According to the people who are diagnosed with Depersonalization Disorder, their cortisol levels are virtually non-existant, compared to the normal people who do not have this disorder. Cortisol is actually a sort of balance drug, which regulates your craving for carbohydrates. Sugar and caffeine are related to cortisol in that if you drink caffeine, your cortisol level rises, and you become slightly more energetic. If caffeine is combined with sugar, this rise increases to as much as 18 times (according to medical tests).
Now comes the tricky part. I believe people who suffer from depersonalization are classified into two types - both lead to the same disorder, but we come via different ways - one is through depression and anxiety, and the other is through trauma. Some may argue that the depression and anxiety could well be a byproduct of trauma, and I will have to agree on that. The difference between the two is that those who are inflicted with this disorder via depression and anxiety find some kind of cure with anti-depressants and anti-anxiety drugs like Prozac etc. For the ones who get inflicted through trauma (like me), these drugs actually WORSEN the disorder. I know this because I took an anti-depressant (caused by the disorder in part) prescribed an inept psychiatrist, and it worsened the disorder so badly that I thought I was going crazy. The entire world changed many folds over, and everything seemed hazy and strange, even to someone who has weathered this condition for over a decade and managed to get a pretty normal life.
Then here's the kicker. When I read about the cortisol levels and the effects of coffee and sugar, I tried it when the condition got worse when I was really tired and the disorder was starting to make me feel slightly confused. The effect managed to kick start my adrenaline and made me able to, at least for a while, lighten the effects of the disorder. However, this also made me crave bread. I managed to inhale a half-loaf in 15 minutes.
According to the studies, rises in cortisol levels make you crave carbohydrates, making you fat. So if this is the case, that would mean that it actually works, and my body isn't exactly resilient or adapted to the chemical. It just means that my BRAIN is. Cortisol alone is able to affect a number of functions, and the key is that although all other functions are still intact for us, the key one which links our experiences to reality has been somehow Severed.
According to more studies on cortisol, it highlights stress levels and susceptibility to adrenal fatigue like burn out or exhaustion. Cortisol increases under stress, raising blood glucose, breaking up muscle protein and fat for energy, and increasing responsiveness to effects of adrenaline and stimulating cardiac output. This is important, because most of DP sufferers say exercise works. I can vouchsafe for that. After an intense game of basketball or after my Karate lessons, I feel more invigorated and more alert than I usually do.
Besides that, another thing I once remarked during my Karate lessons is that my fight or flight responses seem to be dulled, for some reason. Cortisol actually is the regulator of this response. Stress elevates cortisol levels almost 10-fold, making people susceptible to diseases like diabetes and obesity due to the sudden food cravings. And here is the Key Point : Over-elevated Cortisol levels can actually impair cognition due to cortisol induced damage to the hippocampus, the area of the brain vital for learning and memory. It also leads to depression and insomnia.
Cortisol is caused by stress. Unfortunately, we have too low levels of cortisol, which means instead of feeling alert and awake during times of duress, we instead maintain the same fluffy warmness and surrealness we feel all the time. This probably defines DP. When we feel stressed, we get confused and uncomfortable, because our cortisol is unable to raise up to counter the stresses we feel.
Since depression and stress shrinks the brains, it's not entirely strange to find that most DP sufferers are actually highly intelligent and inquisitive. In fact, instead of thinking outside the box like most people, we live outside the box in it's entirety. To us, thinking inside the box is the challenge. This will probably lead to another field of studies in order to get people to be more creative, I'm sure.
That said, cortisol may be the key thing in regulating and stirring the other person within us.
I have another observation I'd like to point out. REM is closely related to DP - we all know this because we all feel in a state of dreaminess constantly (for the chronic sufferers, anyway), and the interesting thing is, when we panic, REM actually occurs. Have you tried to focus on any One Single Thing when you panic? You'll realise your pupils are moving so quickly your vision seems shaky and unreal. In other words, REM is related to brain responses of threat, which should have instinctively made you react, but people who have gone through trauma are so used to being under pressure, stress, and general threat that the fight or flight response has burnt itself into our brains (Or to be more accurate, the response electolyte has fused), and constantly living under this condition has made us adapt to the response. I, for one, have become mellowed due to the fact that I don't even react when threatened severely. (Hence I took up Karate)
The only way around this, I believe, is to unlearn the way we don't respond to threat, by simply learning to respond to threat. This will not raise the veil of dreams, but at least it will make us more...well, able to survive, if it comes to that.
I've heard many theories that it may be a condition that we can actually choose to forgo, if my mind was somehow stronger. It's like losing weight--we just have to put our mind to it.
My theory is based on evolutionary theorum. I realise that for most people, it's a direct result of trauma suffered as a child or adult. For most people, it's childhood trauma. Because of this, I believe that it is a conditioned...erm...condition. When we burn our fingers, a blister forms, filled with water to soften and cushion and protect the injury. A clot forms on an open wound. Body parts fall off when frost-bite sets in. The human body finds ways to survive and continue to live.
Because of the trauma, our minds may have developed a certain 'detachment', a certain escape route into an alternate reality, where everything seems softened, less sharp, less real, to protect itself from trauma. By regulating certain chemicals in the body, like how we feel "full" when we eat. But like obese people who have grown somehow immune to the chemical, we could have easily become able to ignore the raise in the levels of that particular bodily reaction.
So if that is the case, then to beat this insensitivity, we should adopt the same method as the obese people in treating their own sicknesses, which is to dance sensual dances while pretending to be ballet dancers.
Oh eewww. I made myself sick typing that.
Actually, there is no known cure, because there's nothing clearly wrong with the body--it's just that we've been exposed too much to it that we become insensitized. I suppose Trauma is really just that ? overexposure to a certain chemical in the brain that makes us imbalanced. Instead of being able to respond to an influx of that chemical when threat presents itself, we become so used to it that we don?t respond to it all all. Morever, that particular chemical can damage the brain when excess of it is produced, and therefore in a way, we have had our brains ?injured? due to the excess of the chemical, and are unable to fully utilise our sensory perceptions.
So in other words, finding the opposite of trance inducing drugs like Ecstasy, etc, will also mean a ways of heightening consiousness and alleviating us from this ailment, since these drugs cause DP. But it'll also mean dependency and addiction, because just as the trance-inducing drugs are addictive, the opposites will mean a strong bounce to reality, and a sink into deeper trances, like bouncing forcibly in the water. The other thing is that instead of working to find ways to remove some chemical or add some chemical to the brain, perhaps we should work on developing some kind of bypass to utilise another part of our brains, or perhaps some kind of substance that will actually heal the injury.
The first thing, however, will be to assess where the injury is located, that we may cure it. How does one stimulate that particular part of the brain? Will stimulation alone work? Why is electrotherapy so subjective in it?s success rate? What about hibernation? Will a prolonged shut down of the human mind assist in it?s repair?
All of this will remain theory until proven otherwise.
Now comes the tricky part. I believe people who suffer from depersonalization are classified into two types - both lead to the same disorder, but we come via different ways - one is through depression and anxiety, and the other is through trauma. Some may argue that the depression and anxiety could well be a byproduct of trauma, and I will have to agree on that. The difference between the two is that those who are inflicted with this disorder via depression and anxiety find some kind of cure with anti-depressants and anti-anxiety drugs like Prozac etc. For the ones who get inflicted through trauma (like me), these drugs actually WORSEN the disorder. I know this because I took an anti-depressant (caused by the disorder in part) prescribed an inept psychiatrist, and it worsened the disorder so badly that I thought I was going crazy. The entire world changed many folds over, and everything seemed hazy and strange, even to someone who has weathered this condition for over a decade and managed to get a pretty normal life.
Then here's the kicker. When I read about the cortisol levels and the effects of coffee and sugar, I tried it when the condition got worse when I was really tired and the disorder was starting to make me feel slightly confused. The effect managed to kick start my adrenaline and made me able to, at least for a while, lighten the effects of the disorder. However, this also made me crave bread. I managed to inhale a half-loaf in 15 minutes.
According to the studies, rises in cortisol levels make you crave carbohydrates, making you fat. So if this is the case, that would mean that it actually works, and my body isn't exactly resilient or adapted to the chemical. It just means that my BRAIN is. Cortisol alone is able to affect a number of functions, and the key is that although all other functions are still intact for us, the key one which links our experiences to reality has been somehow Severed.
According to more studies on cortisol, it highlights stress levels and susceptibility to adrenal fatigue like burn out or exhaustion. Cortisol increases under stress, raising blood glucose, breaking up muscle protein and fat for energy, and increasing responsiveness to effects of adrenaline and stimulating cardiac output. This is important, because most of DP sufferers say exercise works. I can vouchsafe for that. After an intense game of basketball or after my Karate lessons, I feel more invigorated and more alert than I usually do.
Besides that, another thing I once remarked during my Karate lessons is that my fight or flight responses seem to be dulled, for some reason. Cortisol actually is the regulator of this response. Stress elevates cortisol levels almost 10-fold, making people susceptible to diseases like diabetes and obesity due to the sudden food cravings. And here is the Key Point : Over-elevated Cortisol levels can actually impair cognition due to cortisol induced damage to the hippocampus, the area of the brain vital for learning and memory. It also leads to depression and insomnia.
Cortisol is caused by stress. Unfortunately, we have too low levels of cortisol, which means instead of feeling alert and awake during times of duress, we instead maintain the same fluffy warmness and surrealness we feel all the time. This probably defines DP. When we feel stressed, we get confused and uncomfortable, because our cortisol is unable to raise up to counter the stresses we feel.
Since depression and stress shrinks the brains, it's not entirely strange to find that most DP sufferers are actually highly intelligent and inquisitive. In fact, instead of thinking outside the box like most people, we live outside the box in it's entirety. To us, thinking inside the box is the challenge. This will probably lead to another field of studies in order to get people to be more creative, I'm sure.
That said, cortisol may be the key thing in regulating and stirring the other person within us.
I have another observation I'd like to point out. REM is closely related to DP - we all know this because we all feel in a state of dreaminess constantly (for the chronic sufferers, anyway), and the interesting thing is, when we panic, REM actually occurs. Have you tried to focus on any One Single Thing when you panic? You'll realise your pupils are moving so quickly your vision seems shaky and unreal. In other words, REM is related to brain responses of threat, which should have instinctively made you react, but people who have gone through trauma are so used to being under pressure, stress, and general threat that the fight or flight response has burnt itself into our brains (Or to be more accurate, the response electolyte has fused), and constantly living under this condition has made us adapt to the response. I, for one, have become mellowed due to the fact that I don't even react when threatened severely. (Hence I took up Karate)
The only way around this, I believe, is to unlearn the way we don't respond to threat, by simply learning to respond to threat. This will not raise the veil of dreams, but at least it will make us more...well, able to survive, if it comes to that.
I've heard many theories that it may be a condition that we can actually choose to forgo, if my mind was somehow stronger. It's like losing weight--we just have to put our mind to it.
My theory is based on evolutionary theorum. I realise that for most people, it's a direct result of trauma suffered as a child or adult. For most people, it's childhood trauma. Because of this, I believe that it is a conditioned...erm...condition. When we burn our fingers, a blister forms, filled with water to soften and cushion and protect the injury. A clot forms on an open wound. Body parts fall off when frost-bite sets in. The human body finds ways to survive and continue to live.
Because of the trauma, our minds may have developed a certain 'detachment', a certain escape route into an alternate reality, where everything seems softened, less sharp, less real, to protect itself from trauma. By regulating certain chemicals in the body, like how we feel "full" when we eat. But like obese people who have grown somehow immune to the chemical, we could have easily become able to ignore the raise in the levels of that particular bodily reaction.
So if that is the case, then to beat this insensitivity, we should adopt the same method as the obese people in treating their own sicknesses, which is to dance sensual dances while pretending to be ballet dancers.
Oh eewww. I made myself sick typing that.
Actually, there is no known cure, because there's nothing clearly wrong with the body--it's just that we've been exposed too much to it that we become insensitized. I suppose Trauma is really just that ? overexposure to a certain chemical in the brain that makes us imbalanced. Instead of being able to respond to an influx of that chemical when threat presents itself, we become so used to it that we don?t respond to it all all. Morever, that particular chemical can damage the brain when excess of it is produced, and therefore in a way, we have had our brains ?injured? due to the excess of the chemical, and are unable to fully utilise our sensory perceptions.
So in other words, finding the opposite of trance inducing drugs like Ecstasy, etc, will also mean a ways of heightening consiousness and alleviating us from this ailment, since these drugs cause DP. But it'll also mean dependency and addiction, because just as the trance-inducing drugs are addictive, the opposites will mean a strong bounce to reality, and a sink into deeper trances, like bouncing forcibly in the water. The other thing is that instead of working to find ways to remove some chemical or add some chemical to the brain, perhaps we should work on developing some kind of bypass to utilise another part of our brains, or perhaps some kind of substance that will actually heal the injury.
The first thing, however, will be to assess where the injury is located, that we may cure it. How does one stimulate that particular part of the brain? Will stimulation alone work? Why is electrotherapy so subjective in it?s success rate? What about hibernation? Will a prolonged shut down of the human mind assist in it?s repair?
All of this will remain theory until proven otherwise.
