How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett

Cumulative imbalance in the body budget—say, from growing up in adversity, where you don’t feel safe or are deprived of basic necessities like nutritious food, quiet time to sleep, and so on—also changes the structure of your interoceptive network, rewiring your brain and reducing its ability to accurately regulate your body budget. All it takes are a couple of highly negative experiences for children to feel like they are living in a combat zone, reducing the size of their body-budgeting regions by the time they reach adulthood. Growing up in a family that is harsh or chaotic, with a lot of conflict or verbal criticism, increases inflammation in adolescent girls and places kids on a trajectory toward chronic disease; it’s almost as bad for the development of these networks as childhood abuse or neglect. Ditto for suffering as the target of a bully. Kids who were bullied as children show low-grade inflammation that persists into adulthood, which predisposes them to a host of psychiatric and physical diseases. These are the myriad ways that an imbalanced body budget sculpts your brain, translating into a higher lifetime risk of heart disease, arthritis, diabetes, cancer, and other diseases.14