How to stop your lizard from falling into the minefield
It’s 11pm, it’s dark, the lights are all out in the house except for one. Every 5 seconds my phone lights up and buzzes on the night stand next to my bed. Bzzz. Bzzz.
“Maybe that was the last one?”
Bzzz. Bzzz.
“It’s okay, this isn’t important.”
Bzzz. Bzzz.
“Maybe if I write back and say I’ll take care of it it will stop.”
Bzzz. Bzzz.
I open my eyes and see a soft glow peering through the half-closed blinds of the bedroom window. It’s the moon.
I look up at the moon. It amazes me that this moon is the same moon that you look at. It’s the same moon that Cleopatra looked at. It’s the same moon that Plato looked at. It’s the same moon that Kennedy and Gorbachev, Earhart and Lindbergh, Alexander and the Buddha looked at.
I begin to wonder if the great Marcus Aurelias, the emperor of Rome from 161–180 AD, looked up at this moon and felt as much as stress as I do right now.
I’m sure he did.
After all he was called to be emperor at the beginning of the decline of the Roman empire.
The actual fear that we both experienced, the fear that all human beings experience, isn’t as interesting as the causes of that fear.
We can agree that Marcus had some legitimate things to worry about. He needed to deal with wars with the Parthian Empire, barbaric tribes raiding and murdering his people, the rise of a new religion called Christianity, and the Antonine Plague that was killing even more people.
Clearly my problems are smaller.
But is the fear and my reaction to it any different?
Bzzz. Bzzz.
My phone is buzzing because there’s a project that needs to go live on the company website tomorrow that has some minor problems.
The problems aren’t big, and they’re not permanent. It’s a digital project, so we can fix the problems in a matter of a few hours and nothing catastrophic will happen. Certainly no one will die because of it.
So why is my perception of this fear the same as Marcus?
The Lizard Brain
The lizard brain is a physical part of your brain, the pre-historic lump near the brain stem that is responsible for fear and rage and reproductive drive. It’s an ancient brain. One that is virtually identical in both you and I (and Marcus).
The lizard brain has one mission, to keep us alive, and 3 modes:
- Should I run from it?
2. Should I fight it?
3. Should I mate with it?
Modern societies have done a good job (for the most part) with teaching us how to tame the 2nd and the 3rd modes of the lizard brain. In most situations we can control our desire to fight and our desire to mate.
But it’s the 1st mode that I think we suffer from the most.
Fear.
In the developed parts of the world, we no longer have to be afraid that we will die if we ignore our fears.
But we are afraid anyway.
Our lizard brain is incredibly strong. It can hijack our logic in a matter of seconds and draw conclusions that, if you were to explain them to a child, would seem ridiculous.
But to us they seem rational.
Take the scenario above, for instance. This is something that happens weekly with nearly every single person I work with here in Silicon Valley. There is a small crisis, it’s both reversible and not life-threatening, but our lizard brain blows it up into a huge life-or-death scenario.
Here is how the lizard brain does this:
Small problem with project → Answer it or your boss will be upset → If your boss is upset you’ll be in trouble → If you get in trouble you’ll be talked to → If you’re talked to you could lose your job → If you lose your job you will need to find a new job → If you can’t find a new job you’ll run out of money → If you run out of money you’ll end up homeless → If you end up homeless you could be attacked at night → If you fight back you could be stabbed → If you are stabbed you will die → Fix the small problem.
Obviously sitting in the safety of our phone or computer screen and reading this we think it’s a ridiculous train of thought. But, what we don’t realize is that under our logical brain the lizard brain is working this scenario.
It renders this scenario without us being aware of it, and it does this because it’s been trained from thousands of years of evolution and from dozens of years of experience.
But, these scenarios haven’t just been placed there by accident or inherited.
This was taught to us.
Little by little over our childhoods our parents told us, “Be careful! Don’t go there or you could fall! Don’t touch that it can make you sick! Don’t talk to strangers! Work hard in school or you won’t go to college! Don’t talk back, it’s not polite!”
All these don’ts turn into a mental minefield of fear. We’re not necessarily afraid of what is actually happening, we’re afraid of what might happen.
The mines are placed underground in our subconscious. We can’t see them, but we know we shouldn’t walk near them.
Re-graphing our operating system
I hate to say this, but there isn’t a “quick-and-easy 30-minute” way to reverse this way of thinking. It’s programmed deep into us and the only way to re-program ourselves is by doing it one line of code at a time, one experience at a time.
One way I’ve been thinking about this recently is in the form of a pie graph. In this graph the lizard brain is in charge of survival and our modern brain is in charge of improving our quality of life.
For most of human history the graph has looked something like this:
My guess is that in modern history (the last 100 years) the graph has shifted to this:
Not much has changed in our mental model. The lizard brain still dominates and we’re still living on survival instincts.
Which is fine. There’s nothing wrong with living a long life to a ripe age of 90 and passing your flame on to your children.
But if you’ve read any of my previous writing, you know that I’m not really a fan of a “fine” life.
I want a vibrant life.
I want a bright, high-contrast, high-excitement life.
I want my chart to be 90% quality and only 10% survival.
Of course, I’m nowhere near that percentage. Although I do think some people are (Richard Branson and Tony Robbins perhaps?)
My lizard brain is no exception and it still rules me like everyone else.
Which is why it’s 11pm and I’m sweating.
My heart is beating harder than it should be.
I’m definitely not asleep, and I’m definitely not happy.
But I’m not picking up my phone.
Re-programming one line at a time.
What is your pie chart like?
Every year on my birthday I take a survey of how my life has developed. Did I let myself down? Did I impress myself? Did I live in a way I would be proud of myself?
What I’ve started doing recently is drawing my pie chart as I see it so far. That way every year I can look and see whether I’m moving in the right direction or if I’ve let my lizard brain take back some of the territory.
So here is my pie chart for 2018:
What would you say your chart looks like? Feel free to drop a response in the comments below and I’d love to hear any tips or strategies that have helped you uncover a few of those landmines.
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