What Is PTSD And How Does It Affect Your Normal Functioning?

Bad things happen. It is a fact of life. No one can be happy and lucky forever. Pain is inevitable.

But some pain is worse than others. Sure, you will have your informative pain, your character-building pain, and your pain that leads to catharsis. You can’t get out of a bad relationship without going through a painful breakup. That pain is necessary in order to live a happy life.

Some pain is pointlessly painful, however. There is nothing to be gained from it. Or even if there is, the same lesson could have been learned much more efficiently and at a lesser cost.

Any of that pain, whether it was useful or not, can leave a mark on a person. We call this mark PTSD, or “post traumatic stress disorder”. In fact, you might have head of PTSD, as it is a relatively recent development in the theory of how the human mind works.

Today, we are going to talk about PTSD. Why does it happen? What does it do to you? And how can you respond to it in a healthy manner? Let’s begin with that first question.

Why Does PTSD Happen?

The human brain is a survival tool. Humans developed such huge brains because the intelligence they granted us proved to be rather useful in adapting to any environment.

Adaptation through intelligence and perseverance are both the superpowers of the human race. We can correlate and process information much more distantly and deeply than any other animal, and we can choose to push ourselves past our limits even when it is dangerous.

But there is a shadow to that power: Trauma. You see, part of the way the human brain works is that it accentuates the negative. If you are a prehistoric person who is picking roots and berries in the woods, then signs of another person’s death by sabretooth tiger will stick out to you.

You will remember those signs so that you know to either watch out for a tiger or avoid that place altogether. And if you yourself are attacked (or even witness an attack), then you will have an even more intense memory of the same lesson. But at the same time, you can see how there might be diminishing returns at a certain level of remembering those signs and events.

If you become afraid that a tiger might be stalking you all the time, then it can become hard to eat, sleep, or be happy and let your guard down. This same tendency applies to modern people as well. The human’s brain retains that lesson so intensely that it preoccupies their life.

What Does PTSD Do?

If you want a strictly scientific answer, then PTSD will usually create an overproduction of cortisol and noradrenaline. These are both hormones that serve as neurotransmitters in the brain. Cortisol is the stress chemical, as it relates to the tension of muscles.

An abundance of cortisol allows you to tense your muscles quickly. But at the same time, if you have too much of it for too long then you are tense forever without a release.

Noradrenaline has a similar job, but with decision making rather than muscle action. This is the chemical responsible for triggering your “fight or flight” response. It will hit you like a truck, and you will find yourself trying to choose between acting in response to whatever situation you are in or avoiding the situation entirely. This brings with it its own erratic problems.

You can tense up and prepare for danger and harm in response to fireworks or a sprinkler going off. You can also have a fight or flight response due to someone asking you what time it is.

Most people who suffer from PTSD are not going to know what is happening in their body. They will just know that they are far too stressed and panicky given their circumstances. This can make it get in the way of both going to work and having fun for a lot of reasons.

The human brain is not strictly rational. This is usually an advantage, as it allows for lateral and abstract thinking. But it also means that a person might get a PTSD trigger from something that makes no sense. As a result, it can become impossible for a person predict their triggers.

And if a trigger can make normal behavior much harder for you and triggers can happen anywhere, having PTSD can suddenly turn the world into a giant minefield.

How is PTSD Treated?

There are two levels at which PTSD is treated: The cognitive and the chemical. Cognitive behavior therapy is used to treat PTSD by helping the person suffering from it assert control over their mind. They work with a therapist to build mindfulness of when they are in danger.

Since danger is pretty uncommon for most people, a cognitive approach can do a lot to give a person control over their PTSD by simply recognizing that they are not in the danger their body is telling them they are in.

The other side of PTSD is addressing the chemical side of things. The most common medications for treating PTSD are anti-anxiety medications, which limit the amount of anxiety-inducing chemicals your body can produce, and antidepressants.

Antidepressants help strengthen the amygdala, which helps you process your emotions better. If you have a strong emotional processing capacity, then emotions that seemed overwhelming can be dealt with much better and even more quickly than before.

This is not to say that these are cures. Some people deal with PTSD for life. But all PTSD can at least be reduced in intensity by the proper cognitive and chemical treatments.

Conclusion

While some PTSD lasts through a person’s life, most will go away as time and emotional capacity increases. If you or someone you love is dealing with something like that, then remember that there is always help out there. Come visit us if you want or need it: https://epiphanywellness.com/