Remembering

Over the weekend I read an article about chronic pain, a condition which has often held me in its grip for 25 years. I've learned to manage my pain, letting it stop me from almost nothing.  A long-time friend recently expressed astonishment that I'd suffered so much, and he'd never known.  If I let the pain own me, then it would win.  So, I own it.  I've gone for months, perhaps occasionally even a year, during which my simple practices to manage the pain left me almost unconscious of it during the day.

The decision I made to own the pain two and a half decades ago was a good one, it seems.  The article said that recent brain research shows that when pain takes control of us, our brains actually change shape.  Depression often results.  While I've often wondered at it, I don't believe I've ever been "depressed" more than having a down day or two, when I struggled to control the pain when it wrestled vehemently to prevail.

What has always interested me is that even after long periods without the pain, the very slightest aggravation can spin me deeply back into the very worst of it, leaving me to begin once again the slow journey back to relative comfort.  I've often thought that there must be a switch in my brain which takes only a small trigger to flip.  Perhaps this is what the recent brain research suggests. "Don't let it get started," was the message of the article.

Just as I've been pondering this new finding, I've been walking a parallel path of flipped switches, this time as a result of my decision to give up sugar during Lent.   For decades I lived a healthy eating/healthy living regimen.  I liked sweet things, but they didn't control me.  I owned my decisions about what to eat and what to avoid.

I really wish I could see a scan of my brain on sugar.  I suspect that like the brain on pain, my brain changes contorts and takes with it every modicum of self-control. Now a scarce six days after abandoning my sweet treats, my body seems to have remembered how to be healthy.  Like the switch in my brain that flips bringing or alleviating pain, my control over sugar has valiantly returned.

As surely as dancing an athletic Viennese waltz at the pace of a sprinter reminds my body how to work, the absence of sugar has reminded my impulse controls how to be healthy.  When I walked through the door this evening, I was starved.  I'd missed my usual afternoon snack, and I was nearly shaky.  Over the last year or two, I would have headed right for the cupboard for crackers, nuts, or pretzels, accompanied by a glass of red wine, or more recently a whiskey sour.  Just one, but my sugar shot nonetheless.

This evening I made a beeline to the refrigerator for a pear and iced tea.  Later I craved raw nuts.  I wanted to exercise.  I wanted to sit and write, rather than watching another TV show. Giving up the sugar has apparently flipped a switch in my brain: the healthy living switch.

A friend and I share the stage of life when we aren't inclined to go back for more education, but we've both said that, if we had it to do over again, and neuroscience existed then, we would like to study the brain.  I am fascinated by the ability of some relatively insignificant thing to slip a switch and either bring health or pain, even changing the shape of our brains.

I find it equally compelling to reflect on how I have chosen to dominate my pain, but contrarily, I've let my addiction to sugar control me.  Why is it that the moment I have even a single sweet treat that I forget how good healthy habits feel?  I would like to say it is simply a process of remembering what I need to do, and I think I would be right.  However, I don't think it is remembering the way we most often speak of it--the cognitive way.  I am quite certain that this kind of remembering is seated deep in the brain, in a switch which determines who or what runs my life.

There was a line in a movie that I watched over the weekend, spoken by a newly converted vegan, "Nothing tastes as good as this feels."  I want to remember every day for the rest of the year that nothing tastes as good as this feels.