Depends on what you mean by "psychological issues", thats a broad expression with a unfair negative sound . Every people on earth probably have "psychological issues" more or less and we should not dismiss the idea that one kind of those "issues" could be more common in POISers then others. When science start to dismiss cause/effect ideas its often reaching a dead end (for example school medicine). Personally long term stress has been a major factor that has coexisted as long as I had POIS and could very well be the releasing factor for me. Stress hits on us diffrently depending on diffrent psychological traits. We are borned diffrent - "Some are like water, some are like the heat. Some are a melody and some are the beat".
I'm a sensitive and empathic individual and the youngest sibling. There is science supporting that people like that are more prone to stress then others. Thats not "issues" - thats the natural composition of traits that balances and enriches the interactions between humans. Further more there is no negative valuation in having "psychological issues", its only a initial position and we all have diffrent initial positions. After the result of a IQ-poll here some made the hypothesis that POIS'ers are generally more intelligent then others and with intelligence comes understanding of more risk factors and thus potentially more stress. Or it could just be that intelligent persons just spend more time at the computers/books. But that sedentary lifestyle might also have influence of our social life and cause "psychological issues" - a term that conventional medicine tend to use for people in a wrongful manner.
Yes, I agree with this. What irks me a bit is when people suggest that POIS is entirely psychological, or a consequence of some process in our minds. I know that stress affects me (and most of us) negatively, and that we all have unreleased emotions and bad experiences at some point, but there has to be some physical reason behind what is happening to us. Hundreds of thousands of people live in terrible conditions in the world, under heavy stress, in the middle of wars, enduring abuse... and we don't see them developing POIS. Sure, stress isn't good for anybody and they might develop lasting trauma from their experiences (or at least the most sensitive and empathetic of them, like you said), but POIS looks like a very specific set of symptoms that isn't common at all, at least as far as we know.
If the vagus nerve is malfunctioning as I believe, it could fail to regulate our bodies' response to stress, and lead to excessive activation of the sympathetic nervous system or an uncontrolled release of stress hormones, thus making normal stress more damaging to us than it is to normal people. Just an idea. Personally, stress doesn't hurt me too much, but fear does. I think that the key for it to be damaging is the adrenaline response. I'll expand a bit on this on my thread when I'm done with the exams I have next week (a good source of stress!
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