A short excerpt from a YouTube video by Ashok Gupta explaining why people with ME/CFS and fibromyalgia feel more emotional. Gupta attributes sudden anger and amplified emotions (anger, fear, shame, guilt, disgust) to an overactive amygdala that sends strong signals and overwhelms the prefrontal (rational) mind, producing a magnified fear state.
How come sudden anger is so much more now that I have this condition? Yeah. Well, it's the amygdala. This is proof of this. So the anger response, the fear response, they come. The fight or flight response comes from the amygdala. Yeah. Or certainly not comes from the amygdala. But the amygdala is our emotional center that sends out a lot of the signaling to the rest of the brain and overwhelms our prefrontal cortex, or rational thinking mind. And therefore, when we are in more of a state of fear, we're going to naturally be in more of a state of anger. So the amygdala becomes trigger happy with many different emotions like shame or guilt or disgust. All of these emotions become magnified because the fear is magnified.
