Review of The Gupta Program For Chronic Health Conditions

I first came across The Gupta Program (affiliate link) a little over ten years ago when I had been ill with a mysterious flu-like illness that left me severely fatigued for years. I bought the program and started this blog to track my progress. At the time, the program was delivered on DVDs. Last year Ashok and his team released an updated version delivered online and agreed to give me access so I could review it. I’m an affiliate so I earn a commission if you buy the program by following any of the links on this blog but I’m going to be as objective as I can in this review.

The Amygdala Hypothesis

Ashok Gupta’s hypothesis is that chronic health conditions such as ME/CFS, Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, Electromagnetic Sensitivity, Depression and Anxiety can be caused by the brain and body getting stuck a feedback loop where bodily symptoms are perceived by the brain as an ongoing threat. This activates the brain and body’s fight-or-flight response, triggering the sympathetic nervous system and immune system, leading to more symptoms.

Once stuck in this state, the body is unable to fully rest because the parasympathetic nervous system responsible for our rest-and-digest response is deactivated. Stuck in a perpetual state of hypervigilance, our body becomes permanently exhausted as we experience the wide array of symptoms associated with these chronic conditions. The illness then lingers long after the initial trigger has passed.

In this hypothesis, the solution to resolving these conditions is to use techniques that utilise neural plasticity to retrain the brain to deactivate the threat response so that the body can heal itself. Teaching you how to do this is the primary aim of The Gupta Program.

Overview Of The Program

The Gupta Program (affiliate link) is an online self-guided mindfulness-based stress reduction program incorporating Neuro-Linguistic Programming techniques, aimed at calming the sympathetic nervous system to help heal chronic health conditions like ME/CFS.

Core of the program is the Stop-Stop-Stop technique: a thought-breaking technique incorporating physical movement, visual imagery, and positive distractions. It is intended to retrain your unconscious mind to break the self-perpetuating stress response that he believes keeps the conditions active. The technique is performed on a floor map on which you physically move around while breaking any negative thoughts associated with the condition or it’s symptoms, to retrain unconscious triggers that keep our brain in a state of constant threat. The body should then heal itself with a little assistance from the other elements of the program such as sleep, diet and meditation.

Meditation is a significant component of the program, intended to calm the nervous system so that the body can heal itself. There are 30 meditations included in the program and Ashok recommends at least 20 minutes of meditation each morning and evening with the morning meditation intended to be part of an “hour of power”. The program has a big emphasis on mindfulness, pacing effectively, and addressing personality traits that can make recovery challenging.

I’ve studied Life Coaching and NLP pretty extensively before becoming ill and during my recovery, and I notice a lot of similar themes in this program. The personality parts exercises for instance are straight out of NLP. Ashok isn’t a doctor, but he has studied stress management extensively and has recovered from ME/CFS himself. I have no doubt that he is sincere and there are many people in the private Facebook group who attribute their recovery to the program. One of the recurring themes in the program is letting go of perfectionism: “Do your best, leave the rest”, says Ashok.

This is a very professionally produced program which clearly draws on Ashok’s work with his client, coaches, and the earlier edition. The videos have been completely reshot since the older DVD version and are now set in the calming backdrop of the Swiss Alps rather than Ashok’s office.

The Gupta Program offers Health & Happiness. But does it deliver?

What You Get

The program is delivered via an easy-to-navigate membership site containing a series of 15 video sessions, each of which lasts up to an hour and can be watched at your own pace. The first 3 sessions explaining the basis of the program are available online for free.

You also get access to 30 meditations and audio exercises, a large floor-map, a 250 page manual containing the full transcripts of all the videos and numerous exercise worksheets, and access to a private Facebook group with other “retrainers” and recovered coaches.

Once a member of the program, you can also purchase a series of webinars and/or 1-on-1 coaching from coaches trained by Ashok.

Here is a list of the contents of the program:

Course Sessions

1. How To Use This Program
2. Introduction To Meditation
3. Explanation Of The Condition
4. Getting Ready To Retrain the Brain
5. The Main 7-Step Brain Retraining Technique
6. The 7 Main Attitudes For Success
7. Relaxing The Nervous System: Pacing, Diet, Sleep & Nature
8. The Gupta Program Accelerator Technique
9. Mindfulness & Pacing
10. Re-engaging With Joy & Summary Of The Tools
11. Retraining Our Parts For Self-Love
12. Retraining Our Protector Parts
13. Integration Of Parts For Health & Happiness
14. Handling People And Situations: The New Groove Technique
15. Getting Back Into Normal Life for Health And Happiness

Meditations

1. Introductory Meditation
2. Soften and Flow Meditation
3. Body Meditation
4. Peace Meditation
5. Contentment Meditation
6. Compassion Meditation
7. Music-Free Meditation
8. Surrender Meditation
9. Waves Of Healing Meditation
10. Getting Back To Sleep Meditation

Audio Exercises

1. Worried Part Technique
2. Instructions For 5 Visualisations
3. 5 Visualisations Exercise
4. The Full 7-Step Stop-Stop-Stop Process
5. The Short Version
6. The Gupta Program Accelerator
7. Mindful Moment
8. The New Groove Technique
9. Who Do I Choose To Be?
10. Inner Child Strengthener

Personality Parts Exercises

1. Retraining The Achiever
2. Retraining The Helper
3. Retraining The Approval Seeker
4. Retraining The Safety Seeker
5. Retraining The Inner Critic
6. Retraining The Protector #1
7. Retraining The Protector #2
8. Integration Of Parts Exercise

What I Didn’t Like

Here are some things I didn’t like about the program:

• The audio player for the meditations is way too small on my iPhone 5s to allow effective fast-forward and rewind, which I found necessary because the meditations would often drop out midway and I’d need to restart them. You can purchase the meditations as MP3 downloads which would make them more flexible, but that costs an extra A$67.
• I often needed to reload the page with the meditations on them in order to play a second one, and this often took several minutes or would just hang; which is frustrating when I’m eager to play a meditation to calm my nervous system.
• The program is available on a subscription basis, meaning that if you want to use it for more than a year, it will cost you $50 extra each year. Mind you, that’s pretty cheap.
• The videos for Session 15 still aren’t available, although you do have the script in the physical manual.
• Several videos prior to Session 7, which introduces pacing, mention it without explaining what pacing is, as if the order of the sessions was changed after they were scripted, shot or edited. This is a minor quibble though since if you’ve had ME/CFS for any length of time you’ve probably already come across the idea of pacing, and it’s fairly obvious from the name what it means.

Does It Work?

Of course, the question you really want the answer to if you’re reading this is:

Will it work for me?

I can’t answer that because I don’t know what is really wrong with you. I don’t even know if Ashok’s Amygdala Hypothesis is correct; but I’ve studied a lot of material on how to recover from ME/CFS and the contents of this program is consistent with most of what I’ve read about giving your body the best possible chance to heal itself.

I’m a bit sceptical of the whole Stop-Stop-Stop business really retraining our unconscious mind, but maybe it really does work and at least it gets you moving. The Parts Exercises could well help heal emotional trauma that you haven’t previously identified which could also activate your fight-or-flight response.

Concepts like mindfulness and meditation have been around as healing modalities for a long time and have been proven to reduce sympathetic nervous system activation. It’s reasonable to believe that if this really is your problem, this program will address it as well as anything else I’ve come across.

In 2018 the UK Advertising Standards Association upheld a complaint that the website for the program claimed it could treat Fibromyalgia, CFS/ME and Electrical Sensitivites but did not consider the evidence provided was sufficient. The UK ME association welcomed the finding; which is weird considering that some people attribute their recovery to this program. I would have thought an association supposedly dedicated to the wellbeing of its members would want to fully investigate anything that appeared to improve their health. The evidence provided by Ashok did show that people had recovered or improved on the program; just not to the ASA’s satisfaction.

CFS/ME associations around the world have a history of dismissing treatments based on mindfulness based stress reduction and autonomic nervous system desensitisation even though they clearly work for some individuals, while simultaneously bemoaning the efficacy of conventional medical treatments. We live in crazy times when Ashok can’t claim to improve people’s health despite the widely accepted link between chronic stress and physical illness; yet the controversial findings of the PACE trial are taken as gospel by the medical community. The Gupta Program’s claims seem decidedly benign in comparison.

I believe that the reason my first attempt at The Gupta Program 10 years ago wasn’t successful was because I had undiagnosed obstructive sleep apnea. Ashok recommends we stop searching for other causes of and treatments for our illness, because the never-ending search for answers is driven by the same anxiety that keeps our body in a state of hypervigilance. This may be good advice for some people, but it was terrible advice for me. If I hadn’t continued to pursue conventional medical diagnostics, I wouldn’t have discovered that I had severe obstructive sleep apnea, and would probably be way more ill than I am now. No amount of meditation or brain retraining is going to undo the physical constriction of my airway which prevents me getting into the deep restful state of sleep that my body needs to regenerate.

In my experience, being chronically deep-sleep-deprived can lead to the same bewildering array of symptoms as ME/CFS. I’m now using CPAP every night to alleviate my sleep apnea symptoms, along with The Gupta Program materials to deal with my remaining daytime fatigue and flu-like symptoms. I seem to be gradually recovering, but it’s taking a long time. Maybe my years of untreated sleep apnea eventually brought on ME/CFS, or perhaps they just share the same symptoms when the body is totally run down because it is never really at rest.

Given my experience, I would recommend that you ruled out all possible medical conditions before trying this program; especially ones that many doctors are unlikely to recognise based on presenting symptoms, such as obstructive sleep apnea. That means having a sleep study if you haven’t already. I regret not doing this earlier myself as it extended my suffering by a solid decade. I’d also recommend visiting a doctor who specialises in ME/CFS to make sure there isn’t something else wrong.

If you’ve covered those bases and still haven’t recovered, The Gupta Program may work for you if the stress of being ill is a factor in perpetuating your illness. It’s an absolute bargain compared to the cost of conventional medical treatment and has a money back guarantee. I see very little chance that anything in this program could make you any worse, so you have very little to lose. Just make certain you don’t have obstructive sleep apnea first!

Save $50 On The Purchase Price

I’ve been a long time affiliate, which means that if you buy the program by clicking on one of the links on this site, I get a commission. It also means I can offer you a discount code that will save you $50 when you buy the program.

To get the discount, click here to visit The Gupta Program site (affiliate link) and enter the following code in the Discount Code box when you purchase it:

CFSSURVIVOR