Is Your Brain Inflamed?

Has Your Decision-Making Being Hijacked?

Have you ever experienced times of stress where you feel strong feelings of fear, anger or even aggression, and then made an irrational or illogical decision and thought why the hell did I do that?! Or have you ever overreacted to something which you’ve later felt guilty or ashamed about, and wondered what on earth happened to have made you respond like that?! These are prime example where your amygdala takes over from the pre-frontal cortex and instead of being calm and collected and cool as a cucumber, you’re a hypersensitive impulsive person making knee jerk reactions and wondering how the bloody hell you can break this cycle.

The Amygdala and the Pre-Frontal Cortex

Let’s keep it straightforward. These are two different parts of the brain. When you get stressed, the amygdala activates the fight or flight response which then sets off a cascade of hormones and neurotransmitters that prepare your body to either stand and fight or run for your life.

The amygdala is a part of the limbic system, the part of your brain responsible for processing and storing emotions, as well as how you perceive things like fear and anger. It tends to be driven by impulsiveness, fear, and is much more irrational and illogical than the higher brain regions such as the pre-frontal cortex.

The pre-frontal cortex lies at the front of the brain and is responsible for much more complex processing and higher more intricate cognitive function such as how you express your personality and interact with others, capacity to feel empathy, knowing right from wrong, future consequences of immediate decisions and your ability to make conscious, composed, logical and rational decisions. It should be the boss, the one in control, but there are times when the amygdala hijacks control of this process. When this happens, it’s like the adult has left the building and we’re left trying to navigate the world from a reactive, impulsive and irrational place such as that of a kid when confronted with something particularly scary and overwhelming.

Inflammation Leads To Poor Decision Making

One of the major things that threatens our ability to make good decisions via this amygdala hijack, is inflammation in the body, particularly inflammation in the brain. This only further opens the door to make poor dietary and lifestyle choices, which then increases inflammation! See what a vicious circle we have here?

There are many things that contribute to inflammation such as poor dietary choices coming from a typical western diet, also known as the SAD diet (standard Australian/American diet, but quite an apt acronym if you ask me!), an inactive lifestyle, poor sleep, chronic stress, exposure to toxins, infections and other pathogens, a compromised gut (leaky gut = leaky brain!)

How Can You Hack This Cycle?

So the goal to break the spell if you will, is to reduce inflammation. This will help get a foot in the door in order to start making better decisions, which will further reduce inflammation and in turn, increase ability to make even better decisions. It’s a process that will snowball when given the opportunity to build momentum.

As there are many things that are contributing to a state of whole body inflammation, there are a number of ways we can take action to break this cycle and retrain the brain to respond in a more sophisticated way.

These may sound so simple and unsexy, because they are the things we all know we should and could be doing. They are underrated and overlooked for their simplicity, yet undeniably powerful. There is plenty of research that demonstrates efforts made to reduce inflammation caused by inflammatory foods and other toxins and pathogens, support a healthy gut and microbiome, optimise nutrient status, maintain a healthy weight, increase brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and improve stress and sleep parameters, will all allow your brain to perform at a higher function and be able to make better decisions.

Some simple suggestions to get started on include:

• Reduce dietary intake of highly refined and processed foods that have little nutritional value

• Increase nutrient dense fruits and vegetables, whole grains, nuts, seeds and other healthy fats, especially omega-3

• Eliminate gluten and dairy

• Participate in physical activity

• Increase and/or improve sleep

• Reduce excess body fat

• Swap common household products, cosmetics and perfumes for natural alternatives

A natural health practitioner can further help you by:

• identifying and eliminating any underlying stealth pathogens that may be wreaking havoc

• reduce or eliminate intake of individualised inflammatory foods (these can be healthy foods too!)

• further support chronic stress and poor sleep patterns

• provide you with targeted antioxidants or other anti-inflammatory compounds that may help lower inflammation and oxidative stress that can act as an entry point into breaking this cycle

• offer individualised strategies and solutions by meeting you where you’re at and taking your feelings and circumstances into consideration

You have the power to take control over your brain and stop the cycle of unwanted patterns of behaviour with just a few simple strategies!!!

So….. Why not start today?!