(Guest) Blog Post #10: How I Healed My Neuroplastic Symptoms — and Why I Built Nervana to Help Others Do the Same
5 minute read
Nora Rodden, CEO & Co-founder of Nervana
If you’re reading this on Rachel Hollander’s blog, you’re probably already familiar with the mind-body connection and the role the nervous system plays in chronic symptoms. Still, I know how hard it can be to trust that this applies to you, or your unique symptoms, or your unique journey.
My name is Nora Rodden, and for years I lived in that exact place: stuck with chronic symptoms like pain, digestive issues and insomnia that disrupted my life.
Here’s my story, what I wish someone had told me on day one, and why it led me to create Nervana, a neuroscience-based app to help people retrain persistent symptoms when the body has structurally healed.
My Story: When My Symptoms Didn’t Add Up
My journey began my senior year at Cornell when I was hit by a car as a pedestrian heading to class (I was even in a crosswalk!) I was taken to a trauma center with a concussion and micro-fractures in my back. The injury eventually healed… but my pain didn’t.
Over the next five years, I tried everything:
Steroid injections
Physical therapy
Endless “alignment fixes”Even nerve ablation, burning off the nerves in my back
None of it worked. The pain was still there every morning I woke up. I would find temporary relief after certain creams or exercises (shoutout to my acupuncture mat that I loved), but nothing lasted.
Later, while working a high-stress job in New York City, I experienced constant bloating no matter what diet I tried. Once again, I sought the help of every specialist in the city, and tried every diet and supplement out there. Nothing worked.
Finally, while pursuing my MS in Biotech and MBA from Harvard, I was hit in the face with sudden sleep issues: the dreaded insomnia. It felt like a cruel game of whack-a-mole: fix one symptom and another would pop up.
I spent nights scrolling Reddit and YouTube, desperate for someone with my exact symptoms or diagnoses who had gotten better. I genuinely believed there was something deeply wrong with me that doctors just weren’t catching. Though I had received formal diagnoses for my back pain (stenosis) and my GI issues (SIBO), I wasn’t responding to traditional treatments.
And then, completely by accident, everything changed.
The Clinical Trial That Changed Everything
While at Harvard, I came across a clinical trial for chronic back pain through a poster on campus. Desperate, I applied immediately.
It turned out to be a mind-body trial grounded in emerging pain neuroscience, emotional processing, and nervous system regulation. I walked in very skeptical, especially given my biotech training. For a few weeks, I learned how the brain and nervous system create, amplify, and sustain symptoms, long after the body has healed.
It was the first time someone explained to me:
Why symptoms persist despite normal tests
How fear and hypervigilance keep the nervous system stuck in “fight or flight”
Why perfectionists, caretakers, and high-achievers are more susceptible
How the brain’s predictive pathways can be retrained through simple exercises like journaling to uncover hidden stressors
Why when I feel “not stressed” I can still be stressed inside
Within weeks, something started to shift. The persistent pain in my back softened. My GI symptoms improved. My sleep came back. And ultimately, my symptoms resolved. It wasn’t an all-at-once transformation. It was gradual, but after a few weeks, I simply stopped obsessing over my symptoms or my symptom recovery. I stopped identifying with my symptoms once I learned that they were all related, all tied to the same root cause: my hypervigilant self (whether because of natural personality patterns or because of my car accident or other traumas in my life) was causing my body to tense and brace, perpetuating my symptoms no matter what I tried.
I remember thinking:
“Why did it take me five years, a dozen specialists, thousands of dollars, and a clinical trial to learn something that should be standard care?”
That question became the seed for Nervana.
Why We Built Nervana
After the trial, I went back into biotech, working in strategy and operations. But I couldn’t stop thinking about people like me: people still stuck cycling through treatments, feeling broken, scared, and alone.
I wanted to build the thing I desperately needed during those five years: A structured, compassionate, science-backed program that teaches people exactly how to retrain their symptoms, outside of a clinical trial setting, which lacks access and scale. I wanted to let the whole world know that sometimes, your missing link to recovery is not another medication, diet, or medical rabbit hole, it’s simply slowing down and understanding what your body is trying to tell you.
After meeting my co-founder Miles, an engineer and repeat founder with his own chronic symptom journey, we built Nervana together.
Nervana is a neuroscience-based mobile app designed to retrain the brain-body alarm system that keeps symptoms alive.
It brings together what helped me recover:
1. Science-Based Education
Short lessons that explain neuroplastic symptoms in clear, grounded language, without overwhelming people.
2. An AI Nervana Coach
5-minute voice sessions with your Nervana AI coach to help you practice nervous system skills, work through fear, and integrate emotional awareness.
3. Regulation Practices
Somatic tracking, breathwork, emotional processing (EAET principles), and awareness skills, all sequenced intentionally.
4. Journaling Prompts
Because so much healing is recognizing the unprocessed, underlying emotions we live with.
5. Empowering Symptom Trends
Not to obsessively track symptoms, but to help people notice the “tells” that point toward neuroplasticity. We also allow users to export a PDF of their insights to their medical team to encourage holistic care.
There isn’t one single magic technique in Nervana, and we certainly don’t think you can just think certain thoughts and poof, your symptoms disappear. But we provide consistent, bite-sized retraining that helps the nervous system feel safe again.
How Are We Different?
Nervana is more than an education app, it’s a full nervous-system retraining program powered by a conversational AI coach that goes far beyond a chatbot. Your coach learns your patterns over time, helping you uncover insights, apply the tools to your real life, and build daily neuroplastic habits, while also giving healthcare providers a structured, evidence-informed adjunct they can confidently integrate into care.
Inside the Nervana App
A few notes on our design choices:
We intentionally kept sessions to ~15 minutes to avoid cognitive overload.
The Nervana Coach uses short voice conversations to reinforce safety because repetition is what rewires neural pathways. It also includes medical guardrails for AI safety.
The program is structured so users don’t wonder “What do I do next?”, the next step is always clear.
Our goal is simple: Make nervous system retraining accessible, affordable, and science-based for anyone who has tried everything under the sun (our logo!) for their chronic symptoms.
We just launched in the App Store! Download “Nervana: Chronic Symptom Coach” here. Use the code “HOLLANDER50” for $50 off.
You can follow Nervana here:
📱 TikTok: @trynervana
📸 Instagram: @trynervana
🌐 Nora’s Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/norarabah/
If Nervana can help even a fraction of the people who were once in my shoes, then building it will have been the most meaningful thing I’ve ever done.
