How to combat stress causing depression
© PeterSmithUK.com
Overactivation of the bodies stress physiology causes inflammation in the brain, and it’s this inflammation that causes imbalances in our neurotransmitters in the first place. The prevailing view that depression is somehow a lack of serotonin or dopamine is now outdated, there are imbalances in neurotransmitter activity observed in the depressed brain but what we want to know and what we want to treat is what’s causing those imbalances in the first place.
Furthermore inflammation in the brain causes synapses to break down more quickly than our brains ability to regrow and regenerate them resulting in a net loss of synaptic connections in key structures of the brain involved in depression including the hippocampus and cortex.
The good news is the brain is highly neuro plastic and it can regrow these lost connections but only if create a healthy environment inside the brain and the first thing to do is get rid of excessive inflammation.
Inflammation can come from many sources but it seems that the number one or most common source of inflammation is elevation in the production of cortisol from the hypothalamus pituitary adrenal pathway. In this article I discuss how to switch off overactivity in the HPA axis.
We can train the brain to acquire new abilities and with sufficient training these abilities can be programmed into the subconscious systems of the brain so they run automatically. The only bad news is that it does take quite a few hours (50-100) of work to make significant changes to the way the brain manages stress physiology.
One of the simplest and cheapest things you can do which I routinely teach in my practice is to perform 50 hours of deep relaxation brain training exercises to entrain the brain how to switch off the HPA axis and sympathetic nervous system. When we repeatedly do a thing the region of the brain that enables us to do that thing grows and develops, we literally hardwire an improved ability to do that thing, this is one aspect of what is called neuroplasticity it means we get better at doing things the more we do them unfortunately this type of neuroplasticity is a double-edged sword it can develop desirable skills such as having a good memory or playing an instrument but it can equally develop undesirable abilities including continuously activating stress responses.
If you’ve had a prolonged period of stress whether recently or in the past it will have grown and developed the neuro circuits that switch on physical stress response and once developed these enlarged neuro circuits remain even after the stresses gone and potentially even after you think you have resolved your thoughts and feelings about the stressful past in psychotherapy. When this happens the way to combat it is to grow the opposite circuits in the brain that switch off stress physiology so that we become highly skilled at doing this automatically. We can entrain and hardwire this skill into our brain with repeated relaxation brain training, like I said whenever we do a thing repeatedly the brain grows and develops the circuits that enable us to do that thing better and to do that thing automatically. My observation in my practice is it takes 50 hours of this relaxation brain training spread over 3 to 6 months which equates to 20-30 minutes a day to make a therapeutic change to our stress physiology.
If you would like to learn this technique and have me look into your individual case to develop a tailor-made prescription of natural remedies I run a practice in central London and do online consultations via Skype for people that live too far away. For more information click here.
A 2nd technique that you can use to change the way the brain processes stress physiology is meditation, but not all meditations are the same, mindfulness meditation has definitely been the most well researched and proven to have therapeutic effects against depression and anxiety, it also has been shown to reduce inflammation.
Again I recommend performing 50 hours of mindfulness in no less than 3 and no more than 6 months, the time is important because it takes a certain amount of time the neurons to grow so we can’t do too quickly on the one hand but on the other hand the brain does not start to rewire itself if we don’t do a brain training exercise with enough intensity and regularity, if you do your brain training to infrequently and slowly the brain doesn’t recognise it as important and you don’t stimulate neuroplastic change.
Mindfulness meditation classes are not hard to find these days however I believe that the style of mindfulness meditation has become popular is not the ideal type of meditation for people with mental health problems to start with. I write about this elsewhere but briefly the popular style currently being taught is open monitoring mindfulness which allows any and every thought to pass through your mind but for people with depression, panic attacks, anxiety disorders, OCD and intrusive thoughts when you practice open monitoring mindfulness all too often you become overwhelmed and hijacked by the condition you have. To address this I teach a specific style of mindfulness meditation for people with mental health problems that inhibits the intrusive thoughts and have adapted mindfulness meditation for the specific needs of different mental health problems such as depression versus anxiety.
When properly used meditation can be an incredibly powerful healing tool, it can rebalance over and under activity in the amygdala involved in anxiety and depression, it can improve emotional processing in the cortex, it can stimulate regrowth of lost grey matter in the cortex and hippocampus involved in mental health problems; it can improve resilience to stress, impulse control, reduce inflammation, anxiety and depression and improve sleep. I know this is a big list, don’t get me wrong meditation is not a cure all I’m not selling snake oil here it just promotes multiple surprisingly powerful healing effects in the brain, I’ve never seen anyone completely cure mental health problem with depression alone however I have consistently seen people significantly reduce their mental health problem after 50 hours of meditation brain training.
If you would like to learn how to use meditation to improve your mental health I teach regular meditation classes most in London and online for more information click here.
The Remodelling traumatic memories to stop them triggering excessive stress responses and depression
Another way to combat excess stress physiology is to remodel your stressful thinking or psychology in our cortex or reactivating stressful and traumatic memories stored in our hippocampus, or over-reactivity in our amygdala inappropriately perceiving threats and danger.
There are a variety of techniques you can use to do this including NLP/hypnotherapy, EMDR therapy, TRE, exposure therapy I will be writing more about these in 2019.