Viagra for Your Brain – Chapter 1
Chapter 1 – Meet Your Brain Fuels
By Alen J. Salerian, MD
GABA (GABA-GAMMA-AMNIOBUTYRIC ACID)
GABA is an elegant force of your calm and inner peace. For example, a brain with sickly GABA has recurrent seizures and is almost always irritable, edgy, and combative. In less traumatic cases, sickly GABA may make you fearful, easily reactive, and may cause insomnia.
DOPAMINE
Dopamine gives you energy, concentration, alertness, initiative, and perhaps most importantly the ability to enjoy life. When your dopamine is out of sorts, so is your joy.
NOREPINEPHRINE
Norepinephrine is a good friend of dopamine and offers you energy, alertness, and concentration.
ACETYLCHOLINE
Acetylcholine is the champion defender of your memory. For example, a brain with Alzheimer’s disease has lost its acetylcholine. However, there are lesser degrees. Perhaps acetylcholine is just getting tired with age. Maybe you lose your keys more often, can’t always remember what you just said, forget phone numbers you always knew by heart or annoy your daughter by calling her husband George when his name is Bill.
SEROTONIN
So what do you say to a woman who is irritable, easily frustrated, and highly moody for a week before her menstrual cycle? Your serotonin is low! Serotonin is a brain fuel which helps you cope with anger, irritability and fear. If you are phobic about flying or public speaking, feel plagued with unnecessary worry, get mad at red lights, fight road rage, or become overly agitated at every little thing your partner does, any pill that normalizes your serotonin will help relieve your symptoms.
The influence of these brain fuels does not negate the impact of life events or behavior. These angels, however, often play a defining role in all areas of your behavior. In a genetically predetermined manner, your angels often function in concert with one another and silently relay messages back and forth in response to input from the outside world. In other words, like our height, skin, or eye color, the general traits of your particular angels are programmed at birth. In essence, the brain fuels are the genetic color of your brain and have a profound impact on you and your environment.
No one would challenge the fact that an individual’s sensitivity to sunlight depends upon skin color. People with fair skin are more susceptible to sunburn and skin cancer than people of darker complexion. In a similar manner, the brain’s chemistry determines sensitivity to rejection, mood, fear, irritability, and concentration. It is critical to understand the specific functions of each chemical fuel.
Rats Have Angels (Every Living Creature Does!)
Your brain fuels are highly sensitive to external and internal events: they expand or shrink, grow stronger or weaker, depending on your overall health, diet, exercise, sunlight exposure, and conflicts or tension in your life.
What are your brain fuel’s greatest friends and worst foes? Exercise, sunlight, and good health are the angels’ best friends. Their enemies include chronic unresolved anger, frustration, and any circumstances that trigger real or imagined feelings of being entrapped. No other human dynamic is as universally toxic and potentially deadly to the human spirit and your angels as the perception of entrapment. This dynamic, with its multiple faces – such as people in miserable marriages or financial desperation, or hostile job environments, people living in poverty, or children of abusive homes – directly and mercilessly assault your angels.
The collapse of hope is a serious injury to your angels and depletes their power and functionality.
Let me share a study about rats. Rats are great teachers if we learn from them.
Put some rats in a cage and separate them from their food source. Create a path to the food source but make sure there is an obstacle such as a glass gate which keeps them from their food. Watch the rats: observe how many times and for how long they will try to get to the food before giving up.
The rats have two challenges: physical stamina and mental determination (potentially including willpower, drive, confidence, and mood). Age is a factor as well: if you give them a temporary break and let them dine even once, they will renew their efforts.
The main lesson: the majority of rats stop trying after a predictable number of times, well before they are physically incapable.
Simple enough. So, where are their angels?
Evidence suggests that after repeated failures, the angels shut down. They collapse. Their magical powers suddenly disappear. The angels stop flying, communicating or showing any signs of life.
The Similarities Between Rats and Humans
Entrapment equals hopelessness. Hopelessness equals death.
People who haven’t experienced clinical depression may not easily appreciate the fact that severely depressed people, unable to see their way out of psychological torture, will seriously consider suicide. It’s not hard to find thousands of examples of suicide where the act was an expression of entrapment and hopelessness rather than depresion.
Rats, humans, and your angels are all controlled by life, emotions, chemicals, and our perceptions. When you feel trapped, your angels are injured; when they are sick you end up feeling trapped even if you aren’t. Your brain is you; your angels are you; and your life affects your angels.
Pills, Angels, and Rats
What if you gave a rat a pill to replenish his brain fuels? He would try harder and longer and not give up as his unmedicated counterparts do. It’s as if the medicated rats have thicker skin against frustration, disappointment, and early resignation because the now healthier angels can provide them with extra protection.
We know that what occurs in the human brain is similar to actions and reactions in rat brains. It should not surprise you that the majority of newly introduced medications for sleep, mood, anxiety, and energy disorders were first studied and discovered in pre-clinical rat studies.