Today’s Brain Booster is: a laugh a day keeps dementia at bay! Welcome to the science of gelotology — the study of laughter and its physical and psychological effects. Why is it called gelotology? Because it comes from the Greek ‘gelos' meaning laughter. And it turns out…

Welcome to my podcast, ‘Healing with Dr Helena’, where I challenge the limiting way we currently view disease, and offer a new paradigm for vibrant health and true healing. If modern medicine isn’t providing you with enough answers, and you want to come alive and thrive, rather than merely survive, this podcast is for you. It’s also for people who want to boost their brain to perform at their peak, avoid Alzheimer’s and other dementias, and live longer, stronger, healthier and happier. Each episode comprises four parts: A Brain Booster A Health Headline An Exploration of What’s Missing from Modern Medicine A Whether Report where I answer your whether questions eg ‘I’d like to know whether you can explain how …’ So here’s a snapshot of episode 3. Today’s Brain Booster is to get a Can Do Jar instead of a candy jar. Get a large glass or ceramic jar and label it ‘Can Do Jar’. From now on, whenever you, or anyone in your household, says the word ‘can’t’, they’ll have to put a gold coin in the jar. When the jar…

Welcome to my podcast, ‘Healing with Dr Helena’, where I challenge the limiting way we currently view disease, and offer a new paradigm for vibrant health and true healing. If modern medicine isn’t providing you with enough answers, and you want to come alive and thrive, rather than merely survive, this podcast is for you. Today’s Brain Booster is to recognise that every choice you make impacts your brain. Everything you do, everything you think, everything you believe, and everything you feel, influences the health and functioning of your brain. Your brain is, in fact, changing right now. As you read these words, as you reflect on what they mean, as you fidget in your chair, tiny connections in your brain are forming, strengthening, or fading away. Your brain is not a predetermined, established, unalterable machine. It’s a living, transforming, adapting organ that rewires itself in response to everything you experience. This remarkable ability of our brain to change is known as neuroplasticity. Today’s…

Think about this for a moment: modern medicine has made the most staggering advances. We’ve mapped the entire human genome. We’ve synthesised hormones. We’ve implanted embryos, and we’ve transplanted hearts, lungs, livers, kidneys and pancreases. Yet we’re getting sicker, more tired and more depressed by the day. And we’re getting sicker at a younger and younger age. And it’s not just one disease that’s on the rise, it’s all non-infectious diseases: allergies, autism, autoimmune diseases, arthritis, cancer, diabetes, depression, anxiety, food intolerances … the list goes on. It doesn’t make sense, that in this age of technological marvels, we aren’t making a dent in defying disease. Modern medicine is obviously missing something. That’s why I’ve started my podcast: Healing with Dr Helena. Each episode begins with a Brain Booster (BB). And your first BB is: start with a reason, not a routine. In other words, what’s a compelling reason for you to become proactive about your brain health? And what do I mean by…

HEALING with Dr Helena