THE MANY POWERS OF OUR BRAIN

Hello Pain, Old Friend

Tonight I'm in pain. I've been in pain a lot in my life. It sucks, mainly because it curbs or halts my creativity. It makes me cranky. It interferes with me being able to enjoy the multitude of things that bring me pleasure throughout the day to enjoy, like looking at the face of the man I'm in love with or enjoying my mom's company. Giving my dogs the attention and love they deserve. Keeping this huge house as clean and orderly as my standards demand. Getting accomplished all of the things on my “to do” list. (Well, I never actually do that.) Working on my new, very exciting career opportunity.

When I was at my strongest mentally, I was meditating for about an hour every day and exercising six days a week, training for triathlons. During this time, I was just beginning to embark on controlling pain with my mind. Once, I fell while on a run and twisted my ankle so bad that it immediately swelled up and started throbbing with sharp pain. I went home, hopped into a warm bath, calmed my mind through the meditation techniques I had learned, then started focusing on my ankle. I went inside of it, into the inflamed tissue. I pictured the cells spinning at abnormally high speeds and the electrical impulses firing off pain signals to my brain. Then I focused on calming these signals, smoothing them, interrupting their pathway. I did this for about 20 minutes, just focusing on the pathways of pain signals and one by one, interrupting their delivery.

I opened my eyes. My ankle had stopped throbbing. The swelling had

noticeably gone down. I finished bathing and carefully got out of the bath, stepping first on the non-injured ankle. Gingerly, I put weight on the hurt ankle, waiting to see if the sharp pain I had experienced while putting weight on it just minutes before would still be there. It was still a wee bit tender, but the pain was gone. I could walk normally.

How Our Brains Go South

Does this seem like a miracle? If you think about it, not really. Our brains are the control centers of our entire physical body. Throughout the day, we pick and choose which thoughts we focus on, which ones we push aside or ignore. When things go wrong, the brain starts to focus on certain things that are not healthy, as in the case of depression. I know this from personal experience. Depression happens when the brain starts to focus more dominantly on the unpleasant occurrences throughout the day and pays less and less attention to the positive. Eventually, the receptors that are receiving the negative signals grow bigger from the regular activity and the ones that are slated to receive positive signals slowly start to diminish. Now, when you receive a signal that is more or less neutral, your brain receives it as negative. Those receptors are now just more robust and capable than the positive ones. Life in general appears to be negative.

I know this because I've been there. I was chronically depressed for over five years. It had nothing to do with my personality. It was triggered by a series of events in my life that left me feeling helpless and hopeless. It took me over four years working with various psychiatrists to find the correct medication combination, (it took three different antidepressants at very high doses,) before I got to the point where I could stop the excessive crying and staying in bed most of the day. Even then, it was still debilitating. I found it almost impossible to get anywhere, (like to the store or the post office) before 5 pm. I couldn't even make it out of the house before dark. I'd go so long without using my car that my battery would often be dead.

People misunderstand depression. They think it is more about the way people choose to behave. "Snap out of it!" they say. "You have so much to be thankful for!" "Stop looking at just the negative!" And essentially it is a choice. The problem is that once depressed; it’s almost impossible to have the wherewithal necessary to turn it around. It is certainly not a personality characteristic or weakness in character or even a lack of will. I've always had an unusually positive personality. I've also always been able to see the bright side of things, especially the humor in situations. I've never been categorized as lazy, and, in fact, enjoyed throwing myself into any hard work. Depression is a disorder. It can affect anyone.

Cupid to the Rescue

The only thing that was able to pull me out of it was falling in love. But was this experience, one we all experience, sometimes multiple times, over the course of our lifetimes, enough to combat something as debilitating as ongoing, long-term depression? Scientists have identified what goes on in our brains when we fall in love, and it is nothing short of amazing.

During the initial attraction stage, when we can think of nothing else, three main neurotransmitters are involved. The first is Adrenaline, the same one activated during our stress response. That is why when you are with your new love, your body temperature goes up, your heart races and your mouth goes dry.

The second one is dopamine. This chemical stimulates desire and reward, by triggering an intense rush of pleasure. It has the same effect on the brain as taking cocaine. It also has the added benefits of increasing your energy, leaving you with less need for sleep or food, with focused attention and the ability to find delight in even the smallest of things. (Do you think this could have had anything to do with switching around my brain from being depressed to being balanced again?)

Object of My Affection, Nay...Obsession

Finally, in this initial attraction stage, your brain lowers its serotonin levels, down to the level often found in people with obsessive-compulsive disorders, which would explain why you can't stop thinking about your love---obsessively. This lower level also causes us to think a bit irrationally about our current state of affairs. We idealize our relationship, thinking it is more special and more precious than anyone else's could be, encouraging us to stick with it, leading to the next phase, attachment.

I Love You, Stay, and Let’s Get it On!

During the attachment phase, we are typically having a lot of sex with our new love. During this time, the brain is releasing lots of oxytocin, because this powerful chemical is generously released every time we have an orgasm. It is the reason we feel so close to our beloved after sex. In fact, it has been proven that the more couples have sex, (with orgasms) the closer their bond becomes. The other chemical involved in attaching to a person is vasopressin. It also is released after sex. It's an anti-diuretic hormone and works with your kidneys to control thirst. Scientists discovered what it does regarding love when they studied the prairie vole.

The Horny, Little Prairie Vole, Who Knew?

The little prairie vole is an interesting creature in that it tends to have a lot more sex than necessary for reproduction. (Horny, little bastards.) It also forms relatively stable pairings with each other, just like humans. (I wonder. Does it experience jealousy, engage in affairs, fight over money or who leaves dirty socks lying around the den?) When scientists injected a drug that suppressed the effect of vasopressin into the male prairie vole's brains, their bonds with their females deteriorated almost immediately and they started failing to protect their females from other male suitors. (Now you know why the divorce rate among prairie voles surged for a bit, in case you were staying awake at night over that.)

A Grossly Unharnessed Power

Our brains are truly magical, incredibly powerful control centers. Depending on which direction it is leaning, it can determine your overall level of contentment, motivation, energy and even your actual perception. So, it’s fair to conclude that if I have the ability to control my brain, I can also control my overall life experience, including how much pain I must tolerate, sadness I endure, and even how my overall life will go.

Think about it. (Go ahead. You've got the power.) If I reduced severe pain and even the physical swelling in my ankle by meditating on it, why would I ever have the need to suffer from pain again? If falling in love could create enough of a change in brain chemicals to release me from years of mental anguish, why I couldn't I recreate that chemical flow through my thoughts to create a more desired reality at any stage of my life?

We know we have a choice as to which thoughts we focus on and which we don't. Given this, it makes us as a society look pretty damned stupid. The pharmaceutical industry in the U.S. makes higher profit margins than any other industry, despite harrowing, multi-million dollar lawsuits. In fact, Pfizer made a staggering 51.6 BILLION dollars last YEAR, after only spending 6.6 billion on research and development and 11.4 billion on marketing. (That's interesting. They spent twice as much on marketing than on research and development.) That left them with a profit of 22 billion, or a 43% profit margin.

After you recover from nausea over the information you just read, (hopefully without reaching for a nausea medication,) think about this. We have everything we need to control pain, depression, nausea, swelling, inflammation and yes, I would venture to say even illnesses or life-threatening diseases such as cancer. Have you ever seen the movie, "Lucy"? It's about a woman who accidentally ingests a chemical that causes her to start using higher and higher percentages of her brain. As she increases this percentage, she’s able to not only heal herself but alter the physical world around her. Is this just science fiction? We know we only use a small fraction of our capabilities. We also know that nature, as a rule, does not create waste. The simple conclusion one can draw from this is that we are doing nature and ourselves a grand disservice by under-utilizing the majority of our brain power.

Perhaps We are Focused on the Wrong Subject

Instead of concentrating on teaching ourselves how to use our own, natural resources to combat the ailments and imperfections that come with being human, we put our time, effort and way too much of our money and resources into creating unnatural chemicals that do the job that we could do just with brain power alone. The problem with this approach is that nothing comes for free. Medications or anything foreign that we introduce into our systems come with undesirable consequences. Drugs have side-effects. Their production is hard on the environment. They cost a lot of money and are not always for the greater good of the individual or even society as a whole.

I'm writing this to you after consuming a Percoset about a half hour ago to combat the pain I was experiencing. I feel compelled to reveal my hypocrisy. Why didn't I just meditate and alleviate my pain? Why didn't I call my partner Justin in and have him send a flood of happy chemicals dancing through my brain, to get rid of my pain? Because I'm lazy. It's easier to pop a pill than it is to get into a meditative state. At least, that’s my current outlook. (And besides, Justin was busy, but I do plan to catch him in just a moment and hit him up for some oxytocin, serotonin, and vasopressin.)

I would love to get back to my healthiest, where I was just embarking on the ability to control not only my pain but also correct an injury just by using my mind. And I will always be thankful for my life love coming to me during a time when I was headed for trouble with my depression. He provided just the right cocktail of brain chemicals needed to turn my entire perception around. I have been off antidepressants now for over a year, and even though we have had some excruciating times, even a few that threatened our union itself, I never once felt that deep, insurmountable, devastating, black cloud of hopelessness swooping over me, which I know is true depression. Thanks to love, I'm a world away from that state now.

Don’t Ban Pharmaceuticals Just Yet, Though

If you or anyone you know could be suffering from depression, please, get help from a professional. While this article points out that we can certainly control our brains, the problem with depression is that your brain has gotten itself in a state where it cannot find the pathways or the motivation necessary to help itself. It is in situations like this that we must reach out to others. Although I frown heavily upon the pharmaceutical industry and consider it to be just one, big, glorified drug dealer, pushing its product on the unsuspecting and the suffering, I am still very grateful that I have had access to certain antidepressants and pain medications when I've needed them. It is a good thing to have them available to help us when we are not in a condition to help ourselves.

To Further Evolution

I just hope that as we evolve as a species, we can start to realize just how capable we are of coming up with healthier ways to heal ourselves. Just think of where we'd be if we were putting 22 billion dollars each year, (just the yearly profit margin of one pharmaceutical company) into the study, practice and teaching of using the power of our brains to promote healing. Our world would be a much healthier, much more pleasant and more advanced place, a place where I can guess that everything from sprained ankles to devastating diseases would be, at the very least, much more managed, if not entirely eradicated.

Here's to your health and your happy thoughts...and of course, to falling in love.

(Justin? Could you come in here please?)