Just recently learned about Robert Sapolsky. His work is centralized on how stress affects cognition and can damage the brain. OMG, I cannot get his books to me fast enough. My brain has been so fucked up by stress. To the point where I even have a tick (almost like Tourette’s) when unpleasant stressors enter my brain. At night with my wife before I fall asleep, my whole body ticks every five minutes until I doze off, fighting off the intense thoughts of anxiety about completely irrational worries. (Thank God for my wife, who is also crazy in her own wonderful way.) All of this started after I got unplugged from the Mormons (and all the drama that ensued).
But non-life-threatening stressors, such as constantly worrying about money or pleasing your boss, also trigger the release of adrenalin and other stress hormones, which, over time, can have devastating consequences to your health, he said: “If you turn on the stress response chronically for purely psychological reasons, you increase your risk of adult onset diabetes and high blood pressure. If you’re chronically shutting down the digestive system, there’s a bunch of gastrointestinal disorders you’re more at risk for as well.”
In children, the continual release of glucocorticoids can suppress the secretion of normal growth hormones. “There’s actually a syndrome called stress dwarfism in kids who are so psychologically stressed that growth is markedly impaired,” Sapolsky said.
I guess I just want to understand the Swiss cheese that is now my brain because of all this. It has created a new me that didn’t exist before, not a bad me, just a different one. Before I was a master of self-deception and perception management, wearing my khakis and living more than just a double life. Like every Mormon, there was me, and there was the me that I presented to the world. Not anymore. I’m just me now, one, authentic, broken, asshole-y, passionate, sometimes kind, me. People either like that person or they don’t. I’m working on my own progress in my own way, but if someone doesn’t like it, FUCK ‘EM! That is there problem, not mine. There are plenty of people and jobs in the world that are just fine with WHO I AM and I will not return to any level of behavior other than that.
Time to get reading Sapolsky to understand myself better.
Robert Sapolsky discusses physiological effects of stress
https://news.stanford.edu/news/2007/march7/sapolskysr-030707.html
#books #neurology #stress