Short Road To The Dumps

     ...Short road back out, too.

     I think I figured something out.  I had a couple of bouts of really dark, dark depression recently, one lasting for several days.  I didn't know why and I remembered having similar troubles about this time last year.

     Cabin fever?  Seasonal affective depression?

     Oh, two more items: each  period of depression was preceded by several hours of happiness.   Annnnd-- this time of year, I have access to really, really good cookies covered in rich, dark chocolate.

     My self-control around those good cookies...not what it should be.  Each time I got the blues, I'd eaten more of 'em than I should've the day before.  Not quite half a box over a few hours.  That's way too much.

     Back when the docs were working on my migraines/facial pain thing, they tried a class of drugs that mess with serotonin levels.  (Antidepressants: they've been known to work on otherwise-intractable pain in some cases.  Draw your own conclusions).  I was very sensitive to them and they had unsettling effects.  Dark chocolate, enough of it, is thought to increase serotonin levels in the brain* and if you use that stuff up quicker than you make it, you can get a nasty little serotonin crash: you run plumb outta the stuff.

     I have moderated my dark chocolate cookie intake.  I feel about two hundred percent better.  Correlation isn't causation, but....
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* Exactly what goes on with serotonin in the brain isn't well understood; for some reason, people aren't lining up to get their gray matter plumbed into a chemical analysis set-up.  Research on SSRI drugs and related matters is pretty empirical; they feed drugs to volunteers and use indirect means to figure out their effects.