Ashok Gupta explains how the amygdala can become overprotective from stress, contributing to ME/CFS. He describes how excessive workload and mental or emotional pressure trigger the condition, and argues you can retrain your amygdala through conscious reappraisal to reduce inappropriate stress responses.
Another example in the diagram is when you feel stressed because your boss has expectations of you to complete a project. Now remember, these protective responses were designed to protect us from physical dangers like wild tigers or rival tribes. But in the modern world we don't face those physical dangers anymore that much. Instead, the dangers are often emotional and psychological in nature. Now can you see how this system works perfectly and has been perfected over millions of years of evolution to protect us from dangers. It creates the best response that it can based on your previous experiences, but also checks with your conscious mind just in case you have changed your mind as to whether something is dangerous or not. In fact, we are only alive here today thanks in a large part to our amygdalas that make sure we survive. However, this protection mechanism also holds the clue to cfs. Sometimes these unconscious protection mechanisms get programmed to over protect us and can get it wrong. I'll give an example of this. A mild example of this is a phobia or a panic attack where the amygdala overprotects us and makes us feel anxious to something that we shouldn't be so anxious about. So if someone has a phobia of spiders, for instance, it is the amygdala which is overreacting to the spider and it gets the conscious mind carried away with it. So as we have seen, the amygdala takes in incoming information, decides if it is dangerous or not and triggers off what we call the fight or flight response to protect us from those physical dangers. Now it does this because it has learnt to do it in response to something and your conscious mind has given the amygdala its blessing. As an example, let's go back to one of the things we discussed earlier. Let's say the example of doing a project of work or say a project in education, someone like your boss or your teacher may hand you a project and you may instantly have a fear response. So your amygdala sees the project and thinks this is a threat because it thinks, I don't know, you may not do a good job or maybe you won't be able to get it done on time or whatever the potential threat might be. The amygdala then sends an emotionally charged message to the conscious mind saying hey, this is some scary stuff. Now if your conscious mind gets carried away with this, then you send a message back to the amygdala saying yes, you are right, this project really is scary. So as soon as you allow your conscious mind to get carried away with the thoughts repeatedly, then the amygdala knows to trigger the stress response every time a project is handed to you. However, this response can be retrained and we are doing this constantly all through our lives. There are probably, for instance, things you used to be afraid of that you are not afraid of now. It's just the way you have conditioned your mind to think and you always have the power to recondition your mind. So in this example, it may be that on a particular day your boss hands you another task or project, but this time you recognise that you are overreacting and so you don't get afraid, but you. But instead you just say to yourself, it's fine, I'll get the project done. It's no big deal. The moment you've said this, you have begun to retrain your amygdala. You've begun to retrain it not to react to projects. And if you do this repeatedly, then very soon your amygdala gets the message and no longer reacts to projects. Now, why does it do this? Well, the amygdala still knows that you know best and so it will listen to you. It's your servant. It will do what you want it to do. Now, you may ask, if the amygdala is my servant, why doesn't it just do what I want it to do? Well, you have to communicate with it in the right way. If you just get annoyed at yourself for getting upset and stressed out, that won't make any difference. The amygdala won't listen. It will just get more annoyed. If you get annoyed that you're stressing out about something. As I said, it just gets worse. But the amygdala can be retrained when you no longer buy into its fear reactions and instead interrupt those negative patterns and do something different. So, in summary, here are the key points from this session so far. We have a conscious mind and a subconscious mind. Inside the subconscious mind is the amygdala. The amygdala's role is to decide if something threatens us and to release an appropriate response to protect us, often involving stimulating the fight or flight response. The fight or flight response is also known as the stress response. We will also refer to it as stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system. We can sometimes unknowingly train the amygdala to be concerned or even fearful of things that we don't want to be afraid of. Through our conscious mind, we can always retrain the amygdala. So now we shall move on to the explanation of what causes CFS and we shall Use the concepts of the conscious mind, the subconscious mind and the amygdala in our explanation. So how does CFS start? In this section we are going to discuss the initial factors which cause CFS as well as the factors which cause it to continue and perpetuate. Don't worry if you don't understand it all. I will summarise it in a very simple way at the end. And remember, you can always re watch this session. Now in my experience with most people the condition tends to start during a particularly stressful period in someone's life. So from what we talked about earlier, you can imagine what is happening. Lots of stimuli are coming into the amygdala on the left hand side and the amygdala sees a lot of these things as threatening and so it sends up emotionally charged thoughts up to the conscious mind on the right hand side of this diagram, trying to alert the conscious mind to the threats and to get you to deal with these threats at the time you may have been overcome with these negative thoughts, which means that the amygdala is getting lots of messages back that you are in danger. This is represented on the left hand side. In fact, a lot of people talk about feeling overwhelmed at the beginning of the condition, just not being able to cope and deal with everything. Basically a feeling of I can't cope, it's all too much. This is basically where the amygdala keeps feeling under threat and keeps making you consciously also feel like you are under threat. Now this isn't true in all cases. A minority of people develop CFS when things are generally okay. However, when I delve deeper there are often some stresses which are subconscious. For example, things they haven't dealt with, unresolved issues and other things. A number of people contract CFS at university and claim that they were having a good time, but on closer inspection they come to understand that they are also in a brand new environment. Probably a bad diet, drinking a lot, the stress of workload and exams, being away from home, and often the stress of socially integrating with a new peer group. Therefore, what may be stressful to our amygdalas we may not think is stressful at all. The most common trigger for CFS I have come across has been excessive workloads and excessive pressure at work. In fact, many people report that they started noticing some fatigue like symptoms before the condition started and that generally they had felt very run down and had felt on edge for quite a while. Think about whether this applies to you. This stress, by the way, can be mental, emotional and or physical. For instance, I have treated people who have suffered emotional abuse from a partner for years before contracting cfs. That would count as emotional stress and other people who have exercised excessively before contracting it. Physical stress. For most people, it tends to be a combination of all three.
