Do you think you can foretell how you would behave in most situations?
We like to believe we know ourselves and answer ‘Yes, I know exactly what I would do!’ But sometimes we can be surprised by how wrong our predictions are.
The moments we’re most likely to mispredict our actions involve stress, so let’s review what happens in that case.
If you’re in a dangerous situation, you’ll probably flee, fight or freeze. Your body will ensure your chances of surviving are as high as possible in different ways: the breathing gets faster, blood flows away from the digestive system to the muscles, pupils dilate, the heart rate increases, muscles tense, etc.
There’s a lot that the body does automatically that we aren’t conscious of. Here are the names of some of the actors of your nervous system involved and a very simplified description of their roles in this strategy:
- the amygdala interprets a stimulus, like an image or a smell, that provokes anger or fear and notifies the hypothalamus
- the hypothalamus activates the sympathetic nervous system,
- the sympathetic nervous system (also known as fight or flight system) prepares the body for action.
Image credit: Original by Jvnkfood, converted to PNG and reduced to 8-bit by Pokéfan95, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
You’ve probably heard that this mechanism has kept us safe from predators in the past, but nowadays we also react like that in stressful situations. Like in a heated discussion, a tense moment in traffic or public speaking, where our life isn’t really endangered. During such events it would actually feel better to go through the stress without the heart racing, for example. And to avoid health problems that are caused by chronic stress. However, we can’t choose to turn off the amygdala.
What we can do sometimes is use techniques to calm ourselves down, like certain breathing patterns or evoking soothing thoughts. Yes, this might work in some cases. Other times, it won’t.
In fact, when the amygdala senses acute danger, it will bypass the part of the brain responsible for rational thought, the pre-frontal cortex. That’s because the amygdala also receives inputs from the sensory systems and can react to them more quickly than the cortex, that needs more time to process the information. The pre-frontal cortex is more precise, but the amygdala can react quicker! So, in extremely stressful situations, we act before we think.
That can lead to heroic deeds but also to unwanted outcomes (check the TED talk listed in the references for examples).
We can’t control the world, but we have some control over ourselves. That’s why some professions involve intense training. However, we can’t prepare for every possible situation, so knowing that the amygdala bypasses the cortex in critical situations is helpful to find compassion for ourselves and others, if the behavior isn’t exemplary.
And it could prompt us to make changes that prevent us from getting into such situations in the first place.
| References |
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| TEDx talk from Betsy Hugget “Fight, flight or freeze: Your body’s defense mechanism” First-person account about how how we don’t always respond how we want to. |
| Chapter Two: ‘One second before’, section ‘The Amygdala as Part of Networks in the Brain’ from Robert Sapolsky’s book ‘Behavior’ Discusses the connections from and to the amygdala. I haven’t finished reading yet, but I’m quite confident to predict that the whole book is utterly amazing. |
| Article by Robert Sapolsky (updated March 13, 2020) ‘Our Brains on Coronavirus’ Another text from Professor Sapolsky about how we make bad decisions when we’re stressed (in the context of the coronavirus pandemic). |
| Article from Harvard Health Publishing (updated July 6th, 2020) ‘Understanding the stress response – Chronic activation of this survival mechanism impairs health’ More details about how the body reacts to stress and chronic stress and how we could better deal with it. |
| Wikipedia entry: fight or flight response More information about what happens to the body and examples of reactions to stress in other animals |
| Wikipedia entry: amygdala hyjack A little bit more about how the rational part of the brain is bypassed in threatening situations. |