Depression and Stress.
Written for a 12 step group
I found that my depression and stress sickness was greatly helped when I started to work on repairing the wreckage of the past that was constantly being fueled by my various addictions. From years of practicing various addictions I had dug a deep hole for myself and my family. The bigger mess I made, the more stress I created for myself and the more depression and hopelessness arose from my wrong lifestyle. Once I started to restructure my life in the direction of recovery, the benefits started showing up at my door. One thing was certain, I could not keep my old sick life and get better as well. Something had to go.
Living an unbalanced life really contributed to my depression. Stress and depression go hand in hand, then we get sick from the stress and the depression and stress just gets worse and it becomes a death spiral. Meditation and mindfulness helped me as well as my joining the simple living movement. Without time for contemplative practices and relaxation I am sunk. This is an almost top necessity for me. I tell those that say they have no time to relax to get into voluntary simplicity. If you can't keep up, scale back until you can keep up. I need to eat right and sleep right and exercise right as well. Many foods help trigger crazy thinking and can lead to depression, especially the salty and chemical rich, artificial factory foods. This is much easier to see once we clean up our diet.
Besides nutrition and getting the proper vitamins I have to work in spiritual areas as well. I need a balance to live right - not 100% spiritual and not 100% physical, but need to blend the two seamlessly for balanced recovery. 12 step work as well as personal religious and spiritual studies helped me in this area. I find that sometime spiritual practitioners neglect the natural laws that govern our bodies and suffer in this area from lack of living a balanced life. Some of us forget we are spiritual beings residing in physical bodies living in physical world and governed my both spiritual and physical or natural laws in addition to man made laws. We need some effort with spiritual work and some effort in physical work for a good balance or as the Buddha recommended - taking the middle path. Joining the simple living movent in 1996 also helped with reducing stress and giving me a new life.
I am lucky to be able to recover in these areas using natural methods. Other persons suffering from depression might have a chemical imbalance in the brain and need medical advice and special medications. If this is the case, it is a matter of doing the footwork in all these medical areas to find out what can be done. Depression can stem from many areas but once thing is for sure, If we dedicate ourselves to work on getting better and making a better life for us we can almost always improve our life in a positive direction and make progress.
Adrenal steroids (cortisol) secreted when a person is under stress reach the brain and over time can affect the structure of the brain. When stress hormones, intended for a life or death fight or flight situation, remain switched for an extended period, they can slow the growth of nerve fibers in the areas of the brain responsible for emotions and other brain functions. We also produce cortisol from any other stressors the body perceives, whether it is physical stress, such as a sickness, injury, surgery, or temperature extremes as well as psychological stress that we and the world put on us.
Each of us has produces a different amount of these chemicals and has a different sensitivity to them and this might be the missing link as to a part of the question as to why some of us are more addictive than others with how we each produce and react to these stress chemicals differently. Besides fat, anger and depression can be helped with exercise. Exercise helps remove these stress chemicals from our bodies as well as produce other chemicals that give us a sense of well being - endorphins. Yes, we have our own drug pusher within each of us. We can learn to reduce the urge to pacify ourselves with food, drugs, alcohol, compulsive spending from stress, but really need to work on restructuring our lives so they are less stressful if we ever want to find peace and serenity. You see, 12 steps or not, we all have to answer to natural law. Within the boundaries of natural law is where stress chemicals come from within us and as addicts I believe we are super sensitized to these chemicals and we seek relief though our various addictions. So, as addicts we should be in tune with using any tools available to us for recovery purposes whether it is the spiritual tools of meditation and 12 step work or the mechanical tools of eating right and exercise.
Here is a small snip from Psychotherapy Toady regarding the benefits of exercise with addiction.
Why does exercise have such an impact on the emotional brain? Naturally, there is, first of all, its effect on endorphins. These tiny molecules secreted by the brain resemble opium and its derivatives, such as morphine and heroin. The emotional brain contains many receptors for endorphins, and that's why it is so sensitive to opium-it immediately radiates a sensation of well-being and satisfaction by hijacking one of the emotional brain's own intrinsic mechanisms. Opium has a powerful effect on emotions-in fact, it's the strongest known antidote to the pangs of separation and mourning. However, when derivatives of opium are used too often, they can become habit forming. Brain receptors become inured to them, so the dose must be systematically increased in order to produce the same effect. Moreover, because the receptors become less and less sensitive, regular pleasures lose all their power and potency-including sex, the pleasure of which is often reduced in drug addicts.
The secretion of endorphins brought on by physical exercise does exactly the opposite. The more the natural mechanism of pleasure is gently stimulated by exercise, the more sensitive the mechanism itself becomes. In addition to relishing sex and life's other big pleasures, people who exercise regularly actually get more pleasure out of the little things in life: their friendships, their cats, their meals, their hobbies, or even the smiles of passersby in the street. Essentially, it becomes easier for them to be satisfied, And in fact, the experience of pleasure is just the opposite of depression. Depression is defined, above all, by the absence of pleasure, more so than by sadness, which is probably the reason why the release of endorphins has such a potent antidepressant and anxiolytic effect. Stimulating the emotional brain by exercise also kindles the immune system. It promotes the proliferation of "natural killer" cells, making them more aggressive against infections and cancer cells. The opposite effect occurs with heroin addicts, whose immunedefenses collapse, often causing them to become gravely ill.
Exercise may also strengthen another physiological mechanism related to emotional health. This mechanism involves what we have already learned about heart rate variability. "'People who exercise regularly show a greater variability in heart rate and more coherence than people who do not. This means that their parasympathetic system, the physiological "brake" that brings on periods of calm, is healthier and stronger. A good balance between the two branches of the autonomic nervous system is one of the best potential antidotes to anxiety and panic attacks. All the symptoms of anxiety start with an overactive sympathetic system, a dry mouth, accelerated heartbeat, sweating, trembling, a rise in blood pressure. The sympathetic and parasympathetic systems are always in opposition. Thus, the more stimulation the parasympathetic branch receives, the stronger it becomes-like a developing muscle.
V (Male)
A Christian-Buddhist practitioner living a life of Voluntary Simplicity and grateful recovering Debtor, Drug and Substance Abuser, Compulsive Overeater, Clutterer, Rageaholic, Speculative Gambler, Compulsive Spender, Sex and Sensation Addict.
