Right smack dab in the middle of your noggin is a part of your brain called the thalamus. This is sort of like your brain’s traffic cop whose job it is to direct the data you get from your senses and make sure it gets to where it's supposed to be going. So if you smell some delicious chocolate chip cookies baking, your thalamus will be sure that "yummy smell" data makes it way to the part of your brain that makes you hungry.
Now this is where it gets interesting. Whenever you get input from your senses, it gets sent to two different parts of your brain for analysis. One is called the frontal cortex, and it's right below your forehead. The other is called the amygdala (uh-MIG-duhluh), which is actually two nerve centers that look like almonds and are located on either side of the thalamus.
The frontal cortex is where the cool stuff happens. It's the part of our brain that makes us different than gorillas and chimpanzees, it's where the "human" part of us lives and is why we can figure out how to build an airplane, drive a car, or do other complicated things that other less evolved animals can't. From an evolutionary perspective, this is a brand spankin' new part of our brain, it's only been around a couple million years.
The amygdala on the other hand, is old. Real old. It's part of what is often called the "reptilian brain" because it's been around since we were virtually reptiles ourselves, and one of the main jobs of the amygdala is assessing danger and keeping us safe.
The amygdala is like a file cabinet of important memories. Not memories such as your favorite guacamole recipe or where you put your car keys, but memories the reptile in you considers important. You know, stuff that can hurt or kill you.
You have to keep in mind that the job of a reptile is only one thing, to make more reptiles, so it doesn’t need to remember much to accomplish that and it doesn’t consider most events important and worthy of remembering. What about catching food you may ask? Reptiles only need to catch food and eat in order to stay alive to make more reptiles. It's a pretty single minded existence, and probably hard to believe that we still have that part of our brain making decisions for us, but we do, and it's a powerful force.
If a lizard strolls out into the open in
broad daylight and gets attacked by a
predator and manages to survive, the
amygdala is going to remember that.
Not for a day, not for a week. Forever.
From then on, the lizard will remember
that open spaces and daylight equal
danger, and will start to hide or only
come out to catch prey at night. Hard to
disagree that those are all good ideas in the life of a lizard right?
That part of your brain still operates the same way.
Let’s look at an example to make it more concrete. There was a time when you didn't have a memory in your amygdala for burning yourself on a stove. You weren't really careful around stoves and you didn't think about the possibility of getting burned, no matter what your parents told you. One day you were playing around and not being careful, or decided to see what the grown-ups were making such a big fuss about, and you touched a hot stove. Remember that day?
That's ok, YOU don't have to. Your amygdala remembers. Vividly.
The memory of that burn got filed away in your amygdala, and I bet you've been MUCH more careful around hot stoves every since. If you accidentally touch a stove, even a cold one that WON’T burn you, your amygdala remembers those few seconds that happened decades ago and instinctively pulls your hand away. You don't think about it or wait to see if it’s REALLY going to burn you. You don't decide to pull away. Your amygdala takes over in an instant and you just ACT.
So what's the problem? That sounds like it's working pretty good, right?Yep, most of the time the amygdala works great and the threats it protects us from are valid. But not always...
As wonderfully effective at keeping us alive as the amygdala is, there are some pretty significant drawbacks.
Remember how it was difficult if not impossible to remember the first time you burned yourself on a stove and created that imprinted memory in your mind you carry around to this day? That happens with a LOT of things and is what makes treating anxiety, phobias, and panic attacks so challenging - you're often completely unaware of what distant memory or association is triggering your fear! It's why it's so frustrating when someone who doesn't have a difficulty with anxiety asks, "Why the heck are you afraid of that for”? You often have NO IDEA WHY you're so afraid and reacting with anxiety or panic, you just are and have no conscious awareness of why! The answers are sealed up tight in the amygdala.
How do I know this? fMRI experiments have been done during which an individual’s amygdala was activated just by being shown PHOTOS of unfamiliar things. A change that is not routine is the very first sign of risk, whether it’s hearing the sound of a car horn, a big bump on an airplane, being in strange surroundings outside your comfort zone, or hearing a twig snap. From your amygdala’s perspective, scary always starts with different.
During these experiments, test subjects were shown photos of people they didn’t know. Keep in mind, the photos weren’t of angry or intimidating people, just normal, everyday people you might run into at the mall or while standing in line at the bank. The key factor is that they were unfamiliar. Then the subjects were also shown photos of people they DID know.
When the photos of people they did know were shown to them, their amygdala was cool as a cucumber and the fMRI registered no significant change. However, when they were shown photos of people they hadn’t seen before, the fMRI showed the amygdala light up with activity, signaling that it thought a possible threat was present.
The people involved in the test didn’t FEEL any anxiety or fear at all. What’s important and so significant about these experiments is that it is evidence of just how sensitive the amygdala is and that it can and often is registering threats on a level below our conscious awareness.
This explains why you can be going about your day, feeling just peachy keen, and all of a sudden, seemingly out of nowhere, you feel your anxiety kick in. It may appear that you weren’t thinking about anything that was bothersome, and that nothing happened to cause you to feel that way, but now we know that isn’t necessarily the reality. The anxiety you feel can originate from something the amygdala considers a potential threat, even if you know there’s nothing to be the least bit concerned about, and you may NEVER even be aware of what it was!
If this can happen with photos of people you don’t know, imagine what can happen when a memory is triggered of something even slightly more legitimate, such as a painful childhood memory or when you think about how awful it felt the last time you got anxious or had a panic attack.
That’s right, you can actually become conditioned to be afraid of your own feelings of fear, which will come as no surprise to most people struggling with
anxiety.Remember, the amygdala’s job is to keep you safe, so it doesn’t take any chances. When the amygdala detects a threat, it initiates an instant self-preservation reaction that's commonly referred to as the fight or flight reaction. It immediately prepares us to do one of two things, run away from whatever the danger is, or fight it off if we can't.
Let's just take a pause here, because just knowing and being aware of all this can be tremendously helpful. Anxiety, fear, and panic seem so mysterious, and like they come out of nowhere, but that simply isn't true. They come from the amygdala and the reaction it kicks into gear to keep you safe. It's not because you're sick, strange, weak, or a coward. At the very worst, you brain is confused and is taking steps to protect you when there's no need for protection. You’re OVERPROTECTING yourself. It's what I call a "mental misunderstanding".
All the symptoms and crummy feelings you experience when you get anxious have an explanation behind them and a reason they’re occurring, all rooted in the fact that your body is doing absolutely everything it can to keep you safe, whether it needs to or not.
Let's take a look at just a few of the more common physical changes you might experience as part of the fight or flight reaction so if you feel them again you know why they're happening and can take comfort in the fact that they're designed to help you if you need it, not hurt you:
Trembling - As soon as your fear response is triggered, one of the first things to occur is your body’s massive release of adrenaline to prime your muscles for action. If you were to take off and run down the street every time you got anxious or afraid, you would use up the adrenaline in short order, but when you get the same sensations of fear sitting in your car, in line, or at work, you don’t have any way to use up that monster dose of energy so it can cause trembling as a means of releasing it.
Sweating - Whenever you think of someone who’s nervous of anxious, what probably comes to mind is someone who’s sweaty and jumpy. We even have everyday expressions that infer sweating is a symptom of nerves, we tell people, “Don’t sweat it” when we want to imply it’s nothing to get worked up about.
Nervous sweating is actually your body beginning to cool itself for the pending exertion of fighting or fleeing. It’s also been theorized that a sweaty body is more difficult for a predator to grab onto, which would be a good benefit if we had to choose the “fight” part of the fight or flight equation.
Dizziness and a Feeling of Disassociation From Reality This is a very bothersome and frightening feeling, where you may feel somewhat distanced from reality or the world around you, or as if you’re in a movie on the outside looking in on yourself. This feeling is primarily caused by the rapid change in brain chemistry combined with a decreased level of oxygen to your brain from shallow breathing. With proper treatment, it can actually be one of the first symptoms to vanish.
Intense Desire to Escape the Situation - Your need to avoid or escape from the situation that may be bringing you anxiety is the "flight" part of the fight or flight response at work. Remember, when you’re in the midst of your fear response, you have millions of years of evolution screaming at you to RUN AND GET AWAY.
Rapid Heartbeat - Your heart starts pounding to quickly get blood to your muscles in case it’s needed.Stomachaches and GastroIntestinal Issues - During your fear response all unnecessary bodily functions shut down so maximum resources can be directed to where they’re needed most during a crisis. One of the least “urgent” things going on within your body is digestion, so it shuts down until the threat is deemed over so your salivation can stop and your mouth can go dry, as well as a host of other stomach or gastrointestinal changes.
Inability to Concentrate or Think Clearly - David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at the Baylor College of Medicine explained it nicely when he says, “Normally your brain is doing lots of things at the same time, just under the surface of awareness. Your brain is thinking about where you’re going to eat lunch and what you’re going to wear to the party tonight, and what you're doing for your career, and so on. What happens in a really scary situation is that the amygdala essentially tells the rest of the brain, ‘Hey, everybody shut up and pay attention to this.’ All the nonessential processes get shut down and your whole brain, or as much of your processing power as you have, gets devoted to this one thing going on.”
When you get afraid, it’s very easy to focus on your fear, and very, very difficult to focus or pay attention to ANYTHING else.
As soon as the amygdala detects something it thinks could even possibly be a threat, it kicks off this reaction to some degree, but then it gets a second opinion...
Remember how I told you about the frontal cortex, the part of your brain that hangs out under your forehead? I explained that the thalamus sends all your sensory data to TWO parts of your brain, one being the amygdala that we’ve been talking about, and the other being the frontal cortex. Whenever the amygdala thinks it has a "situation" it needs to protect you from, it starts the fight or flight reaction we just talked about, but the NEXT thing it does, is contact the newer and smarter frontal cortex for confirmation that its assessment is correct.
If the frontal cortex agrees with the amygdala’s verdict that a threat is present, the fight or flight reaction continues and grows stronger. However, if the front cortex processed the data the amygdala gave it using all the advanced logic and reasoning that it has on tap and determined that there isn't really a threat, it tries to convince the amygdala to settle down. When it's successful in reversing the amygdala’s decision, the fight or flight reaction comes to an end. Back when the photo experiment was done, the amygdala may have been screaming out, “Yikes! Look at all these spooky looking people who may be out to get me! Whadda think frontal cortex?”, to which the frontal cortex would reply, “Relax, they’re just photos, don’t bother getting all worked up.”
These reactions are accomplished by two subsystems in your body called the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. These two systems work in harmony to maintain your level of relaxation and anxiety as you go about your life. If you're sitting on your couch in your living room watching television, chances are you'll be feeling pretty relaxed, which is a sign of the parasympathetic nervous system at work. It makes you breathe easy and feel that all is well in the world.
But when you get afraid or anxious, the sympathetic nervous system gets triggered and begins to shut down and override its relaxed parasympathetic cousin. This is where the fight or flight reaction gets started from.
Maybe you're thinking that is doesn't make much sense, that's it's pretty poor design. I mean why wouldn't our brains wait to get the input from our more intelligent and discriminating frontal cortex before putting us through all this anxious misery for no reason?
It’s because of speed. In comparison to the amygdala, the
frontal cortex is slow as molasses. By the time the frontal cortex evaluates a threat for validity, it could already be too late. Think about the narrowly avoided car crash we spoke about earlier. If the amygdala hadn’t had thrown on
your fear response immediately, you may have been hurt of even killed. What about the hot stove? If you waited even the second or two it would take your frontal cortex to make the decision regarding whether or not you should pull your hand away or leave it there to sizzle, you’d already be badly burned. When the threats are real, you don’t have time to wait for the frontal cortex to dilly-dally.