The Neuroscience of Access Bars: Delete Thoughts, Not Just Manage Them
The Neuroscience of Access Bars: Delete Thoughts, Not Just Manage Them
What if the way you've been dealing with stress, anxious thoughts, and emotional overload has only ever been half the solution? Most of us have been taught to manage our minds — to breathe through it, push past it, or reframe it. But the neuroscience of Access Bars points to something altogether more radical: the possibility of clearing that mental and emotional charge, rather than just managing it forever.
Every Thought You Have Changes Your Body
Neuroscientist and bestselling author Dr Daniel Amen has spent decades studying how mental patterns shape the physical brain. His central insight — that every thought you have impacts the cells in your body — is deceptively simple and quietly revolutionary. Thoughts aren't floating abstractions. They generate real, measurable electrical activity that ripples through your nervous system, your organs, and your cells.
When you understand that, it stops being surprising that so many people feel stuck. Carrying years of accumulated thoughts, emotional reactions, and deeply held beliefs isn't just mentally exhausting — it's something your whole body is holding too.
What the Neuroscience of Access Bars Actually Shows
This is where the neuroscience of Access Bars becomes genuinely exciting. In 2015, neuroscientist Dr Jeffrey Fannin - who has spent over fifteen years mapping and analysing the brain, and is founder of the Centre for Cognitive Enhancement, did an impromptu EEG brain scan on someone before and after a single Access Bars session at a conference in San Diego. He went in with no prior knowledge of Access Bars and no agenda other than scientific curiosity.
What he found stopped him in his tracks: brain regions that had been highly active before the session appeared significantly calmer afterwards.
Dr Fannin later expanded this into a wider study of sixty participants. The neuroscience of Access Bars produced a striking result: 85% of participants showed an increase in brain coherence following a session - comparable to the effects seen in advanced, long-term meditators, but produced immediately, after just one session.
You can watch Dr Fannin present his findings here: Review of Access Bars® by Neuroscientist Dr. Jeffrey L. Fannin — it's a fascinating ten minutes.
A New Book Taking the Science Even Further
The neuroscience of Access Bars is now being explored in even greater depth. Dr Juanjo Suárez's new book, The Neuroscience of Access Consciousness®, blends scientific research with personal experience to reveal what's truly possible within the human mind.
Through a clear and accessible exploration of the brain - its structures, functions, and interconnected systems - Dr Suárez explains how tools such as the mantra, questions, and the clearing statement influence neural pathways, helping you shift from survival mode into a state of internal coherence and greater awareness. The book also explores the connection between Access Bars and osteopathy, offering insight into the physical and energetic changes that can occur in the body after a session.
If you'd like to go deeper into the science, you can find the book at books.juanjosuarez.life.
From Managed to Actually Cleared
Here's why the neuroscience of Access Bars matters so much in practice. According to Dr Amen's research, years of stress and anxious thinking can hold your body in a sustained pattern of tension at a cellular level - some practitioners describe this as cells shifting from an elliptical, contracted shape associated with dis-ease to a more open, spherical shape associated with health and ease.
Most approaches to mental wellbeing ask you to manage the noise: meditate around it, reframe it, breathe through it. The neuroscience of Access Bars suggests a different possibility - that the electromagnetic build-up of thoughts, feelings, and beliefs stored in the brain can be released at the source.
That's what makes Access Bars so different! Delete thoughts, feelings, and emotions - rather than manage.
Who Tends to Notice the Difference
In my fourteen years of facilitating Access Bars sessions, I've worked with people carrying all kinds of mental and emotional weight - racing thoughts, low mood, irritability, obsessive worry, and that bone-deep exhaustion that comes from holding it all together. Many find that the neuroscience of Access Bars translates into something they feel immediately: a sense of space, lightness, and calm that's genuinely difficult to access through willpower alone.
It isn't a replacement for professional mental health care where that's needed, but as a complement to it, or simply as a regular reset for an overloaded mind, the neuroscience of Access Bars offers something quietly remarkable.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Neuroscience of Access Bars
Ready to Experience It?
If you're near East Croydon and curious what your brain - and your body - might feel like with a little less to carry, I'd love to welcome you for a session at Access Joyful Body.
What if the most radical thing you can do is simply let it go? What else is possible?
Written by Jayne Micallef
Jayne is a certified Access Consciousness CFMW and Access Bars Facilitator based in East Croydon, London. She has been facilitating Access Bars sessions and practitioner training across the UK since 2012. Learn more about Jayne