One Spirit Medicine: Ancient Ways to Ultimate Wellness by Alberto Villoldo

Author:Alberto Villoldo
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Publisher: Hay House, Inc.
Published: 2015-05-04T14:00:00+00:00

OVERSTIMULATION AND FIGHT-OR-FLIGHT

Two stressors we face today—overstimulation and an overactive fight-or-flight system—often go hand in hand. We’re bombarded with more information and sensory stimulation than we can possibly handle, which sets off our HPA axis, our fight-or-flight response.

From television and the Internet alone, we’re exposed to more stimuli in a week than our Paleolithic ancestors were exposed to in a lifetime. And we’re continually running to keep up with new information, to the point that we’re chronically exhausted. I can’t count how many times I have heard someone say, “If it weren’t for caffeine, I wouldn’t get anything done!” Nature designed the brain to deal with only one lion roaring at us at a time, not the entire jungle turning against us. Now, however, our brain is too overtaxed to spend time sorting through all the data, much less looking at it with fresh eyes and deciding what is or is not a crisis, and what, if anything, needs to be done about it.

The media bring us news about wars and devastation happening in distant lands, but our fight-or-flight response operates only with local coordinates, and doesn’t understand far away. When we read about some catastrophic event, the thinking part of our brain grasps that it’s happening at another time and place. But the brain perceives images nonverbally and much faster. So when the hippocampus, which regulates the fight-or-flight response, is presented with streaming video of an atrocity, it registers it as happening now and nearby, and goes on high alert. The more damaged the hippocampus is by stress and toxins, the closer and more threatening the danger seems to be.

I’m convinced that hippocampus damage on a national scale can be measured by the number of guns owned by a country’s citizens. According to The Washington Post, the U.S. has the highest per capita gun ownership in the world—nearly 90 guns for every 100 people—and the highest rate of gun-related murders in the developed world.4 The hippocampus senses danger lurking behind every tree.

Another reason why our fight, flight, or freeze response is perennially on—“freeze” is the response of an overloaded HPA axis—is the speed with which we have to react to incoming information. Our feelings are conveyed by hormones traveling through the body in a slow, analog chemical system. You can bask in the feeling of love toward a child or a pet, or seethe in anger for days. Our thoughts, on the other hand, course through our nervous system at the speed of light, in digital electrical signals demanding an immediate response. Therefore, in our information-overloaded, super-caffeinated society, there is an ever-widening gap between our thoughts and our feelings, our heads and our guts, and overstimulation is the result. We sleep but do not rest. We are chronically exhausted and overworked. And this stress keeps the HPA axis running nonstop, stuck in the on position, poisoning the brain with stress hormones that leave us paralyzed in fear or felled by chronic exhaustion.

You’ve probably heard the expression, “Neurons that fire together wire together.

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