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Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Spirituality and Mental Health

Spirituality can be a great coping tool to aide with mental health recovery. If you are not a religious person, you can think of your "spirit" as being your soul, your will, or fate, but it also applies in helping you work with your mental limitations to achieve your personal goals.  Refer to the poem  "Invictus" by Ernest Henley and think about how it may relate to depression, addiction, or just feeling lost:

Out of the night that covers me
      Black as the pit from pole to pole
I thank whatever gods may be
      For my unconquerable soul
In the fell clutch of circumstance
      I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
      My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
      Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
      Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
      How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
      I am the captain of my soul.

Our spirit or soul can do much to help regulate our brains.  So let's talk about the brain first.  If you make a fist with your hand and cover your thumb with your fingers, you have made a crude model of your brain.  The bottom of my hand is the brain stem; all creatures have a brain stem, reptiles, insects, humans, fish etc. The brain stem tells us to do things like eat and sleep and breathe and reproduce, basic survival stuff.

If I fold my fingers back, or the top of the brain back, you can see the thumb which represents the amygdala and hippocampus, also called the limbic system, and this controls the emotional centers of our brain. Things like fear, anxiety, sadness, laughter, contentment, love, and attachment to people are processed here.  Mammals all have this part of the brain, they can attach to their young and take care of them, and can even attach to humans because they have more than just a brain stem. 

The fingers that folds over the limbic system represent the cortex, the front being called the prefrontal cortex. This controls such things as verbal language, decision making, and creativity; it is our logical or intelligence center of the brain. This is what distinguishes us from animals and makes us “aware of our awareness” and is how we have agency to choose, or a will of our own. Animals and insects follow their basic survival needs and emotions, humans can choose to put those things aside in pursuit of their individual goals and desires. For example, an animal is very compelled to eat and satisfy the hunger instinct. A human can hold back the survival instinct to eat when they are fasting for a personal reason or if they are trying to avoid eating unhealthy food; even though the human’s limbic system and brain stem says “eat” and their prefrontal cortex says “wait” and they make the appropriate actions that will get them to refrain from eating food until the time is right. Animals can be trained to do interesting things, but based on reinforcement of survival needs, not on a purpose outside themselves.

There is a constant back and forth messaging going back between brain stem, limbic system and prefrontal cortex. Basic survival needs, emotional needs, and decisions/planning/analyzing are constantly at play with each other. Your alarm goes off at 6:00 am in the morning and your brain stem says “more sleep,” your limbic system says “I hate myself for going to bed at 2:00 am, I feel awful, why do I have to go to stupid school” and your prefrontal cortex says “Lack of sleep or not I’m going to get a bad grade if I get another tardy so I better get up.” So (depending on the state of your mental health) you get up and tell yourself “get to bed earlier tonight.” What if you would have just stayed in bed? You would have had to face the consequence of getting a tardy or absence and a lowered grade, but also would have had to face an irritated parent, would have extra work the next day catching up, and possibly extra chores depending on the consequence given at home.  Parents are constantly trying to teach children to do what is in their best interest even if it is hard at the moment, because basing decisions on survival needs and emotions isn’t going to get you far in life.
 
It is very important that your brain is in optimal working condition in order for your prefrontal cortex to make decisions in your best interest. Neurotransmitters in your brain are what make this back and forth exchange from logical brain to emotional brain happen. There are so many neurotransmitters and so many neurons in our brain that there are lots of ways this can go awry.  One wrong meal, a bad test score, a fight with a loved one, can throw off the balance of neurotransmitters.  It is very important to keep your body and brain healthy so you can make decisions based on what is overall good for you and others. If you are super tired and hungry, your brain cells are probably not working optimally, and you will make decisions based more on short term emotional and survival needs than you will on long term positive outcome. Can you think of an example of this? (i.e. skipping class to get food because you skipped breakfast, yelling at someone because you didn’t get enough sleep, eating a candy bar because it’s the easiest things to grab instead of preparing healthy food). On the flip side, if your desire is strong and your prefrontal cortex working well, you can make yourself do amazing things that cause pain now but save us pain later. What are some examples of this? Examples: long distance running, immunization shots, college degrees.

Addiction is just another way to say your neurotransmitters are fixed in a pattern of self destruction! It is a disease of choice, you fuel the immediate need instead of long term healthy goals. That is why we go to extreme measures to make sure youth do not fall prey to addictions.  Hopefully you are not dealing with addictions. But we all deal with the little imbalances, like a bad mood, a temper outburst, behavioral issues at school, etc. Brains can cause a lot of problems for everyone, even the people you think “have it all together.” It is dangerous to compare yourself with others, because usually we compare our behind the scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel! It’s a normal part of life to have emotional ups and downs, but your ups or downs won’t look the same as my ups and downs. 
 
Think of yourself as a vehicle. The road you travel is your environment, some are bumpy some are smooth, some have lots of road blocks. Each vehicle looks a little different from the outside. All vehicles have an engine (brain and heart) a gas tank (stomach and digestion) wheels and cogs (limbs) a transmission (circulatory system) and a radio (thoughts) and a steering wheel (agency).  If the steering wheel is agency, what does the driver of the vehicle represent?  Yep! There is another important part of our vehicles and that is our spirit!   It’s very important to distinguish your spirit from your body and brain. Why? Because it took 1 trillion cell divisions to get you the body you have, and there is a lot that can go wrong in 1 trillion cell divisions!  That is why everyone is a little different. I’m short, she is tall, I have digestion issues, my husband can eat whatever he wants and feel great, her prefrontal cortext is able to say “Don’t worry this won’t last forever, you will feel better tomorrow!” while my brain may say “you are weak and tired and can’t go on”.  When I identify myself too much with my vehicle, I lose sight of the fact that I am not my physical body! That is the good news, we can use our spirits and agency no matter what is going on in our brains and bodies and environments to give our lives meaning and purpose to pain and help us press forward toward what is best for our lives.

But that doesn’t always take away the pain. When you are feeling negative emotions, what does your radio tell you?  Example: you are a nobody, you are weak, you are insignificant, you are a failure, etc. Emotional pain is I think the most difficult pain to endure. If you are suffering emotionally, there is an imbalance going on in your physical body, your mental cognitions (the radio), and/or your environment, and you’ll likely suffer spiritually.  If you are suffering spiritually, your logical brain may not get the last say and you will suffer emotionally and physically. It’s a negative feedback loop!  What can we do about that?

These are the three areas of our life experience: biology, environment, and psychology. If we are spiritual beings having an human experience, not human beings having a spiritual experience, then these realms represent the human experience. Psychology is your mental brain: how you see the world, your mind, your thoughts, and how your neurotransmitters all play off each other. Biology is your physical body: your digestion, immune system, blood cells, and how neurotransmitters are being formed and fueled. You environment is your support system: where you live, who you have relationships with, where you work or go to school. When you experiencing something positive in one of these areas, the other two areas are affected positively. See how they are connected? The reverse is true, when one area is affected negatively, all areas go down. If you have a tooth ache (biology) you will likely have some negative thoughts (psychology) and may be short tempered with people around you (environment). If you are depressed (psychology) you may feel low energy and feel yucky (biology) and you may start to do poorly in school (environment). If you break up with your boyfriend (environment) you may not sleep well (biology) and you may have serious thoughts of low self worth (psychology).  This is actually good news! Because this means our SPRIRTS can influence our human experience for good, we can purposely do things in any of these three realms to positively influence the whole system.
 
These are just a few of the tools you can use to help your human experience that often take a spiritual resolve to keep doing, but will help your neurotransmitters stay in balance:

Exercising (B)

Eating clean (B)

Adequate Sleep (B)

Medication when needed (B)

Positive affirmations and thoughts about self (P)

Positive thoughts about others (P)

Positive thoughts and hope for future (P)

Watching out for cognitive distortions (P)

Prayer (P)

Journal Writing (P)

Loving your friends and family (E)

Acts of Service (E)

Going to church (E)

Reading uplifting material (E)

Treating others with respect (E)

Working hard in school, work, or other responsibilities (E)

More good news: ALL these also fuel the spirit! Which you will need to do because it is not easy to try and constantly keep your human realm functioning, you need spiritual meaning and purpose behind your action. This is a positive feedback loop! When you know its the right thing to do, you will tolerate quite a bit of discomfort to make it happen. It will take your personal will power and prefrontal cortex to do this, because who feels like exercising and doing service when they are depressed, no one!  They may not be fun in the short run but they will eventually pull us up little by little until our biology, psychology, and environment are back in balance. So it takes the spiritual resolve to make it happen and making it happen fuels our spiritual resolve. Positive spiral upward!

Overcoming mental health issues often means doing what we know is right no matter how we feel. Try getting in touch with your spiritual side and see if it helps!  Remember you are the captain of your fate, the master of your soul.