For a long time, disassociation has been a major part of how I deal with my body. It's not an ideal solution, and on days when the pain level is high, the amount of brain it takes to tune out pain doesn't leave me with much to spare. Over the years, I'd got so far into the habit of doing it that a lot of the time I wasn't feeling my own skin. This in turn has made it impossible to access many of the simple pleasures of everyday life. I used to be a very tactile person, but when you're trying not to feel your own body too much, touching things is a really bad idea.
I've been doing a lot of figuring out in recent months about what's going on with me and how it all fits together. There are a number of different issues and some of them I'm stuck with - everything relating to the hypermobility. However, not everything awry with me is due to that, and some of it is starting to look fixable. As I've been able to explore things that help me, I've found myself in some interesting virtue cycles.
I think I've found the underlying issue for the low blood pressure. Tackling that means I can be more physically active, which is improving my mood. I've found answers to some of the body stressors that deal with the actual issues, rather than just having to try and tune it all out. That's helping with sleep - trying to go to sleep while trying to tune out body distress isn't easy. As I'm sleeping better I have more energy and I'm more relaxed and have more brain function which is opening up more possibilities. I'm increasingly able to do things that make me feel happy and comfortable.
As far as I can make out, it's happiness that causes the human body to create the hormone and neurotransmitter noradrenaline. This is the chemical that regulates blood pressure. I'd got into a vicious cycle where pain and insufficiency were making me hideously depressed, which was wiping out my blood pressure, which was robbing me of almost all the things I used to do that made me happy. Pushing back the other way is hard sometimes, but I'm getting stronger, and I'm seeing differences day by day.
Mental health is not separate from body health. What happens in our bodies often has a circularity to it - hormones etc don't work in linear, cause and effect kinds of ways. Mood affects body chemistry and body chemistry affects mood and things can go wrong at any point in the process. Once things go wrong, fixing it isn't easy, and it really isn't obvious where to start. It's taken me a long time to figure out all of the mechanics, along with a lot of reading whatever biological science content I could track down online. Assuming I've cracked it at this point - and I think I have. The real test will be whether I keep improving, and how much health and strength I can reclaim.
Happiness isn't some luxury bonus thing. Not if it's implicated in how we make the chemicals we need for our bodies to function. Healthy blood pressure is absolutely essential to our bodies, and if happiness is what helps us regulate blood pressure, then clearly this is an essential thing, and the implications for societies in this are huge.
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