Brain Chemistry Chronicles: January 2013

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Fight or Flight or Chocolates

I was trying to explain to my mother the other day why scanning works to make a person feel better when she is anxious or depressed or angry. What I said was that it hearkens back to ancient times when there were still predators out and about which could kill and eat us. Scanning the horizon made us feel in control of our lives; if we could see whether or not a predator was there, we would feel better.

Because we are not in imminent danger from predators anymore (at least not the non-human kind), we don't need to scan the horizon. But if a person is hyperalert, he has the desire to do so and just because there is no necessity to do so doesn't mean the desire goes away.

Satisfying the desire to scan the horizon, to respond to life or death emergencies, is necessary to feel calm and "happy." But the real crises are not available; one must, therefore, enact response behaviors that quell anxiety through accumulating knowledge about the external threats.

Now, the feeling of anxiety can be satisfied by eating highly fatty or sugar loaded foods, probably because those foods are stimulating, and they are stimulating because they are needed for fight or flight. The fact you don't need them for fight or flight doesn't diminish their power to make you feel better.

Unfortunately, since you don't burn up calories fighting or fleeing, the fuel you're ingesting just gets stored along with all the other fat stores on your body.

If you can satisfy that craving to respond to the false alarm in some way, then you can avoid eating those fight or flight foods that are only going to be wasted on your body.

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.