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The Cascade Effect

by Mike Kirkeberg

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Illness Doesn’t Start with the First Symptom

Gerrie has a heart attack. Her family gathers at her side in the hospital encouraging her to get better. Outside the door, her sister is asking how this could happen; she’s so young.

When there is a disaster of some sort, the kind that happens at the intersection of humans and some sort of technology, there is the inevitable investigation as to what happened. The catastrophe might be a plane crash, a major power outage, or another along those lines.

Many times, during the course of the investigation, the phrase “cascade effect” enters the conversation. The crash, whatever it might be, didn’t happen because of one gaff by a worker or a pilot; rarely does it happen because one thing went wrong with the hardware. It’s a series of events that lead to a critical mass that causes the catastrophic event. So, the event is at the end of a chain.

While there may not be an external element in the crash, it is not surprising that people are similar. We call the event we see and feel the catastrophe when our troubles are a long time in the making. When something goes drastically wrong, it is an event at the end of a chain. Acoording to Dr. Eric Braverman, the first link in the chain is the brain –

The body is known to react to many illnesses with a domino effect, where one small change can affect the workings of the entire body. In most instances, I see that first domino falling as a symptom of brain chemical imbalance.

Gerrie’s illness is the catastrophe. What are the dominos? How could chemical imbalances in the brain be at the root of a heart attack?

Heart attack is an interesting term anyway, isn’t it? Does the heart attack? Or have we been attacking the heart?

Good Stress Gone Bad

In The End of Stress as We Know It, Doctor Bruce McEwen says that stress, while a helpful trait at lower levels, can reach what he calls an allostatic load level that can fill our blood streams with cortisol and other chemicals that can be hazardous to our health. One of the other chemicals he mentions is adrenalin.

As I see it, adrenalin and cortisol are very interesting bedfellows. Adrenalin makes us strong and agile enough to do what needs to be done, while cortisol at high levels makes us too dumb to carry these thngs out effectively.

Excessive stress becomes too much work for our hearts, our immune systems, our brains to bear, and the system begins to break down.

What I want to explore in this blog over time is how Gerrie, my fictional character who is going to survive her coronary problems, is going to work to create enough balance in her life to be successful and live to tell about it.

What do you do for stress? Here is a hint. Stress is not going to go away. And balance is a lofty goal.

Your brain health, thus your physical health depend on you figuring this one out.