Natural Highs: Bringing the
Limbic System into Balance
When I stand before thee at the day’s end, thou shalt see my scars and know that I had my wounds and also my healing.
—Rabindranath Tagore
Our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors all affect our body chemistry. And our body chemistry affects our emotions and behavior. Just climbing out of bed in the morning and getting into a hot shower or bath, for example, elevates our levels of serotonin—“nature’s natural antidepressant”—and makes it easier for us to get into a positive frame of mind. Here’s what our bodies’ natural antidepressants can do to help us to reduce stress and enhance health.
Serotonin keeps our moods balanced and upbeat. It calms anxiety and improves our sleep. Hot baths or showers give us a shot of prolactin (and serotonin), which is associated with that serene state that nursing mothers enter. Touching releases oxytocin, a bonding chemical that mediates emotional closeness and nourishes our brain. Paradoxically, oxytocin both helps us to feel close and connected and set boundaries. These are some of nature’s mood stabilizers; they act in the brain and body in the same way that antidepressants act. They calm, soothe, and help us manage our moods.
When we don’t make use of the medicine chest nature put inside of us and learn how to calm and soothe ourselves through daily, health-enhancing activities, we may want to turn to synthetic or artificial solutions to achieve a state of well-being. We might grab sugary or starchy foods or engage in compulsive sexual activities to get that dopamine release or use substances like alcohol or drugs to unwind, calm down, or de-stress.
Natural mood management amounts to paying attention to all of those little things that make us feel good because they are releasing soothing body chemicals into our bloodstreams and systematically building them into our daily routine. Walk to work, exercise with a friend, take time to relax, and just be. Breathe. We all know intuitively that certain activities just make us feel better, that creating an environment in which we feel relaxed and cozy calms and soothes us, and that taking time to unwind and pamper ourselves improves our attitude and the way we feel about ourselves. When we intentionally make these sorts of activities part of our daily lives, we’re managing our moods the natural way and taking care of our mental and physical health. Rather than depending on synthetic mood managers that may be unhealthy or even self-destructive, we can depend on those that are natural, sustainable, and renewable to achieve and maintain emotional balance. So if you feel that you are doing all the right things and trying hard to understand your trauma issues but something just isn’t kicking in for you, consider making the kind of lifestyle changes that are body/mind building blocks to a healthier, happier you.
Recovery, whether from a substance addiction, process addiction, or the trauma of being an ACoA, is about engaging in the kind of lifestyle behaviors that regulate brain and body chemistry. If you believe the ads on television, we should reach for a medication if we’ve been “sad, anxious, or depressed for two weeks or more.”
Recovery is more than recovering from past pain. It is preventative mental health care. It is action-oriented and exists in the present. It is consciously building qualities of strength and resilience. Learning the skills of emotional literacy and balance allows us to work toward optimal mental and emotional strength and fitness, to be proactive about our mental health maintenance. This lifestyle is our best preventative against getting lost in the kinds of self-destructive and self-medicating behaviors that can undermine our happiness and our personal and professional success.
Processing old pain is only part of the puzzle of emotional wellness. Clients often feel that they are “working so hard” and have an improved understanding of their trauma-related issues—but they still feel stuck. This can be because their form of treatment isn’t allowing them to really get to their core issues and process them or because they are sabotaging their recovery by making poor lifestyle choices. In other words, they are doing the necessary therapy to understand their trauma-related issues, but they are ignoring the needs of their bodies and not balancing their daily stressors with support and stress relief. It is worthwhile to take a look at what we do each day that may either be helping or hurting our cause. We can take a daily inventory of how much exercise we get, how much sleep we get, our network of relationships, the meaning and sense of purpose that drives us, and the amount of stress we have. This inventory allows us to see if our lifestyles are supporting or undermining our ability to actualize positive change. Then we figure out how to adopt healthy daily routines to allow our new changes to gain traction. If we have a good life container, our inner changes will have fertile soil in which to take root and grow.
Using the Body’s Medicine Chest
to Maintain Emotional Balance
Because human beings are always in a process of hurting and healing, nature has equipped us with a sort of self-care chemistry lab that’s built into our brain and body. Learning to use that lab is the key to maintaining both emotional and physical health. It is entirely possible to attain that “feel good” state in a natural and healthy way if we just adopt a few proactive habits and consciously discipline ourselves to stay with them. Regular exercise can be a powerful antidepressant and is linked with decreased anxiety, stress, and hostility (Otto and Smits 2011). Calming body chemicals like serotonin and dopamine are nature’s natural mood stabilizers; they calm us down, smooth out our rough edges, and help us to feel good. We can learn to use these chemicals of emotion to our advantage. Our brains produce more than fifty known active drugs that influence our memory and intelligence and act as natural sedatives. In other words, we can learn to adopt activities that stimulate these natural drugs in a way that enhance our health rather than undermine it. We can learn to self-medicate the healthy way!
Brain Overload: Feeling Stressed
and Self-Sabotaging Food Choices
In the same way that our physical muscles get tired after a tough workout and require rest to recuperate, our mental muscles need rest and relaxation so that they can function optimally. Just as a bicep muscle has practical limitations, so does the muscle of the brain. If we ask our muscles to hold more weight than they are able to support, they will eventually give out.
An interesting Stanford University study involving “brain overload” and described in a Wall Street Journal article may shed light on why we need regular breaks to stay resilient and make healthy choices. Several dozen undergraduates were divided into two groups; one group was given a five-digit number to remember while the second group was given a seven-digit number. They were then told to walk down the hall where they were given two different snack options: a slice of chocolate cake or a bowl of fruit salad. The students with seven digits to remember were nearly twice as likely to choose the cake, while the students given only five digits to remember (a more manageable load) were still relaxed enough to reach for the fruit they knew was better for them. Mental stress and the anxiety created by that bit of extra stuff to remember led straight to poor food choices. The reason, according to Professor Baba Shiv, who conducted the experiment, was that the extra numbers took up valuable space in the brain and became a “cognitive load” (Lehrer 2009). When we’re already feeling overwhelmed, we seem to continue on that path; the prefrontal cortex gets so overtaxed that all it takes is a few extra bits of information before the brain starts to give in to temptation.
In a 2002 experiment, led by Mark Muraven at the University at Albany, a group of male subjects was asked to not think about a white elephant for five minutes while writing down their thoughts. That turns out to be a rather difficult mental challenge, akin to staying focused on a tedious project at work. (A control group was given a few simple arithmetic problems to solve.) Then, Mr. Muraven had the subjects take a beer taste test, although he warned them that their next task involved driving a car. Sure enough, people in the white elephant group drank significantly more beer than people in the control group, which suggests that they had a harder time not indulging in alcohol (ibid).
“A tired brain preoccupied with its problems is going to struggle to resist what it wants, even when what it wants isn’t what we need” (ibid). This kind of mental stress overload can affect all sorts of little choices that we make throughout our day that are related to self-medicating behaviors.
Members of an alcoholic/addicted family carry a great deal of psychological and emotional weight that stresses our mental muscles. Denying is also stressful; as we try to figure out whether or not to deal with that “pink elephant in the living room,” our muscles for living “normally” lose their resilience and strength. This is why self-care and surrender are so important in recovery. We need to surrender to the recognition that we cannot carry more than we can carry and build back our resilience and strength in our mental and emotional muscles so that we can begin to make healthy, healing choices for ourselves.
What Is Self-Care, Anyway?
Our emotions and our bodies are so closely linked that taking care of the body is taking care of the mind, and taking care of the mind is taking care of the body. Both are crucial to emotional health.
Trauma can undermine our motivation to take care of ourselves, particularly in the areas of hygiene, rest, good nutrition, and exercise. After a traumatic experience, people often lose some maturational achievements and regress to earlier modes of coping with stress. In children, this may show up as an inability to take care of themselves in such areas as feeding and toilet training; in adults, it is expressed in excessive dependence and in a loss of capacity to make thoughtful, autonomous decisions. (van der Kolk 1994). The recovery process can also put us under extra strain and at times be somewhat regressive. As we revisit childhood pain and vulnerability, we revisit our childhood states. For this reason, extra attention to self-care is an important part of getting back on track and staying on track. Adopting lifestyle changes that not only heal the body mind but also are strategies for sustaining mental and emotional health while processing painful situations as they occur—our ultimate goal in recovery.
Why wait to get sick before we get help? We have learned that lowering our cholesterol reduces heart disease. There is such a thing as emotional cholesterol, too. Following are a variety of ways to keep our emotional cholesterol low so we can stay mentally and emotionally fit.
Your Well-Being Checklist: Are You Getting Enough . . . ?
• Good Food. Eat well: eat a balanced diet and stay away from excess sugar, white flour, and caffeine. Stress depletes dopamine and so does lack of sleep and poor nutrition. Alcohol, caffeine, and sugar all appear to decrease dopamine levels in the brain. Some foods, however, actually increase dopamine levels and get that magical medicine chest working in our favor. Foods like avocados, almonds, bananas, dairy products, pumpkin and sesame seeds, and legumes are the ones to reach for.
• Exercise. Research studies found that exercising, such as brisk walking three to four times a week, can have the same mood-elevating results as medication when it comes to treating depression.
• Sleep and Rest. Get enough sleep: we need sufficient sleep to give our nervous systems, muscles, and minds the rest they require to function well. Lack of proper sleep can exacerbate depression and anxiety and lead to low energy levels, mood swings, and a lack of ability to concentrate.
• Oxygen. Breathe: scientists have discovered that oxygen is critical for the production of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), a high-energy molecule that stores the energy our bodies need to do just about everything. ATP releases energy when it is broken down (hydrolyzed) into ADP (or adenosine diphosphate). Because this energy is used for many metabolic processes it is considered the universal energy currency for metabolism. Oxygen is the most vital component in ATP production. And if something goes wrong with the production of ATP, the result is lowered vitality, disease, and premature aging.[citation t/k from author]
• Yoga/Meditation. Yoga exercises increase respiratory efficiency, normalize gastrointestinal functions, and increase muscle and skeletal flexibility and joint range of motion, and meditation trains us to calm the mind and body.
• Sunlight. Get thirty minutes of sunlight a day. Sunlight, because it contains vitamin D, helps prevent cancer, bone disease, depression, and many other illnesses that are only now beginning to be understood. Also, because vitamin D can help lower and control insulin, sunlight may also play a role in helping us reach our weight-loss goals.
• Connection: As Margaret Mead said, “Having someone wonder where you are when you don’t come home at night is a very old human need.” Humans are pack animals, and we apparently experience health benefits, including longer lives, if we have a network of supportive relationships. In a study done in Canada, a sense of community proved to have beneficial effects on people’s health. It was concluded that a sense of belonging might be part of health prevention (MacPherson et al 2006). This is currently an area of study and research and results may vary from study to study, gender to gender, and culture to culture, but across the board, relationships clearly play a role in longevity.
• Positivity. Maintain a positive attitude: researchers at the University of Texas found that people with an upbeat view of life were less likely than pessimists to show signs of frailty. They speculate that positive emotions may directly affect health by altering the chemical balance of the body. Alternatively, it may be that an upbeat attitude helps to boost a person’s health by making it more likely they will feel good about themselves and their lives. (Leath 1999).
• Self-Soothing. Take a bath: a warm bath releases prolactin, the same soothing hormone released by nursing mothers. Massage releases oxytocin—nature’s “brain fertilizer” that actually causes neurons to connect and grow.
• Unloading. Journal, pray, or share your feelings: all of these activities enhance immune function (Pennebaker 1997, Dossey1993).
• Meaningful Activity. Rather that straining to “find a passion,” try being passionate about what you find. Our capacity for depth and engagement can be applied to and repeated with a number of meaningful activities throughout our life spans. Have some goals that allow you to feel purposeful; develop a self-reflectiveness that can give life a sense of meaning and beauty. A sense of appreciation and gratitude are consistently correlated with happiness and health.
• Therapeutic Support Systems: The kind of trauma that occurs in childhood and evidences itself through the symptoms that we discussed in our chapters on relationship trauma does not tend to get better on its own. Its roots are deep, and once we begin dealing with it, we need a reliable support network. The kind of deep sharing that goes on in group therapy actually elevates the immune system and acts as a destressor.
Breathe, Breathe, Breathe
If you feel yourself beginning to enter that emotionally frayed and fried zone, try some simple mood-managing strategies. Next time you’re sitting in front of your computer and your body morphs into a vibrating mass of nervous little pricks or you hear one more piece of lousy financial news and your gut starts to glue itself to the inside wall of your stomach, simply breathe in slowly and mindfully and bring your mind into the here and now in the present. Slow down your breathing, relax your muscles, and calm your nervous system.
The breath connects the body and the mind, so slowing down the breath has the effect of calming the body, mind, and emotions. Breathing is a bodily function that is regulated by the autonomic nervous system as well as the conscious voluntary nervous system. Breathing is the only body function that creates a bridge between the conscious and unconscious mind/body, bringing them into a mutual balance.
Sometimes our fear and hypervigilance makes us hold our breath. When our brains anticipate danger or we get scared, our breathing rate increases so that more oxygen can be sent to the blood cells and muscle fibers to prepare us to fight or run away to safety. In either case we can try to relax ourselves consciously by slowing down and deepening our inhalations and exhalations, thereby stimulating our relaxation response and calming our emotions.
Try it for yourself right now. Simply draw deep, rhythmic breaths, allow your diaphragm to expand as you do this, and observe calm coming into your body, mind, and emotions. Then loosen up your mind. As your breath helps you to even out your mood, allow your mind to move toward or away from what is preoccupying it without getting caught up in or stuck in it. Other techniques are to allow your thoughts to simply pass by the inner eye of your mind as if you were sitting on the banks of a river watching the water carry them downstream, or release them as if they were floating up into the clouds and being carried away by a gentle breeze.
Why Exercise Is a Natural Antidepressant
Endorphins are the body’s sedatives and also act as painkillers, diminishing our perception of pain. When we are hurt and endorphins are released, they have an analgesic effect that is far more potent than morphine. This effect allows us to feel empowered and to function. Endorphins are manufactured in our brain, spinal cord, and many other parts of our bodies. Not coincidently, the neuron receptors that endorphins bind to are the same ones that bind to some pain medicines. However, unlike morphine, the activation of these receptors by the body’s own endorphins does not lead to addiction, dependence, or negative lifestyle patterns.
Exercise boosts the brain’s feel-good endorphins, releases muscle tension, improves sleep, and reduces levels of the stress hormone cortisol. It also increases our body temperature, which may have a calming effect. All of these changes in our mind and body can improve such symptoms as sadness, anxiety, irritability, stress, fatigue, anger, self-doubt, helplessness, and hopelessness—all of which are associated with depression (Singh et al).
Though research suggests that it may take at least thirty minutes of exercise a day, three to five times a week, to significantly improve depression symptoms, any amount of activity—as little as ten to fifteen minutes at a time—can still improve mood in the short term. Research also shows that we’re more likely to maintain good exercise habits if we get exercise to fit into our lives—for example, by walking or biking to work, or by walking, jogging, or playing a sport with friends (Blumenthal et al 1999).
Exercise is proactive. Along with the obvious physiological benefits, it is helpful psychologically to feel that we can do something each day to help ourselves. So walk, bike, play a sport, go to a yoga class, or dance around your house to your favorite music. It’s fun, relaxing, and good for your body, mind, and soul.
Put Meaning and Purpose into Your Life
The feeling that we are making a positive contribution to our world that connects us to others who are making similar contributions is an esteem-building activity that makes us feel good about ourselves. “Well-being is a process (of staying well), not an end-state, so any conceptualization of well-being that concentrates on end-states . . . is probably off track. It may be that in some cultures well-being is characterized by self-acceptance, positive relations with others, autonomy, environmental mastery, purpose in life, and personal growth” (Leath 1999). We build resilience throughout life when we can mobilize our circumstances to meet our needs and engage with others in meeting theirs; it is the circle of life.
“Purpose in life involves having clear perceptions of what kind of far-off yet potentially achievable future experience will bring about rewarding experience. Meaning in life, however, does not necessarily involve sustained focus on particular goals” (ibid).
Developing a sense of meaning is not only intellectual; it involves engaging in activities that create meaning, and it is different for different people and different cultures. We are all naturally engaged in a process by which we assign meaning to our lives based on what we have experienced in the past, what we have learned through experience, what plans for the future we can formulate, and our willingness and ability to work toward actualizing those plans.
Maintain the Right Ratio
of Positive versus Negative Emotions
Barbara Fredrickson, a social psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of Positivity, writes about what makes for an upbeat outlook on life. In her research, Fredrickson found that it is important to actively maintain a conscious balance between our negative and positive emotions in order to sustain a positive attitude. “Our emotions tend to obey a tipping point,” she writes. That tipping point among Americans tends to be a 3-to-1. “We need three positive emotions to lift us up for every one negative emotion that brings us down” (Fredrickson 2009). To improve the ratio, Fredrickson feels that we need to give ourselves time to do the things that we enjoy and to live more in the present. “Resilient people manage adversity and handle unexpected things. It’s not just that they only experience positive emotions, but instead that they are able to cultivate more positive feelings. Resilient people don’t make social comparisons. Instead they focus on what’s positive in their own lives” (ibid).
Twelve-step programs talk about “comparing and despairing” or “comparing our insides to other people’s outsides.” Keeping the focus on ourselves and being grateful for what we have rather than bemoaning what others have that we lack ups our positivity ratio, which ups our mood and frame of mind. Fredrickson’s research shows that “Positivity reigns whenever positive emotions—like love, joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, and inspiration—touch and open your heart. One of the most positive emotions to elicit is gratitude. . . . If we see what we are going through as a gift or an opportunity it unlocks that positive emotion” (ibid).
So keep a journal and a gratitude list, say a prayer, or walk outdoors with a friend and share what’s on your mind. Get the help you need when you need it, and engage in the kinds of activities that give you a sense of pleasure and meaning. Research bears out that these activities work on the brain in a similar way as brain meds, and they can even have better, lasting results because, when you’re personally proactive, you’re actively taking charge of your own emotional health.