Friday, June 29, 2012

Hey Bob? Do you remember what Marlin Perkins said about this?

A little more about the fight or flight response physiologically.  If you're running from a lion, your body wants to take every little smidgen of energy and use it to get the heck out of dodge.  

In that moment, NON-ESSENTIAL SYSTEMS IN YOUR BODY SHUT DOWN.  So at the moment your cardiovascular and respiratory system kick into high gear, your body stops using energy for things like digestion, immune response, visual acuity, storing short-term memory . . . and logical thought.  Ever wonder why in the moment you can never come up with just the right thing to say, or you can't remember to use the coping skills you've spent so much time storing in your prefrontal cortex?  If you're running from a lion, you do not need to remember the details about the episode of Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom you saw as a kid where the lions brought down a wilderbeast.  You don't need logic, or details, or self-soothing, or a snappy comeback.  You just need to run. 

 Except in our world, fight or flight doesn't really make sense because we don't really face very many situations in which either choice is really warranted (thank goodness!).  If your boss corners you in the office and reads you the riot act about something or other, you're stuck.  A physical fight response will get you fired (though many people go there anyway) and it would look kind of silly to scream and run away as fast as you can.  So we freeze.  Tongue tied and tense, we're riveted to the spot.  Afterward, when blood flow returns to normal, we think of all the great things we could have said in that moment, or all the ways we could have handled it differently.  Cause those things live in our prefrontal cortex. 

Marlin Perkins
So how do we get there in the moment????  How do we convince our amygdalas to calm the heck down and let our thinking brain handle things?  It's the same way you get to Carnegie Hall.  Practice, practice, practice.  When we have a stressful experience, we tend to run the instant replay OVER and OVER and OVER in our heads, right?  Except we replay it EXACTLY as it happened.  Boss cornered us, we froze.  We rehearse being all amygdala-y in the moment, which actually increases the chances it will go just like that the next time.  If we rehearse the way we WANTED to handle things, we increase the chances it will go just like that the next time.  So catch yourself rehearsing what you DON'T want to have happen, and rewrite it in your head to handle it the way your thinking brain knows works best. 

Over time, your brain will develop the attitude that it CAN handle any situation rather than it CAN'T, and sensory input doesn't trigger an amygdala response nearly as often.  Ta DAH!!!!  What???  Handle STRESS without ANXIETY????   No way.       

Yes, Way. 

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