Taking a Deep Breath

I have for some reason in the last few weeks begun to feel really stressed out. In order to combat this I have tried changing my diet, adding an extra hour to my workouts, ceasing certain activities, increasing others. Basically, I have been testing through variables to isolate whatever has crept into my subconsciousness and decided to derail the train that had been running so smoothly.

I'm afraid, however, it would be somewhat delusional on my part to say that the train itself wasn't breaking down internally. As I have been poking and proding myself both physically and mentally the stress fractures have become fairly clear. Years of self-abuse have caught up to a man in his mid thirties. I have worked hard to get myself into the best mental and physical shape possible to deal with the doctoral track meet that is my working life for over two years now, but I fear the bad behavior I submitted my body to for over a decade is, in a cliched way, coming back to haunt me. This does not deter me from keeping the better habits I have acquired in the last few years, e.g. running, not smoking, nutritional standards, lots of water, etc.; but something is chemically not right upstairs.

Brain-based education is a field in my discipline that examines the neurological, physiological, and psychological aspects of how and why we learn. While epistemology is a main focus for me in this area, our discussion ( I am taking a class in BBE) of the need for chemical balance in the brain alerted me to the possible problems I am feeling. The dance of the chemicals inside our head is delicate, and I believe that when I have kept it in a massive imbalance, it has not seemed apparent that there was a problem. It is in righting the ship and trying to get back to a fair balance that the funkiness is perhaps occurring, a sort of the closer to neutral I get the more awful I feel because it is not the norm I established for my little special chemical processes. Thinking about this frankly scares the shit out of me. But it is what it is. I have to deal with it.