Bookmark

Not at all! That's what these threads are for.

I'm personally going to try and be a bit more active here because I finally have a little free time, and I'd rather you be honest with where you are 'at.' So fire away when you need to.

I'm going to try and explain TMS slightly differently than @miffybunny, although I do completely agree with her general assertion. The first part will be basic info to many but it needs to be re-visited first (long, wordy post(s) incoming!).

We all have 2 aspects to our involuntary nervous system: the parasympathetic (the 'auto-pilot' of resting and digesting), and the sympathetic, which is our primal survival mechanism. Normally the body is parasympathetic dominant, and things function normally (metabolism, sleep cycles, digestion and elimination, muscle tone, etc). Note that there is A LOT going on in your body every second you are alive that you have absolutely no conscious awareness of.

When the brain perceives a threat (this is a key concept we'll return to shortly), it causes the sympathetic to take over. The result is a stress hormone release that changes the physiology in order to help you fight, hide, or run away. The heart rate increases, the pupils dilate, and blood flow to the skin decreases (in case you get wounded, so you'll bleed less), etc.

The brain activity heightens, we become hypervigilant, condense our general focus onto the threat, and try to predict the worst-case scenario (if we prepare for the worst, we have a better chance of survival). The brain also closes itself down to new ideas, and it's creative center shuts down. During survival mode, pondering, creating, etc are too risky, so they get closed off. Ever try and explain something to someone during an argument? Good luck!

Also, blood flow, resources, and energy are diverted away from digestive and reproductive organs, because the last thing your brain is concerned about when there is a threat is digesting food and reproducing.

These changes are meant to be temporary! Then the threat either ends your life, or you escape, your body cleans up the stress hormones, and your physiology normalizes. Or that's how it's supposed to work.

But as the human brain has evolved over time, we now have a 'problem.' The frontal cortex is now about 40% of the total brain size. This is why humans are able to do human things, like art, music, speech, higher thought processes, etc. There are animals with far bigger brains than us, but their frontal cortex is nothing compared to total brain size. But because of this, the human brain quite literally doesn't know the difference between real and imagined (there are plenty of studies out there backing this up!).

So why is this bad? Because the brain doesn't differentiate between threats. 5000 years ago we would only have this system triggered every so often, and usually only when our lives were actually threatened. But now, ANY stressful situation or 'threat' will cause the changes I mentioned above. So as we try and predict the worst-case scenario, our brains can experience that as if it's actually happening, and cause more stress hormone release.

We condense our focus on the problem because that's what we are programmed to do, and now comes another wave of stress hormone release. Very quickly an anxiety state can occur, and start to loop (stress -->physical/emotional symtpoms --> stress and on and on). The loop can continue for days, months and even a lifetime. It may not always be present, but it is often sitting under the surface IF we don't do anything to diffuse it.

So a body in a sympathetic-dominant state will have dysfunction, simply because we are not designed for it. Our brains have evolved to a point that they can produce an intense physical reaction by thought alone, and once the stress/threat process starts, our thoughts change in a way that would normally help us if our lives were actually threatened, but now cause the 'loop' IF left unchecked.

Anxiety is simply, quite literally, a body/mind stuck in a survival mode.

If you can't understand how you got there, a good therapist can help. But in my professional opinion, most of Western society is living in some level of chronic fight or flight, which is why chronic pain is so common now. Our muscle tone gets over-stimulated and the thickest, most partially contracted muscles in the body, the postural muscles, are prime targets. If the tension is high enough in the neck, it can also cause headaches of various types.

Life moves quicker now, and we are bombarded with bad news and all types of stress daily, and we stay stuck. Especially if we endured stress in childhood, the body gets very good at maintaining survival mode. Practice makes perfect, right? It's like a car that is stuck in a low gear trying to do 80 on the highway, and yet we can't often act on the stress ("I want to yell at my boss but I can't!), so it's like we are stepping on the gas and the brake at the same time.

I am repeating these things for people that haven't heard it this way before, and to help the rest with a stronger understanding and acceptance through repetition.

What makes this even more difficult is that newer science is showing we can actually become somewhat addicted to stress hormones, so our brain/body will unconsciously try and drive back into survival mode if that's what it's used to, even if it's uncomfortable, painful, or whatever. After all, the survival state is created by chronic release of stress hormones, and just like any substance introduced into the body repeatedly over time, the physiology will eventually change to accommodate that substance. So trying to change one's physiology away from a TMS (or survival state), can be a bit like trying to break an addiction to any substance, which is one of the reasons people who have 'cured' themselves from TMS can have relapses. Biochemically it's not very different than an alcoholic relapsing. Reading and studying TMS is like going to rehab, and people are often good for awhile, and some for life. But sooner or sometimes much later, boom, the 'addiction' reasserts itself.

Second post about what to do about it incoming