When Stress Is Out of Control

Stress levels are off the charts these days. Unfortunately, medicine has no answers for all the stress that's killing us. Well, they say they do, but they don't.

Their biggest answer is psych drugs--antidepressants, antipsychotics and the rest of the gang. And these drugs may make you feel a bit better, but the odds are stacked against even that. Worse, these treatments don't actually heal anything.

So you're risking your brain, your nervous system and your endocrine system just to feel a little bit better--maybe. Or maybe not. That doesn't sound like a sensible trade-off to me. If I'm going to risk a lot, I want to get a lot in return, too.

Let's talk about this.

Stress rampages through our bodies and causes woe upon woe. And stress is cumulative. Making it through a rough patch doesn't mean your stress understands it's time to back off and start making nice. Oh, no; stress stays and stays and stays until we do something about it.

And since symptoms vary widely, we may not even realize that stress is the problem.

But since nobody mentions the need to deal with stress, let alone say anything about how we can do that, each stress event starts at the level where the last one left off.

This is not good news.

Let me give you an example. I was eleven-months-old when the drunk driver smashed into my parents' car and mashed my endocrine system; I was 25-years-old when a doctor finally took my health problems seriously. So, stress, in the form of a misfiring endocrine system, had a quarter-century to set up house and go about its business.

If you had an abusive childhood, you're in the same boat. And it's the same if you suffered a violent assault at some point in your life. Or lived through a war. Or worked on the front-lines of a police or fire department. Lived in a soul-sapping marriage. Ate an inadequate diet. And I could go on.

You end up with a bunch of symptoms that don't really add up, so doctors tend to write you off as a complainer, not somebody with real problems.

Medical schools teach doctors-to-be that when they hear hoof beats, they should think "horse," not "zebra." In other words, they should think of garden-variety solutions, not off-the-wall stuff. Then you show up looking and sounding like a zebra with polka dots! What are they supposed to do with that?

Now the truth is, none of your symptoms is exotic all by itself, but you present so many of them, all arrayed in new-and-different combinations that boggle the mind.

Fixing long-term stress is a step-it-through kind of deal; no magic bullets, no one-size-fits-all solutions, just taking one step at a time to get to where you want to go. It's not all that hard, but it has a whole lot of moving parts.

While a single article can't begin to cover all the moving parts, let me get you started down a good path.

Your nervous and endocrine systems, the major players in any stress situation, are controlled by the hypothalamus, a tiny gland that's part of the brain. Unfortunately, this little wonder-gland gets no protection from the blood/brain barrier that's supposed to keep the brain safe.

The last fifty years or so have been really, really hard on the hypothalamus. These days, our now-raggedy little king gets whacked pretty much every day, usually multiple times.

Whacking the hypothalamus causes stress, which the body stores because it has no other choice. So day after day, week after week, year after year, we're doing ourselves in. Not by choice, but because we don't realize the cause or the consequences.

What happened fifty-or-so years ago? That's when hypothalamus enemies started showing up in our food. These enemies, called excitotoxins, rev our brains up to toxic levels, which damages the hypothalamus. Some autopsies have even found hypothalami with holes going clear through them!

Three excitotoxins cause most of the trouble: Aspartame, glutamate and soy. Aspartame shows up in diet foods, mostly soda and chewing gum. Glutamate shows up as monosodium glutamate, which is in virtually all fast foods, restaurant foods, meals from a box or the freezer--everywhere you look, in other words.

Soy's everywhere, too. In addition to being an excitotoxin, soy stomps on the thyroid, throws your estrogen out of balance (breast cancer for gals; prostate cancer for guys), eats the minerals in your body, etc. And most soy gets sprayed with cancer-causing glyphosate. Soy is a disaster.

Eliminating excitotoxins lowers your body's internal stress levels, which gives your body a fighting chance. Giving excitotoxins the old heave-ho takes patience and is probably the hardest part of fixing the problem, but health is worth every ounce of effort you put into it.

And so are you.

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