The Goldilocks Zone

Our bodies work in a complex interconnection of various chemicals. To keep in good condition, our body works hard to keep chemical reserves and usage in an ideal “good zone” and does some on the fly compensation if your levels are just a bit out. If our levels are too far out of “good”, we become unwell in some fairly predictable ways. If those levels affect our neurotransmitters, prolonged problems are called Mental Illness. Understanding the Goldilocks Zone helps us to understand what causes long term Mental Illness, and why this turns standard psychology and psychiatry on its heads.

Understanding The Goldilocks Zone

If you are not already aware of the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, it is a children’s story about how an entitled girl breaks into the home of The Three Bears – Mumma Bear, Papa Bear and Baby Bear. While there, she rocks in their chairs, eats their porridge and sleeps in their beds. For each of these, she finds that Mumma Bear’s item is too soft or cold, Papa Bear’s is too hard or hot, but Baby Bear’s is “Just Right”.

Is it just right?

Or is it that after too far one way, and too far the other way, something in the middle is “Fine”?

The idea of the Goldilocks Zone is that anything that isn’t too extreme is going to be good enough. The Goldilocks Zone is where the outcome you are looking for is possible without too much struggle.

Astronomers use this idea to describe the distance away from a star that a planet needs to be in order for life * to be possible (* life as we know it here on Earth). For our star, roughly from the orbit of Venus, through Earth and to the orbit of Mars is our star’s Habitable Goldilocks Zone. Earth is a bit on the cold side of the optimal point in this zone, but with a bit of carbon dioxide acting is a light greenhouse gas, Earth’s temperature is pretty good. If we increase the ratio of greenhouse gases, our planet will become too warm.

The concept of the Goldilocks Zone allows us to move away from “perfect” and head towards “usable”, often with a bit of minor tweaking.

Diabetes Biological Example

As a biological example, our brains and body burn glucose to make energy and perform tasks. We use our blood stream to move glaucous around to our muscles and brain. If the amount of glucose is too low, we experience hypoglycaemia, where our muscles have no strength and it brain doesn’t function well – it is hard to think. Hypoglycaemia (hypo means low, glyce means sugar, emia means blood, lit low blood sugar). To avoid this problem, it would make sense to flood our blood with glucose – except that the molecule is quite large and can hurt our finer blood vessels, leading to blindness and problems with our fingers and toes. We’ll need those. There is a range of enough blood sugar that we function well, and either too little or too much where we don’t function well – a Goldilocks Zone of “fine”.

If we are doing vigorous exercise, we want the level to be a bit higher than average to feed our muscles, and if we are relaxing, we want it to be a bit lower than average to protect our fine blood vessels. These two thresholds form the outer boundaries of the Goldilocks Zone.

Many ADHDers benefit from having a slightly higher BSL Goldilocks Zone than Neurotypical people. Unfortunately, ADHDers often push this too far and have a high risk of developing Diabetes as a result.

When we are healthy, our body will try to keep our blood sugar in the right zone, adjusting the specific point a bit up and down to quickly adapt to circumstances. If our level is too low, we will feel sick and weak, triggering a feeling of hunger craving for sugary food and release sugars from our body stores. If our level is too high, we will feel sick and nauseas so we won’t eat, and thirsty to dilute the sugar in our blood and insulin to counteract the excess sugar.

Understanding Homeostasis

The mechanisms our body uses to maintain our levels in the Goldilocks Zone are called Homeostasis (homeo means “self”, stasis from “static”).

If your home uses a hot water tank, it maintains it hot temperature through homeostasis.

To get hot water out of the hot water tap, we store hot water in a holding tank held at a certain temperature, usually 60 deg Celsius.

If the tank gets too hot, it can lead to burns or even the tank exploding…

(not likely, Mythbusters worked very hard to make their hot water tanks explode).

If the water is too cold, then we use up all of the warm water too fast. Not good when you have many people wanting a hot shower.

A thermostat monitors the temperature of the water in the tank, and when it cools down below a certain point, perhaps 55 degrees, it turns the heater on. When the heat reaches 60 degrees, the heater turns off. If the temperature exceeds 60 degrees, it lets some hot water out of the safety valve, allowing fresh cold water in to mix, dropping the temperature in the tank down below 60. In this way, the temperature in the tank stays nicely homeostatically around 60 degrees.

Goldilocks Zones, Neurotransmitters and Mental Health

Mental Health is Biology

How our biology works to keep us stable is a marvel. You can see it at work with how we maintain a steady temperature, steady red blood cell ratio, ferritin levels for iron, glucose levels in our blood and so on. Even so, it may not be apparent why this is so important for Mental Health.

In a direct fashion, when our body is out of homeostasis for something like blood sugar, or hormone levels, or temperature, our body can’t function well. A poorly functioning body is ill. Our brain is not only in our body, it is a part of our body. When our body is ill, so is our brain. Mostly, though, your general Doctor should notice when your general body health levels are out and rectify that, which should correct the temporary mental ill health this may have brough about.

Long Term Mental Illness is Mostly Neurotransmitters

Long term mental illness without a general body health cause is generally about our neurotransmitters being out of the Goldilocks Zone. Neurotransmitters affect our cognition (thinking, understanding and executive function), behaviours (what you do) and mood (how you feel, how you react).

Understanding Neurotransmitters is relatively new.

Otto Leowi, an Austrian Scientist, discovered a chemical fluid that sent messages to a frog’s heart and published his results in 1921 – we now know this fluid was a neurotransmitter. Piecing together how various versions of these chemicals allow our brains to work has taken a long time.

Parallel to Leowi, people’s odd behaviours were given various names depending on the philosophy of who was observing them at the time, leading to several clusters of naming system and categorisation, which has led to the double problem of awful names and doubled up labels – its a mess. These labels would cluster together similar symptoms – reported thought deviations, behaviours and moods. We refer to these as mental diagnoses, mental illnesses and neurological conditions / diagnoses / diseases.

What does that mean?

In mental health, when we note that someone is different to the “normal”, we give a label that represents the observed behaviours, reported thoughts and reported moods that fit a certain category of other noted similar behaviours, reported thoughts and reported moods. We had two major methods for trying to help people – medicine that we applied empirically, or talking to change why they might be doing what they do.

Empirically applying medication meant that we would notice that a medicine helped some people with their mental health symptoms. We would try the medication on another person in that category and see if it helped them too. If it did, then a trial would try to establish if this medication was often enough helpful that it can be prescribed for that label. We didn’t know why it helped, and we weren’t sure what the medicine did to the brains. Because the labels were clusters of people with similar symptoms, and symptoms can be caused by multiple different things, sometimes the medicine would help that causal biology, and sometimes it wouldn’t. Consider that in the 1920s, Fever was a diagnosis, treated by ice baths. When we worked out what caused you to have a Fever, we switched the diagnosis to a symptom that prompts “why do they have a fever?” and once that was established, addressing the cause of the fever stopped the fever and helped the person get better.

Talking therapy tried to address the psychosocial life circumstances that may be contributing to your dis ease. Most therapists were psychologists, who effectively ignored the majority of biological causes, attributing odd cognition, behaviours and moods to psychosocial drivers and trying to talk you out of having these symptoms. When the symptoms were caused by psychosocial drivers, or ignorance, then talking therapies worked well. When the symptoms were due to biological causes, mostly neurotransmitter problems, talking therapies don’t work well or for long.

In the absence of understanding the pathology of mental illness, this was a better treatment model than doing nothing.

Unfortunately, we still rely on this method and far too often ignore the biological causes for the majority of diagnoses.

So let us turn that around.

Mental Health via Goldilocks and the 7 Neurotransmitters

There are 7 major neurotransmitters that affect our mental health.

The first cluster is the Dopaminergic cluster, which incorporate Dopamine, Noradrenaline and Adrenaline. The next cluster of import is Serotonin and Melatonin. The last cluster is Oxytocin and Endorphins. We cover these in more detail on our Neurotransmitter pages.

In short, if Dopamine is low, you have ADHD and will struggle to make the proper amount of Noradrenaline. Often ADHDers rely on Adrenaline to compensate, which stresses the body. We cover this in far more detail in our pages on ADHD. If Dopamine is too high, this can cause people to become thought disjointed and disordered. We frequently refer to these conditions as schizophrenia and psychosis.

Noradrenaline out of the Goldilocks Zone will cause our Amygdala to misreport our safety status. When operating correctly, our Amygdala draws on our Thalamus, Hypothalamus and our sensory system to determine when we are safe. If our Amygdala conclude we are “safe”, we will feel calm, content and at ease. With this mood we will take advantage of opportunity or rest. When our Amygdala concludes we “not safe”, we will feel fear/anxious if we identify likely pain, anger if something is out of order and disgust if we can be corrupted by substance or behaviour.

When our Amygdala works effectively, it helps us to figure out what to prioritise based on how we feel, and thus what actions to do. When our Amygdala can’t get the Goldilocks Zone of Noradrenaline, it reports “not safe” as it can’t confirm that we are “safe”. When our mood is “not safe” we will feel constantly anxious and or aggressive. This is the flight and fight response that is supposed to respond to emergencies, but it is stuck on. Our Amygdala prioritises base survival tasks and thinking is hard.

Our system will heighten to try to identify the threat that we can’t easily directly identify, leading to sensory and emotional hypersensitivity. Low levels of Noradrenaline can lead to self harming, suicidal ideation and suicide attempts. High levels can lead to paranoia, grandiosity and faulty conclusions to problems.

Noradrenaline imbalance looks like General Anxiety Disorder, Social Anxiety, Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and at extremes, BiPolar Affective Disorder (BPAD).

Adrenaline is what we use to do things, that is, initialise the tasks our Amygdala has identified are important and carry them through to completion. Too much Adrenaline will make us go straight to fight/flight mode, disabling our frontal “thinking” cortex, leaving us with simple answers and reduced comprehension. Low Adrenaline will leave us avoiding tasks and feeling down, aka Depression.

Oxytocin is the hormone that we use to feel good around people who are good for us. It helps us to connect socially, picking up social cues from people who matter to us, and enjoying their company. Low Oxytocin will inhibit our ability to feel sociable and pick up social cues. When we are around people we like, who are good for us, Oxytocin will increase and trigger additional Endorphins.

Endorphins manage pain and joy. If we are hurt, Endorphins will be spent on decreasing pain signals, and thus aren’t available to trigger the feeling of Joy. It is hard to have fun when we are in pain. Low Endorphins and low Adrenaline create a low energy mood devoid of joy – Anhedonia. Slightly elevated Endorphins and Oxytocin plus a person we care about create feelings of love.

Conclusion

By only briefly describing the symptoms we can expect from only 7 neurotransmitters out of the Goldilocks Zone, I have described most of the common Mental Health disorders.

I have only covered the big 7 Neurotransmitters here in a simple way. There are more neurotransmitters that are beyond the scope of this introduction, and Neurotransmitters can have some very subtle actions in other parts of our brain.

Imagine 7 variable sliding levels, where the middle of each is the Goldilocks Zone for that slider’s neurotransmitter. Raising and lowering each of the sliders creates a combination of moods, thoughts and behaviours – symptoms – that we then give a label to called a Mental Illness Diagnosis. To reverse the effect, we can give medication to compensate and to effectively shift the neurotransmitter back to the Goldilocks Zone, allowing your brain to function as it should. This doesn’t change your fundamental personality, the medication just gets rid of those annoying brain glitches while it is effective.

For many of my clients, I have used this approach to more accurately work out what is causing their distressing or interfering symptoms, recommend medications and more accurately formulate what is the best label for a diagnosis.

Once your brain is working better, you can then implement the skills and knowledge from our sessions to improve your life to what you want it to be.