Your Brain Shatters Under Stress. Here’s How To Put The Pieces Back Together.
Fast danger, slow safety.
The Orchestra
The brain is the most complex thing in the known universe.
What makes it look “brainy” is the wrinkly outer layer called the cortex.
The cortex is an orchestra, a large, jazzy, jammy orchestra.
There are different instruments, the separate, specialized brain areas for each of your senses. Smell, taste, touch, sound, sight, balance, temperature, and others.
Other brain areas combine the senses, integrating individual instruments into entire sections of the orchestra. The Woodwinds, the brass, the percussion.
There’s a special part of the cortex called the prefrontal cortex or PFC, just behind your eyes and forehead. It’s the conductor.
The PFC (and other “high level” brain areas) are the most connected areas.
They monitor and send feedback to all other cortical areas, all at once.
Your “inner adult,” the calm, wise, smooth action-taking version of you, is enabled by your PFC.
(While other areas are involved in conducting, we’ll keep it simple by just referring to the PFC.)
The Melodies
The music of the orchestra is brain waves, electrical pulses sent in rhythms.
Brain cells (neurons), which look like a cross between worms and trees, send electrical pulses to other neurons. They communicate and synchronize in a group, deciding what songs to play together.
Zooming out, the groups are bigger, playing more complex songs. This is what you’d see in an EEG, a graph of brainwaves.
Fast, high frequency pulses are local. They don’t travel far.
Small groups of neurons send gamma (fast) frequency pulses to other nearby groups, a lively debate to decide what melodies they should play to groups farther away.
These melodies being sent far away travel in slower rhythms.
After gamma (fastest), the slower waves (in decreasing order) are beta, alpha, theta, delta, the “slow” wave group, and infraslow (“below slow”) waves.
All of these waves are present in the brain, almost all the time.
Shattering
With so much going on, conducting is difficult.
Every brain area wants to speak. The natural state of individual neurons in the brain is “ON.”
Left to their own devices, neurons would be constantly firing, which sometimes happens and is called an epileptic event.
Even in normal functioning, all brain networks are prone to repeat patterns they’ve repeated before.
The only way to create a new song with everyone playing together is through coordination by rhythms.
The PFC has to use slow waves to conduct a new piece of music.
In neutral and moderately challenging situations, the PFC is dominated by alpha and theta rhythms, pretty slow, good conditions for full awareness of the present moment.
During stress, however, the PFC speeds up. It sends signals to the autonomic nervous system to activate threat mode.
Threat mode is characterized by short term survival. Our heart rate increases, adrenaline pumps through our blood, and we do our best to get our body safe.
At this point, the PFC loses control, and the orchestra scatters.
All the brain networks are clamoring to let them do what they’ve done before, the automatic behaviors that have kept us alive in the past.
Subjectively, this feels like getting dragged around by our automatic thought loops.
Old regrets, “I should’ve…”
Habitual worries, “What if…?”
Extreme judgments, “I’m so…They’re so…”
These are basically shards of thought, old strategies to get us out of trouble as fast as possible, but not the most intelligent strategies for the present problem.
Better Solutions
Difficult situations that cause prolonged stress can’t be solved well with automatic survival strategies.
They need novel, nuanced solutions, the kind that require the whole brain working in concert to create.
This can’t happen in threat mode.
When threat mode is off, the PFC can slow down, regain control, and create the neural harmony necessary for us to turn stress-causing problems into anecdotes we can use to help others later.
The question then is, how do we turn off threat mode when we need long term solutions, not quick survival tactics?
The answer is: affective touch.
Gently rub certain areas of skin (scalp, shoulders and arms, back of the head and neck).
This activates nerves called c-fibers, which register pleasant touch and reduce the autonomic stress response.
As threat mode fades, the PFC regains control of the runaway orchestra and can create new songs, effective solutions.
Havening
Specifically, there is a technique called Havening.
It’s a cutting edge treatment to trauma. While still in early stages of research, the effects are immediate and obvious.
I’ve started using it in my coaching, and the results have been nothing short of amazing.
It not only reduces the threat response now, but retrains the brain for later.
When you can shut off your threat response quickly, the brain learns that what it thought was a threat, ended up not being a big deal.
There’s much more to say, to be said later, but let’s summarize first.
Whenever you’re feeling stress, and you think you have to solve a problem in order to get rid of the stress, consider that you might have it backwards.
In order to solve the problem, you need your whole brain playing a coordinated symphony.
The stress itself is keeping your brain fragmented.
Get yourself to a place of safety and brain wholeness the way you’d do so to your own infant, through soothing touch.
Your survival response fades, your inner adult awakens again, and your solutions are more intelligent.
