Emotional Volatility

The mechanism Aajonus described in detail, drawing heavily on the work of Elnora Van Winkle, is that emotional and neurological experiences produce hormones during the period of the experience, and those hormones have byproducts. The byproducts of positive emotional states, such as falling in love or experiencing delight, do not normally accumulate in the body and are cleared without leaving residue. The byproducts of negative emotional states, specifically anxiety, trauma, terror, rage, and grief, do accumulate and store in body tissues just like any other toxin. When the body eventually attempts to detoxify those stored compounds, they circulate in the blood at elevated concentrations, and the nervous system responds to their presence by recreating the same emotional and behavioral state in which they were originally produced.

Aajonus described these byproducts as psychotropic compounds. They are not neutral waste; they are pharmacologically active, meaning their presence in the blood produces alterations in mood, perception, and behavior just as any psychotropic drug would. A person whose blood is carrying a high concentration of these compounds will be emotionally volatile, irritable, angry, anxious, or depressed not because of anything happening in their life, but because the chemistry of their blood is dictating that state. The person has no more voluntary control over this than an alcoholic has over their thinking while intoxicated.

Van Winkle, who Aajonus described as having spent 47 to 52 years cataloging every chemical in the brain and nervous system at Milhauser Laboratories at New York University, identified this mechanism through blood analysis. She found that when individuals were experiencing emotional eruptions that bore no relationship to any immediate circumstance in their lives, their blood showed elevated levels of these psychotropic byproducts being pulled out of storage. When those individuals were not in an emotionally volatile state, the blood levels of those compounds were low. The correlation was consistent and reproducible.

Aajonus described one case in detail to illustrate how this mechanism works in practice. A woman was in a prolonged state of rage and hostility directed at her husband, who had done nothing to provoke it. Van Winkle, working with this woman, asked her to simply lie down and take a nap, then report what she remembered when she woke up. The woman woke from a short sleep and recalled a specific event from her childhood in which her father had betrayed her by giving to her sister something that had been promised to her. This single event had produced almost two years of resentment toward her father when she was a child.

The stored byproducts of that resentment, carried in the body for decades, were now detoxifying and circulating in her blood. Because her father was male and her husband was male, the emotional content of the stored chemistry was being discharged onto the nearest available male. The man in front of her was receiving the full behavioral and emotional output of an experience he had nothing to do with. Van Winkle found it took this woman approximately eight weeks to fully detoxify the stored byproducts of that original two-year period of resentment. Once the detox was complete, the unprovoked rage toward her husband ceased entirely.

Aajonus cited this case as evidence that the emotional content people discharge in relationships is frequently not about the present relationship at all. It is about stored neurological chemistry from earlier, often childhood, experiences being cleared from the body. The implication for people observing themselves or others in states of irrational emotional volatility is that the question to ask is not "what is wrong with this person" or "what did I do to provoke this" but rather "what old chemistry is being released right now."

Aajonus was explicit that certain foods directly produce emotional volatility through their effects on blood sugar and brain chemistry. Sugar in particular, whether from refined sources or from excessive fruit consumption, creates what he called radical instability in brain function. He compared the emotional behavior of diabetics and sugar-imbalanced individuals to the behavior of intoxicated people: one moment aggressive or violent, the next moment gentle or loving, with no rational basis for the swing and no capacity for the person to control it. He said the chemical changes in the brain produced by sugar fluctuation are "ultra-radical, incredibly radical" and that people in that state genuinely have no power over their emotional reactions because the chemistry is driving everything.

Aajonus described his own experience with this directly. When he was consuming too much fruit, even within a raw food framework, he experienced intense over-emotionality, constant crying, and feelings of everything too intensely. When he reduced fruit consumption to once every two to three days, or three to four days, the emotionality settled substantially. He noted that eating sweet foods can produce weepiness, emotional dissatisfaction, and an unmoored quality to one's inner state, and acknowledged that some people find a certain comfort in that weepiness because they are accustomed to it, but emphasized that the comfort is part of a cycle that keeps the instability going.

When he was a fruitarian and raw vegan eating large quantities of fruit, he described plotting daily with intense seriousness about how to stop political figures he opposed. He said the emotional intensity, the anger, and the anxiety that accompanied that period dissolved when he began eating raw meat daily and eliminated most fruit. He described becoming "an entirely different person" who could approach the same circumstances "without all that anxiety and that anger." This he presented not as a philosophical shift but as a direct biochemical consequence of changing the food supply to the nervous system.

Food additives and processed foods produce a related but distinct form of emotional disruption. Aajonus cited Canadian studies from the late 1950s and through the 1960s showing that children fed sugar and processed foods with additives had lower IQ, less academic aptitude, and a propensity toward violence. He also cited the Feingold Foundation's work with a high school in Madison, Wisconsin, as a demonstration that changing the food supply changes the emotional and behavioral outputs of individuals, including children who were expected to be violent or antisocial. The mechanism is the same: the chemical condition of the nervous system determines the emotional and behavioral output, and the chemical condition of the nervous system is determined substantially by what is eaten.

Aajonus identified a second major biochemical source of emotional volatility that operates through a different mechanism: the accumulation of activity hormones, specifically testosterone, estrogen, and adrenaline, when those hormones are produced by the body but not discharged through physical activity. He said that 95 percent of anxiety is created because the body needs exercise. People who produce high levels of these hormones and do not spend them through physical activity will find those hormones driving them into a state of anxiety, irritability, emotional volatility, and relational instability.

He described a population of people who produce a lot of activity hormones as individuals who will never be satisfied for more than moments if they do not exercise, who are easily irritated or impatient, and who usually cannot maintain relationships in a balanced way, especially intimate relationships. This is not a character flaw but a hormonal condition that can be resolved by directing those hormones into physical activity. The emotional volatility is the body's way of trying to burn energy that was produced for physical use.

For individuals who are too fatigued or physically compromised to exercise, Aajonus recommended singing as an alternative. He stated that 20 minutes of singing is the equivalent of an hour on a treadmill in terms of physical exertion, because singing requires the controlled use of breath, tone, pitch, and the coordination of brain and body simultaneously. He noted that if a person has a bad voice they can find a soundproofed space, but the activity itself is the point: it burns the activity hormones before they translate into anxiety and emotional volatility.

When a person on the Primal Diet begins detoxifying stored neurological compounds, including heavy metals and psychotropic hormone byproducts from past traumas, the process can produce intense and apparently unprovoked emotional eruptions. Aajonus addressed this both as a predictable consequence of the detoxification process and as something that needs to be managed carefully, particularly in the context of relationships.

He described seeing people push hard into neurological detoxification and then destroy relationships they had maintained for 10 or 11 years, because the emotional content discharging during the detox was being directed at the people closest to them. The person going through the detox has an internal framework of understanding for what is happening, but the partner or family member receiving the emotional discharge does not. Aajonus said he does not tell anyone to push a neurological detoxification unless they are living alone and not having to interact with many people, because the risk to relationships is substantial.

He was also cautious about encouraging people to actively seek or accelerate emotional detoxification. He said he does not trust the kind of detoxifications that produce intense emotional volatility, and noted that even people who believe they are in control of their emotional state may not be. He described observing one person directly and noting four separate instances of that person moving into a fear-based, aggressive, attacking approach during a single day, while that person believed they were calm and in control. He pointed out that people living inside a state of emotional volatility often cannot perceive it from within; it requires outside observation.

Aajonus added starch as a category to his nutritional framework specifically because of its role in binding with the toxic neurological compounds being released during emotional detoxification. He explained that the byproducts of psychotropic trauma hormones stored in the nervous system need a binding agent to be safely moved out of the body, and that starch serves that function. The starch binds with the compounds as they are pulled out of storage, preventing them from circulating at levels that would produce the most extreme emotional disruption, and facilitates their elimination from the body. He described heavy metals in the nervous system as taking a long time to accumulate their toxic charge, and the starch as necessary to bind with the resulting highly toxic byproducts when that material begins to move.

This was presented as part of the reason many people experience psychological problems within a toxic society regardless of the origin of the toxicity, whether from childhood emotional trauma, dietary contamination, or environmental exposures. The nervous system accumulates and stores all of these compounds together, and the detoxification process does not cleanly separate them.

Aajonus mentioned a scientist who demonstrated that crying changes the nature of toxins present in the brain, specifically converting them into endorphins, which are then expelled through the tear ducts. He cited this as physiological evidence that the body has its own mechanisms for processing certain neurological toxic loads through emotional expression. He acknowledged that there is sometimes a legitimate satisfaction in weepiness, particularly for people who are in emotional detox, and did not frame crying itself as pathological. The body is doing something functional with the chemistry when tears are produced.

This is distinct from the emotional volatility produced by sugar, by stored trauma byproducts, or by unreleased activity hormones. The tearful state associated with too much sweet fruit is different in character from the tearful state associated with detoxification, even though both involve emotional expression. The mechanism differs, and the response differs accordingly.

Elnora Van Winkle recommended primal therapy as the appropriate response to emotional volatility arising from stored trauma byproducts. Primal therapy, associated with the 1960s and 1970s, involves venting anger through screaming, beating pillows, kicking furniture, and other forms of forceful physical and vocal release. Aajonus disagreed with this position, and he described having argued with Van Winkle about it repeatedly over two years.

His objection was precise. If the body is in a state of emotional volatility because psychotropic trauma byproducts are circulating in the blood, and if the person responds to that state by engaging in more anger and more rage, the behavior itself produces additional psychotropic compounds, which then have their own byproducts, which then store in the body. The cycle becomes self-perpetuating. Primal therapy may provide temporary relief by burning off some of the circulating chemistry through intense physical activity, but it simultaneously creates new deposits that will need to be detoxified in the future. He described his own experience in the 1960s and 1970s with primal therapy and said that it "just kept the momentum going."

His alternative approach was to take the energy generated by the emotional state and redirect it into an activity that produces happiness: singing, dancing, painting, listening to music, walking among flowers, or any other activity that the person genuinely enjoys. The physical energy generated by the hormones is burned off through the activity, but the neurological and emotional patterning is being rewired toward happiness rather than toward anger. Over time, this means that when old trauma byproducts arise again, the automatic response of the nervous system is to go toward something enjoyable rather than toward explosive expression. The programming changes.

He specifically recommended what he called a "nut formula" for moments when the emotional energy is intense: eating the formula and then going to sing or do something enjoyable. He did not specify the exact formula composition in the transcripts available, but presented it as a food support for managing the chemistry in the moment while the energy is redirected.

He stated clearly that if a person releases angst through angst, they will live in angst permanently. He described this as a vicious cycle with no exit. Van Winkle herself, he said, died in a very angry moment, which he presented as a consequence of her adherence to primal therapy as a method. He described her as having made substantial physical progress on the Primal Diet, gaining 50 pounds after appearing severely underweight, and then deteriorating after switching to an instinctive diet. He also stated that her ongoing practice of primal therapy kept the anger alive and cycling in her system.

Aajonus wrote in We Want to Live that anger is emotional feedback that something in a person's life needs to change, and that the rational response is to identify what is generating the anger and address it, or to leave a situation that cannot be resolved. He noted that an overly acidic system causes irritability that can escalate into anger and violence, and that cooking meat creates heterocyclic amines and lipid peroxides that irritate nerves in many people, which he addressed by recommending raw white meats.

He also stated clearly that anger expressed as violence usually perpetuates more violence and fear, and that the expression of anger through violent means should only be considered when it is genuinely constructive rather than simply reactive. This is consistent with his rejection of primal therapy: the indiscriminate expression of anger through rage does not resolve the anger; it recreates it.

He made an equally important point about the belief that emotional states cause physical disease. He rejected the claim that anger causes cancer, citing his own clinical observation that some of the most gentle and sweet people he encountered died of cancer, while some of the most chronically angry people he knew had no cancer whatsoever. He framed the relationship between emotion and disease as running together rather than as a causal hierarchy in which the mind produces the body's conditions. The physiology and the emotional state arise together from the same underlying chemistry; neither one causes the other in a simple linear sense.

Aajonus addressed a specific claim that when the blood is more acidic, 75 percent of thoughts will be negative, and when the blood is more alkaline, 75 percent of thoughts will be positive. He stated that his experience supports that belief in general terms without confirming the specific percentages. His position was that when the nerves are irritated, the thinking and emotional output become negative and volatile. This aligns with his broader framework that the chemical state of the blood and nervous system drives the emotional and cognitive experience, not the reverse.

He also noted the role of bacteria levels in emotional stability, stating that when the body lacks sufficient bacterial assistance and must rely on the solvent process to eliminate toxicity, the body becomes depressed. When bacterial, viral, mold, or parasitical help is available for detoxification, the body functions more efficiently and the person's mood stabilizes. Low bacterial levels were linked by him to a cluster of traits including poor organization, procrastination, difficulty with time, living in fantasy, and inability to maintain awareness of oneself in relation to others.

Aajonus included electromagnetic field (EMF) exposure as a source of emotional volatility in his list of environmental triggers. He cited scientific demonstration that animal cells exposed to EMFs above 3 gauss showed altered molecular structure and behavior. Among the symptoms he described from high EMF exposure in his own subjective and objective experience were hyperactivity, ADD, ADHD, and anger. He framed these not as psychological conditions but as consequences of molecular disruption to the cellular environment, consistent with his broader position that emotional states are physiological events.

Aajonus stated explicitly that he believes almost all violent and antisocial behavior has biochemical and biological roots. He derived this belief from direct observation: he witnessed emotional and behavioral states being turned on, off, or significantly mitigated by changes in what a person eats. He described his own family as evidence, contrasting the cooperative relationships within his mother's family of 13 siblings, who ate differently, with the hostility and unhappiness among the four boys in his immediate family, who were raised with processed foods, microwave technology, and a household full of chemicals. He said they had everything materially and were among the unhappiest people he knew.

He also described a specific patient who was an antisocial man of large build with a nasty temper who had become a landscape artist in order to avoid having to interact with people. Dietary intervention shifted that person's emotional and behavioral baseline significantly. This he presented as a demonstration of the principle that the body's chemical state, not character or moral development, is the primary driver of antisocial and volatile emotional behavior.

He wrote about his own father's situation in We Want to Live, describing a high salt intake combined with tremendous adrenaline flow that he believed produced extreme irritability, sometimes violence, and regular migraines. He stated that his father's trauma from earlier in life never healed because his nerves did not properly heal, and that he did not eat raw meat, which Aajonus believed would have supported the neurological repair that might have stabilized the emotional volatility.

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