Yesterday, I shared with you a study on aspartame and its impact on neurotransmitters. Although the study was on rats, it has impact for people.
The subjects were given the same amount of aspartame found in a diet soda for 40 days. That is a little over a month. Some of you have been consuming aspartame in greater amounts for longer periods than the rats in the study.
If their brains were impacted after 40 days, imagine yours after 12 months or even 12 years of using products with aspartame.
Your diet soda didn’t create the problem, yet it may be making it harder for you and your spouse to deal with. It could be keeping your nervous system agitated around the clock.
Your diet may have made you a nervous wreck BEFORE the affair happened. The affair just shook things up more.
I touched on how the when the neurotransmitter serotonin was disrupted, how it can impact behavior related to affairs. Another one of the brain chemicals disrupted by aspartame use is GABA.
GABA has been described by some researchers as being the ‘brakes of the brain‘. Besides calming you down, it influences your ability to learn new material, your memory and health.
You wouldn’t consider driving a car without brakes or with faulty brakes. In such a case, you never know whether or not it will stop when you need it to.
When you’re GABA is disrupted, your ability to calm yourself down is disrupted as well. This means someone with disrupted GABA is impaired in their ability to calm down.
The brakes on their brain and nervous system aren’t working. Yelling at them to “calm down!” or “put on your big boy pants” aren’t going to change things.
Sure, you can yell and threaten them, but their ability to ‘put the brakes on their mind’ or agitation isn’t working. When this happens to you, agitation becomes a daily occurrence.
You want to calm down, but can’t. Not being able to calm yourself leads to you feeling out of control. Like the car with faulty brakes, you’re mind and emotions are spinning out and you can’t stop them.
The activity in your brain takes off like a rocket with thoughts going every which direction. The thoughts start going faster and faster, yet with messed up GABA, the brakes may or may not work.
This means that they aren’t thinking clearly as well.
It’s not that you’re losing your mind. It’s not that you can’t forgive or are unwilling to. When your brain can’t calm itself down, no amount of threats will calm it down for you.
This is one reason why in handling the crisis of an affair, your diet is important. Your brain may be working against you and you’re ignoring the danger signs.
This is where you can benefit from the video on “Overcoming Affair Trauma”. It covers what is needed in calming your brain back down. It guides you in getting unstuck from being a constant state of agitation.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
