The amygdala is part of the limbic system is a storehouse for emotional memories and is involved in emotional reactions. It is an almond sized mass within each hemisphere which receives sensory information from our external environment. It is responsible for survival instincts such as the ‘fight or flight’ response and if it becomes ‘hijacked’ or taken over, it can cause a variety of anxiety disorders including Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
In normal or low to moderately stressed situations, the amygdala relays external sensory information for example from the eyes or ears to the “thinking brain” for processing. When a person is experiencing low to moderate stress levels, the “thinking brain” – the pre-frontal cortex, the area of the brain responsible for planning and decision making, calms the amygdala. The cortex “thinks” about the sensory information and makes sense of it and responds rationally and slowly.
However, in extreme situations where a person is experiencing severe stress in relation to their external environment, the amygdala can become hijacked. When this happens the activation of the amygdala takes over and shuts off the “thinking brain” and other areas of the brain responsible for controlled intellectual abilities such as planning and decision making. The “feeling brain” takes over the “thinking brain”. The sensory information bypasses the cortex or “thinking brain” making emotional reactions primary so that a person can react quickly without having to think in extreme situations where there is an imminent threat. This can be useful in emergency situations, when a person needs to react quickly. However, when the amygdala is being continually triggered in normal day to day living, and left untreated a person can develop anxiety disorders.
Unless those triggers are removed, a person will continue to react in a heightened way and continue to experience distress. Reacting in a heightened way can reinforce the triggers and the person can continue to experience distress in those situations. When the amygdala is constantly stimulated by sensory information that reminds it of a distressing event, a person can become stuck in a cycle where the amygdala automatically reacts based on previously stored patterns. You end up doing what your amygdala wants instead of the other way around. You basically have no control over your emotions. A common disorder associated with this response is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Understanding Trauma and Your Triggers
When a person experiences a distressing or traumatic event, often the amount of stress can be so overwhelming. It exceeds one’s ability to cope and integrate the emotions involved with that experience. As a result, incompletely processed thoughts and emotions experienced at the time of the event become stored as memories in the brain through the senses. Memories based on what you saw, heard, smelt and felt emotionally and in your body are stored away for future reference. So that when a similar situation arises, the brain will remember this event and respond accordingly. However, when unresolved thoughts are left unprocessed and a person experiences a similar event in their present which resembles the past event, a person can become “triggered”. When a person is triggered, they are really experiencing the emotions associated with the old experience rather than the present one.
Breaking old patterns
A pattern is created though repetitive perception of events and situations as having something in common with old events. We respond in a way which reinforces and consolidates our beliefs about certain situations or events or people. Even if our beliefs are not true, our emotional memories are often stronger than our rational minds. Therefore, for a pattern to be truly broken, a person’s perceptions which have created the beliefs need to change. Changing perceptions is not an easy task, especially if the perception and pattern have been reinforced over many years. But there are some practical strategies one can use to break old thinking styles and patterns of behaviour.
Because the mind is hard wired for survival, it learns to protect itself at any cost, even when the threat is not real. In cases where the distressing events or trauma has been that stressful and overwhelming, the mind has become primed to be on the look out for certain cues which resemble the old event. These cues become a person’s triggers.
Triggers can be experienced through anyone of the senses. When you hear a song which reminds you of someone or an experience and those emotions are triggered again. Or when you smell a certain fragrance or aroma which reminds you of a certain place. A trigger could be context, time and space of the situation. For example a certain time of day in which a certain event took place over many times. It could be a bodily sensation or feeling a certain way which invokes an emotional response. For example, being stuck in bumper to bumper traffic could resemble the feeling of being trapped and invoke an anxious response.
The key to breaking old patterns of thinking and behaving is learning to recognise and understand your triggers. Awareness is necessary to understanding what’s driving your emotional response. So that when a particular situation arises, rather than reacting emotionally, you are able to respond rationally. When you find yourself triggered or you are having an emotional reaction you can avoid the amygdala hijack and prevent your emotions from taking control.
Your Internal dialogue or what you say to yourself has the biggest effect on you. Catastrophising only builds things up in your mind, placing more pressure and expectation on your mind. You already have enough of that so the key is to calm, soothe, deescalate and diffuse the feelings by choosing positive encouraging words to create positive thoughts and subsequently positive emotions.
Emotions usually arise unexpectedly and very fast which make them difficult to catch in time and so make it hard think to think rationally. So, its important to address the emotions that you are experiencing first before you react. Now this may take some practice but the more it is practiced, the more efficient you become at managing your emotions. And it may sound a little crazy that you actually move into the emotion and feel it, rather than trying to avoid it, which most people find difficult to do. But when you deny, ignore or suppress your emotions, its only a matter of time before they resurface – like pushing a beach ball further and further down under water. The more the pressure builds, so too does the need of that beach ball to pop back up to re-establish balance in pressure.
- Feel and allow the emotions to arise; fear, hurt, injustice, hate, anger, fight
- Surrender and allow them to come up fully and allow them to be there
- Allow yourself to experience the emotions – just allow yourself to have the emotions
- Keep surrendering – accept and allow them and experience the emotions without resistance or judging
- No matter how extreme they are, they cannot harm you
- Allow your thoughts to come without judging them but by unconditionally allowing them
- Try to sit quietly with yourself and feel and listen and focus inwardly -just feel
- Feel where the sensations are in your body
- Feel into yourself, the sensations in your body are your anchors and feel yourself anchored to your body – stay with yourself
- You may not be able to hear your thoughts at this stage, especially your rational thoughts from your higher self, because your emotions are overwhelming you and drowning out your thoughts.
- While listening and feeling your emotions, identify your emotions at the same time
e.g say; I am angry, I am hurt and upset, I am scared that…
By identifying emotions, this can help reduce the anxiety because usually your emotions overwhelm you and you are unable to feel clearly exactly how you’re feeling. As a result, fear of the unknown often continues to trigger more and more anxiety because you can’t identify how you are feeling or you don’t know what your feelings are. Sometimes this can lead to panic attacks when you allow your emotions especially fear to spiral out of control.
- Have a conversation with yourself about what you are feeling and identify what the injustice or upset is about.
e.g. Im angry because that’s not right, she should have done that, that’s so wrong, im scared because I think something bad is going to happen
Ask yourself:
- What have they done to upset you?
- Why are you upset?
- What is your biggest fear?
- Whats the worse that can happen?
- How have they wronged you?
Allow yourself full self-disclosure without any judgement, allow yourself to freely and fully express yourself inside your mind, no limitations, full permission, unconditional approval and acceptance – go nuts!
- While having these conversations, listen to your thoughts and conversation and try to identify any irrational thoughts
Wherever there are negative emotions, there are often irrational thoughts associated which are fuelling the emotions.
Eg. Catastrophising, making mountains out of molehills, entitlement, victim mentality, poor me, blaming, all or nothing/black or white thinking, should and musts
Identifying irrational thoughts often helps to point out to yourself that you may be the cause or reason for your own emotions – the way you are perceiving them may be making you feel this way and perhaps not the other person or situation.
By having the conversation with yourself, it enables a gap or space for consideration of the whole picture and not just that eg. they’ve wronged you and possibly you have mis-interpreted the situation or what a person has said. Gives you room to explore your thinking and reflect and change to get to the truth. It gives you time to find all what is different in this situation compared to an old situation. By clarifying the differences between past and present events enables you to dispute and refute any assumptions you are making based on old experiences. Assumptions are killers of awareness, change and growth.
Keep doing this until you feel heard and you start to feel calmer and quieter. This may also help to alleviate some stress and emotion and calm you.
- Dispute irrational beliefs
Building self-awareness: Think back over any similar situations to the one you are currently facing and ask yourself whether you remember feeling a similar way to what you are feeling now?
- Have I felt this way before?
- Have I had these thoughts before?
- Can you see a pattern of similar triggers causing you to feel a similar way?
Challenge your beliefs with rational thoughts
– is this true?
– what is the evidence for my beliefs?
– what are other possible explanations for what happened?
– Question those thoughts of: If they do this or If they did that, it means that” (does it really mean that?)
Develop a range of alternative reasons for the other persons actions, or for the situation without minimising your own.
In fact, keep yourself excluded from the scenario and just look at the person, their role, their job, the context of the situation and the circumstance. Develop positive reasons for why they’ve done what they did, practical reasons as many as you can think of for why the situation is occurring. Take into consideration how any outside influences and context (what, where, when) may be affecting their actions and affecting the situation. Continue to dispute any irrational thinking while doing this, focusing only on positive reasons.
- Think back to the interaction and look for anything positive you can tease out of the situation – what they said, how you felt at the time, how you may have misinterpreted what they said, how you were feeling at the time and how this may have influenced your perception of what they said or the situation.
- Give the other person the benefit of the doubt and trust that they are an adult who is positive and rational and intelligent and imagine them thinking the most positive thoughts about you and what would this type of person would think.
- Think of all the things they have done that oppose what you think they’ve done e.g if you think they are trying to control you, then think of all the ways they have tried to give you freedom in some way
People who have experienced trauma often find it difficult to imagine positive outcomes and their default way of thinking is to assume the worst. They often project their own negative thoughts onto that situation.
You don’t have to believe it at this stage, just say it to help you balance your thoughts and give you some perspective with some alternatives and positives so you can help to regain your rational thought and intuition about the whole situation rather than being tunnel visioned and biased toward your own thinking.
This will expand your perspective and take a little of your attention away from yourself and making you the centre of the situation. Expand the tunnel vision which usually occurs when you feel scared or emotional as with when “fight or flight response” has been activated.
Ask yourself – “Have I felt this feeling before?” – If yes – this feeling has not changed but remained the same – it is the one constant in a variety of different situations.
So you can conclude that, it is NOT the situation around you that needs to change, but rather the feeling – or the thoughts behind the feeling which are creating the feeling.
After the initial surge of emotions has passed, and this too shall pass, you will have more balanced and rational thoughts to begin developing strategies and solutions.
Mindfulness tips
Living in the now not thinking about the future is important as you don’t know if its going to happen or not. This is not living in the now because you are living in the future and it may not happen. Living in the future is wasted time that you won’t get back. Mindfulness means focusing on the task at hand and completing tasks gracefully and mindfully without rushing. Rushing activates the fight or flight response which creates anxiety.
Ask yourself:
- Is it in your control? No – then don’t worry
- What is within your control? ok then what can you do about it?
- Do you need to become more informed, outline your options to help empower yourself
- Energy flows where attention goes – you cannot worry yourself to a solution, only focus on what is within your control and act because anxiety feeds on inactivity and denial.
- Denial is the enemy of awareness and therefore growth. It takes more energy in the mind to not face something, to try to ignore it than it does to look at it and break it down and do what needs to be done. So ask yourself- what is it that I’m not looking at?
Strategies for being present help to break down the attachment to the past or future by remaining in the present, here and now.
- Focusing on bodily sensations – Eckhart Tolle says bodily sensations are the portals to the present. They are true evidence that you are experiencing the here and now.
- Mindful breathing – being aware that you are inhaling, aware that you are exhaling.