Understanding PTSD & Anxiety

The areas of the brain of a person with PTSD that usually show up on scans are the amygdala and the hippocampus – regions associated with memory and emotions, especially fear. The amygdala is highly active when someone is experiencing anxiety, stress, or phobias, while the hippocampus commonly shrinks in the brain of a person with PTSD, which can help explain why they experience flashbacks.

Both the amygdala and the mid-anterior cingulate cortex become over-stimulated when a person suffers from PTSD. The amygdala engages in the assessment of threat-related stimuli (basically what in the environment is considered a danger), the formation and storage of emotional memories; fear conditioning; and memory consolidation. The ACC also plays a role in emotional awareness (particularly empathy); registering physical pain, and regulating autonomic functions like heart rate and blood pressure.

The hippocampus, right inferior frontal gyrus, ventromedial PFC, dorsolateral PFC, and orbitofrontal cortex all become hypoactive, some to the point of atrophy:

• Hippocampus: involved in the formation of new memories and is also associated with learning and emotions.
• Right inferior frontal gyrus: inhibition and attentional control.
• Ventromedial PFC: implicated in the processing of risk and fear.
• Dorsolateral PFC: attention and working memory, and very complex functions, such as planning activities, so it’s very high level structure.
• Orbitofrontal cortex: involved impulse control and response inhibition. This hypothesized role for the frontal areas of the brain can be traced back to Phineas Gage, who allegedly experienced a drastic reduction in social inhibition after a railroad accident that caused extensive damage to his prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortices. An atrophied OC likely negatively influences social inhibition.

The traumatized brain and its sociability.

Optimism or pessimism is not necessarily a "choice" for many with differing brain activity.

Memory in the anxious or traumatized person is usually poor, due to the effects of a shrunken hippocampus; their conversational ability is narrowed.

With a lack of memory to supplement healthy conversation, it pushes the sufferer further away from others, magnifying their anxiety. Trauma sufferers will recall non-emotional memories more than emotional memories, the drawback here is that emotional conversation is crucial to bonding in every type of human relationship. An absence of creative ability to produce creative and emotional conversation is the Achilles heel of trauma sufferers.

"Present findings indicate that hippocampal region (HR) damage impairs aspects of everyday language comprehension and production that require creativity"

"Creativity, Comprehension, Conversation and the Hippocampal Region: New Data and Theory" by Donald G. MacKay and Rutherford Goldstein

With an overactive amygdala, the traumatized person is naturally more distrustful, leading them to identify negative patterns and perceive the world more critically. This makes them less able to open up to people, due to their inherently high cynicism. The initial phase for forming relationships in normal people is much larger in anxiety-afflicted brains.

"Fundamental to all human languages is an unlimited expressive capacity and creative flexibility that allow speakers to rapidly generate novel and complex utterances."

"We conclude that the relational binding and representational flexibility afforded by the hippocampal declarative memory system positions the hippocampus as a key contributor to language use and processing."

"The hippocampus and the flexible use and processing of language"
by Melissa C. Duff and Sarah Brown-Schmidt

The conclusion that can be drawn is that traumatized and anxious people are socially disadvantaged to an extent, due to several cause and effect neurological factors. The major effects being high social distrust, high social fear, higher social inhibition, and low memory retention leading to their social skills being negatively impacted.

Trauma has the effect of deactivating areas of the brain associated with emotion and memory. In a situation of helplessness - the human brain will shut down areas of governing response and recall to prevent the host from being targeted further or acting rashly in a dangerous environment. These effects can linger for a lifetime.

From the above graphic, it shows a child merely separated from their parents can suffer significant mental changes.

While the resulting cynicism has several advantages in identifying threats, it backfires in sufferers emotional health - lacking the liberal openness of a neurotypical person, the traumatized person will struggle to socialize and be overly anxious, manifesting in what society calls "introversion".

Psilocybin: The Answer To Mental Illness

Psychoactive entheogenic compounds such as psilocybin, which is present in 200 species of mushrooms, is a substance already naturally present in the matter of the human mind.

Of course, entheogenic compounds are suppressed by the pharmaceutical industry "studies" and sanctioned against by the powers-that-be; naturally occurring substances cannot be patented or reliably centralized as they occur in nature.

The decentralization of the human mind.

If entheogenic compounds became mainstream for medicinal use, the very lucrative psychology & counseling industry would go bust (or take a big hit), the huge SSRI drug industry (worth 16.8 billion dollars by 2020) would go under, not to mention that psilocybin can erase the effects of brainwashing by erasing fears and anxiety, boosting empathy and assisting to dissolve negative phenotypical neurological imprints; thus pushing back many years of costly social engineering — the shadow government's worst nightmare is the decentralization of the human mind.

Works like a "surgical intervention".

Yes, really. A five-year study of the drug suggests it could work "like a surgical intervention" for mental illness.

Other psychedelics, such as DMT, also have a similar effect in reforming priorly ingrained neural structures, an article from Reset.me states:

https://youtu.be/EDYctenkgJo

“When any stimulus enters the brain, the brain tries to understand it based on previous experiences,” the video says. “This pattern is like a shortcut, activated every time we face a similar situation.” That’s why trauma or other powerful events can make such an impact when they occur early in life.

The architecture of trauma in the brain.

If you are attacked by a dog as a child, for example, your brain might automatically associate the experience with any canine encounter, causing you to fear dogs for the rest of your life. “We might even react adversely to a distant bark,” the film states. Even if you can logically recognize that every dog is not going to be a threat, your initial reaction could still be one of programmed fear. And if events are repeated with the same result, the patterns only reinforce their connections, building up like scar tissue.

That’s where psychedelics can help. “Ayahuasca hyperactivates the entire brain region where we store and process emotional memory, often uncovering long-forgotten memories,” the video says. “This hyperactivation enables the conscious part of the new brain to temporarily override previously entrenched patterns, allowing new connections to be made.”

Memories can then be reevaluated and experiences addressed with more distance from the reflexive reactions to previous trauma. For example, an ayahuasca journey could allow the person who is afraid of dogs to break the fear’s hold on their brain and move past the negative encounter.

“Ayahuasca users typically describe having emerged with new perspectives on past experiences and deeply rooted patterns of behavior,” the film concludes.

Similarly in psilocybin, brain-imaging studies have shown that the substance targets areas of the brain overactive in depression.

In depressed or traumatized people the connections between brain circuits in the "sense-of-self" region are too strong, the neurology is warped and they become dysfunctional, as the brain is an adaptive organ — under certain traumas it rewires itself into a rut, for some people fetal trauma means they live their lives accustomed to a personality and social attachment style that is maladjusted.

Psychedelics loosen these "sense-of-self", overly self-conscious neural connections and create new ones and/or restore lost connections — psilocybin could provide intense relief and change the neural infrastructure from one of imbalanced self-defeat, to one of renewed balance.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="645"] Psilocybin boosts connectivity in many areas of the brain while slowing down areas associated with depression and stress. Graph illustrates.[/caption]

The Lancet reported that psilocybin mushrooms were able to lift the severe depression of all twelve human volunteer participants, even though they had been struggling with the disease for an average of over seventeen years and despite that fact that none of the subjects had found relief with multiple rounds of standard anti-depressant medication.

This is a powerful substance that has the ability to totally shift human perception.

It's no coincidence that many users of psilocybin often claim to see the world completely differently post-use.

I spoke to one psilocybin user who claimed the following:

"I have social anxiety but now there has been an increase in my comfort level while conversing with other people. I tend to be pessimistic and self-averse, but lately optimism and self-compassion have been major themes in my perception."