Honest review of the Gupta Program for long covid recovery

On this site, I review the strategies that helped me recover from long covid and chronic fatigue syndrome. See all long covid recovery posts.

This is for information purposes only and nothing I share should be considered medical advice. What works for me may or may not work for you. Please do your own research and consult with your own trusted medical professionals.

This site may contain affiliate links. If you buy something I may earn a small commission at no cost to you. 

What is brain retraining?

Brain retraining is using the power of your mind to change how you think about your symptoms and then move toward healing. The most popular programs are the Gupta Program, DNRS and ANS Rewire.

Brain retraining starts with noticing symptom-thoughts and worries, such as:

• I will never get better.
• I am worried if I wash my hair/go for a walk/make dinner, I will be even more tired later.
• My heart is beating is so fast right now. I am worried I am really sick even though I’ve had everything checked out by my doctor and she says I am OK.

Once you notice them, you interrupt the thoughts. In the Gupta Program, you replace the thought with feelings of love and safety. You then reassure the part of you that’s worrying about this. And then you visualize a time when you were healthy and happy.

This video is one of the best FREE explanations of brain retraining I’ve found, though not Gupta-specific.

There are other CFS recovery programs that focus on somatic experiencing, pacing and more. I recommend checking out the CFS Recovery Programs Guide by Lindsay Vine if you want to explore what type of program that best suits you right now, which may or may not be brain training.

Why I chose the Gupta program

I chose the Gupta Program because I liked it best of the brain retraining programs that had free trials. I loved that it incorporated breathwork and meditation. I also appreciated that the founder Ashok Gupta acknowledged many of us have trauma and included ways of gently working with it in the program.

The Gupta Program is the only brain retraining program with published randomized clinical trials demonstrating that it is effective. Their team is constantly doing more research and changing the program as more things are discovered. This was important to me at the time I signed up.

More than anything, I liked listening to Ashok. He teaches all the lessons so I have listened to him for hours and hours. I found him to be kind, caring and genuine. One of his sayings is “Do your best and leave the rest.” I loved that he wants you to do things at your own pace and in your own way.

What I loved about the Gupta Program

The core aspects of most brain retraining are based on Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and will be similar in most brain training programs. This includes doing “rounds” every morning where you work on worry thoughts and practice interrupting them using the program’s routine, as I described above. You will also do rounds during the day to interrupt thoughts as they happen. There is also a tool called the Accelerator that is a modified version of this round that helps you bring down the intensity on stuck thoughts, like “I will never get better.”

I honestly never loved rounds. It’s super repetitive by design and takes a lot of effort to make it interesting. But I did it with as much enthusiasm as I could muster, and it worked on me up to a point.

My favourite part of the Gupta Program is parts work, which was borrowed from Internal Family Systems therapy. Parts work says you have different parts inside of you. For example, part of you wants a second slice of chocolate cake and part of you thinks you better not.

In a chronic illness scenario, part of you may really need to rest right now. But part of you learned that you need to stay busy and keep achieving to feel loved and safe. So that Achiever part of you may push you to keep going when you really need a break. Common parts include the Achiever, Perfectionist, People Pleaser, Victim, Safety Seeker, Protector, Inner Child and more.

Just realizing the conflicting parts of you are there is not enough. You need to learn how to listen to your parts and eventually reassure them. These parts were created during traumatic or very stressful times in your life. But you don’t need to engage with traumatic memories to work with them. Instead you deal with how your parts impact you today.

Parts work totally changed my life. I now see a trauma therapist and we do parts work together along with EMDR. She was very impressed with how the Gupta program lets me continue doing some of our work in between sessions.

What didn’t work for me

I was doing the Gupta Program for six months when I just hit a wall. I just really didn’t want to do the program anymore. I also had my first big crash since getting sick and the Gupta Program wasn’t getting me out of it. Ashok’s advice is that this is normal and keep going, which I did for a while. But then through talking it over with my counselor I realized I needed a break.

On a whim, I tried the Curable app and noticed big improvements very quickly. This turned me on to more somatic approaches of healing where you learn to feel and respond to sensations and emotions in your body.

Ashok is doing his best to pivot the Gupta Program to include somatic healing approaches as they are showing a lot of promise right now. They released a new daily somatic tracking exercise that’s very good. There is also an hour of live “Guptacize” programming every day, where Gupta coaches take you through a meditation and rounds of brain retraining. Some of the coaches focus solely on somatic approaches, sometimes doing things outside of the core program.

My results

When I first started the Gupta Program, my anxiety was 11 out of 10. I was just vibrating with anxiety more than I ever had in my life. After the program, my anxiety is basically non-existent.

I also healed from many of my more debilitating physical symptoms while I was doing the Gupta Program including shortness of breath, fast heart rate, dizziness and many of my vision problems.

When I started the program I was housebound and spent 95% of my day in bed, struggling to do basic self-care like showering and eating. When I stopped doing the program, I was able to leave my house and go somewhere close to home for an hour or two almost every day. I could read and use the computer a little bit. I could also walk 10-15 minutes on good days. Not healed, but way better.

I ended up using mind body and somatic approaches to carry me to the next phase of my recovery. But I am very much grateful for my time doing the program. It was what I needed during the early phase of my recovery.

I would recommend the Gupta Program to anyone who thinks brain retraining might help them.

💡If you sign up using my affiliate link, I may get a small commission at no additional cost to you. So please consider using my link if you want to check out the program.