This Is Your Brain on Inflammation: ADHD, Autism, Depression, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s.
If you were a child of the 80s and 90s like myself, you will remember this commercial. “This is your brain. This is drugs. This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?”
With the ever rising incidences and diagnoses for ADHD, Autism, Depression, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s and nothing to resolve them in the medical world, I think we can change the 80s drug slogan to make it more applicable for today. After all, the more we ‘early diagnose and manage/treat’ a condition, the more disability associated with that condition rises. The best case scenario your doctor provides is to ‘manage’ the symptoms.
But here’s the reality. Symptoms aren’t stupid. Your body never does anything stupid. Symptoms are nothing more than your attempts at buying time to escape what is potentially dangerous or harmful. That potential danger could be something you ate, a lack of movement, a poor relationship, or chemical influence. One of those symptoms is inflammation, regardless of the condition or disease process.
“This is your brain. This is inflammation. This is your brain on inflammation. Any questions?”
If there’s a commonality of brain inflammation to all these mental/emotional conditions, then how does the brain get inflamed? Don’t think of inflammation as an isolated event. Inflammation is a byproduct of an immune response due to trauma. And again, don’t look at trauma as just an event. Trauma is a persistent pattern of dysfunction. It could be physical, chemical, or emotional/social/spiritual.
Our immune system (inflammation) gets activated for 2 main reasons.
Breaking Fear
There’s a saying, ‘We fear that which we do not know.’ Many will recite this as a way of self comforting after being criticized. While I think this is true, I also think ‘we fear that which we do know.’
After the birth of our 3rd son, we joined the ranks for minivan owners. If I could give advice to my 25 year old self, I would tell me, ‘Don’t fear the minivan, those things are freakn’ sweet.’
We got a used one, with all the features possible. Since it wasn’t a hassle to get 3 kids into the back of a sedan anymore, we were more open to driving around a bit. Little did we know, we had a battery terminal that could pop off the positive terminal just by blowing on it. My wife found out the hard way after being stranded in a parking lot after a mom’s group. Thankfully, when it appeared to be a dead battery, the cable had come off.
It doesn’t seem like a big problem except now we know something. We know that there could be a possibility of hitting a pot hole (a probability of that here in Colorado Springs), it could shake the cable loose and then risk the battery not being charged while driving. The fear of getting somewhere, enjoying our time together, and then not being able to start the van back up, permeated through our thoughts.
Constant #fear is just as damaging as drug addictions, trans fats, and cubicle living. Click To TweetI decided that I would use Google University to see how to change the battery terminal. Surprisingly, it looked like something I could handle, and I’m not a car guy. I built up the confidence, went to the car parts store, found all the parts I needed in less than 2 minutes and was ready to tackle the project of saving the minivan.
I opened the hood up, located the battery cables and was dismayed at all the extra cables that weren’t on the Google videos. I began to fear that which I did not know, especially when it comes to electricity. Long story short, under the many suggestions from my wife, I called our car whiz, motor-cross racing friend.
He looked at it, assessed the situation and fixed the problem in about 8 minutes.
What’s the point? The point is that fear is paralyzing, whether you know what you’re getting yourself into or you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into. As I watch and observe our nation during this political season, I think fear of the known and unknown is destroying our nation’s physical health just as much as our low fat diet recommendations, sedentary lifestyles, sugar obsessions, and badges of busyness.