This series will lay bare the biological and neurological factors that have to do with facets of personality and our identification with them
It's important to highlight that this post largely speaks of a single factor, there are many such factors, that I've been planning to write out to the fullest extent of my knowledge in a blog.
The invitation is to process this information and its implications. This info is useless if it stays propositional, a practice comes attached to this. That is the practice of questioning yourself, the leading question is whether it (experience/belief) is a function of state or a function of personality.
So here we will dig in whether you are patient and calm, or consider/believe yourself to be so or not. Calmness and patience, like other traits, are built on something. To follow is an overview of what they're built on. As usual, this isn't an exhaustive overview, but what I would consider a functional overview that allows practical applicability.
The nervous system has 2 branches of interest to us in this matter: the sympathetic and the parasympathetic.
The sympathetic is the quick operating system, jumps to conclusions, survival-oriented, fight and flight system. It deals with the right now. It works on a continuum/spectrum
The parasympathetic is the slow operating system, it analyses and processes, and it's concerned with long-term thinking, consequences of actions, etc. It's typically called the rest, digest and recover system. It also works on a continuum/spectrum.
Most neurotransmitters fall into one of two categories: excitatory and inhibitory.
Dopamine, Acetylcholine, and glutamate are all excitatory (so is adrenaline). They are also tied to the sympathetic nervous system.
GABA, taurine, and serotonin are inhibitory. They stop (inhibit) impulses. GABA especially acts as a top-down regulator, that is conscious control over impulse. They're predominantly implicated in the state and function of the parasympathetic nervous system.
Trauma and stress change the state and function of the brain, circuits, and receptors. Stress also depletes certain minerals and minerals, and sucks energy. Trauma also makes you deficient in GABA and taurine, alongside magnesium.
This means that trauma on a biochemical level drives malnutrition by chronic sustained stress and/or low-stress resilience due to GABA receptor system down-regulation and nervous system dysregulation.
Furthermore, your predisposition to GABA production and sensitivity also has a genetic element (parents and ancestry), epigenetic (mother's pregnancy and birth), and environmental (childhood experience and exposure to toxins/stressors).
So let's return to the central point. If you think/believe/perceive you are not a calm and patient person, is this your identity or your state?
That's exactly the argument I'm laying forth: how can you be patient and calm with a dysregulated nervous system, depleted mineral and vitamin stores, chronic stress and inflammation, low-stress threshold, decreased GABA production, sensitivity and receptors, genetic predisposition, and altered neurological circuits?
I'm willing to wager very little of this is a function of your personality, what happens is an identification with your states (and experiences). However, if we were to address all of these elements, which we can do through supplementation, lifestyle, nutrition, behavioral modification, centering, and meditative practice coupled with introspective practice, your experience of this aspect of your identity would change.
My point is this: your sense of identity and personality is largely based on neurology and biology as a whole. What you think is "just who you are" could very well be an extremely unbalanced brain with dysfunctional circuits.
This co-identification with states is an unconscious noose people wrap around their necks to hang themselves with you. Your personality is not the issue unless, of course, you're a pathological narcissist. Your identification and disordered neur8logy and biology ate the issue at large. Which can be regulated, balanced, and healed.