breaking the doom scroll
7 days ago I changed my morning routine: previously I would doom scroll with my morning coffee, but for the last week I’ve been writing my morning pages instead. I had the…
tags /mental-health /
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my messy brain
seeing my brain in new light & trying to work with it instead of against it
every day now
This pandemic has not been good for my nervous system (I wanted to write “mental health”, but I think that is potentially a misleading term because it makes it seems like actual…
on my (lack of) emotional maturity
I told a close friend recently that I see myself as an emotionally immature person. She was surprised, saying that I tend to have a harsh assessment of myself. I am not…
freeing ourselves from our invisible prisons
on the journey and outcomes of freeing ourselves
my long, winding, challenging road to healing
In my last few posts I wrote about how I’ve become increasingly more aware of my dysregulated nervous system. Just like the analogy I have used that I don’t expect a person…
sometimes the best one can do is to step away
I think that many people who suffered some form of oppression before will feel an extra sense of responsibility towards working for justice, because there is both a sensitivity and projection of…
on coping with emotional dysregulation
I realised that I have problems regulating stress and my emotions, only sometime in the last couple of years. This reminds me of the time when I told an ex-colleague I may…
However, if our emotions are blocked
However, if our emotions are blocked due to denial, repression, or trauma, then blood flow can become chronically constricted, depriving the frontal cortex, as well as other organs, of vital nourishment. This can leave you foggy and less alert, limited in your awareness and thus your ability to intervene into the conversation of your bodymind, to make decisions that change physiology or behavior. As a result, you may become stuck—unable to respond freshly to the world around you, repeating old patterns of behavior and feeling that are responses to an outdated knowledge base.
stress increases with increased steroid production
…stress increases with increased steroid production. Depressed people typically have high levels of these stress steroids. In fact, depressed people are in a chronic state of ACTH activation because of a disrupted feedback loop that fails to signal when there are sufficient levels of steroid in the blood. So the CRF-ACTH axis just keeps pumping out more and more steroids. Autopsies almost always show a tenfold higher level of CRF in the cerebrospinal fluid of those who killed themselves compared to those who died from other causes.