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This information in these pages is derived from a PhD research that included two steps. First, mapping the existing general perspectives on the body and health; second, finding another way to model the syndromes that affect reactive individuals and ‘females more than males’, which medicine says are ‘not well understood’. Other pages concern Cognitive Anthropology (how humans think about susch things); these pages concern the Ecology of Health in its diverse manifestations and factors. This is presented here in the context of daily life, so the findings can make sense to anyone seeking a different approach to the recurrent instability that can affect all aspects of the life in society for a person affected by such syndromes (often there are several diagnoses).

The most important in understanding some of the most challenging aspects of this work is to refer to one’s direct sense of what daily life is like for oneself, apart from beliefs, learned explanations and complicated rationalisations.

Please take into consideration that these are early works (some from the 1990’s), with lesser graphic and video means than are available now.

The human great ape body can also react like wildlife

2 views of exhausion in the flaring sub-clinical syndromes

These two ways of understanding fatigue make sense to those affected with subclinical syndromes that they associate with exhaustion and having been pushed too far.

2 Cas de figure dans les syndromes sub-cliniques

Ces deux facons de comprendre la fatigue font sens a qui associe cet etat à l’epuisement, à avoir été poussé trop loin, et ne plus pouvoir ‘avancer’. [online 2010] 

Pressure & countering pressures cannot stop, undo, or even reduce pressing need

This section concerns health and stress-related difficulties and the ‘climacteric’ problem that is found  in female health, and at the planetery level as well.

‘Pressure’ is also ‘activation’. Pressured is how we feel when we feel stressed, forced to do things just to cope, or constrained by others or rules and regulations. The automatic habit we are taught in childhood is to try counter-acting the pressure; this implies a need to actively do something, or activate some capacity, physical or mental or social, to do what has to be done to create Counter-Pressure. We may react with focused actions, one after the other, or by deploying all means necessary all at the same time, attacking the situation on all fronts simultaneously. Pressure is the sensation received; Activation is the reaction to it. Both are directional, ‘oriented’.

Pressure – or pressing need –  is a built-in property of our system of SurVival and  endurance (or ‘keeping up’). ‘Basic Options’, the approach offered here, aim to stop the endless or prediodic re-deployments of oriented activity (problem solving, directional targeting, goals, planning for the future and fixing the past, seeking or searching, etc. – in other words, ‘activations’. These are productive activities, but they also have counter-productive effects.  The approach is to reduce constant pressure increase, disturbance, and thus also reduce ‘pressing need’ that can reach limits and  ‘oriented activity’ which can take a person to their limits, to just be active, alive.

Pressing need (and therefore ‘oriented activity’ also) characterises both the productive and counter-productive; it is both:
-the origin/ source/ cause/ trigger/ ‘underlying’ problem
-the end/ result/consequence/ effect/ visible manifestation or symtpom

In both individual and collective realms, Pressing Need is a baseline characteristic of the societal general system of ‘keeping up’ and of the ‘human nature’ and its ‘dark side’ – always re-deploying exPRESSions of protection, correction, aggressive-defence,  adaptive skills,  creations of our mind, learning power tactics, using spirited activations, conditioning, programming, habituating, imagination, etc., in any field of empirical evidence, in both domains – human [H-] and material/scientific/technical  [Sc-] {external} or mental and physical {internal}. This is valid in any field understood with any framework or perspective on the human world or at human scale.

The word baseline means that it is what humans consider their resting state, both beginning and end of deployment and re-deployment: see the Vortex-Vertex image below and recall what it is like when everything ‘spirals out of hand’ in your life. All the fragmented re-deployments of the generic strategy of keeping up for SurVival cannot but ultimately increase ‘pressing need’ of one kind or another, for one or another person, for ‘us’, the great humans ‘powerful and successful’ survivors that dominate the planet; and all the problematic counter-productive effects are deemed ‘not well understood’ or ‘apparently without cause’ or ‘non-specific’ (they are a context independent, generic phenomenon). These effects correlate to an unstable agitation, an activation of oriented activity – some examples are: targeted action, goal seeking, problem solving, activating focus to deactivate agitation and activating power to control focused problems, calming to reduce reaction or activating to reduce exhaustion,  etc.  These ultimately cause logical vicious circlesup, to uncontrollable states.  For example, the CNS [“the nerves”] governs the capacity to activate adaptive survival behaviours both physically and mentally, but its long-term weakening in chronic activation is the origin of feeling stressed ‘in the first place’: distressed by pressing need, pressed to react, again and again, up to inability to react any more, or even respond: being de-spondent, with even basic functions no longer working properly. Pressed>dePressed>supPressed physiology… deSpondent. Everything can trigger this: psycho-socio-emotional double-binds (correlated to inversion of evaluations and changes between the physical and mental domains), realist or naturalist cycles of periodic critical instability, internally climacteric and externally climatic problems (e.g. body temperature distribution or adapting to climate change).

This ‘climacteric’ phenomenon (see below) is a direct expression (built into the geometric symbols, the mathematics, the languages, and the logics of perspectival description) of the deployment of oriented activity that we call ‘human’ nature and behaviour. Some basic physiological implications were presented in a medical case report on oxytocin.

 To understand some of the most challenging aspects of this work, it is crucial to refer to one’s actual experience of life, to honest fundamental longing, and to common sense, without dismissing or ignoring any aspect (e.g. the body’s health and sensations, or the rawest emotions and the deepest yearnings such as for a life not so hard or painful, freedom, peace, a world with more respect and empathy or compassion, etc.). This means to refer to one’s direct sense of what daily life is like for oneself, apart from what is acceptable or politifcally correct, all the accepted beliefs, the learned explanations or behaviours, especially about what is ‘Human’, ‘Natural’, or ‘Life’,  the complicated rationalisations we construct to justify our doings and the world we keep recreating. It salso means to refer simultaneously to what the ‘state of the world’ feels like from one’s local vantage point. For example, is the ‘strong economy’ actually good to you in your every day life? Is it truly a job and ‘more work’ you desire or just not being in need of money or of basic things (food, shelter, clothing…)? Does the fate of orangutans or koalas alter your survival behaviour at work or at home? Does your giving to charities stop completely your sadness about the ‘pain of the world’ or truly resolve the inequities? You may  care about the ‘ecological footprint’ of our energy greed, and increasingly find your energy bills expensive, but can you really afford the costly solar technology that gives booming ‘green’ business to the few? Do you know you could reduce both cost and footprint by using a simple home-made ‘solar cooker’? What bars you from knowing about it? You might say, ‘I would not have the time’ – What do you spend the majority of your time doing and where does ‘not having the time’ come from? Right here, right now, are you actually peacefully happy and well?  Etc.

Not separating by discernment of the various divided aspects of these realities, how we construct them in perception, experience, and explanation, as well as how we rationalise and express our reactions and value actions, conditions and states, allows to apprehend them by ‘gauging’ the situation more directly, more inclusibvely, and to finally see something else. This website presents this through discussing various ways of looking at situations of different kinds. Choose those you can relate to, and try some of the others.

[online 2010]

 The ‘Climacteric’ Problem, whirlwind like

The problem of ‘climacteric’ behaviour is mostly known as a personal and health behaviour in women. But it is a generic human behaviour in many critical circumstances, in which activity climaxes at limits. In certain periods of human history, it is acted out by nearly the entire population, unconsciously and with little understanding of what is happening – the biggest problem for women too: “what is happening to me?”

The term ‘climacteric’ easily calls up, linguistically the word ‘climate’ too…

Neglected options for the ‘Climacteric’ Problem

This website is not a place to look for solutions to specific problems. It offers certain practical options to deal with a particular type of situation that keeps coming back up, and which has global effects.  Universal solutions for general problems and panacea cures have no place here either, but generalised difficulty and fundamental problems are the source of this work, and are encountered both individually, especially in health as well as daily life living conditions, and also collectively: in ‘global’ problems and in theory construction. One telling expression for this type of situation is the word ‘climacteric’ (variable like the weather, subject to recurrent crises).

For the mind of ‘thinking in imaging’:

The problems of ‘climacteric’ states are expressed in this image of spin:

Getting into a spin, spin Right or Left, Up & Down, fall into a dark hole, spiral out of control (out of hand: both L- & R-), hit rock bottom and bounce back up… like a whirlwind.  The ‘likeness’ makes this very amenable to modeling with the Rubber Sheet Geometry.

This problem of ‘climacteric’ behaviour (generally associated with women in dominant culture) is also that of collective human contribution to Climate Change.

 The Vertex-Vortex Left-Right Spin and deployment of critical instability
[Imagine this picture in your mind in 3D volume and in motion, as the spin changes]

What is proposed here is derived from studying experimentally low-grade chronic syndromes (medically ‘sub-clinical’) that involve cognitive, emotional,  and physical uproars and falls, an in application of a geometric method of Topologic Situation Modelling^©,  which was introduced in a recent doctorate thesis (2008). It not a panacea solution for everything, nor a ‘theory of everything’, but a kind of animated geometry that is found in sensations of feeling ‘pushed to the edge’ of instability, and is expressed in a certain type gestures, and in a certain kind of cognition. [See animations, slides presentations in the PhD page.] Using this method provides  an overview of the deployments of culture and civilisation, but also access to options that resolve the ‘climacteric’ edge: ‘basic’ options that are ignored by other methods.

We have many ways of dealing with irregular and unstable or ‘climacteric’ states and situations, and they work well, in many cases/for most people/in most of humanity’s world, but not for all cases. In some circumstances, the solutions do not ultimately resolve the situation but seem to shift and compound the problem, and recreate it in worse form, pushing the situation down ‘into the pit’ even more. Why? After we have solved problems, one after the other, one derived from the other, eventually we get back to the first one, only now it is  more entrenched. Or may be, we have tried this solution, that strategy, this other way, and even turned the attempts on their head and done the opposite because our understanding has shifted; after we have tried this, tried that, and tried all the many ways, we may end up back to square one, with  essentially the same problem, having only shifted it from one sphere to another, and  made it a little worse. This constitutes a circumnavigating, the result of which is not quite the original place: the original situation is now more difficult, or complex, more unstable or more deeply established. Many  collective problems related to human nature behave this way: how better are we at preventing war, disease,  poverty, or crises of all kinds, than we were three thousand years ago? How effective is our modern ethics, compared to  the morals  and justice of antiquity? For some sensitive individuals, this is a recurring problem on a daily basis, and life seems to  simply go around in circles, never leading anywhere, plagued with crises and limitations. Many people try (unconsciously) to control childhood agitation, pain, and poor thriving by raising mental self-control, or to control anger or fear, stress and poor social integration by raising brain-derived substances (usually through foods); How better off are these adults, once this ‘raising’ power runs out of steam after mid-life, or even causes major health damage after puberty? How effective are modern types of medicine compared to medieval or archaic practices in such cases? If one looks at the situation rather than have a biased and limited view singling out some aspects (or many),  pushing the power, intelligence, or skilled excellence, does little to resolve it once and for all. This can occur in health and in the mind, in theory/philosophy and in the daily life events of our collective ‘world’. Usual strategies that work in most cases and even time-honoured traditional ones help little, and often actually, unwittingly , compound the original situation. Our approaches include considering problems to solve (the belief that our great intelligence can sort out anything), regular correction of what looks too often like chaos,  reconditioning  what seems out of place,  using cycles and habit (justified by ‘nature’ and necessity or inevitability),  monitoring what is wrong (by senses or instruments) to evade critical danger (the mystique of survival), compensating a low in one sphere by a high  in another, or the opposite (in this type of situation, both are operating, so correcting one causes the other, in a different place – think of the global economic enslavement of third world populations for consumerism, or of conditions deemed psychosomatic, or a recurrent cancer that moves elsewhere in the body, etc. ) These ultimately all result in a globally increased pressure and always the need to ‘raise’ or build yet something else (boosting energy or control, stimulating mental concentration or targeted reactions, raising funds or awareness, increasing growth or development, progressing and degenerating), etc.

The climacteric tendency is both the source and result of the ‘animalistic’ survival behaviour that is inherently selfish and plunders the resources in its environments, both physical and human, to save its self or body from the sense of danger. In the collective realm, it is the essence of the unpredictable and ‘dark side’ of human nature in the collective realm, or of the body in medicine. It makes it difficult for an individual to fit in with societal rules, morals and mores about civilised behaviour, although, paradoxically it has its origins in their practices (the paradox is apparent in representations but does not arise in the animated geometry). In the medical realm, the tendency is both the source and result of the brain-mind driven use of the body as a resource, to cope with stress and strain (and to develop ‘detail’ intelligence: discursive, algorithmic, symbolic representation), or to keep up the internal pressure (effort) or keep up externally with ‘the real world’ (now that we have eliminated most of the dangers of ‘the natural world’ we had to survive physically). In a female menopausal body, it manifests as an instability of  body temperature, and a return to chaotic teenage-like emotions. The net result is still damage in many forms and growing frailty.

The word ‘climacteric’ is taken, here, as an expression of a geometric modification, independently of whether it manifests, for example, in global climate events, collective climax behaviours (e.g .fascination for the extreme, the leading or head, and the Great), or the menopausal climateric ‘change of life’. It refers to, or rather models differently, the extreme periodic instability phenomena, whether of a catastrophic, chaotic or dangerous nature, or a simple distortion, in any shape or form. The method deals with irregularity  or over-set regularity, and periodic critical instability, at several levels, and offers a new approach to the limited understanding of the effects of our representations and stabilising or establishing strategies. Far from resolving once and for all the situation, they often have unexpected counter-productive effects. In any area, they reinforce, not reduce, the climateric tendency, and this causes many problems and much suffering that do not have to be.

An example: Not-so-spontaneous behaviours of feeding

We praise ourselves on our ‘free will’, our mind’s capacity to ‘rise above’ the mundanities of the lowly body, and on self-knowledge. Yet we turn to food for ‘comfort’ (to feel better), for energy, and to others, more knowledgeable, to use foods for healing. How well do you know why you eat this or that, when and in particular quantities, why you get addicted to salt or sugar, or do not, why you like this food and not that one, what drives it all? The interaction between the brain, the body, and the ‘energy requirements’ of our fast and stressed lives govern, and drive some of us to uncontrollable climacteric behaviours.
To get an idea of how feeding behaviour and hunger-satiety are intermeshed with all aspects of our lives, especially emotional and behavioural (include cognition, here), peruse thisinteresting poster on feeding made available free by the journal Nature.

Educate yourself about the experiential correlates of substances such as norepinephrine, adrenaline, cortisol, dopamine, and of parts of the brain such as the amygdala, the hypothalamic osmostat (ParaVentricular Nucleus) [see medical case report], etc., and work out how much conscious control you actually have on them. Many of our behaviours are culturally programmed by collective habits;  many are also physiologically conditioned into our body’s behaviour, through emotions; most of us are quite unconscious of their own self-medication with food (and I am not talking of chocolate or coffee addiction, or worse, but of our collectively accepted ‘normal needs’ of salt, sugar, spices to activate digestion, warming drinks, grain carbohydrates, animal fats,or  red meat of large animals, etc. Most of our feeding behaviours are also reactive, compensatory, adaptive: what we often call a ‘spontaneous reaction’ is actually not ‘spontaneous’ but coupled to the stimulus, and targeted at a particular necessary compensation. How much control does our ‘person’ or ‘self’ actually have on the hidden but distressing need of the ‘hungry ghost’ that we often are. How much of our behaviour is driven by this sense of urgent need, often an emergency need of energy to keep up? How much control do our societies have over our collective use of food and water resources? And will speeding them up reduce our overuse of these resources?
For many, the problem does not appear until later in life, until the effects of ageing become visible and painful. For some, feeding is an unstable affair with tastes and propensities that vary with the level of stress activation; it becomes a climacteric problem, which neither psychology nor medicine know how to sort out permanently and without side effects later or in some other aspect of daily life, any more than societal and cultural institutions do.
Instead of educating ourselves… and falling into complex but fragmented explanations that hide this baseline sense, we could also simply observe the body, outside of all our ideas and beliefs about it, observe its sensations and its behaviours outside of the accepted rationalisations that we have integrated  by education and self-education.

For the mind apprehending in ‘imaging’:

Expressing the ‘climacteric’ without valuations, with gestures & non-real images

If you have a mind for ‘thinking in imaging’, the problems attached to the word ‘climacteric’, including  ‘falling’ into long-periodic critical instability (and certain hidden benefits of rising ‘states’ that change) are better expressed, without valuing, by the topologic properties of the image of spin (to and from ) vertex and vortex (see image above). 

This image is a ‘basic’ one, related to sensation, but language reflects it collectively, especially the geometric similarity of ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ (vertex, vortex), although the topologic properties at top and bottom are different. The bottom models a quantic jump or ‘sudden change’ or ‘singularity’ (such as a critical instability that reorganises or de-organises); the top models expansion, projection, cycling, repetition,  ‘going back to square one’,or ‘all over again’. The motion in 3D volume (the spiral or spin) can be imagined as moving ‘left’ or ‘right’, with an inversion after ‘passing’ either a singularity or a ‘completed’ cycle; it can also be projected as ‘up’ and ‘down’, Rising and Falling,  increase and decrease, reduced and improved capacity to move or change. Complicating things, new notions come, about a ‘middle’ in between the extremes, or a ‘balance’ of left and right – they do not exist in spiraling, cannot be found and stabilised.

Traces in language

All these terms are the kind of vocabulary employed in advanced disciplines that use topology (e.g. physics, computer modelling of behaviour or of the physical, anatomy, crystals…). They are inherent in general culture as well: improving the capacity to adapt to tough living conditions (e.g. ‘raising’ children, ‘rising to the occasion’) or to think in general-specific perspective (e.g. ‘raising awareness’), to understand details,  solve problems (e.g. ‘increased’ intelligence IQ). The more primitive form of this vocabulary is also found in archaic texts (‘way of the Middle’) and stories derived from projecting Creation myths into physical or human  realities (‘fall  of man’). But more importantly, it is also found in the uneducated talk we use when we describe what living and surviving is like from our local viewpoint (‘our life as a whole’ but also ‘the human exPERIence’, and how we explain it), and our situations and sensations of stress  and strain (this I dubbed ‘ill health talk’, which the doctor systematically translates into formal medical names and learned explanations with symptoms and diseases categories) or how we release from them.

Ask yourself: what does it feel like when ‘the sky is falling on my head’, when the ‘whole world’ (seen from your local viewpoint) spins out of control, resonates (hitting both vertex and vortex) to the point of falling apart?  What does it feel  “like” when ‘turning left or right’, trying this and trying that and every solution, only leads to ‘not knowing where to turn any more’ and feeling ‘pushed around’  and ‘stuck in cycles’?… This is a crucial and archaic ‘fundamental problem’ found at the core of most ancient cultures, more visibly in the frameworks of Eastern cultures. The result in the ‘dark side of human nature’ is a crucial and archaic major issue that exists at the core of all ‘great’ cultures. Both still unresolved, despite all the ‘advanced’ solutions.

Pressure, counter-pressures, and the habit of valuing

This image expresses the common-sense notion that Pressure (e.g. up) and  Countering Pressure (e.g. down), just cannot stop, undo, or even reduce the sense of feeling pressured, of having Pressing Need, because these strategies still rely on the very notion of Pressure (whichever way it is interpreted in diverse contexts), increasing or decreasing it (with whichever evaluations of ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ effect), and they keep up the promotion of living ‘under pressure’.

The extensions and values of ‘improvement’ or ‘benefit’ derived from this image are attributed to many things: the mind’s intelligence or motivation, the body’s vitality, strength, stamina or power,  to endurance or the capacity to endure horrific conditions, or the survival drive or the will to survive that we call ‘health’ and being ‘well-adapted’ to human society and its technological, material world,  or to the collective human ‘survival success’ or ‘evolution’ (which automatically makes the non-driven ‘not successful’, and puts them at the bottom as not fully ‘human’ or even sub-human, or as ‘mistakes of nature’, ‘error of evolution’, etc.)… Some thrive in ‘living under pressure’, but for most, it is not pleasant, a miserable ‘survival mode, although  it is not acceptable to say so because the few find it exhilarating, source of ‘achievement’ and it appears the only way to a ‘successful’ life, and we put  on pedestals their sur-human talents. The benefit for the few, however, means hidden damage to most: loss of access to ‘living at ease’.

3 geometric projections of the same topologic phenomenon of critical behaviour

Advanced thinking sees in this Vortex-Vertex Spin image: either a limited view (the most common: 2-sided breakthrough, emergence or catastrophe, good or bad), or an integrated view (the extended path of cycles considered as ultimately the ‘only’ possible one in dominant culture, or considered the most essential problem in the archaic-derived core of culture – both are endless: the ‘goal’ or end-state  is never quite ‘reached’)  –  all three images have topologic properties of boundary and their combination automatically results in critical periodic instability.

    Fall into the dark hole, ‘abyss’, ‘bottomless pit’                    Catastrophe, collapse                 ‘The Eye’, ‘passing the gate’, ‘crossing the great water’, quantic jump

Nexial topology permits to explain the source and result of our fragmented explanations, specific  or targeted strategies (oriented), and generalised practices (aimed at orienting), by modelling the geometry of their ‘deployment’ strategy. It also shows another view, more ‘basic’, not always oriented/orienting, not involving reaching boundary, critical conditions or reactions, nor cycles, periodic phenomena, and endless paths but only approaching them. It therefore models how to avoid the plan-projected property of scattering, and its human/physical counterparts: fall-apart, and wasting, because deployment does not reach these characteristic re-deployments. If there is uncontrollable pressure (not man-made), re-deployment may be necessary and/or inevitable, but if this occurs, repetitively or in cycles, it becomes a systematic re-deployment, a conventionalised way of thinking about our realities, a habitual ‘inevitable necessity’ of meeting the many needs attached to keeping this up, and an unrecognised  (and unchallenged) baseline of deployment and over-extended re-deployments – a man-made way of life based on meeting the requirements of this state of over-extended need – an accepted and even ought lifestyle. The consequences, obviously, our great cultures and technologies do not manage to control, despite our arrogant belief that we soon will: the problem remains rampant, and ‘not well understood’, despite all our new theories.

The ‘basic’ approach relies on a non-nexial and basic form of geometric topology (non ‘mathematised’ or computerised) that is a cognitive ability (conventionally viewed as uncommon – the research found it to be inherent in human cognition not limited to the sensory). The basic approach means to deploy the  ways of living ‘under pressure’ only under extreme pressure or for a particular purpose, and otherwise know what to do to stop the correlate state of need (conventionally put: to reduce needs to be met).