Your Life as a Metabolic Adjunct

Adjunct adj; A thing added to something else as a supplementary rather than an essential part.

You may know that I've always said that drugging neuroses is not a good idea. By neurosis I'm referring to things like; depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorders and disorders of eating and hunger. Basically, imbalance in the functioning of the nervous system.

I recognise the need for drugs. There are a very small minority whose neurosis is a product of an abnormal nervous system, that malfunctions regularly. Their system needs to be brought up to par. Overlapping with them are those who's neurosis is at the most extreme end. At that point neurosis can become psychosis.

My objection is essentially that the nature of the nervous system is inherently self-correcting. The way it is working can be interrupted and altered by its own seat-the brain-which we have a conscious part under our charge. We feel that part of the brain is us.

So why commit to drugs as the answer when we have/are not exploring the means to use our minds to adjust our minds/brains/ nervous system function?

This is inevitable. You cannot evade it. If drugs work, they achieve the same end, stimulating/suppressing malfunction in that system. Indeed, many of these drugs are as much vehicles for invoking the so called placebo effect as they are effective in and of themselves. The placebo effect here especially, is just the assumption that this are making you better.

That is an example of your mind, interrupting your mind.

So we might as well bite that bullet with real vigour.

Instinctive objection to drugging the nervous system into submission is normal. Drug companies use of the notion of neurosis as your "illness" which you needed "medicine" for, was used to bypass that.

When really a lot of it is about convenience. So what? No one needs to hide from that. In societies where we expect machine-like infallibility from ourselves and each other, having to do anything to keep going can become part of that.

Accepting that you are weighing up that need in taking drugs helps you to keep an eye out for when that changes. When a bit of space opens up for you. A chance to try and deal with underlying issues. Or when you're tired of crude chemical manipulation.

Lifestyle, which is really a euphemism for your life, is even worse than a pill for every ill. Drugs are at least convenient and trigger your mind to help itself, lifestyle brings nothing, it only takes. It's all your effort framed as if it somehow isn't.

It cannot be classed as "treatment" it brings no active ingredient. No technique, no help, just exhortations. Like the preacher in the pulpit. There's barely any discernible placebo either most of the time. Tellingly, it also avoids adjusting your nervous system. Just like careless drugging, it doesn't bother to make use of your nervous system's ability to self correct and adjust.

Which is just as necessary and inevitable as adjusting it for your mental health.

Lifestyle has pretentions that it is a life built around healthy habits, when really it is groundhog day. Every day recreating a failing strategy. Ending up treating your life as an adjunct, a metabolic adjustment. What is designed to adapt is left to continue whilst your life is pressed to be a switch for it, day after day after day.

Your. Whole. Life.