When your best defence does more harm than good 😱

...and how to make it work for you.

When you have worrying thoughts, it’s your brain trying to protect you, but the impact it has can be ironically damaging.

So why is your brain trying to help you by cluttering your head with worrisome thoughts?

Well, it goes back tens of thousands of years when our ancestors lived in caves, and those who survived did so by being aware of threats and acting quickly.

The limbic system - or lizard brain - is really helpful when it comes to keeping us alert of any threats. In the stone age, it would keep you alive by activating the fight, flight or freeze response when you heard a dangerous animal nearby. The amygdala kicks in and stimulates the release of adrenaline so you could run away fast, or to give you the best chance of winning a fight with the animal. 

Back then, your brain's ability to sense danger and react this way, was literally what would keep you alive. You’d use the adrenaline to fight or flee, and when the threat was over your stress levels would return to normal, and you’d live another day. 

For most of us these days, there aren’t many dangerous animals lurking in the shadows (although my youngest child does like to jump out from behind the sofa when I come home which can have a similar effect 🤣). The trouble is that we experience fear in so many other ways now.

How many of these situations have you experienced in the past month? Fear of failure, fear of losing your job, fear of not being good enough, fear of rejection, fear of conflict, fear of not being noticed, fear of being noticed…the list goes on. 

Any of these fears can make the brain feel it’s a dangerous situation and trigger the release of hormones so we’re ready to fight, freeze or flee. But there’s often no actual challenge that needs us to be pumping adrenaline through our veins - no wolf waiting to attack us - so instead we have an increased heart rate and blood pressure, with nowhere to direct this energy. If the danger is in our head, it’s a fight that we’re not able to have, and we’re not able to flee from the thoughts. This can re-stimulate the hormones and before we know it we’re pumping more stress hormones through our body. 

The twisted irony is that the increased levels and continuous stream of stress hormones that’s meant to protect us, is causing us more harm than good nowadays. 

So when this happens, remember that it’s perfectly normal to feel like this, and your mind is just trying to protect you. That doesn’t mean you need to continue feeling worried though, and there are things you can do to reduce the number of occasions it happens and how much of an issue it causes. 

One thing you can do is ‘press pause’ which you can read more about here, and which we’ll talk about more next time…