The Hidden Mechanism Behind Your Recurring Problems

What if I told you that the chronic pain you've been battling, the anxiety that won't quit, the relationship patterns that keep repeating—what if none of these were actually happening to you from the outside, but were being created by you, without your conscious awareness?

Before you roll your eyes and think I'm about to blame you for your suffering, let me share something that changed everything for me.

I used to wake up every morning with the same knot in my stomach. The same tension in my shoulders. The same dread about the day ahead, with the same exact worries about the future from the day before. For years, I thought this is just my life, a mess that I have to fix mechanically from the outside. To treat my conditions I tried the traditional doctors, chiropractors, diet, exercise routines and even a 14 day complete water fast. Still, I was treating the symptoms, assuming they were coming from somewhere outside of my own nervous system.

But what if the problem was elsewhere? What if my brain itself had become so good at predicting these experiences that it was literally creating them and perpetuating them, day after day, like a broken record player stuck on the same scratchy sound?

The Prediction Machine in Your Brain

Your brain doesn't passively wait for reality to happen to it. It actively constructs your reality, second by second, using what neuroscientists call “predictive coding”. Everything you experience—every sensation, emotion, even all experiences of pain, are essentially your brain's best guess about what should be happening next, based on what has happened before.

Dr. Andy Clark, one of the leading researchers in this field, puts it this way: "The brain is fundamentally a prediction machine, constantly generating hypotheses about the hidden causes of sensory inputs." Your brain has become an expert at predicting your familiar struggles in a self perpetuating loop.

I realized I wasn't experiencing chronic stress because stressful things kept happening to me. I was experiencing chronic stress because my brain had become incredibly skilled at predicting stress based on my past experiences. It was like having a smoke alarm that goes off every time you make toast—hypersensitive, overprotective, and creating the very emergency it was trying to prevent. This is what was causing my symptoms, depression, chronic pain, anxiety and OCD, all at the tender age of 18.

When Your Brain Becomes Your Prison

The research on this is both fascinating and heartbreaking. Studies show that certain personality traits—chronic worry, perfectionism, self-criticism—can literally condition your brain into what scientists call "central sensitization." Your danger alarm system becomes so sensitive that normal life experiences trigger the same neural patterns as past trauma.

You end up trapped in what researchers call an "unfortunate loop." You can eat perfectly, exercise religiously, have financial security—but if your brain is trained to predict problems, it will keep manufacturing them. Your prediction becomes your reality.

I watched this happen in my own life for years. The same arguments with my partner. The same career frustrations. The same physical symptoms. I kept thinking these were separate problems that needed separate solutions, when actually they were all expressions of the same predictive pattern my brain had learned to run. My brain was used to stress and catastrophe, so it projected it in every area of my life.

The philosopher Henri Bergson wrote over a century ago that "the present moment is the invisible progress of the past devouring the future." He was talking about memory, but he might as well have been describing predictive coding—constantly using past experiences to create future realities, often trapping us in cycles we don't even recognize.

But what if understanding this fundamental mechanism could set us free and give us control over our brain’s predictions?

The Fortunate Loop

Here's what I discovered: if your brain created these patterns through learning from the past, it can also uncreate them. The same neuroplasticity that got you stuck can get you unstuck. But it requires more than just positive thinking or willpower. It requires understanding how your particular prediction machine works and systematically retraining it with neuroscience.

I started paying attention to the moment-by-moment predictions my brain was making. "This conversation will go badly." "My life can’t change." "My back will hurt after sitting." Most of these predictions were so automatic I barely noticed them. They were the familiar known. Old patterns in my brain.

The breakthrough came when I realized I could catch these predictions in real-time and consciously generate new ones. Not fake positivity, but teaching the brain a new response to old patterns. Neuroplasticity occurs in real time when we interrupt old loops with awareness and curiosity, not force or aggression like in the military.

It sounds simple, almost too simple. But the results were profound. My brain slowly began generating different predictions, which created different experiences, which reinforced different predictions. The unfortunate loop became a fortunate one and surprisingly, my physical and emotional symptoms disappeared.

The Path Forward

This isn't about mind-over-matter or pretending your symptoms aren't real. They are completely real—they're just being generated by learned neural pathways that can be retrained out of old loops into new ones. The pain is real. The anxiety is real. The patterns are real, but so is your capacity to change them.

Most approaches to chronic conditions focus on managing symptoms or changing external circumstances. But what if the real leverage point is deeper—in the predictive mechanism of the brain itself?

Over the past months, I've been working with individuals who struggle with chronic pain to apply these insights systematically. We're not just talking about neuroplasticity in theory—we're using specific, practical methods to retrain the predictive patterns that create and maintain chronic pain and other symptoms.

The results have been remarkable. People who had been stuck in pain cycles for months—some for years—are experiencing genuine, lasting freedom from chronic pain. Not because we're treating their pain, but because we're retraining the predictions their brain makes about what will happen next.

If you've been struggling with chronic pain or symptoms related to a dysregulated nervous system and feel like you've tried everything, if you suspect there might be a neuroplastic component to your symptoms, I'm building a new program focused specifically on rewiring these predictive patterns.

This isn't a symptom management program. It's a deep dive into understanding and changing the neural mechanisms that create chronic conditions in the first place. It’s psychological, emotional and biological. We'll work together, in groups to identify your specific predictive patterns and systematically retrain them using cutting-edge neuroplasticity principles. The same tools that changed my life and got me symptom free.

If this resonates with you, I'd love to have you join the waitlist. I'll be sharing more details about the program structure, timing, and methodology in the coming weeks.

[Join the Waitlist Here]

More resources on predictive coding:

How predictive coding creates chronic pain

How the brain creates our conscious reality

Thank you for reading.

I hope this was insightful.

To your success & joy.

— Kimia

Neuroplasticity Practitioner & Educator