Balancing the information-seeking and safety-seeking parts of the brain.
By Elizabeth A. Stanley, Ph.D.
Psychology Today, July 14, 2020
Because our thinking brain and survival brain are at odds during the coronavirus pandemic, many common choices intended to calm ourselves actually exacerbate our stress and anxiety. This post explains what we can do instead.
The thinking brain tends to quiet its anxiety by trying to reduce uncertainty. Spending a lot of time on social media, watching the news constantly, or doing research about COVID-19 helps the thinking brain feel like it’s taking control, but these choices can trigger the survival brain to turn on more stress arousal—as my previous post explained.
So, what can we do?
One straightforward solution is getting intentional about our consumption of news and social media. To help avoid unnecessary stress arousal, we can set boundaries about when and how often we check the news and our social media feeds. Unless our work requires it, for instance, we can choose to avoid these sources first thing in the morning, because they’re more likely to set us on an anxious path for the day.
Even better, we can go directly to the source of our stress and anxiety by helping our survival brain feel safe.
Remember that where we direct our attention—consciously or unconsciously—has tremendous ripple effects through our survival brain, nervous system, and body. That’s why googling about the soaring number of coronavirus cases can cause our survival brain to turn on stress.
With this in mind, we can train ourselves to notice where our attention is directed in any moment. It might be focused externally (such as listening to someone talk) or internally (such as drawn to spinning thoughts or chronic pain in the body).
Once we become aware of our current attentional focus, we can observe what’s happening in our body. Because the survival brain isn’t verbal, we must look to physical sensations to interpret and understand the survival brain’s cues. My previous post identified the sensations associated with stress arousal and anxiety. Sometimes our (conscious or unconscious) attentional focus is making us calmer, but sometimes it’s making us more stressed.
During this attentional inventory, if we realize that our survival brain has turned on stress and anxiety, we can choose to redirect our attention in ways that help the survival brain feel safe. This sets the conditions for true recovery.
For instance, focusing attention on places of contact between our body and its surroundings—such as the pressure and heaviness of our butt in the chair—helps the survival brain feel stable and grounded. (You can download a basic five-minute guided audio exercise from my website. My book Widen the Window offers an advanced-move exercise to help the survival brain discharge stress arousal and return the body back to baseline.)
Building a Thinking Brain-Survival Brain Alliance
There are several other strategies we can learn and practice to help our thinking brain and survival brain be allies, instead of adversaries. Widen the Window explores five resilience-building habits we can practice regularly—and how and why they work. Several strategies are common knowledge, although why they are so important is often misunderstood. For instance, getting eight hours of sleep is one of the most important tools we have—in large part because the sleeping thinking brain cannot block the survival brain’s recovery process. Likewise, regular cardiovascular exercise allows the body to discharge excess stress hormones.
Here are two other non-obvious techniques for building a thinking brain-survival brain alliance. First, we can diagnose our current stress arousal by noticing the level of intensity we’re being drawn to in this moment. To be effective, the re-regulating tool we then select must align with our survival brain’s truth in this moment. Say, for instance, we’re hyperaroused with anxiety or anger. In this case, we can’t expect calming music, positive reframing, or meditation to work, when what our survival brain and body actually need is to expend excess energy.
Second, once we’ve learned our survival brain’s truth, we can take an action that shows it that we’re listening and responding to its cues. Say, for instance, when we tune in to our body, we discover that we’re feeling tense and restless: What the survival brain is begging for right now is some physical movement. Instead of just stretching our neck and staying at the computer, is it possible instead to delay our next task and take a 15-minute walk outside? At the very least, we can always choose to take at least 60 seconds to stand up and stretch.
Any choice we make that’s informed by our survival brain’s current cues shows it that we’ve heard its message. Knowing its message has been received, our survival brain can stand down—helping to guard against any additional stress arousal.
Even more importantly, anytime we make choices informed by the survival brain’s cues, we also help our survival brain access a sense of agency. Why does this matter? Remember that if the survival brain perceives itself to be helpless, powerless, or lacking control, it will turn on traumatic stress. Therefore, whenever we make choices that build survival brain agency, we’re also creating our best possible protection from experiencing trauma.
Originally published in Psychology Today, July 14, 2020.