Is Stress Good or Will My Brain Explode?

What if I told you that stress is not a bad thing?

What if I even told you that stress is good?

Okay, you have to understand what I'm talkin' about. Modern lives are so driven by stress that we're all walking around like ticking time bombs. Except for those meditators out there. (But are they even for real?)

via GIPHY

It turns out that a little bit of stress is just the ticket to feel good and accomplish a lot of good things.

I'm talking about challenge. I'm talking about excitement. Yes, I'm even talking about...

Deadlines

Questions Work Magic: How They Change the Brain

Quick - What does a lemon taste like?

I know what a lemon tastes like. Tell me something else instead:

What just happened inside your mouth?

David Hoffeld asks another one: Want to know what your brain does when it hears a question?

His article from the website FastCompany.com explores the neurological consequences of hearing a question. Questions temporarily hijack the brain. Did you immediately think about lemons? First, serotonin is released, causing the brain to relax. Next you get a hit of dopamine. The question takes over your thought processes while you think about the answer. The technical term is instinctive elaboration.

The hijacking doesn't last forever. The person who was asked the question can choose to ignore it, can argue against it, can go off on a tangent - though for people with ADHD or bipolar disorder, a question that interrupts our train of thought may cause us to derail.

But Hoffeld cites a number of research studies that document when you ask somebody whether they are going to do something, you increase the probability that they will do it - buy a car, vote in an upcoming election, even donate blood.

Questions not only alter your perception. They can even alter your chemistry. Chances are, when you read the lemon question, you started to salivate.

How Will You Get Through This Week?

Self care is not my best subject in the best of times. I can establish a routine, get up, eat breakfast, go to work, walk in the afternoon, and so on. I can hang on to good habits, eat a healthy diet, wear amber glasses at night. But that place in the list where I am supposed to do something for myself? Here is how that goes:

    Therapist: What will you do for fun this week?

    Me:

Okay, so what will YOU do for fun this week? (Clearly, I could use some ideas.)

And now there is this insurrection. How did that word work its way into daily conversation?

Will This Trauma Never End?

I found this video while trying to survive the cluster f*ck of misdiagnosis, antidepressants, mixed episodes, and a psychiatrist and therapist who didn't know what they didn't know, so it must be me and maybe I had borderline personality disorder - the go to diagnosis for patients that the professionals are tired of.

OK Go - This Too Shall Pass. And in fact, it did. I survived to... today? I offer it to everybody who is trying to survive the current COVID cluster f*ck in the US.

Pride Month Report: What Parents Can Do for Their Trans Daughters and Sons

1.8 million LBGTQ youth (13-24) in the US seriously consider suicide each year. The numbers for trans people in particular are even more staggering. According to the UCLA Williams Institute report, 81.7 percent of those surveyed by the National Center for Transgender Equality had seriously thought about killing themselves in their lifetimes, and 48.3 percent had done so in the last year. 40.4 percent of transgender people attempted suicide sometime in their lifetime.

Suicide happens when pain exceeds resources for coping with pain. This report adds evidence to that assertion. The following statistics are pulled directly and paraphrased or quoted from this report.

Mental Health Innovators Ponder the End of the COVID-19 Honeymoon

Dear Mental Health Innovators: The COVID-19 Honeymoon Is Almost Over.

The title of a recent PsychiatricTimes.com article caught my eye. Honeymoon? Then I realized it was dated May 19, so perhaps the authors could rewrite the title with the "Almost" removed.

The authors identify predictable stages of psychological response to our current pandemic. Unbeknownst to those whose education was really less education and more training for their future jobs (so things like history were deemed a waste of time), the human family has lived through past disasters, including multiple pandemics. There are patterns to these things.

Heroic Stage

Trauma, COVID-19, and Cutting Yourself Some Slack

Are you failing to build your abs while social distancing?
Or learn that new language?
Or clean out that closet (you know which one)?

Are you utterly exhausted while getting nothing done and beating yourself up for it?

STOP. Just stop.
And read on.

Where Is My Therapist?

I could have talked to my therapist yesterday by phone. She's not on vacation. But this week I decided to forgo an appointment. That may have been a mistake. . .

So I turn to a rerun from eight years ago, For When Your Therapist Goes on Vacation. I think I'll be focusing on humor for the next few weeks. Keep coming back! If you've got any good jokes, put them in the comments (click on the little envelope icon at the bottom.)

How to Stay Sane

Shock, rage, fear, despair, depression, hopelessness, apathy, or even how about - drinking the kool-aid, surrender. Do we have a better choice?

Robin Chance, behavioral specialist and therapist, did a little therapy for the nation three years ago with her article, How to stay sane if Trump is driving you insane: Advice from a therapist. She offered a better choice.

Two questions: (1) How do we integrate this crisis into our understanding of the world? and (2) what do we do now? Now that the crisis of three years ago is our new normal, it seems time to revisit her words.

Mental Health Care as our Institutions Fail

There are twelve psychiatrists in Zimbabwe for a population of 16 million people. When Dixon Chibanda, one of the twelve lost a patient to suicide because she could not afford the $15 bus fare to get to her appointment, he did not blame her for breaking the appointment. He came up with another system to deliver mental health care. He trained grandmothers.

Six Ways to Heal the Holes in Your Head

Do you ever feel like you have holes in your head? Actually, you do. Ventricles are the spaces between the grey matter (brain cells) and white matter (wiring that connects the brain cells) in your brain. Depressive episodes, manic episodes, and psychosis all burn up brain tissue, leading to bigger ventricles. (Image: Effects of Western diet on the brain. See companion image, Effects of Mediterranean diet below.)

This loss of brain cells hits the hippocampus (in charge of memory and emotion regulation) particularly hard. In the early years after my last mental health crisis, I talked about my “Swiss cheese brain.” At my worst, I lost bills, I lost words, I lost everything my wife said to me on the way out the door in the morning. She took to writing down what I said I would do before she got home, never more than two items.

I lost the list.

Spiritual Practices for the Dark Night - Giving Thanks. Again.

This post transitions from a month dedicated to PsychiatricTimes.com  to a month dedicated to gratitude. In short, I am grateful for Psychiatric Times. When I needed to figure out what the hell happened to my brain and how do I fix it, this online magazine for psychiatrists and other mental health professionals began my slow, steady self-education with its research reports, book reviews, philosophical discussions and occasional rants.

Mmm, sort of like Prozac Monologues: information, provocation, entertainment, and an occasional rant. That's how Google describes this blog. What do you think?

In the month of November, I will write posts about other resources and people for whom I am grateful. Today I repeat a post from ten years ago, part of a series on Spiritual Practices for the Dark Night. Those were dark nights, indeed, for me. These days, I think they are dark nights for everybody. But I digress...

Stages of Recovery - AKA Hope

It gets better.  It really does.

People who get tired of the Chemistry Experiment go off their meds.  Why?  Because the meds don't work.  Or they make us sick.  And the doctor doesn't hear us, because the doctor has one tool in his/her toolbox.  [Hint: It's not an ear.]  And he/she thinks that the solution to our problem is compliance, because there isn't time for listening and problem solving.

When you walk into a hammer store, they will try to sell you a hammer.  Fair enough.  If you are trying to rebuild the life that your illness took from you, chances are you will need a hammer.  Chances are you will need some other tools, as well.

The doctor doesn't have those other tools.  But they are out there.  And so is the map.

You are angry that the meds promised what they could not deliver.  Get over it.  Pull out the map.  Or the toolbox.  Mixed metaphor.  Whatever.  Get over it.  Get to work on your recovery.

The Recovery Map

Changing Food Habits - Contemplation and Preparation

Do you have any idea how complex the neuroscience of your food habits are?  Cinnabon, Chili's, General Mills, et al know way more about your brain than you do.  David Kessler, former FDA Commissioner, pediatrician and Dean of Yale and UC San Francisco Medical Schools, tells the story in The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite.

Neuroscientists know how the salt/sugar/fat triple whammy messes with the brain circuitry, taking offline the I have had enough now sensors and replacing them with More, please.  Reward centers, neurotransmitters, HPA axis, limbic system, operant conditioning -- they are messing with you.  Neither your meds nor an aluminum foil hat will protect you.

My Food Autobiography and the Stages of Change

This is not a post about dieting.  If you are looking for the quick fix for the upcoming wedding, reunion or beach vacation, move on to the next page on Google's list.

Before life so rudely interrupted, I was doing a New Year's series on the Stages of Change.  Since then I have rewritten my profile, reflecting on change as a theme.  I don't particularly care for change, but I am fascinated by how people manage to pull it off.  And I am astounded that at age 54 I changed a basic health practice, that being my eating habits, and have maintained that practice for six years.

Let me repeat.  This is not about dieting.  Who wants to DIE-t?  This is about changing the pathways inside your brain, retraining it, creating new synaptic connections that serve you better than the ruts (automatic reflexes) your thoughts and behaviors now travel.

Not in one leap.  One step at a time.