It was implied in our vows that my husband would handle all things spider related. I take our vows very seriously and I insist that he do so as well. We all have our “thing” and mine is spiders.
I remember traveling down the Hiwassee river in a funyak. They are somehow a mix of a canoe, kayak and raft. You sit in them like a kayak with your legs out straight in front of you and you paddle them. Google it, it’s a thing. I was happily drifting along when suddenly a spider the size of San Francisco dropped out of a tree and onto my legs. I somehow managed to use that paddle like a pole vault and, from a sitting position, launch myself out of that funyak. I have my amygdala to thank for that. It saved my life that day.
As a matter of fact, that’s it’s job. Your amygdala is a part of your brain that is located just above the brain stem. It formed soon after your brain stem formed and is a primal part of your brain responsible for the fight/flight/freeze response. In newborns, it’s the part of the brain that helps them get their needs met. If there’s something in their world that doesn’t feel quite right, their amygdala fires and they cry. Newborns don’t have the ability to reason that you’re making the bottle and probably intend to feed them soon. They just react to the fact that they’re hungry and they cry.
As we grow up and have the ability to meet our own needs and our brains become more developed, the amygdala becomes more specialized. It responds to things that are considered a threat. And when we are in dangerous situations, our amygdala fires to let our body’s know that we are under attack and it’s time to spring into action. It responds as if you’re being chased by a bear. So, any time we experience a situation in which we’ve experienced considerable distress, our brain and our body stores up all kinds of information about the environment so it can look for signs of this danger in the future. This is where things can begin to get complicated.
Let’s say that we take another funyak trip down the Hiwassee. As I’m sitting there in the funyak, holding my paddle, the sights, sounds and smells of the Hiwasee around me, I might notice that my heart starts pounding a bit. I might experience muscle tension and feel antsy. My body has begun to anticipate danger and my amygdala is responding. It’s preparing me for battle on a sunny, calm afternoon, not a spider in sight.
Maybe for you it’s not spiders. Maybe your girlfriend broke up with you in the coffee shop around the corner. Now, every time you walk in there, you get a little queasy and want to bolt. Or maybe you had a car accident in a particular intersection and your chest gets tight and you speed up a little every time you drive through it.
Often, the more traumatic the incident, or the more out of control we felt, the stronger the response in our bodies later on. This can become problematic when our bodies are responding as if they’re being chased by a bear and there’s no bear. Because they are designed to protect us, when they pick up on those cues from our environment, they respond as if the bear is back. So, what do we do about it?
Often, we try to address our anxiety by fussing at it. It doesn’t feel like we’re supposed to be scared, so we try to fuss ourselves out of it. We use logic and reasoning and reprimand. But your amygdala doesn’t speak that language. It’s trying to keep you safe. When that spider dropped in my lap, that was an immediate threat and my body responded to my amygdala’s prompting without the need for logic or reasoning. That is amazing! But also sometimes inconvenient when what our amygdala perceives as a threat is not an actual bear (or spider.)
When a newborn is crying, how do we reassure them? We pick them up (touch), we hold them close (touch and smell), we talk to them in a soothing tone (hearing), we feed them (taste), we smile at them and let them see our calm faces (sight), etc. We help them feel safe by using the five senses. And that’s how we reach our amygdala. We use our five senses to ground us and help our amygdala know that we’re safe. We speak to ourselves in a calm tone of voice. We look for things in our environment that remind us that we are safe. It can help to pop a peppermint in to help ground you into the present where you’re safe. We look around us to see the things in our environment that tell us we’re safe and to see that there’s no bear.
It can also help to do things like take a deep breath. I could do a whole post on your vagus nerve, but for today I’ll just say that, when we take a big deep breath and release it, we can often immediately begin to feel a little more calm.
This is an overly simplified way to explain it, but once you calm your body down a little and your amygdala begins to notice, it’s able to hear from the logic and reasoning part of your brain again. But first, it needs to know that there’s no bear.
So, try it! Next time you notice your body telling you that you don’t feel safe (pounding heart, hard to breath, muscle tension, etc.) try using your five senses to calm your body down and help your amygdala stop firing.
