Amygdala hijack
Why your nervous system is the new front line
If you go down to the woods tonight
Edinburgh, 1994, 11pm on a Friday night. I was on my way out to a techno night I loved - or so I planned.
As I walked down the busy main road linking the student area to the city centre, I came towards a bus stop where a bunch of kids about the same age as me were hanging around.
As I made my way through them, one of them turned to me and asked for the bus fare home. I said I didn’t have any change. Things escalated dizzyingly fast.
His friends started to surround me. Requests became shouts of “Money! Money!”
Even as I repeated increasingly desperately that I didn’t have any, some part of me knew this really wasn’t about the bus fare.
Suddenly, one of them reached his arm back and, throwing all of his weight behind the punch, smashed me squarely in the centre of my face.
And before I even knew what was happening, some completely automatic response kicked in and I was racing away.
Straight between two of the kids, left up High Street, left again down a side alley to where friends lived and safety.
I buzzed and buzzed on the doorbell. Thankfully, one of my friends was in. As I burst through their front door, she took one look at my face (covered in blood, nose broken) and gasped, “oh my God.”
Playing it back in my mind afterwards - which was something I did a lot - what struck me was that I really had no idea how I’d got there. Everything happened on autopilot.
Some deep, animal part of my brain had sized up the situation, identified the nearest safe haven, and got me there literally faster than I could think about it. My conscious mind had simply been brushed aside, as something that would only get in the way.
I didn’t know it then, but what saved me from things getting any worse that night was a little gland in my brain called the amygdala.
As it took in what was happening and recognised the danger I was in, it fired up my sympathetic nervous system and took me into fight-flight-freeze mode.
Even as I was frantically insisting that I didn’t have any spare change, my unconscious mind was lighting up emergency functions all over my body.
My heart rate was spiking. Adrenaline was coursing into my bloodstream. My muscles were tensing, my pupils dilating. Anything non-essential, like digestion, was put on pause.
Every single aspect of my metabolism was preparing to do one of three things: to fight, or flee, like my life depended on it - or failing that, to stay very, very still.
What I learned that night, apart from why you should cross the street rather than walk through gangs of kids at night, was that the amygdala can be amazingly good at keeping us alive when we’re in physical danger.
And there lies the problem.
Your amygdala on politics
Here’s the thing. Your amygdala doesn’t just react to gangs of kids attacking you at bus stops. It can also decide to trigger fight-flight-freeze in the face of anything else that it perceives as threatening.
Like… arguments with our partners. Train cancellations. Call centre queues. People on the internet who are wrong. News coverage of wildfires, or airstrikes, or famines, or riots, or the cost of living, or corruption, or government incompetence.
Never mind that there’s no immediate physical threat. Your rational mind has been brushed aside, remember?
And fight-flight-freeze doesn’t just trigger physical responses, either. It fires up all kinds of mental and emotional reactions too.
Rage or terror can descend over us like a mist.
We become less empathetic, more aggressive.
We focus on our individual self-interests, not the common good.
Or we lock into our in-groups and start ‘othering’ anyone we see as different from us.
All of which can be life-saving when you’re in immediate physical danger. But a lot less useful when the threat is something social or political or global; something you saw on the news, or that someone said on Twitter.
Last year, 91% of adults in the UK reported facing high or extreme levels of stress.
Things could get a lot worse over the next few years, given the worsening state of the world and all the political, economic, environmental, and social risks lying around like so much tinder.
And the problem with that is that fight-flight-freeze is emphatically not a good headspace for us to be in if we’re trying to navigate apocalyptic times together.
It’s not just that it makes us more selfish, aggressive and tribal right when we need to come together, or catastrophically worse at differentiating what’s real from what’s illusory when we’re already chest deep in misinformation and conspiracy theories.
It’s also about what happens to us when we’re in and out of fight-flight-freeze the whole time, so that it starts to become a chronic condition in our lives.
Too much of this, and we find ourselves in burnout: a state of mental, physical and emotional exhaustion in which we feel overwhelmed, helpless, defeated, or alone in the world.
Or compassion fatigue, where the constant stress and hyper-vigilance reduces our ability to feel, care about, or want to relieve other people’s suffering - and our natural kindness is replaced by anger, scepticism, cynicism, or intolerance.
Breakdown and breakthrough loops
The biggest risk of all here is of a vicious circle, where the worsening state of the world makes us feel anxious, depressed or threatened, which breeds prejudice, hostility and conflict, which then makes it even harder for us to improve the state of the world.
In my day job at Larger Us we call this a breakdown loop. And if you’re an authoritarian populist like Donald Trump or Nigel Farage then it’s absolute catnip, because it creates the perfect conditions for your divisive brand of politics to thrive.
But don’t fall into the trap of thinking that it’s only people who vote for Trump, Reform or the AFD who are vulnerable to this. We all are.
I saw this the whole time when I was running a campaign to try to stop Brexit. Remainers like me were every bit as vulnerable as Leavers to foaming with rage, or panicking that our entire way of life was under threat. Same story with Democrats in all of the last few US elections.
Nor is it just authoritarian populist political leaders who take their audiences into fight-flight-freeze. ‘Progressive’ campaigners are at it the whole time too - leading with images of destruction and suffering to get us to sign petitions or give £10 a month, or portraying all our opponents as inhuman psychopaths who must be stopped.
Fight-flight-freeze is ground zero for the toxic state of our politics, and it’s very much an equal opportunity affliction. None of us is immune. Everyone everywhere is freaking out. And so it is that something that starts in our private thoughts ripples out into the world, and helps to create the chaotic reality that we’re all inhabiting.
So something we think about a lot at Larger Us is whether it’s possible to reverse the polarity of the cycle - so that a vicious circle becomes a virtuous spiral, and a breakdown loop becomes a breakthrough loop. Like this:
Our power to choose
Meet Viktor Frankl - someone who knew more than most of us ever will about the horrors life can throw at you. He spent World War Two in Theresienstadt and then Auschwitz; his father, mother, brother and wife all died in the camps.
Yet his message is a fundamentally hopeful one. It concerns our power to choose how we respond to threats, both perceived and actual - even in the worst places on earth.
In his classic book Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl wrote that:
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
This isn’t just rhetoric. It’s hard neurological fact, and it has to do with which part of the brain we engage when we perceive a threat.
One option - the default - is the amygdala, with the effects that we’ve seen.
The other, though, is a completely different part of the brain: the pre-frontal cortex, or PFC.
Situated right at the front of our brains, the PFC is all about complex cognitive behaviour, decision making, and how we moderate our behaviour for social situations.
Where the amygdala triggers knee jerk responses, the PFC is far more considered.
Where the amygdala takes us into overwhelm, the PFC allows us to evaluate our emotions, and to respond reflectively, critically, empathetically and imaginatively.
And where the amygdala fires up fight-flight-freeze, the PFC is home base for the very different, altogether more prosocial threat response called tend-and-befriend.
This is the threat response that we often see after disasters, where people both tend to themselves and their immediate family groups, and befriend others to build collaborative networks of mutual self-help.
Just the kind of behaviour that we need during an apocalypse.
But crucially, it takes work to be able to overcome ‘amygdala hijack’. The amygdala’s survival instinct is deeply hard-wired. So easing it out of the driving seat and giving the PFC the chance to take the wheel takes presence of mind - literally.
First responders and soldiers train constantly to be able to do this, because they know that in the thick of an emergency or a firefight, panic and overwhelm can kill you.
Today though, it’s not just emergency workers and special forces who need to worry about this. Increasingly, all of us are at risk of panic, overwhelm, burnout and compassion fatigue. And we need to train for it too.
So what might such training involve?
I’ve had to face this question head on because - as my family will cheerfully confirm - I am really quite bad at this.
When things feel too chaotic to me, and especially if someone is making me feel guilty, I go rapidly to a place of total overwhelm in which I either become tetchy as hell, or start wallowing in catastrophising narratives about where my life has gone wrong.
But my family would also say (I hope) that I am so much better at managing this stuff than I was ten years ago. I’ll get more into the hows, whys and wherefores in a future post, but briefly, I think it comes down to three things:
Learning to untrigger in the heat of the moment - where there are tried and tested techniques to defuse rage, panic and overwhelm (which, thank goodness, I started to learn at a training course 10 years ago)
Learning to hold fast - the longer term job of building up our resilience, mental fortitude and personal agency, and having a ‘story of self’ that supports these things (Stoicism, which my brother Jules wrote a brilliant book about, is an absolute treasure house of techniques for this)
Learning to let go - the flipside of holding fast, which is basically about not sweating the small stuff and realising that ultimately, it’s all small stuff (which is where meditation and contemplative practices really come into their own)
In the end, it doesn’t really matter which techniques we use to overcome amygdala hijack and defuse fight-flight-freeze states. What does matter, though - more and more every day - is that we find the techniques that work for us, and practice them.
Not just for our individual wellbeing and to reduce the very real risk of burnout, given the growing pile of things that threaten to frazzle us.
But also for our collective good - because our mental and emotional states are the front line for our ability to take collective action, for whether we come together or fall apart, and for whether we head towards a breakdown or a breakthrough future.
Which leads us back to a question we’ve touched on here before: whose job is it to support us in learning these skills, given that they’re the work of a lifetime? Faith leaders? Educators? Psychologists? Community leaders? Everyone’s?
It could be any of the above, of course. But if we’re serious about shifting track decisively from breakdown to breakthrough, then figuring out a comprehensive answer to this question is an absolutely crucial step. I’ll set out some thoughts on how we do that in another post soon.
Links I liked
Aufgeschoben ist nicht aufgehoben: “to postpone an event is not to avert it”. That’s both a German saying and Yascha Mounk’s take on the election there. This is the German political establishment’s last chance to defuse the threat from the far right.
This from Hassan Damluji at Global Nation on why middle powers need to squad up and take a stand for global rules and norms like respecting sovereignty, fair trade, helping poor countries, and solving problems multilaterally. TLDR: rather than all skulking around trying to avoid the Eye of Sauron, we need a Fellowship of the Ring.
Sam Freedman has written much the best explainer I’ve seen on the origins and ideology of Muskworld.
More in Common has a new report out on ‘Progressive Activists’, the most politically engaged of the 7 segments that make up the UK. They’re young, educated, and well informed - and also stressed, lonely, sad and out of step with the rest of the country.
Speaking of progressive activists, I’m late to the gripping story of what happened in South Devon in the last UK election, where Britain’s first community-led primary led to the Conservatives’ first defeat in the constituency in a century. Even if political parties refuse to build alliances, their voters can still do it on the ground.