Valarian: a Case Study

Of all of the herbal remedies that can help to manage anxiety and nervous exhaustion, Valarian or Valeriana officinalis, is definitely one of the more effective that I have come across. It grows wild throughout the UK, Asia and most of North America. It has been used in herbal medicine since at least the time of Hippocrates in the fourth century BC. The famous ancient Greek botanist Dioscorides believed that it was an excellent diuretic as well as being useful in warming the body. During medieval times the herb took on almost mythical properties and was often referred to by the name of "all-heal"; Nicholas Culpeper even went so far as to pronounce it as a cure for the plague. 

I seriously doubt that Valerian does cure everything (especially the plague!) but I do know that it promotes sleep and helps to reduce anxiety; something that Culpeper curiously fails to mention. It seems to affect some people more than others, though scientific research has proven its usefulness in treating mild insomnia. It is two groups of chemical compounds in particular that are the focus of efforts to understand the exact mechanisms through which Valerian works: valeric acid and valepotriates. 
It is the roots of the plant that are used and can be taken either as a tincture or tea. Many health stores also sell valerian capsules which are certainly the safer than preparing it yourself. An overdose of Valerian would be fatal so extra care must be taken when using it. It can also be mistaken for Red Valerian or Centranthus Ruber, which is not actually part of the same species (although it does have similar medicinal properties according to Jekka McVicar) and it toxic at much smaller doses (I have had the unfortunate effect of taking slightly too much and being poisoned. Not seriously but still not pleasant.). 
Although Valerian affects the same set of receptors (GABA_A) as benzodiazepines, they are not thought to be addictive or reactant to alcohol. For the best effect I would recommend taking it for short periods of time as I find that the effects lessen with prolonged usage and for a great nights sleep dissolve the contents of a capsule into Camomile tea. Oh, and for goodness sake consult a doctor or trained herbal medicinist before taking it, just to be safe! A word of warning about the smell too. Some people think that it smells like leather, others that it smells like wet dog. You decide, but don't say that I didn't warn you.


For more info I'd recommend:
Jekka McVicar, Jekka's Complete Herb Book (London, 2007).
Steven Foster and Rebecca L. Johnson, National Geographic Desk Reference to Nature's Medicine (Washington, 2006)  Probably the most informative book on herbal medicine.
Nicholas Culpeper, Culpeper's Complete Herbal (2009 ed.) (London, 2009).

Cheers!

Here's to lost opportunities! It's only one, don't worry, and a very nice one at that!

Something new...

Just trying out the blogger mobile app. On a break and slightly bored so I thought why not? It means that now I can bore you all from anywhere in the world! Sorry about that... You've got to love technology!

Post Evening Analysis

I did something that I try to do as little as possible last night (no innuendo please, this is a clean blog!). I attended a dinner party with about one-hundred and seventy people. I only do about one large dinner a year, mostly to keep my parents happy; certainly not for fun. It really is my idea of hell, being stuck next to someone I don't really know for roughly two or three hours whilst trying to eat when my stomach is so tied up in knots that it is a real struggle to digest anything. There is no escape once you've arrived, to leave during a meal would be a severe breach of social etiquette. If I could, I would, but my parents raised me according to strict rules concerning manners, so much so that it is able to keep my natural flight instincts under wraps. That is not to say that these rules are unbreakable, but I'm an Aspie: I love rules, even if I don't entirely understand/agree with them.
This time wasn't so bad I guess though I wouldn't say I enjoyed it. It was more interesting than fun. I used the EMDR and I am pleased to say that it does actually help a little. A bit of mindfulness and I was able to remove some of the more unpleasant physical symptoms of my anxiety. Through a bit of preparation I was able to make plenty of small talk, or at least enough to ensure that the two ladies on either side of me were not bored (a big faux-pas apparently!). I've found that as long as I can get them to do most of the talking then I don't have to do much. I much prefer to listen than talk anyway. You can learn a lot if you listen and offer a supportive and sympathetic view.
These kind of events also provide an excellent opportunity to practice my skills with regards to body language. A room full of hundreds of people socialising is absolutely terrifying to me, but when I can focus on a hundred unspoken conversations, it kind of takes my mind off of it. Now that you can make a game out of. Seeing if you can correctly identify who is attracted to who, who is about to have an argument and who wants to leave like me. All I can say is that I am glad that that is over for a while. I can finally relax after a week and a half of anxiety.
On the sad side I felt something for an individual that I met again for the first time in a while. From her body language I could tell the feeling was mutual. I felt comfortable discussing things with her and actually enjoyed her company. I even admitted to her that I had Aspergers, which makes me feel more comfortable, knowing that it is out in the open. However, I know that I cannot rationally commit to anything resembling a relationship yet; to do so would be highly unfair for the other person as I have more than my fair share of problems. Part of me hopes that I'll see her again, but I left without saying goodbye as I was  petrified of having her ask for my number as I (irrationally or rationally?) see that as the start of a commitment to a social relationship. Again, part of me wanted to accept such an outcome, but my fear (and knowledge) of the huge change that it would bring about overruled it. I guess that I didn't know enough about her to know that she would not bring about too much change in my life, and I couldn't risk committing before I knew more. So for the time being I can only imagine 'what if?' again and hope that some day conditions will be more favourable. I have some thinking to do.

The Vulnerability of I.

The human brain is an enigma, wrapped in mystery and carefully concealed in a massive stack full of brain-like objects. You may have heard of the many school shootings that occur in the world. You may think that it is just some sicko acting out his (or less likely her) disturbed fantasies, fantasies moulded by a violent upbringing. You'd assume that they were born like that. After all, they say that personality is fixed in human beings by the time that we are 22. You'd never do anything like that, how could you? The acts are repugnant and without justification. You are over 22 and you think that you will never really change.
 Well, I am afraid that I have some bad news. You're mind is the product of countless and highly complex so-called 'zombie' programs that you cannot consciously alter, each one responsible for a multitude of different operations. Your emotions, the way that you are feeling right now, is the result of chemical changes within your body and brain. Even small changes to the contained cosmos that is your body can throw the equilibrium that is you at this very point in time. Brain tumours may sound like they are just lumps in the brain and you'd be forgiven for thinking that they cannot change an individual completely. Forgiven , but still wrong.
The following is an extract from David Eagleman's book Incognito that both brilliantly and disturbingly illustrates just how fragile everything that you think you are is. It is a truly concerning read:

"On the steamy first day of August 1966, Charles Whitman took an elevator to the top floor of the University of Texas Tower in Austin. The twenty-five-year-old climbed three flights of stairs to the observation deck, lugging with him a trunk full of guns and ammunition. At the top he killed a receptionist with the butt of his rifle. He then shot at two families of tourists coming up the stairwell before  beginning to fire indiscriminately from the deck at people below. The first woman he shot was pregnant. As others ran to help her, he shot them as well. He shot pedestrians in the street and the ambulance drivers that came to rescue them.

                The night before Whitman had sat at his typewriter and composed a suicide note:

I do not really understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and

intelligent young man. However, lately (I cannot recall when it started) I have been a victim of

many unusual and irrational thoughts.

As news of the shooting spread, all Austin police officers were ordered to the campus. After several hours, three officers and a quickly deputised citizen worked their way up the stairs and managed to kill Whitman on the deck. Not including Whitman, thirteen people were killed and thirty-three wounded.

                The story of Whitman’s rampage dominated National headlines the next day. And when police went to investigate his home for clues, the story became even more grim: in the early hours of the morning before the shooting, he had murdered his mother and stabbed his wife to death in her sleep. After these first killings, he had returned to his suicide note, now writing by hand.

                It was after much thought that I decided to Kill my wife, Kathy, tonight… I love her dearly, and

                she has been a fine wife to me as any man could ever hope to have. I cannot rationally pinpoint

                any specific reason for doing this….

Along with the shock of the murders lay another, more hidden surprise: the juxtaposition of his aberrant actions and his un-remarkable personal life. Whitman was a former Eagle Scout and marine, worked as a teller in a bank, and volunteered as a scout-master for Austin Scout Troop 5. As a child he’d scored 138 on the Stanford Binet IQ test, placing him in the top 0.1 percentile. So after he launched his bloody, indiscriminate shooting from the University of Texas Tower, everyone wanted answers.

                For that matter, so did Whitman. He requested in his suicide note that an autopsy be performed to determine if something had changed in his brain – because he suspected it had. A few months before the shooting, Whitman had written in his diary:

                I talked to my doctor once for about two hours and tried to convey to him my fears that I felt overcome

by overwhelming violent impulses. After one session I never saw the doctor again, and since then I have

been fighting my mental turmoil alone, and seemingly to no avail.

Whitman’s body was taken to the morgue, his skull was put under the bone saw, and the medical examiner lifted the brain from its vault. He discovered that Whitman’s brain harboured a tumour about the diameter of a nickel. This tumour, called a glioblastoma, had blossomed from beneath a structure called the thalamus, impinged on the hypothalamus, and compressed a third region, called the amygdala. The amygdala is involved in emotional regulation, especially as regards fear and aggression. By the late 1800s, researchers had discovered that damage to the amygdala caused emotional and social disturbances. In the 1930s, biologists Heinrich Klüver and Paul Bucy demonstrated that damage to the amygdala in monkeys led to a constellation of symptoms including lack of fear, blunting of emotion, and overreaction. Female monkeys with amygdala damage showed inappropriate maternal behaviour, often neglecting or physically abusing their infants. In normal humans, activity in the amygdala increases when people are shown threatening faces, are put in frightening situations, or experience social phobias.

                Whitman’s intuition about himself – that something in his brain was changing his behaviour – was spot-on.

                I imagine it appears that I brutally killed both of my loved ones. I was only trying to do a quick

                thorough job…. If my life insurance policy is valid please pay off my debts…. Donate the rest

anonymously to a mental health foundation. Maybe research can prevent further tragedies

of this type.

Others had noticed the changes as well. Elaine Fuess, a close friend of Whitman’s, observed, “Even when he looked perfectly normal, he gave you the feeling of trying to control something in himself.” Presumably, that, “something” was his collection of angry, aggressive zombie programs. His cooler, rational parties were battling his reactive, violent parties, but damage from the tumour tipped the vote so it was no longer a fair fight.

 David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (London, 2011), pp. 151-3.

Copyright © David M. Eagleman, 2011. 

I feel that since I have posted an extract of his work, I should provide a link for people to buy it if they are as fascinated by it as I was: Buy Incognito on Amazon.com

EMDR

Once again let me apologise profusely for not having kept up with my posting on this blog... again. I hate offering excuses as they are usually an attempt to dodge taking responsibility for a wrongdoing. However I do have a kind of excuse. No, my dog didn't eat my notes or keyboard and although my broadband is slower than an octogenarian attempting to traverse the Himalayas, it is still working. Come to think of it I'm certain that I have used this one before. Time.
I can only do so much time staring at a computer screen before developing headaches and my eyes start to feel weirder than Alice in Wonderland (seriously, how weird is that book/film. Someone must have been abusing certain substances). It actually effects my sleep. Close your eyes after using a computer for too long and you'll see images come to mind really easily and depending on what you've been working on this does not make for quality dreams and therefore quality sleep. You spent all night dreaming about research on neurological disorders and I can guarantee that you will not wake up feeling refreshed. Interested perhaps, but not refreshed. I can usually manage about 6 hours a day before any serious effects occur, but that has to include gaming too.
I've probably already mentioned that I'm an avid gamer. I love it; it's how I unwind on an evening after work though never after 8.00pm as the negative effects on sleep of time spent after this hour are particularly damaging. Light prevents the release of melatonin (also known as the sleep hormone) from the hypothalamus, so blasting the most light sensitive part of your body with bright light just before attempting to sleep is counter-productive.
Anyway, to get back to my excuse, I am currently writing for another blog (not my own and sadly unpaid), which is great, but it means that I have less time to write on my own. It's going well and my work seems to be appreciated and getting a lot of hits. I'm not going to disclose the name of it as I want to keep the two separate. Sorry... compartmentalising is one of my coping strategies, I hope you understand.
Now that my apology/excuse is out of the way (at surprisingly lengthy looking back at it!) I can get back to the title. An odd one I am sure you'd agree. EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitisation and pRocessing and is a anxiety management technique developed by Dr Francine Shapiro. Essentially, it is believed that anxiety is based in the right hemisphere of the brain, but that these feelings often cannot be rationalised or dealt with because reasoning skills are located in the left hemisphere. By quickly moving your eyes from left to right, communication between the two hemispheres is, through some complex quirk of neurobiology, increased thereby allowing the feelings to be suppressed.
I haven't tried this technique yet myself, but anything (safe and legal) that can help manage stress and anxiety is worth a go. Try it and see how it goes: I certainly will.

I think that I may be a little depressed at the moment. Everything is various shades of grey and I can't enjoy things that I used to like being outside. Oh, wait, it's not just me? Everyone in Britain has the same symptoms as me? For the last month? Maybe it's not depression, maybe it's the terrible weather! (I blame the Met Office for issuing drought warnings across the country back in March!)

I usually like rain or I am at least curiously apathetic towards it. If I'm away in a Mediterranean country for too long I even start to miss it! But over four weeks of constant gloom and downpours is enough to drive anyone a little stir-fry crazy. A bit of sun would be nice; just enough for my body to be able to synthesise a little vitamin D. It does however make that hot mug of tea whilst sheltering indoors that bit more enjoyable. In all seriousness though, it is actually more than a little depressing. However, every cloud has a silver lining (please forgive the terrible pun, I am after all a little depressed!).

 Contrary to popular belief it isn't always raining in Britain; in fact this time last year we were basking in a miniature heat-wave. One stereotype that is true though, is that we do talk about the weather an awful lot. For an aspie who is socially challenged this is a Godsend. Two people who have absolutely bugger all in common can make small talk for at least as long as social mores dictate. The weather is something we all have in common and it changes often enough here to make it vaguely interesting. Hailing in May? Just something to use when you are next stuck chatting to someone that you don't really know. Thank God for British peculiarities!