Brain Chemistry Chronicles: The Power of Ruby Slippers and Magic Words

Saturday, November 24, 2012

The Power of Ruby Slippers and Magic Words

So, you're the owner of a hyperalert brain that gets alarmed at the slightest provocation and sends life-or-death signals that must be responded to immediately to avoid psychic pain. Your fight-or-flight response to that alarm causes problems in your life in many ways, not the least of which is the effect is has on the people around you who witness it.

But part of the difficulty of avoiding psychic pain is that the person experiencing the false alarm and responding to it doesn't realize that the bad feeling is coming from his brain. He thinks himself fully justified in being angry or sad or anxious or lethargic because he has come up with reasons for his feeling state that make perfect sense to him. That they don't make sense to others doesn't matter to him. He may tell himself that his friends or family or coworkers just don't understand, or that they are jealous and seek to sabotage him. It doesn't occur to him that he is getting upset about something minor or easily tolerated or quickly remedied, and if some brave person points it out to him, he indignantly insists his complaint is legitimate and his so-called "friend" should support him in his beliefs.

A friend who wants to support him, though, often doesn't fare any better. She may get trapped into what would seem a rational strategy of offering suggestions for how the person could fix the problem. These suggestions are usually rejected, one by one, until the helpful friend gives up in exasperation. The offered solutions are rejected ostensibly because they are bad solutions, but in reality, the problem is not what the hyperalert person has presented it to be; the problem is his brain chemistry. The friend's suggested remedies will not help the real problem. The sufferer probably realizes the truth on some unconscious level, so he avoids solving the imagined problem to avoid facing the probability that even if he finds a solution, he will still feel bad.

And that's what usually happens. A problem solved may be followed by momentary relief, but then the bad feeling returns and another, equally intractable problem is identified that must be solved in order for the hyperalert person to feel good again. And so the cycle continues, sometimes for a whole lifetime.

How can this be avoided? Well, the first step is to acknowledge the brain's role in producing the bad feeling. That's not easy. People often are heavily invested in their rationale for why they are unhappy. Acknowledging the brain's role means acknowledging that your unhappiness is all in your mind. When you've spent a lifetime blaming everything and everyone outside yourself for your misery, you're not eager to accept that you can stop being miserable whenever you want. And perhaps even more difficult to accept is knowing that you had the power to change all along, that all those years of misery could have been avoided.

Once you see your brain chemistry as the culprit, the next step is perhaps harder to take: to make a different decision about what to do when the bad feeling strikes. The brain's alarm is powerful; the strength of the longstanding stimulus-response chains makes it hard to think and to resist. The sequence is firmly established, after all, so the organism doesn't have to think, just react, the way she should in a real life-or-death situation. But when it's not life-or-death, changing her response means going against powerful conditioning. It gets easier with time and practice, but there's always a chance that the automatic response mode will kick in when the hyperalert person least expects it, undoing perhaps months of "normal" behavior.

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About this blog . . .

I created this blog as a place to write about my day to day struggles with what I call bad brain chemistry. In discussing those struggles, I also share my theories about bad brain chemistry and how its effects can be mitigated.

I started this project about 20 years ago, when depression and other bad moods were making my life miserable. A man I met during that time (now my husband) convinced me that I had to change; a therapist who offered medication scared me into finding a way to change. The result was my theory of brain chemistry, which goes beyond merely labeling mood disorders as physical phenomena and finding medication to fix them. I seek to explain bad brain chemistry in a way that shows the disorder to be rational and naturally human, and dealing with it something that a human can do through rational thought.

As I go along with this blog, I'll talk more about this theory and how I think people who have this condition tend to deal with it.

You're welcome to join me!

My Theory of Bad Brain Chemistry, Part I

My theories are based on how my mind works, but I think that I'm not alone, that other people share this problem with brain chemistry that doesn't work well in the modern world. My idea is that the way my brain works was advantageous at some point in the history of humanity. People like me, hyperalert people, were useful to human society because they were extremely aware of their environment.

In a situation where people are in constant danger of being devoured by predators, or attacked by human enemies, those who are hyperalert make good scouts, good watchers, good guards. Also useful to people who must hunt for food every day in order to eat are those who are good at seeing animal prey, noticing and remembering their patterns, their behavior, their defenses, their smell. And those who know how to find edible plants or other important items such as reeds or flints or underground sources of water will also be valued by their group.

Unfortunately, in modern society (especially middle class Western society), there's less need for hyperalert people because there's less danger from predators. And there's very little need to hunt down food or water or tools in one's surroundings--we can simply go to a store to get all those things, or even better, have them brought to us.

In this situation, being hyperalert is not only no longer an advantage; it seems instead a disadvantage. In fact, it's often thought of as a disability instead of a highly valued ability. I have only to cite the disruptive effect of hyperalertness on the modern elementary classroom to make my point. What has been termed ADD--attention deficit disorder--is to me hyperalertness, a condition of the brain that is not so much an inability to pay attention, as it is an inability to stop paying attention.

And it is this condition of hyperalertness, I believe, that can lead to depression, anger and other moods that make life quite difficult for many people, including me. What was once good brain chemistry is now deemed bad and in need of fixing.