Can You Actually Rewire Your Brain And Does The Torah Think So Too?

On sound vibrations, neuroplasticity, and what “think good and it will be good” really means.

A few weeks ago, I downloaded an app called Endel. A friend mentioned it and I was skeptical at first. It is basically sound vibrations, ambient tones that shift depending on what you need: sleep, focus, morning energy. No words, no guided meditation telling you to breathe deeply. Just sound.

I gave it a shot anyway.

I started using it at night and am sleeping deeper now than I have in years. Real, deep sleep. I wake up and I actually feel like I slept. In the morning, I do 15 minutes of what they call a wake-up soundscape before I look at my phone, before I talk to anyone. Pure vibration, zero talking. And I walk away from those 15 minutes feeling genuinely energized and ready. Not coffee-ready: really ready. When I need to focus on my work, I turn it on and I enter an almost effortless concentration where the hours disappear. I have no idea exactly how it works on a technical level, but the science behind it is real. Endel is backed by peer-reviewed research on how sound frequency affects the nervous system and brainwave states. The brain responds to sound in ways that we’re only beginning to understand.

Which got me thinking about something bigger. If sound alone can shift my brain state so dramatically and consistently, how malleable is the brain really? Can we actually rewire it, not just in the moment, but in lasting, permanent ways? Can a person genuinely change who they are at the level of the mind?

I was talking to my daughter over Shavuos and we got into a conversation about manifestation. It is one of those words that has been so overused that it has almost lost all meaning. You see it everywhere. On Instagram, in self-help books, on coffee mugs. Manifest your dreams. Manifest abundance. Manifest your best life. Okay, but what does that actually mean and does it actually work?

My daughter said something profound that I kept turning over in my mind for days after. She said the real idea behind manifestation is not about sitting on your couch and visualizing a check arriving in the mail. It’s about rewiring your brain to genuinely believe that good things are possible for you, until that belief changes how you show up in the world, make decisions, and how you move through the world.

When you actually believe something on a deep level, it changes your behavior, and changed behavior produces changed outcomes.

It is not magic. It is not bypassing effort. It is changing our operating system.

“It’s about rewiring your brain to genuinely believe that good things are possible for you, until that belief changes how you show up in the world.”

That is a very different thing than what most people mean when they throw the word manifestation around. That is neuroscience. Researchers call it neuroplasticity, which is the brain’s ability to form new neural pathways based on repeated thought patterns, behaviors, and experiences. The brain you have today is not the brain you are permanently stuck with. The thoughts you think most often literally carve grooves in your neural wiring. Think a thought enough times and the brain will begin to automate it. It becomes your default, your unconscious operating mode. The good news is this works in both directions. You can carve new grooves. You can build new defaults. The brain is not a fixed organ. It is a living, changeable record of everything you have practiced thinking.

So where does the Torah fit into all of this? Because I think it fits in more deeply than most people realize.

There is a famous saying of the Lubavitcher Rebbe: Tracht gut, vet zein gut. Think good and it will be good. Most people hear that as a kind of spiritual encouragement: Be optimistic. Have bitachon. Trust that Hashem is running the world. And yes, it is all of that. But I think there is a layer underneath that we often miss.

What if thinking good is not just a passive hope or a one-time mindset shift? What if it is an active, ongoing practice of literally reshaping the mind? What if the Rebbe was describing, in six Yiddish words, exactly what neuroscientists now spend entire careers and research budgets studying? The idea that the quality of your consistent thoughts determines the quality of your life is not a modern wellness concept, it is ancient, woven through the entire fabric of Torah.

The Torah has always understood that the mind is not fixed. We are commanded to do teshuvah, to return, to change, to become someone genuinely new. Not just to feel bad about the past and move on. To actually become a different person. The concept of chazarah b’teshuvah assumes that deep, real transformation of who we are is not only possible, but expected. Hashem does not command the impossible. If we are commanded to change, then change is possible. The brain can be rewired. The self can be rebuilt.

And in a way, that is what the entire Jewish calendar is doing. Shabbos every week pulls you out of one brain state and into another. The yamim tovim each carry a specific energy and practice designed to shift something internal. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are essentially the most intense neuroplasticity exercise of the year. We are spending days repeating out loud who we want to become, asking to be written into a different story, rehearsing new patterns of thought and behavior. The liturgy does not just describe change. It produces it.

I want to tell you about a client I worked with. I will call her Sarah. I’ve been sitting with her story a lot as I think through all of this.

Sarah came to me about a year and a half ago. From the outside she had everything together. Beautiful family, good marriage, involved in her community. She was the person everyone else leaned on. The one who showed up. The one who knew what to say. But in our very first session she told me something that has stayed with me. She said: “I genuinely do not know if I like myself. And I have felt that way for as long as I can remember.”

Not “I have low confidence.” Not “I struggle with imposter syndrome.” She did not even know if she liked herself. She had been living her entire adult life performing a version of herself that she thought other people needed, because the real version, she believed, was not enough. Not interesting enough. Not deep enough. Not worthy enough of taking up space.

She could not trace it back to one thing. It was not a single trauma. It was more like a slow accumulation. A mother who criticized more than she praised. A school environment where she was never quite the smartest or the prettiest or the most talented. Years of quietly absorbing the message that she was fine, just not exceptional. And at some point, her brain had taken all of that and written it into its code as fact. This is who you are. You are someone who does not quite measure up.

What made it so painful to work through was that Sarah was genuinely wonderful. Warm, perceptive, funny in a dry quiet way that would sneak up on you. But she could not receive any of it. When someone complimented her, she deflected immediately. When she did something well, she explained it away. Her brain was so committed to its original story that it filtered out any evidence that contradicted it.

We worked on this slowly and sometimes it felt almost unbearably slow. There were sessions where she would say “I just think this is who I am. I think some people are built this way and I am one of them.” And I would say to her: “You are not built this way. You have just practiced living this way. For a very long time. And we are going to practice something different.”

We did small things. We kept a running list of moments where she showed up as herself and it was enough, more than enough. We paid attention to the exact words her brain used against her and we interrupted them, not with toxic positivity, not with “you are amazing!” but with honest, specific, provable counter-evidence. We made it almost clinical at times because the emotional route was too easy for her brain to reject.

It took a long time. There was no single turning point. It was more like one day she came in and said something small about how she had spoken up at a Shabbos table the week before and instead of shrinking afterward, waiting to see if people had found her annoying, she had just let herself enjoy the conversation. She said: “I think I’m starting to believe I am allowed to be here.”

I am allowed to be here. That is what rewiring looks like. Not a transformation. Not a revelation. Just a quiet, hard-won permission to exist without apology.

I keep coming back to the simplicity of what my daughter said over Shavuos. That manifestation, at its core, is about changing what your brain believes is true about yourself and about what is available to you. And the Torah said it first. Think good and it will be good. Not think good and magically receive good. Think good, consistently, persistently as a practice, until your brain believes it, until it changes how you walk into a room, how you respond to a compliment, how you talk to yourself at two in the morning when nobody else is listening. Until it becomes who you are.

The brain is not your destiny; it is your starting point.

And if a sound app can move the needle in two weeks, imagine what you can do with your mind if you actually committed to it. n

Tamara Gestetner, LMFT, is a psychotherapist and certified mediator based in Cedarhurst who helps individuals and couples navigate relationships, career questions, and the challenges people face in everyday life. She is also the host of the podcast Talk2Tamara. Readers are welcome to submit questions or topics they would like addressed in future columns. Tamara can be reached at TamaraGestetner.com, [email protected], or 646-239-5686.