Understanding Arousal
Arousal has to do with how “revved up” a person is. When a car is going sixty mph, the engine is revved up more than when it’s going ten mph. How revved up the engine is depends upon how much gas is flowing into the engine. Similarly, a person’s arousal is higher when more stress hormones flow into their brain and body. There is some conscious control over it, but most human arousal is regulated unconsciously.
Als’s Seven Levels of Arousal
Understanding arousal can help make it less threatening. Neurological researcher Dr. Heidelise Als has classified seven levels of arousal. Understanding these levels can help you be more comfortable with emotion, particularly at higher levels.
Level One—Deep Sleep. Not even dreaming is taking place.
Level Two—Active Sleep. A tiny bit of stress hormone is released by the body clock to increase arousal enough to dream.
Level Three—Drowsy. From Level Two upward, a bit more hormone is released and the person starts to wake up. Or, from Level Four downward, a bit less hormone is released to prepare for sleep.
Level Four—Alert Not Processing. Enough hormones are pumping through the brain and body to keep the person awake, but arousal is not high enough to perform tasks requiring high-level cognition.
Level Five—Alert Processing. Additional stress hormone activates high-level cognition. Executive Function, including reflective function, is available. Links established by practice of the Strengthening Exercise help limit arousal to Level Five.
Let’s stick with Level Five for a moment. Let’s say you’re having a good day. There are no worries standing in the way of focusing on your work. You could say you have 100 percent of your mental capacity available. But that’s not quite the case. The mind, like a computer, reserves some of its capacity to maintain basic operations and stay organized. Though your mind has great capacity, you have only part of it at your command. Some capacity is set aside to stay oriented in three ways: to maintain a sense of your identity, to maintain a sense of where you are, and to maintain a sense of time.
Let’s say you have one hundred units of mental capacity, and that maintaining sense of self, sense of location, and sense of time takes up ten units. That leaves ninety units to work with. When you’re having a good day, and seem to have your mental faculties fully available to you, what you really have at your command are ninety units.
Level Six—Agitation. Emotion enters the picture. It could be a positive emotion such as joy or a negative emotion such as anxiety or anger. Whether positive or negative, emotion takes over some of those ninety units.
If a weak emotion takes over ten units, it leaves you eighty to work with. But if there’s a strong emotion that takes over eighty units, only ten units remain at your disposal, leaving your mental capability markedly reduced.
It is in Level Six that reflective function disappears. Executive Function, under the load of agitation, weakens. If the person’s Executive Function is not robust, it may disappear. This is the point at which a fearful flier begins to go into a personal movie. Links established by practice of the Strengthening Exercise help Executive Function dismiss false alarms and allow a return to Level Five.
Level Seven—Flooding. Emotion takes over ninety units. Since ten units are in reserve for basic mental activities, there are no units left at your direction. Control of the mind is lost. There is no Executive Function. It has been hijacked by emotion.
This can mean panic—but it doesn’t have to. It depends upon whether or not the person is familiar with his or her mind being hijacked by emotion. The person who, as a child, navigated every arousal level accompanied by a caregiver, knows this condition is fleeting. For him or her, flooding is experienced simply as, “Oh, I’m flooded.” But, for the person who, as a child, was not accompanied by its caregiver through all arousal levels, flooding may be experienced as an extreme threat. In that case, Level Seven does mean panic. When a parent takes a child to Disney World for the first time, it’s their job to accompany the child on rides that are challenging. Similarly, it is the parent’s job to accompany their child on the roller-coaster ride through the levels of arousal Als has identified, so the child learns that feelings—even intense ones—are natural and endurable. Most anxious fliers will recognize that their early trips through “Emotional World” were solo. Even as an adult, they equate arousal with fear, and fear with danger. When aroused, they may think, “What if it is too much for me? Will I have a heart attack, or suffocate, or go crazy?
Als doesn’t break Level Seven down into different kinds of flooding, but I identify five levels of flooding: A, B, C, D, and E.
Level Seven A—Loss of Control. This is the level at which emotion takes over all ninety units available. Thinking or focus cannot be directed.
Level Seven B—Loss of Location. Emotion takes over, say, ninety-three units. Ten units are required to maintain orientation in person, place, and time. Something’s got to give. The first thing to go is the sense of physical orientation. Things seem disconnected, unreal, or surreal. You may see yourself from a vantage point outside your body.
Level Seven C—Loss of Time. Emotion takes over around ninety-six units. Time disappears. Already you are unable to direct your mind’s focus. Already you are disoriented or lost. Both become “forever” as sense of time disappears.
Level Seven D—Threat of Loss of Identity. As emotion takes over ninety-nine units and moves toward one hundred, identity cannot be maintained. For the person who has not been accompanied at this level—and psychologically held when here—by a caregiver, the slipping away of identity may be experienced as terror of annihilation.
Level Seven E—Loss of Identity. When emotion takes over one hundred units, identity is no longer produced. Terror of annihilation, if any, ends. There is no time. There is no place. There is no identity. There is no fear. There is only awareness of awareness. Spiritual disciplines refer to this experience by various terms. In Zen Buddhism, it is termed kensho, seeing one’s nature. When all experience other than awareness has vanished, awareness finds there is nothing to be aware of other than awareness. When all memory, all perception, all thought, and all identification disappears, nothing remains except this one phenomenon: awareness. But when everything other than awareness has been stripped away, what is there to be aware of? Awareness is aware only of awareness. When that occurs, when everything else is stripped away, only one’s ultimate identity—the identity we all share—is left.
The person who reaches Level Seven D but not Seven E may be traumatized. In psychic equivalence, what is in the mind is experienced as what is real. The converse is also true. If something does not exist in the mind, it does not exist in reality. Thus failure to produce a sense of self during psychic equivalence is experienced as death. It is this synthetic experience of death that causes panic to be so terrifying. Having been at the edge of annihilation and escaped, the person becomes thereafter vigilant in every moment to avoid annihilation by never again giving up control.
Flooding Is Temporary
During flooding, though there is the fear it will last forever, it can’t. Why? When you flip a switch to turn on lights, a piece of metal physically connects the wires attached to the switch. And as long as the switch stays in that position, the connection remains. But in the mind, connections are made not by metal but by chemicals. Connections made by chemicals last only a few seconds. Level Seven experience can be the result of a huge number of connections, all of which are being made chemically. The Level Seven experience is temporary because the chemicals wear off in a few seconds.
When the connections wear off, you go from Level Seven to Level Six, from panic to high anxiety. The conditions that pushed you into Level Seven may still be present and may push you back up again. This explains why panic may seem to come in waves. The distinction between high anxiety and panic can be lost, causing you to believe you have been in a state of panic for hours when actually you’ve been shuttling between Levels Six and Seven.
Understanding Als’s Seven Levels of Arousal can sharpen your ability to distinguish between Level Seven and Level Six. Recognizing a level and knowing it is temporary can help you accept that level without fear.
Positive Flooding
It’s possible for flooding to be a positive experience. Orgasm is a perfect example. There are different levels there, too. In Level Seven A, ninety units of mental capacity are filled with pleasure. That’s nice. But in a Level Seven B orgasm, you lose awareness of where you are. In Level Seven C, time disappears, transporting you into a state of eternity. In Level Seven D, identity disappears. Freed of identity, all sense of separation vanishes.
How does the person deal with fear of Level Seven D annihilation during the sexual experience? Research suggests that orgasm is possible only when oxytocin has shut down the fear system. Without this shutting down of the fear system, entry into orgasm—with its loss of person, place, and time—may not be possible. When in the experience, orgasm—like panic—seems timeless. In a state of panic, there is fear it will never end. But it does end. With panic—as with orgasm—the chemical connections wear out. The experience of timelessness yields as a sense of time returns. The experience of oneness is lost as identity reappears. It is important to hold onto knowing that whether the flooding is panic or orgasm, you always come back.
Neutral Flooding
Neutral flooding is caused not by rising emotion but by rising concentration. In some sports, neutral flooding—the mind filled with concentration on the game—is called being “in the zone.” In automobile racing, it is called “driving 11/10ths.” Let’s say the maximum speed a car can go around a certain curve is 100 mph. Going around a 100-mph curve at 100 mph is called “driving 10/10ths.” In a long race where peak concentration can’t be maintained, you go around it at 90. This is called “driving 9/10ths.”
There is a special case in which a driver goes around a 100-mph curve at 110: that’s “driving 11/10ths,” being in the zone. How is that possible? Under the stress of competition, the demand for extra performance sometimes presses the 10 units of mental capacity reserved for basic orientation into service to drive the car. In this extraordinary state of mind, not just 90 units but all 100 units become available, and the 100-mph curve in an ordinary state of mind is a 110-mph curve in this extraordinary state of mind. This phenomenon is discussed at length in a book by Hungarian-born psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi entitled Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. The flow state, as Csikszentmihalyi describes it, is an optimal state of intrinsic motivation, where the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing.
When this state occurs during racing, the driver, the car, the track, and the world are all one. During a race in Rouen, France, approaching a 90-degree turn at 140 mph, I had the experience that I was watching from a few feet above the car. I did not know who was driving the car. Actually, I was not sure anyone was driving, for it seemed as though the car and the track were part of a reality that was simply unfolding.
During what Csikszentmihalyi calls flow, immersed in the game, the player’s sense of identity is gone. Though every ounce of the person’s being is engaged in the action, there is no sense that she is playing any role at all in what is happening. The player experiences the game as though what is happening is unwinding, like string from a spool. This occurs in all sorts of activities, from sports to mathematics to the arts—in performance, on the page, and on the canvas.
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Panic is sometimes called flooding. More accurately, panic is fear of flooding. Flooding, though unusual, is normal. It is a state in which identity begins to disappear (does disappear in Level Seven E) because the mental capacity that ordinarily produces identity is all but used up by intense mental activity or pleasure, or all but overtaken by emotion. If it is understood simply as what it is, fear of it can subside. It helps to understand that flooding—which can be negative, neutral, or positive—is temporary, and that identity always comes back.