An Amygdala, a Priest, and a Rabbi . . .
The mind has a brilliant capacity to respond to threat instantly and subconsciously. If you think of your brain as a high-functioning control board, receiving and distributing information at an almost inconceivable rate of speed, then the amygdala is the ESC key. Escape. Control-Alt-Delete. In an Interstellar-esque summer blockbuster, the amygdala is that bright red panic button at the far corner of the will, the control panel, shielded by a clear plastic casing that Matthew McConaughey must smash open with the butt of a fire extinguisher before the Earth is demolished by the [insert object of impending doom here].
In reality, these two almond-shaped emergency responders, each of them about an inch long, have no plastic casing, no protective cover, no barrier whatsoever. The pair of them just hang out in the midbrain, exposed in the temporal lobe with all of the other controls of the limbic system: the hippocampus button, which forms long-term memories; the cingulate gyrus switch, which regulates aggressive behavior; the dentate gyrus knob, which regulates happiness; and the Staples “Easy” button, which provides stress relief in the form of a catch phrase. The amygdala is working in the background, constantly monitoring for answers to “Am I safe?”
As you go about your daily life, you constantly receive data from the outside world through all the senses: vision, hearing, smell, touch, and taste. This data enters the brain via the thalamus, a structure sitting on top of your brain stem that both processes and transmits sensory input. If the data received is potentially threatening, the thalamus tosses it over to the amygdala. The amygdala analyzes the perceived threat, deciding just how threatening it might be and how much epinephrine (think: adrenaline) is needed to deal with it. The amygdala pages the hypothalamus; the hypothalamus texts the adrenal gland; the adrenal gland sends an e-mail confirmation; and after that series of split-second exchanges, epinephrine is tweeted (actually, it’s secreted).
That’s why you experience the fear response within milliseconds of any perceived threat. Now you are protected. You have averted disaster yet again.
The amygdala commandeers the entire brain and every major system of the body to respond to the threat. Adrenaline courses through your body. Your heart is pumping, your blood pressure rises, and you might even be able to lift a compact vehicle. If you begin to slip on the ice while walking, or see something slither in front of you on the path, or suddenly become lightheaded, you will be controlled by this magnificent and spontaneous first responder. Thanks to the amygdala, you can now manage this potentially threatening situation, whether it’s a visit to the DMV or a minor fender bender or even [insert object of impending doom here].
As you peel back the layers and begin to understand the origin of and chemistry behind worry, it’s likely that you’ll develop a love-hate relationship with your amygdala. Much like a beckoning carton of ice cream in the freezer, the amygdala simultaneously comforts and aggravates. But like all components of our minds and bodies that play some part in our anxiety, the amygdala is doing precisely what it’s supposed to do. It’s behaving impeccably, as a matter of fact. And for that alone we should be thankful.
Thank you, amygdala.
Thank you for playing such a crucial role in making me a huge, worry-making machine. I really appreciate you. As much as I resent you.
Love, Me
If there’s one thing we all have in common, it’s that every one of us has survived a (seemingly) life-threatening car backfire. That POW sounds quickly and unexpectedly. In instances like these, the amygdala receives incoming data (the auditory POW) and (knowing that sound indicates a possible danger, like a firearm discharge) immediately instructs the body to assume a guarded state. “Escape mode!” We turn without thinking, seeking the source of the explosion. We cover our heads. We overreact. If our guard is down, we might even stumble forward, crouch close to the ground, or cover our heads, shielding ourselves from stray firework shells and imaginary bullets. And then we feel like total idiots when we realize that the perpetrator behind this near-death experience was an old Ford with a clogged fuel filter. We stand up, shake off the threat, and pray no one saw that rather dramatic reaction. But still, the amygdala is doing precisely what it’s intended to do. And it deserves our appreciation.
This characteristic is more than human nature. It’s universal to the animal kingdom, in the world of predator and prey. Somewhere on the open savannahs of Africa, an impala explodes into a spectacle of zigzag leaps to confuse and outrun the claws of a cheetah. Once the cheetah gives up the chase, the impala will shake and tremble to release the leftover bodily tension after narrowly escaping death. Then it will gracefully dash off to rejoin the herd. And don’t we act just as quickly when a car backfires, when the plane we’re riding experiences sudden turbulence, and when we trip on that crack in the sidewalk? That response is ingrained in us.
We can call this arousal of the amygdala the fast-track method. When the car momentarily loses traction as it hits ice, we are thrust into emergency response mode before we even have time to think, “Holy crap, here comes the ditch!” That’s the shortcut to the amygdala via the thalamus. It’s the amygdala functioning at its finest, in both worriers and non-worriers alike, in both the healthiest of us and those with mental health disorders. Whether you consciously observe it or not, you probably employ the fast-track method daily.
New Yorkers know this reaction in a special way. Any New Yorker can easily recall at least one experience of stepping on an uneven subway grate. Walking through Times Square, the metal grill beneath you will suddenly sway and shift and sink perhaps an inch into the sidewalk, but it still gives you the impression for one fleeting second that you’re going to fall straight through the ground and onto the gritty train tracks below. And for the next month or so, you step over or around every grill, grate, plate, or manhole cover you encounter. You’re reminded of that terrifying feeling of (as you imagined it) falling through that hole in the ground and becoming a permanent fixture of Times Square’s subterranean transit system. For a few weeks your amygdala has a built-in message: “This may be unstable, and I could fall through. DANGER!”
From Subway Grates to Snakes
One of my offices is out of my home, back on a few acres in the woods. It is a beautiful setting, but occasionally, maybe once every two years, if you were walking down the sidewalk to the entrance, you will be greeted by a snake draped across the stone walk in front of you. Let’s play this out. You’re strolling down the sidewalk, totally relaxed. You’re not on guard, for there’s no reason to be. Suddenly and unexpectedly you spot a snake directly in front of you on the sidewalk. If you’re like me, you jump back and squeal like a child. You can imagine what happens next. You momentarily freeze while your heart races, then you back away slowly and hope you can find another path to the door.
Let’s slow that instant reaction and look at it from your mental processing. As your brain receives the stimulus of the snake, its monitoring function searches your memory banks to make sense of the scene, as it does every moment of your waking life. In this case, it concludes “Dangerous mismatch! You and this object at this close proximity in this environment equal threat.” In literally the blink of an eye, your brain considers and rules out the response options of jumping over the snake, stomping on it, grabbing something with which to hit it, or standing there screaming at the top of your lungs. It picks “Freeze, then back away slowly.” (The little squeal you let out is not a required part of the package, but it does seem like the right thing to do.) The bodily sensations that go along with being scared can be uncomfortable. But they are a required component of a vital system of learning. When you become surprised by a threat and you let your brain’s automatic response take over, it will serve you well. Its most important task will be to generate and then sort through ideas about how to solve the problem.
Once you’ve had that mini-trauma (just like the subway grate misstep), for the next three or four days, every stick on the ground is a snake. Every garden hose is a snake. Every rustle in the leaves is a snake. Why? Because with both the subway grate and the sidewalk snake, the unconscious was caught off guard. It’s as though your defensive system is in the “everything seems pretty safe here” mode, and all of a sudden it is as surprised as you are by this little threat. When you are traumatized by that sort of thing, the unconscious says, “I am so sorry, boss. I let you down. I was operating as though everything was fine when a true threat was present. I promise I’m on guard now! I’ll protect you! I’m on the lookout full time for snakes now!” Your amygdala decides it’s smarter to suspect that more objects are snakes than to let down its guard and allow you to step on a snake and get bitten. So it modifies your sense of threat. “Okay, when I sense anything resembling a snake or a location where a snake might be present, I’m gonna be on guard for snakes.”
Since the amygdala’s motto is “better safe than sorry,” we all will be on the receiving end of plenty of false positives, reacting as though threat is present when no threat exists. We’ll gasp and freeze when suddenly spotting the dog leash on the ground because it looks similar enough to the snake we saw three days ago—just so the amygdala doesn’t allow us to unknowingly step on a copperhead that might be within reach of us.
As we have an increasing number of false positive experiences, the amygdala will learn that encounters with snakes are actually pretty rare, and eventually it will back down to its pre-snake encounter state. In fact, that’s exactly how our amygdala will quiet down. We place it into a safe, reasonable facsimile of the scene in which we were frightened, and we let it hang out and learn that this scene (the dog leash, the rustling leaves, the garden hose) is actually not a threat, so it is different from that scene (the snake on the sidewalk). This system works pretty darn well, unless we continue to tell ourselves that a threat is imminent. Let me explain.
We can arouse the amygdala through a second set of circuitry, from the brain’s prefrontal cortex, which interprets events and generates opinions about the possibility of pending danger. Since this circuitry involves a higher level processing from outside the limbic system, it triggers an alarm response more slowly, in about a couple of seconds. (That may not sound very slow, but you have to compare it with a few-hundredths of a second when cortical response is uninvolved.) The slow track arousal of the amygdala is the result of talking yourself into worrying.
“Talk myself into worrying?” you might say. “Trust me, I worry enough without prompting. I don’t need to talk myself into more worry, thank you very much.”
Well, you may not always do it consciously, but I bet you’ve talked yourself into worrying about a meeting or an encounter or an occasion before the moment has even arrived.
“Baloney. Give me an example.”
Okay, I will. Let’s say you’ve been invited to a dinner party. En route to said party, you think to yourself, “Oh, no. I just realized that the host invited Ashley, and I can’t stand Ashley.” It’s less that you can’t stand Ashley and more that you and Ashley aren’t on the best of terms these days. The last time you and she were in the same room together, you got into a heated argument about politics or religion or Dancing with the Stars . . . some hot-button issue. “I can’t deal with this tonight,” you tell yourself. “She’s going to bring up that fight we had, and she’ll want to talk about it and ‘fix things.’ It’s going to be so awkward.” Within seconds, another frightening realization hits you. “OMG, what if she doesn’t want to resolve things? What if she got there early so she could tell everyone what a nasty person I am? I’ll walk into the front door, and she’ll have turned all the dinner guests against me over one stupid argument that happened three months ago. Ugh. I just can’t tolerate facing that embarrassment. I should call and tell them that I got stuck at work or something. I should avoid the situation altogether.” You haven’t even parked the car and already you’re catastrophizing about a situation that might be threatening but just as easily could be harmless. You’ve predetermined that this dinner will be a dismal failure, and this prediction hinges on a person who may or may not be invited, who may or may not arrive early with the intention of soiling your good name, and who may or may not even recall the aforementioned argument.
Sound familiar? “Uh, oh. This could be trouble. Should I avoid the situation? I should at least get on guard for threat.” It may not be a dinner party, and it may not be about Ashley, but we talk up these types of scenarios all the time. Meanwhile, our amygdala hears only one message, “Danger,” and secretes that energizing adrenaline.
Of course, this train of thought is perfectly logical, in fact vital, if your job is to seek out worst-case scenarios. A firefighter walking into a burning building, for instance, cannot assume that things will go smoothly. Firefighters have been trained to adopt this kind of thinking and to plan for the worst. A SWAT team leader knows that he cannot turn any corners lightly, that he needs backup, and that he must have all necessary resources at his disposable in the event that this forcible entry gets ugly.
As for the rest of us—those who aren’t police officers or specialists in risk analysis—this direct link between catastrophizing and the amygdala gets us nowhere. This incessant “talking” can only put us into an unwarranted state of distress. We pull into the parking lot of a local bar. We tell ourselves, “Oh, no. This parking lot is crowded. That means it’s going to be just as crowded inside. What if it’s so crowded that I become trapped? When I get anxious, I have trouble concentrating. Then I have trouble putting sentences together. What if I get flustered and then embarrass myself? What if I feel trapped in a conversation with someone as it starts going south? I can’t handle that. I shouldn’t even bother. I should just go home.”
Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk.
And where does all of this talking get us? Well, it doesn’t make us calmer or more comfortable. All we do when we’re into nonstop worrying is get our amygdala riled up for all the wrong reasons. This catastrophic self-talk gets our worry juices flowing and causes the amygdala to release epinephrine before we arrive at the dinner party, before we enter the potentially crowded local bar, before we step onto the plane. You see, this is the scenic route. This is the long road worry travels down.
An amygdala walks into a bar, and the bartender says, “Hey, don’t come in here looking for trouble!” (That one kills at psychology conferences.)
The worst part of talking ourselves into a freaked-out state? The neocortex—the talking, thinking, interpreting brain—has no hard wiring to the amygdala that says, “Whoops, my bad. No cause for alarm. You don’t have to prepare for panic anymore.” That “Just kidding!” message comes back undeliverable. Remember, this is the brain’s limbic system, which developed early in the evolution of mammals, the neocortex is trying to communicate with. Hence, the simple structure of the amygdala is built with an economy of action. Like a mother watching her toddler swim for the first time, the amygdala (once triggered) is constantly on alert, ready to offset any threatening situation with a healthy dose of epinephrine. That is its primary, simple function, love it or hate it. No just kidding button is available.
Even if a situation is safe but you tell yourself it’s dangerous, your amygdala will come to the rescue like Dudley Do-Right of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. (You don’t remember that cartoon? He was all about liberating the damsel in distress. “I’ll save you, Nell!”) The amygdala is your Dudley Do-Right. Let’s use a flying example again. Imagine you’re on a commercial flight that passes through moderate turbulence. Such turbulence is completely safe for the plane. But if you interpret the experience as dangerous, then your amygdala will set off its alarm to protect you. If you want to be less anxious on a plane, we don’t have to change anything about the flight. We have to change your interpretation.
So how, then, are we going to get your amygdala to chill out when you are in your catastrophizer mode? How do we get those almond-shaped epinephrine pushers to realize that everything is as it should be, that you don’t need all this worrying, that you don’t want all this worrying?
We’re going to get to all that before we’re done.