Did you know that your brain is not wired for joy and happiness, it is wired for survival? Our brains are perfectly designed to keep us alive and healthy in a primitive and wild environment. When lions jumped out at us from behind a baobab our brain’s number one priority in that moment was to get us across the savanna as fast as possible and up the nearest fig tree to safety. To do that it needed a highly sophisticated nervous system, one that could shift in an instant from cruising along admiring the view, digesting the wild yam you dug up that morning for breakfast, and smelling the lily’s, to instantaneously becoming a racing machine with all the body’s energy systems directed to supreme athleticism, to get across the savannah and up the nearest tree, the humans who could do this the best were the humans who survived, so that means they were your ancestors. The humans who couldn’t do this efficiently died out, their children didn’t make it, they became cat food.
What was important about this extreme change from relaxed and chilled-out to springing from the starting blocks like an Olympic gold medallist and sprinting across the savannah? First, you had to stay focussed on your goal, which was the top branches of a substantial tree. Your brain couldn’t afford any bandwidth being wasted on anything else so it shut down all possibility of any distraction that might slow you down. When you are running from a lion your brain doesn’t need you to be wondering which is the most aesthetically pleasing tree to climb, or what is on your to-do-list for the day, or whether you resolved the argument with your child that morning in an emotionally intelligent manner. All your beautiful human superpowers go offline, unavailable, things like memory, logic, reasoning, creativity, kindness, and compassion fly out the window, that is; your nice self leaves your body, and all you have access to at that moment is flight, fight, or freeze.
What this means to the modern human is that anything that your brain perceives as a threat, it responds as if it were a lion attack. So even if you are dealing with innocuous “threats”, like an argument with a friend, a car cutting in front of you, someone jumping the line at Starbucks, your brain reacts like it would to a lion and shuts down most of your intellectual resources and all you are left with to deal with that situation is attack, defend, and stonewall or shutdown, i.e. Super-bitch or Super-jerk.
Now, if you are aware of this, a brief space opens between your thoughts and gives you the opportunity to choose a different response. How many times, once you have calmed down, have you thought back to an argument and either thought, “I wish I’d said this or I wish I’d said that…”? but your brain was shut down so you had no access to your wisdom and intelligence, or, you might have thought, “I wish I hadn’t said this or that insult…”? because, at the time, your brain only had access to thoughts about attacking, defending, or shutting down.
Conflict at work, on the street, and at home is a huge source of stress these days and a major contributor to draining your body battery and leading you towards susceptibility to burnout. If you have this awareness, you can use it to choose a different response or at least to exit the situation before you say or do anything to damage your relationships. Once you have calmed down and the stress hormones are no longer coursing though your bloodstream, your brain will open up again and you will be able to come up with a perfectly good, emotionally intelligent response.