The primary cause of most mental and medical disorders is chronic stress. The “stress response” is an ancient part of our nervous system that helped our ancestors survive in a crisis. This “stress response,” sometimes called the“fight or flight response,” is designed to handle brief challenges. The immediate cause of a normal and brief stress response is a release of noradrenaline sent to all areas of the brain. This response is designed to address a true life-threatening emergency and to dissipate in 15-20 minutes following the emergency. But what happens if a fight or flight continues indefinitely or is activated many times in a normal daily experience? It becomes chronic stress. Our huge, creative human brain has tremendous foresight and memory to embellish and exaggerate the past and future, awfulizing fears and holding on to resentments and traumas for years.
A car engine is supposed to be revved up once in a while for passing on the highway. What happens to an engine if it is revved up indefinitely? It burns out. When fight or flight continues interminably from high stress lifestyle, chronic pain, or illness, chronic metabolic imbalances, chronic worrying, or just the strain of living in today’s fast-paced world, burnout can occur. Burnout causes, exacerbates, or increases the risk of anxiety, depression, anger, fatigue, headaches, backaches, insomnia, gastrointestinal problems, addiction, AD/HD, adrenal exhaustion, cancer, heart disease, post traumatic stress disorder, and many other conditions. So at the heart of good mental and physical health is the need to modulate excess noradrenaline.
The frontal lobe of the brain inhibits chronic stress and burnout by opposing noradenaline. It seems to have a biochemical survival benefit bjuilt in to help us stop exaggerating the past and projecting our fears into the future. Neuroscientific discoveries strongly suggest that living in the serenity and inner peace of the NOW is a human being’s natural, normal state. If the frontal lobe is not healthy it does not allow this natural state to occur and causes chronic stress to harm mind and body. SAMe drains noradrenaline from the system and, along with SAMe Assist provides the nutrients for a healthy frontal lobe that will enable us to better handle stress rather than living in an ongoing state of “revved up” anxiety, replaying the past and fearing the future.
