DEPRESSION: Too Much Comfort and Convenience?

You move from one contained space to another, from the bedroom to the bathroom to the living room to the car to the cubicle to the warehouse and back to the car, to the living room to the bathroom to the bedroom, artificially lighted and often climate controlled, sanitary environments. Your social and familial interactions often border on shallow to outright confrontational and all of this occurs through hours of sitting on your butt.

Research has linked sitting for long periods of time with a number of health concerns, including obesity and metabolic syndrome — a cluster of conditions that includes increased blood pressure, high blood sugar, excess body fat around the waist and abnormal cholesterol levels. Too much sitting also seems to increase the risk of death from cardiovascular disease and cancer. LINK

Your brain/body is responding to pseudo-survival fears, such as financial problems, unemployment, chronic marital or parent/child conflict, etc, etc, spewing out stress hormones, norepinephrine, cortisol, glutamate, developed to insure physical survival, now employed for psychological survival on a daily basis and year after year, statistically the result of a national epidemic in terms of physical and psychological symptoms, diseases and mental disorders.

Long-term chronic stress can wreck your nervous system through a cyclic adrenaline rush. It can cause oxidative damage to tissues in the body that leads to inflammation. It can stoke symptoms such as headache, achy neck, ulcer, allergies, and diminished sexual desire. Eventually, your body will adapt to a continued state of vigilance by producing an excess amount of the stress hormone cortisol. Too much stress, over time, can exhaust you (you “burn out”), your adrenal glands where cortisol is produced, and accelerate the aging process, harm your immune system, and even shrink vital brain tissue resulting in memory loss and problems with concentration. LINK

LINK: Modern technology is Changing the Way Our Brains Work

You consume a chemical cocktail of pseudo-foods that often lack even basic nutrients that, other than signaling the enteric nervous system that your belly's full and you can move on with your busy day, can result in disruption of gut flora resulting in numerous symptoms such as IBS, anxiety/panic, depression, OCD, bipolar, headaches, chronic pain, body aches, poor memory, cognitive decline, etc, etc, and a general despondent malaise or chronic fatigue that results in your use of energy drinks, caffeinated beverages, nicotine, alcohol and a whole host of prescribed medications to ameliorate your nutrient deficient lifestyle.

Many are still sceptical about the link between [gut] microbes and behaviour and whether it will prove important in human health — but scientists seem more inclined to entertain the idea now than they have in past. In 2007, for example, Francis Collins, now director of the US National Institutes of Health, suggested that the Human Microbiome Project, a large-scale study of the microbes that colonize humans, might help to unravel mental-health disorders. “It did surprise a few people who assumed we were talking about things that are more intestinal than cerebral,” Collins says. “It was a little bit of leap, but it's been tentatively backed up.” LINK 

Often the repetitive emptiness of existence overwhelms you on a subconscious level and all conscious attempts to extract some sense of purpose or meaning seems futile. Yet, you cannot engage any higher meaning and purpose if the basic requirements of existence are fundamentally absent or so utterly degraded as to result in physiological symptoms that impede life fulfillment because mood and functioning are stunted and progressively becoming worse with time through behaviors that your society endorses, but that are essentially, whittling away at your core self and depleting your capacity for life fulfillment and happiness.

 DEPRESSION: A Disease of Civilization

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

Depression is a Disease of Civilization: Hunter-Gatherers Hold the Key to the Cure