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I have to incorporate some or all of the topics into today's journal entry. It's for work tomorrow morning, and I don't want to be the wallflower that doesn't have much thought running through his head.

Well, that's not true. I have thoughts that run through my head constantly, it's just that I operate at a different tempo than other people tend to.

Anyway.

I read up some about how members have been pushed out of the military due to PTSD changing a person's mindset. Some of the comments to those stories highlighted on how a person's normal defenses that separate their different personalities can deteriorate when subject to enough stress. This makes sense, the structure of a mind can be altered to make themselves act a bit differently than they used to.

When someone is subjected to stress, they change their actions to suit the occasion. Multiple periods of stress can build up a person's resistance to stress for a short time, but unless that previous stress is released completely before more stress comes along, it can start wearing down on the person. This wearing down can result in deterioration of the guy's normal behavior and replaces it with a new set of rules and guidelines that can re-occur if any new stress is applied.

The main problem here is not just getting people to notice the signs of stress, it's getting people to deal with the signs of stress.

I have found an outlet for my stress by typing all of this without fear of retribution or judgement. The problem is, I found this outlet by learning with the help of resources I found on my own. And the main resource that helped me wasn't plastered all over with "How to combat stress", but the title of it was "Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-free Productivity".

Because really, the problems with stress can't be solved from the surface. I think that we must learn how to deal with stress and work with it. We must also be able to identify the signs of stress in ourselves first, because we are the best people that can determine things like that.

Then again, I speak from an ignorant fool's perspective.

I've never been afflicted with post-traumatic stress disorder, at least in the way that it crops up in the military. But we should know ourselves, and if we don't know ourselves, how are we going to know when we're not ourselves? It's simple logic.

I believe that PTSD isn't the result of stress, it's the result of the mind dealing with stress. However, in this case, it's repeatedly dealing with more stress than it can handle, so it resorts to a more animal-like instinct to deal with it. Repeated exposures in a short time can make their mark on the brain's workings, overriding normal behavior and essentially changing the working order of the mind.

Whether this becomes a disorder or not depends on the environment they exist in. If they to an environment that favors similar stress management skills, it can be called a lifestyle change. If they go back to the original environment that favors different stress management skills, they suffer a disorder.

This explains why, when people suffer PTSD, they tend to become more distant, as if the environment they are in now isn't the environment they are used to.


In the end, the preferred destiny for all military lifers is to maintain a mostly static environment in which they are both warriors and socialites. This is the most obvious way to prevent or lessen the effects of PTSD, which is basically when the mind has a problem dealing with disassociation between a deployed environment and a cushioned environment.

But it goes much deeper than that. If your reactions to stresses in a cushioned environment are similar to ones in a deployed environment, and you don't go beyond the limitations of accepted behavior in either environment, you have kept in balance. In this example, it isn't the environments that are the same, it's the reactions to those environments.

This is harder than it sounds, and usually depends on how well a person can transition from one state of mind to the next.

Now I can see that what I said earlier needs correcting: it isn't so much that PTSD is the result of a mind's reaction to stress, but that it's the result of a mind's inability to transition between one frame of mind to another.

I could probably go on in even more detail, but I don't think it's worth it. I don't feel like going on about the other topics either, it doesn't seem like a smart thing to do.

Plus I'm distracted by the brand new footer and I want to play around with it.