STRESS RESPONSE: When everyday is an emergency...

When every day is an emergency (Robert Sapolsky), stress accumulates through hormonal and neurochemical imbalances, physiological symptoms increase in intensity. When every day is an emergency, you disconnect from the circadian rhythm of natural life and chronic inflammation ravages your organs. When every day is an emergency, thyroid and adrenal functioning, due to constant fight or flight messages (fear), become erratic resulting in bouts of paralysing fatigue in which you consume energy drinks resulting in sugar spikes and crashes, with more fatigue, until natural sleep cycles become damn near impossible.

WHY ZEBRAS DON'T GET ULCERS - Robert Sapolsky

"We turn on the exact same stress response [as the zebra running from a lion] for purely psychological states. It's thinking about the ozone layer, the taxes coming up, mortality rates, 30 yr mortgages, we turn on the same stress response [as the zebra] and the key difference there is, we're not doing it for a real physiological reason [physical survival] and we're doing it nonstop. After awhile, the stress response is more damaging than the stressor itself, because the stressor is some psychological nonsense that you're falling for. No zebra on earth, running for its life, would understand why fear of speaking in public would cause you to secrete the same hormones, that it's [secreting] in that moment to save it's life." - Robert Sapolsky

When every day is an emergency cortisol levels rise, resulting in a constant sense of agitation with epinephrine/adrenaline spikes we refer to as panic attacks. When everyday is an emergency, bile and digestive enzymes fail to secrete properly resulting in bowel irregularities, excess acid, excretory dysfunction and irritable bowel syndrome. When every day is an emergency there's no time to eat healthy food, so gulping down fast, processed crud results in dietary stress and a royally screwed up gut microbiome (digestive bacteria), in which Candida overgrowth has starved out good gut bacteria, resulting in chronic inflammation.

When every day is an emergency thought processes become muddied with brain fog and memory lacks recall, focus is impeded, motivation lags and constant nagging agitation results in chronic conflict with loved ones. When every day is an emergency just getting out of bed, even after 8-9 hrs of sleep can be a test of endurance, so you down 4 cups of sugar infused caffeine which immediately stimulates the adrenal glands, generating hyper alertness, but eventually resulting in adrenal fatigue. When every day is an emergency, the world and other people seem hazy, like in a dream. and derealization/dissociation become frightening unwanted interpretations of reality. When everyday is an emergency, cortisol receptors in the gut begin to store abdominal fat and no matter how hard you exercise...it doesn't leave.

When every day is an emergency, you may gradually come to believe  "I'm losing my mind" or "I'm going crazy." You will undergo testing and no abnormalities will show up. You will be sent to specialists, i.e, psychiatrists, neurologists, gastroenterologists, endocrinologists, etc., but they understand only their speciality and will fail to see that your emergency has become systemic to the entire body, one precarious physiological system affecting another precarious system resulting in the slow, ever compounding destruction of the body's precious homeostasis or balance. You're off. Way off...not just in one place, but everywhere.

HOW STRESS AFFECTS YOUR BODY- Sharon Horesh Bergquist

When every day is an emergency, high cortisol levels in the blood stream begin to destroy brain cells and cause neurochemical imbalances. When every day is an emergency you go to the doctor to find out what's wrong and he prescribes antidepressants and antianxiety pills, thereby, failing to identify the cause and merely mask the symptoms, until they break through again, which they must, because every day is an emergency. When every day is an emergency, moods become erratic and you become frustrated because you have no idea why you keep feeling this way. Toxic relationships, interactional conflicts, chronic distrust, hate and resentment make every day an emergency and there will be a price to pay, not just mentally, but systemically throughout the entire body.

When every day is an emergency, the body begins to attack itself, resulting in autoimmune disorders and every year a new disorder is identified. Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and "mental illness" statistics rise every year because everybody's living as if every day were an emergency. If you note within yourself a nagging sense of impending doom, recognize you have been living every day as an emergency. If nothing ever seems right and you are never good enough, then every day is an emergency. 

Make no mistake, every time you think "emergency!" the brain signals the body to prepare for attack, as if the lion were chasing you in an attempt to make you dinner. If you hate your job, fight with your spouse, scream at your kids, easily take offense, get angry (fight or flight) at the slightest provocation, perseverate and dwell over the smallest affront, then every day is an emergency. If you chronically worry about the uncertainty of the future, find it impossible to sit still for any appreciable amount of time (because of the thoughts in you head),  consume excess amounts of alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, then every day is an emergency. If you expect others to make you happy, when they obviously can't because of the emergency you're experiencing, demand your world be a perfect place, etc, the brain signals the body that there's an emergency and the body assumes protective measures...on and off, up and down, peace and conflict, sympathetic and parasympathetic, fight or flight, every day, all day long, even in sleep, the brain and body recognize that there is an emergency. 

The only difference is that the emergency is a hypothetical construct of your frontal cortex and, hence, the emergency was never real. You made it up...

HOW STRESS AFFECTS YOUR BRAIN- Madhumita Murgia

"Chronic stress increases the activity level and number of neural connections in the amygdala, your brain's fear center and as levels of cortisol rise, electric signals in your hippocampus, the part of the brain associated with learning, memory and stress control, deteriorate. Cortisol can literally cause your brain to shrink in size." TED-Ed

Make no mistake, when every day you bust your arse to get as much done as you can and then become frustrated that you missed the quota, you're living everyday as an emergency and eventually there will be a price to pay because stress doesn't ebb and flow...it accumulates. Building and accelerating in symptoms, it's embrace becomes tighter with each passing day, until it, literally, squeezes the life out of you.


RECOVERY: Inflammation nation...

ADRENAL FATIGUE: Drowning in a sea of stress...

CRISIS JUMPING: Got recovery?

EMOTIONAL TRAIN WRECK: Accelerating for impact...

DEPRESSION: Brain-Gut connection (or the bugs in your body)

THOUGHT SUPPRESSION: Whatever you do, don't think about white bears!

As long as you have a functioning brain, you can NEVER stop thinking. The brain never shuts off, even when asleep. Unfortunately, thoughts can often be pretty damn powerful and even hijack neurochemical and hormonal processes. Fear-based thoughts, repeated over a long period of time, can eventually wreak havoc on the body. Constant depressive ruminating, can result in physiological responses (stress) to the body.

Many individuals require constant external focus on outside activities to avoid internal activation. The very moment they pause from external focus they become tormented by interior dialogue or ego scripts. One way to alleviate that internal suffering is through ego defusion.

I often work with folks who find leaving their house extremely difficult, because of the fearful thoughts that seem to automatically arise, not only upon leaving the house, but in just thinking about the potential of leaving the house. Yet, eventually, these fears magnify and manifest even in the safety of the home, to where the home loses its status as a safe sanctuary.

Thought suppression - Seeking NOT to think specific thoughts that are painful and elicit an uncomfortable emotional reaction can result in experiential avoidance in which you avoid settings, events and even people who might provoke the thinking that you don’t like or that literally torments you. But the thoughts still arise. This was proven in Wegners White Bear Experiment  in which subjects were informed to think about anything but a "white bear" and if they did think about a white bear they were to ring a bell which, as the video below demonstrates, they could not stop ringing.

Wegner's White Bear Experiment

Once a thought somehow becomes dangerous (activates your 'fight or flight' hormones) you magnify the need to think it because you've alerted the brain to watch out for it, thereby, reinforcing its appearance, resulting in a negative feedback loop that grows stronger each time the thought arises.

Intrusive thoughts - thoughts simply arise. But often can become fixated themes (like musical earworms). The thought of running your car into a telephone pole, throwing your child out a 3 story window, stabbing a co worker, etc, etc, just rise and fall, a momentary lapse into irrationality. However, when these thoughts occur and hijack the stress response, resulting in prolonged physiological experiences, they can be reinforced in the brain circuitry and become repetitive and evoke rumination or dwelling on the thoughts and can even radically change behavior.

Characterizing Pure 'O' and OCD

Exposure and response prevention and ACT processing: With ERP you engage the compulsion and do not respond in the usual way. With Acceptance and commitment therapy you accept the thoughts and commit to continue acting and behaving in accordance with your values.

In other words, if you have intrusive thoughts, rather than anticipating the brain allowing these thoughts to arise and dreading the experience, you actually engage the experience over and over again to desensitise and extinguish the emotional (limbic/amygdala) response.

With ACT therapy there is an ongoing acceptance (operative term) of the thoughts and that the thoughts will arise, due to being consistently reinforced through the HPA axis or stress response. Hence, through repeated exposure the brain (amygdala) becomes “habituated” and is no longer emotionally “charged” or affected by the stimulus. There are many stimuli that occur all around you that the brain is habituated to ignore and ERP seeks to cultivate that same habituation through repetitive exposure.

Irrational vs Rational Worry

EGO DEFUSION: Turning Down the Volume on Suffering

SUBCONSCIOUS SHADOWS: You can run, but you can't hide

Lost in the Matrix of Your Mind

EGO DEFUSION: Turning down the volume on suffering.

EGO DEFUSION - Ego Defusion comes from many different psychological disciplines, particularly Freudian/Jungian ego psychology and the term defusion comes from ACT therapy. The chief difference between Ego Defusion and ACT or CBT is that we are actually labeling the two chief parts of the mind and identifying their roles in thinking.

"Defusing Techniques in ACT and CBT involve distancing, disconnecting or seeing thoughts and feelings for what they are (streams of words, passing sensations), not what they say they are (dangers or facts). STOP, STEP BACK, OBSERVE (the thoughts and feelings, what's happening to/for the other person)." LINK

DEFUSION: "I'm noticing I'm having the thought..."

The first part of Ego Defusion is being able to differentiate between the two types of thinking, ego and Higher Self.

HIGHER SELF: Is your Truth. It’s the part of you that is clear, calm, thoughtful, rational, logical, realistic and oriented to reality as it is. It is the part of you that can be in the moment or even experience the benefits of FLOW, because there are no ego-centered complaints informing you of how things "should" be or what you "must" do instead of how things actually are and what you're actually doing. The Higher Self engages SLOW, thoughtful consideration of facts and responds rather than reacts. The Higher Self can adapt to stress without emotional reactivity.

EGO: The ego is an exaggeration of the self and magnifies the importance of everything, negative and positive (with positive experiences it can lead to addictions, narcissistic and selfish behaviors). It takes normal problems and magnifies them, making it often difficult to think clearly. It uses black and white, catastrophic thinking and blanket generalizations that distort actual reality. Everything it tells you seeks to elicit an emotional response. The ego is NEVER satisfied and nothing is ever good enough.

Essentially the ego is the mental apparatus of suffering. But everything it thinks is a lie, because it thinks in blanket generalizations and has no capacity for considering actual facts due to being involved in emotional reactivity.  It thinks FAST and engages knee-jerk reactions from emotion as opposed to thoughtful consideration of facts. The ego is often non-adaptive to change and demands life be as it says it should be and becomes extremely antagonistic to circumstances that demonstrate otherwise. An apt nick name for the ego is "King Baby."

You can feel pain, even chronic pain, but the ego will inform that "this is horrible, I can’t stand this! Why is this happening to me?" If this Ego Script goes on for too long (and it does become a repetitively scripted inner dialogue) we can eventually wind up with physical symptoms, such as anxiety, panic attacks, heart palpitations, dizziness, depression, suicidal thoughts, depersonalization, irritable bowel symptoms, etc, etc, due to the constant hijacking of the stress response.

Stress Response Hijacking - In the stress response (often called the HPA axis), the Hypothalamus is a threat detector designed exclusively for physical survival, with no consideration for ego-centered concerns. The hypothalamus detects a threat, sends a message to the pituitary which provokes the adrenals to generate the fight or flight response through hormones like cortisol, epinephrine (adrenaline), norepinephrine,  etc.

How Stress Effects Your Body

The problem is when the ego hijacks the hypothalamus, rather than seeing an external threat, the ego generates a hypothetical threat in the mind, which engages the stress response. It will literally equate everyday problems as if your physical survival were threatened and that's how the body will respond.

The ego can hijack your stress response, which informs your body (through symptoms) that an argument with your spouse equates with death, or loss of a job means your life is over or a bad grade on a test means you're a complete failure or a breakup with an intimate partner means you will be alone forever, resulting in actual hormonal effects equivalent to physical threat, demanding activation of the "fight, flight or freeze" stress response.

In other words, if you're driving on an icy road and suddenly lose control of your vehicle, your HPA axis, or stress response, will kick in completely absent the ego. Actual matters of physical survival do not require egocentric emotional reactions. However, when the ego hijacks the stress response it is because of hypothetical ego-centered fears that have nothing to do with physical survival, but the messages sent to the body are equivalent to such a threat.

Ego Defusion: In Ego Defusion, we are simply trying to uncouple the ego from the Higher Self, because for years you've equated them as one unit, "I-me." This uncoupling consists primarily of differentiating between the distorted messages of the ego and the factual truth of your Higher Self. The Self then confronts and disputes the ego's blanket generalizations through rational and realistic assertions of actual facts or what's actually going on.

The language of the ego is criticism, blame, judgement, belittling, labeling, diagnosing and most especially anger, towards other people, but primarily toward yourself. If you’re experiencing depression and/or anxiety you can be sure the ego is either the cause or making it worse. The ego runs on emotion and emotional responses magnify it.

You cannot get rid of your ego. Many ancient spiritual traditions identify the ego as cause of suffering and encourage "ego transcendence." But many of those traditions tend to lump ego and self as one unit to be transcended as a whole. We need a Higher Self to experience and engage the world in ways that increase and improve the Higher Self by increasing and improving the world. 

Ego Defusion simply seeks to turn the volume down of the ego, so that your engagement with the world happens primarily through the Higher Self, without ego-centered fears and stress and without the physical symptoms that fear and stress eventually cause. We want to be able to perceive the world through the Higher Self and not the ego. This results in less stress because the Self learns to ignore the rantings of the ego and seek out the actual truth.

Every morning, upon waking, ask yourself, "what am I going to dedicate this day to, the ego or the Higher Self?"

Internal Struggles by Dr. Russ Harris

RECOVERY: Inflammation Nation...

RECOVERY: Inflammation Nation...

DIETARY STRESS: The state of internalized stress, primarily to the digestive and excretory systems, resulting from the belief that you can consume all the toxic, inflammatory foods and chemicals you want, on a daily basis, and not inevitably experience consequences.

If you're in recovery (chemical/behavioral addictions, mental illness, autoimmune disorders, chronic pain, cancer treatment, trauma, etc) and you continue to ignore the foods and chemicals you ingest, batten down the hatches and prepare for the inevitability of the perfect storm coming your way.

The science is out and it's being replicated every year. The Standard American Diet (SAD) is literally killing us (Good Grief, look at these charts!). Every year there is a rise in heart disease, obesity, diabetes, autoimmune disorders, cancer, mental illness, etc. You would think, with all the advances in medicine, health would be improving. But actually what we're seeing is a rise in new disorders, ailments and diagnoses.

What happens when, for many years, you consume foods that are, or have become, toxic to your body? What happens when you ingest copious amounts of chemicals, over many years, such as processed foods, alcohol, drugs, nicotine, caffeine, sugar and wheat? (been there, done that!).You may be able to get away with it in your youth, but the ravages of time and consistent stress will eventually exact a heavy toll.

INFLAMMATION: Increasingly research is identifying depression, anxiety and other mental illnesses as not stand alone disorders, but symptoms of systemic bodily inflammation, particularly in the gut which also houses close to 80% of your immune system (look at all this research connecting diet with depression!). This is why most mental health disorders involve some form of IBS or irritable bowel system. Keep in mind, you're not only connected up to a central and peripheral nervous system, but also an enteric nervous system through a vagus nerve that runs from the brain to the gut. Any chronic disturbance down below will eventually reach top side resulting in brain inflammation with, migraines, headaches, dizziness, depersonalization, brain fog, depression, anxiety, panic, etc. I just recently perused research that’s pointing to Vitamin D depletion as the main cause of migraines. Imagine that, something as simple as a vitamin D depletion, epidemic in the modern age, could aid in reducing migraines and headaches.

"We were never designed for the sedentary, indoor, socially isolated, fast food laden, sleep deprived, frenzied pace of modern life" - Stephen Ilardi  LINK

SUGAR: One of the most toxic “foods” in our diet. It is estimated that on average we consume 32 oz of sugar everyday and that’s not just white sugar, but particularly high fructose corn syrup and other sugars such as agave nectar barley malt, dextrose, maltose, rice syrup, dextrin, dehydrated can juice, etc, the list is endless. I once read the ingredients on the back of a frozen dinner and it had 20 gms of sugar. It was Swiss steak and potatoes. The fact is the entire western world is addicted to sugar as a staple food of a daily diet.

Robert Lustig M.D - Sugar: The Elephant in the Room  Sugar Science - Dr. Lustig

WHEAT: If you're in recovery there is good possibility your body is in some form of chronic inflammation due to years of stress. Research is pointing to the fact that chronic inflammation is caused or further aggravated by wheat or more specifically gluten.

'Grain Brain' author talks about the effects of wheat on your brain

Dr. Permutter.com

Occasional use of sugar and wheat may be okay for some folks, but in recovery but they should not be the staple of your daily food intake due to dietary stress and the recovery process has enough other stressors and symptoms to cope with that dietary stress should not be one of them.

However, keep in mind that any significant dietary change in support of your recovery may include withdrawal type reactions, particularly if a certain food or substance has been a large part of your diet for years. Eliminating wheat and sugar may result in "carb flu," "candida die-off" or the Herxheimer Reaction and it is recommended you gradually taper to avoid those symptoms.

SENSITIVITY: If you're in a recovery/healing process you may find an increase in sensitivity to things you were never sensitive to, due to inflamed or compromised immune system. Noise, heat, cold, various foods, pollen (can’t wait for spring here in the enchanted forest and all the trees that will make my life a living hell). Sensitivity can arise from a compromised immune system due to chronic inflammation in the gut and this is because 70-80% of your immune system is centered in the gut microbiome.

Drew Ramsey:A Brain Prescription from the Farmacy 

Below is another video stressing the importance of diet in recovery from diabetes and how the past science derived food pyramid was entirely wrong. This doctor promotes a reduction in sugar and wheat with an increase in good fats and vegetables:

      Reversing Type 2 Diabetes by Ignoring the Guidelines



DEPRESSION: The Brain/Gut Connection (or the bugs in your body)

ADRENAL FATIGUE: Drowning in a Sea of Stress...

RECOVERY: It's not a Tap, but a Slide...

CRISIS JUMPING: got recovery?

RECOVERY: It's not a tap, but a slide...

RECOVERY: It's not a Tap, but a slide...

I write this blog for current clients and previous clients so that folks can come here to review concepts identified in our meetings and the chief purpose of this blog is to convey a minimal amount of information to promote, or better yet, provoke you, the consumer of information, to go out into the webosphere and acquire info that will help you take charge of your mental and physical well being.

I may be licensed as a psychotherapist/clinical social worker, but my main function is that of salesman. I am trying to sell a product to everyone I work with and that product is a package of ideas, concepts, theories, strategies, tools, skills, techniques, etc, etc, called RECOVERY.

Recovery is the relentless pursuit of healing within the limitations imposed by mental and physical conditions, always seeking to extend those limitations to increase self actualization and fulfillment.

As someone who has been through several recovery processes (and am currently in the maintenance stage of recovery from an autoimmune disorder) I not only have the knowledge of how to effectively engage the recovery process, through many years of working with individuals engaged in that process, but the experience of my own recovery process.

The time a recovery takes is different for every individual and there is no cookie cutter approach to developing an effective recovery plan. At first it may feels you're tapping around in the dark to achieve even some moderate degree of change and relief, but soon benefits will arise and you will slide into a natural healthy mode of being that will become a lifestyle. There are 5 basic stages of recovery/change.

Who should be in a recovery process:
1. Chemical and behavioral addictions
2. Autoimmune disorders (Lyme, lupus, fibromyalgia, MS, chronic fatigue, etc)
3. Chronic pain and chronic illness
4.Trauma
5. Mood disorders (depression, generalized anxiety, panic disorder, bipolar, etc)
6. Trauma (developmental PTSD, complex PTSD, classic PTSD, etc)
7. Cancer
8. "Mental illness" (depression, anxiety, panic, bipolar, etc)
8. Loss of a loved one and any major life stressor

Wellness Recovery Action Plan
Mary Ellen Copeland, Ph.D

Components of a recovery plan: (Biopsychosocial Holistic approach)
1.   Abstaining from unhealthy/dysfunctional/maladaptive behaviors (relapse prevention)
2.   Identify and eliminate stressors (adrenal fatigue)
3.   Diet/food/chemical consumption (alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, processed foods)
4.   Exercise (move the body)
5.   Supplementation (vitamins/minerals/herbs/adaptogens/meds
6.   H2O (hydration therapy)
7.   Support (therapy/community groups/trusted friends/family/online communities)
8.   Meditation (relaxation/stress reduction/breathing)
9.   Education (know your condition and treatment protocols)
10. Belief (belief in yourself and your goal of recovery)
11. Laughter (humor is crucial!)
12. Fun (recreation, hobbies, interests, within your limitations)
13. 80/20 Rule (80% productive 20% consumptive daily activities)
14. Purpose/meaning
15. Be Relentless (don't quit...)

Problems in Recovery:
1. Stress and boredom (stay active)
2. Episodes of utter abject hopelessness and periods of emptiness
3. Isolation
4. Chronic worry, depressive rumination (affects cortisol levels which can aggravate inflammation)
5. Long periods of laziness, inactivity (resulting in loss of vigilance and motivation)
6. Cognitive decline
7. Non-acceptance (Suffering = pain + resistance)

Wellness Recovery Action Plan. pdf

Sample Wellness Recovery Action Plans

Veterans Group Sample WRAP plan

ADRENAL FATIGUE: Drowning in a Sea of Stress

You cannot swim for years in a sea of stress without drowning. The only difference is that drowning in stress is a very slow and debilitating process resulting in progressively worsening biopsychosocial symptoms (body, mind, relationships).

I met with an individual recently who was prescribed, by his PCP, an antidepressant and a minor tranquilizer (i.e., Xanax, Ativan, Klonopin) for his anxiety. Unfortunately, in the 15 minutes his doctor spent with him a full biopsychosocial evaluation was not performed, but at least the doc referred him to a therapist (which rarely happens) after diagnosing him through a brief interview.

The outcome of my evaluation was nothing short of outrageous. He hated his job of 15 yrs and his marriage was on the edge of complete dissolution. Clearly a good 90% of his life (work and marriage) was dissatisfactory and stressful on a daily basis.

This individual engaged in NO exercise and so we looked at food and chemical consumption patterns. Fortunately, he only drank alcohol on weekends (often to excess), however, he poured a pot of coffee down his gullet every morning, stopping at Star Bucks for a large latte on the way to work, and drank a 2 liter bottle of coke throughout the work day (often with a shot of Red Bull!), not to mention a pack of cigarettes. His diet was no better, consisting of fast food (stop calling it "food"!) with daily consumption of refined white carbs (turns to sugar in your gut my friends!) luncheon meats, sugary snacks, etc, etc. (DEPRESSION: The Brain-Gut Connection)

No pill, in fact, no AMOUNT of pills, is going to help this individual and eventually he will experience a reverse effect of the medications and they may become an additional toxin in the process of drowning in a Sea of Stress or he will become victim to the pharmaceutical treadmill of more meds and higher doses.

The brain is a powerful organ that will completely overwhelm and annihilate the effects of medications, due to tolerance and continuing a dysfunctional, toxic lifestyle. Individual's grind through the pharmaceutical mill on a prescribed cocktail of drugs, but still racked with depression and anxiety symptoms, because the depression and anxiety based symptoms have become signs of a physiological disorder as opposed to just a "mental" disorder.

ADRENAL FATIGUE: Signs and symptoms of Adrenal Fatigue include tendency to gain weight and inability to lose it, especially around the waist, high frequency of getting the flu and other respiratory diseases with symptoms that tend to last longer than usual, tendency to tremble when under pressure, reduced sex drive, lightheadedness when rising from a prone position, brain fog, lack of energy in the afternoon, reliance on coffee to get the day started, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, craving for salty and fatty foods, hypoglycemia, chronic pain of unknown origin and feeling better during a vacation. None of these signs or symptoms by themselves can definitively point to Adrenal Fatigue. However, as a group of symptoms, in the context of an otherwise healthy person, they do form a specific Adrenal Fatigue Syndrome or picture, that is, of a person under stress and the body’s failing physiological response to deal with such a burden. Adrenal Fatigue, as a debilitating condition, is not recognized by conventional medicine and is thus missed by most conventionally trained physicians. LINK

Many researchers estimate that approximately 80% of the U.S. population is experiencing symptoms of adrenal fatigue (Confronting the Demon of Doom). If you are in recovery from chemical or behavioral addictions, most likely you're dealing with symptoms of adrenal fatigue. If you have an autoimmune disorder (Lyme, Lupus, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, etc) adrenal exhaustion may aggravate your symptoms. Those diagnosed with depression, anxiety, bipolar, panic disorder depending on the duration of these conditions may result in adrenal fatigue symptoms or be caused by hormonal imbalances of the adrenal glands. PTSD, and especially complex PTSD and trauma sufferers are also prone to this physiological condition. In addition, those suffering from chronic pain over many years may aggravate the hormonal functioning of the adrenal glands.

If your turning on the stress response several times a day for many years, you must expect that eventually consequences of that stress will arise in the form of adrenal fatigue, immune system suppression, longer healing time from wounds, cancer and heart disease promotion, viral infection increase, rapid aging and reduced longevity, etc, etc. You may have been able to pull it off in your 20's and 30's but, make no mistake, swimming in a sea of stress (personal, relationships, mental, biological, dietary, addictions, etc) will define the drowning process in later years.

ADRENAL FATIGUE: Causes and Effects on the Body

Recovering from adrenal fatigue, depending of the amount of stress and length of time the stress has been experienced, can be a long slog lasting over a year or more and requires a full evaluation of life stressors and identifying ways to reduce that stress and adjusting food and chemical consumption is crucial.

How to Overcome Adrenal Fatigue

Adrenal Fatigue Solution

Dr. Lam.com

The Happiness Myth vs the Peace of Authentic Acceptance

The post modern paradigm, or prevailing perspective, is that you should be consistently "happy" at all times and, if you're not, then there is something inherently wrong with you, often requiring you seek out medications (drugs) that will neuro-chemically compel your brain's amygdala (emotional center) to ignore all psychosocial threats to maintain your emotions in a state of constant pleasure, even though your mood often changes for reasons beyond your conscious awareness and the natural order that allowed you life in the first place seems utterly dismissive of your demand for happiness, based on the stress that seems constantly thrust upon you, ignoring your pleas for a "happiness," that you really can't concretely define, because it has no empirical or physical anchor points and is only a feeling or emotional state that defies actual definition. 

But you seek for it, nonetheless...relentlessly.

THE 3 HAPPINESS MYTHS

Your brain is not genetically constructed for happiness or pleasure, but for constant displeasure or negativity to insure survival. Thousands of years ago if you let your guard down while strolling through the Serengeti, you might become food for a Saber Toothed Tiger (negativity bias). This system of vigilant alertness is still tucked up in your noggin and explains why, when you have four positive and only one negative experience, you may become compulsively fixated on that one negative experience above and beyond the five positive.

Humans are unique in adapting to, and existing in, every climate on planet earth and it is the large frontal lobe that has facilitated that adaptation. However, in our modern technological world physical survival is rarely at stake, while surviving as a psychosocial self in a world progressively demonstrating ever more complex levels of bat-sheit crazy has become a daunting task for a brain specifically structured to exist in small bands of hunter-gatherers engaged in physical survival.

I meet with individuals who experience almost unbearable limitations to their lives. Chronic pain, major depression, panic disorder, traumatic brain injury, schizophrenia, fibromyalgia, OCD, CFS, social anxiety, PTSD, Lyme Disease (personal friend of mine), etc, etc, in which, for many, just leaving the house can be a test of physical and psycho-emotional endurance.

These individuals will never experience "happiness" in their lives and they know it. Yet, they find a way to accept their limitations and authentically adapt to that acceptance within the limitations that have been thrust upon them and in that authentic acceptance they report attaining, not the happiness the masses pursue and rarely acquire, but a deep state of peace that very few ever experience in their relentless search for "happiness." In authentic acceptance individuals engage a recovery program that includes values, goals and purpose, but has little time for fleeting episodes of "happiness" or ephemeral moments of pleasure.

Engaging a recovery process is not simply about extracting from dysfunctional behaviors, but more about encountering new experiences inside and outside your "self" that seek to enhance the experience of being "you," within the limits imposed upon you that are outside your control.

HAPPINESS LIVES IN THE NEW

Inner peace comes from encountering and engaging life authentically and that requires a radical acceptance of your moods and emotional states within your limitations. Your continued need to escape your mind, and the physical and psychological limits imposed upon you, only entangles you in a downward spiral of symptomatic behaviors, because your mind is "you" and there is no escaping from that solitary experience, an experience that can be shared, but never fully encountered by another.

Authentic Acceptance acknowledges limitations and fully thrives within those boundaries, always on the lookout for occasions when those boundaries can be overcome, but never exceeding the lines when harm could come to you or others.

DEMYSTIFYING ACT: ACCEPTANCE

REJECTION: Disobey your fears...

Leave your mind alone, it will quiet itself

MONKEY MIND: Shock the monkey...