I stumbled upon a reddit post asking this question, in which it sort of challenged me to answer.
Infinite peace sounds nice, but that's because we understand what 'suffering' means.
I used to believe that 'Joy' is a 'Sine Function', where its elevation is to be defined 'happiness' and the downward is 'negative joy' or 'sadness', in which now I think it needs revision. Because I think a person can subjectively consistently suffer, day by day and hour by hour without it needing a guaranteed elevation.
More unfortunately, our sadness literally defined us, wired in to modify our morphology.
The brain fold in itself through registering experience and produce stress hormones, it can further increase our amygdala and increase our sensitivity towards stress / mental pain.
The brain’s hippocampus is a critical brain region for learning and memory, and is particularly vulnerable to such insults. Studies in humans have shown that inflammation can adversely affect brain systems linked to motivation and mental agility.
There is also evidence of chronic stress effects on hormones in the brain, including cortisol and corticotropin releasing factor (CRF). High, prolonged levels of cortisol have been associated with mood disorders as well as shrinkage of the hippocampus. It can also cause many physical problems,
It is well established that chronic stress can lead to depression, which is a leading cause of disability worldwide. It is also a recurrent condition – people who have experienced depression are at risk for future bouts of depression, particularly under stress.
There are many reasons for this, and they can be linked to changes in the brain. The reduced hippocampus that a persistent exposure to stress hormones and ongoing inflammation can cause is more commonly seen in depressed patients than in healthy people.
Chronic stress ultimately also changes the chemicals in the brain which modulate cognition and mood, including serotonin. Serotonin is important for mood regulation and wellbeing. In fact, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are used to restore the functional activity of serotonin in the brain in people with depression.
Sleep and circadian rhythm disruption is a common feature in many psychiatric disorders, including depression and anxiety. Stress hormones, such as cortisol, play a key modulatory role in sleep. Elevated cortisol levels can therefore interfere with our sleep. The restoration of sleep patterns and circadian rhythms may therefore provide a treatment approach for these conditions.
I'm still puzzling things out because I'm highly interested in the subject plus I believe in order to fully 'appreciate' our existence it comes from 'understanding ourselves'.
Even though depression is really contextual, but through widely observed cases and phenomologies, it has common attributes, at least when its physiologically observed. I am not saying the 'patient' is defective or some sorts, the more right term is 'disturbed', as much as we rely on our 'neurobiological finesse' to excel at our every day lives, a disturbance in our neurobiological circuitry is something to be understood and accepted, like a problem 'at scale'.
Everyone must've 'subjectively suffer' at some point, but each to its own 'suffering' its unique to their own experience as no experience is exactly the same. The tolerance of the 'suffering' however, is different from body to body, and this is not to be taken lightly.
There’s an emotional component as well. High-stress situations can tax our emotions and exhaust the physical body. The combination of the two can lead to a feeling of being drained and, consequently, numb. Numbness may also be a coping mechanism to prevent more pain from entering the psyche. This is especially true for those in high-stress environments.
I agree to what it have to say based on my personal experience with my own depression. Loneliness also plays a crucial factor to this "event" as not many people do feel the "numbness of emotions". But, everyone has stress hormones from time to time, it just maybe has not tipped enough to feel the "numbness of emotions" when the stress hormones "flooded" the brain. So it may relate to other people that does not understand the nature of the situation very clearly. To some degree, everyone experiences some stress at their time of their life, the degree or rather intensity may be just different from person to person in which some person has different "tolerance levels" in which the brain comes to be flooded with depression.
This is where I argue the search for 'infinite peace of non existence' came from the desire to escape the finite life when pain overweights the joy.
And in a world where the concept of 'pain' and 'joy' is neurobiologically modulated by a biological function, it makes total sense for one to escape life towards infinite peace when one deems the infinite peace is much less troublesome. This is not shown only as an experience that of a human, but also in other animals as well.
Attached is a video documenting a penguin's path towards its own existential demise. Turns out our existential demise is not unique to the human experience but also in other beings that have 'confessed' that 'life is no longer worth the stress hormones that it subjectively given to them', though this is very context dependent and I can't talk about this in detail, but all it can be decipher out of this is that, the 'outward ability' to sense and perceive the world, may not be always beneficial for us, as the tools to perceive the world through sensory perceptions are always as it is, the oxytocin, dopamine, and stress hormones that are secreted are also always as it is, the option to opt out of life is still to be deciphered by their own 'willingness' to opt out of life, the final standing actor in behavior, 'the sense of self awareness that stood above emotional-driven context'.
I'm a believer that one's opinion about life is reflected on how one treats life and inevitably how one chooses to opt out of life:
But if it is hard to fix the precise instant, the subtle step when the mind opted for death, it is easier to deduce from the act itself the consequences it implies. In a sense, and as in melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it. Let's not go too far in such analogies, however, but rather return to everyday words. It is merely confessing that that "is not worth the trouble."
In the face of such contradictions and obscurities must we conclude that there is no relationship between the opinion one has about life and the act one commits to leave it? Let us not exaggerate in this direction. In a man' s attachment to life there is something stronger than all the ills in the world. The body' s judgement is as good as the mind's, and the body shrinks from annihilation. We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us toward death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.
Albert Camus, Myth of Sisyphus
This is what I ultimately reply to the reddit post
Ok, if we were to define the phenomena called 'neuroplasticity',
Throughout lives, individuals manifest idiosyncratic ways of regulating their emotions. These characteristic patterns of habitual emotion regulation usage have been shown to be related to consistent patterns of affective responding, social relationships, and even overall life satisfaction. Recent work suggests that individual differences in emotion regulation usage have neural correlates that are evident in the way individuals automatically process emotional stimuli. These findings suggest that the way individuals regulate their emotions day in and day out meaningfully impacts neural processing, and might, over the longer term, influence the structure of these underlying brain regions.
Recently, this work has been extended to cognitive behaviors. For example, longitudinal studies have found that acquiring large amounts of knowledge, learning a complex motor skill, or engaging in aerobic exercise cause an increase in local gray matter volume. Although prior studies of use-dependent brain plasticity have largely focused on changes in cognition and behaviors, recent cross-sectional work has shown that individual differences in personality traits, emotional expression, temperament, and emotional intelligence also relate meaningfully to regional brain volume. In addition, it has recently been demonstrated that an eight week mindfulness-based stress reduction intervention also affects regional gray matter volume.
Expressive suppression is an emotion regulation strategy that requires interoceptive and emotional awareness.
Scatter plot showing the positive relationship between frequency of expressive suppression and bilateral anterior insula volume from ROI results.
In addition to its primary role in supporting interoception and emotional awareness, the insula also serves as a relay point between the brain regions involved in emotional responding, such as the amygdala, and other regions involved in cognitive regulation, such as the prefrontal cortex. Thus, in addition to monitoring an individual's outward emotional expression during expressive suppression, the anterior insula would be strongly innervated both by bottom-up signals regarding inward emotional state, and top-down signals indicating regulation goals.
The insula is one of the most volumetrically stable regions of the brain, thus even a slight alteration in volume implies a profound effect on mental processing. The current finding of a .3% variation in anterior insula volume (as a proportion of TBV) between individuals as a function of their use of expressive suppression is striking. It may be argued that individuals who engage in frequent usage of expressive suppression do so to manage the high levels of negative affect in their lives, which would then regularly engage the insula.
The findings from the present study demonstrate that individual differences in usage of expressive suppression positively correlate with the volume of the anterior insula. The anterior insula is thought to support emotional and bodily awareness, both of which are engaged during the suppression of emotional responses. This is the first study to demonstrate that habitual engagement of expressive suppression relates meaningfully to anterior insula volume. Further work is needed to explore the longitudinal relationship between long-term usage of expressive suppression and gray matter volume change.
Emotion Regulation and Brain Plasticity: Expressive Suppresion use Predicts Anterior Insula Volume
Yeah so apparently emotional awareness, registering which emotions either good or bad, is actually more like a talent like any talent. It requires practice and it grows from experience that can lead to a more and more adept skill to hone and ultimately a more fruitful and 'beautiful' life.
Suffering is still inevitable, it parts of us that helped us at one point in time to escape from unpleasurable instances, but again, life will always be as it is, life is much like an art, it doesn't care what the observer think, it will just continously display itself.
Life exists as a system, it forces the observer to engage with it, to experience and modulate the inner workings (brain) of the self, it enhances and decreases certain part of the brain.
Just like a humming bird and a sunbird:
The key difference is that a sunbird cannot hover, where as a humming bird can. Hummingbird polinating below:
So sunbird-pollinated flowers and inflorescences are typically sturdier than hummingbird-pollinated flowers, with an appropriate landing spot from which the bird can feed. Sunbird pollinating below:
Both animals allow its environment 'defines' them, as the hummingbird that struggle to find nectar as a very pure source of energy simply dies out and the populace simply drives the more fit species of birds to survive.
Funnily enough, the plant surrounding the presence of those birds also defined itself through time and as the flowers which didn't get pollinated dies out, the environment (/life) also allow itself to be defined by the self (bird). Life exists as a system and its so metal ! ! !
LIFE EXISTS AS A SYSTEM. Like a painting instead of statically standing on the wall, it grabbed our hand without CONSENT and forces us to experience inside the art, more irritatingly, we have feelings! But we have come to understand 'feelings'! At least through languagen and its definition, though awareness of those feeling is another subject, but it shows that we have become to able to be a critique to the art itself, if it's bad or good, through our subjectively perceived emotions being inside the art and how the good and bad come to being. How we find something to be 'distastefull' or 'gross-feeling' or something to be 'beautiful' or gave us a 'funny-fuzzy feeling'.
And now turns out that the awareness of those 'so-called feelings' can give us a more 'mindful' life! How cool is that?! ! ! !
I love life! It's so fucking awesome! My feelings are so fucking awesome!