In Neuroscience terms, a threat response is when your brain perceives a threat and the amygdala triggers your stress response. You may be familiar with this being called your fight flight or freeze response. Let’s call it our FFF for now.
Threats can be social, emotional or imagined and they range in just how deeply your FFF is activated. When we think of FFF it is easy to associate this with a big emotive response right? Some of you might visualise images of swinging punches, yelling and screaming, running for your life in you were in danger. However, your FFF can be incredibly subtle and nowhere near as emotive as the words fight flight or freeze would have you conjure up. Let me explain.
My Neuroscience training has taught me to monitor my physiological state and my responses. This was not something I naturally did, however, over time it has now become second nature to me. I am often thinking about how I am feeling and what my body is telling me in a variety of situations, be they at work or home. Through observing my own physiological responses over time, I have come to realise that your FFF does not have to be a major reaction to a situation and that it can, in fact, be quite the opposite. Your FFF can be very subtle. So subtle that you may not even realise it is occurring unless you are really attuned to your own cues.
While in varying situations you may enact any one of the F’s in the FFF response, it is likely that you have a dominant F. One that triggers subconsciously over and over again. My F is “Flee”. My defence mechanism is to walk away or to get myself out of any given situation that I perceive a threat. What I have come to realise is that I also do this in a very subtle way, that is, I don’t always get up and storm away, run for my life or leave where I am, however, I’ve noticed times where I check out mentally. I flee cognitively.
I experienced such an event recently where my stress level was at its peak and I started to check out. Now to anyone around me they would not have picked up on this. I was still there in the room, still listening and still talking however mentally my cognitive processing wanted to block dealing with the situation I was in. Upon reflection, I can now recall examples of this occurring both professionally and personally. Lucky for me I had such an eagle eye on the physiological responses I picked up on this quickly at the time and was able to employ some Emotion Regulation strategies to get me back on track.
So I ask you. How often do you monitor your physiological responses throughout the day in varying scenarios professionally and personally and do you know what your dominant F is? And most importantly do you have some skills to assist you when you do go into threat mode?
Once your emotional brain has triggered you have the choice to suppress it and bottle it up, express it and let it rip so to speak or to use some emotion regulation strategies to help you move through your big emotion. If you are not familiar with Emotion Regulation you may find my previous article on Conquering Overwhelm useful as it lists out some emotion regulation tips you could try. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/conquering-overwhelm-kathryn-van-der-steege/
Until next time, keep practising managing those big emotions. Building new and lasting habits takes time and cognitive energy but the reward is worth the effort.