In my last post, I described how we often view situations in our lives as life or death despite the fact that our physical lives aren’t in any danger. The evolutionary-based instinctive response to this perception is the triggering of the survival instinct followed by the fight-or-flight reaction (freeze should also be in there, but for some reason, it never gets equal billing).
The fight-or-flight reaction has evolved over the eons to catalyze our minds and bodies in ways that will increase our chances of survival. Physical changes that occur in response to the fight-or-flight reaction include increased heart rate and respiration, a shot of adrenaline, dilation of the pupils, pale or flushed skin as blood flow is redirected to parts of the body that will be needed to survive, muscle tension, and a blunting of pain. Emotional changes include the experience of either fear or anger to motivate survival behavior. Psychological changes include narrowing of attention onto the perceived threat and a quickening of thought to accelerate decision making and action.
All of these changes were very effective when we lived on the Serengeti 250,000 years ago (when we first officially became Homo Sapiens). When confronted with an existential threat, we could either fight to overcome the threat, flee to distance ourselves from the threat, or freeze and hope we weren’t noticed by the threat. But neither fighting, fleeing, or freezing would likely help us “survive” in the concrete jungles or suburban savannahs of the 21st century.
Let me preface this discussion by clarifying what I mean by threatening in the modern world. As I noted in my last post, rarely in the developed world are our physical lives threatened requiring our survival instinct to be activated. At the same time, we regularly experience threats to other types of survival in our lives including threats to our self-identity, self-esteem, and goals. We humans haven’t evolved enough for our primitive brains to know the difference between threats to our physical lives and those to our psychological lives. As a result, we react in the same manner to both kinds of threats with the three Fs.
The Three Fs in the 21st Century
Let’s consider contemporary situations that we might perceive as threatening to our lives. In our education lives, poor grades, disappointing admissions test scores, and rejections from desired colleges would be threatening. In our professional lives, subpart performance evaluations, not getting promoted, and, especially, being fired are hugely threatening at different levels of our lives. In our social lives, conflicts with family and friends, romantic rejections or breakups, and loneliness can feel threatening to so many aspects of psychological and emotional lives.
Yet, can you imagine if you allowed your primitive brain to govern your reactions to these “threats” to your life (in quotes because they are not physical threats that your primitive brain was originally designed for).
Let’s examine how the three “Fs” would play out with, say, a breakup with someone you love. Not only would fighting affirm your former partner’s decision to end the relationship, but if the fighting got out of hand, it could lead to calling the police and criminal charges, which would be a real threat to your survival.
Now, how about fleeing? Yes, fleeing from the breakup and, in doing so, getting physical and emotional distance from the pain that it inflicted on you, could be a healthy response to a heartbreak. It could give you the space to allow yourself to grieve the loss and move on in your life. However, fleeing from romantic rejection often leads to not just the distancing from your former partner, but also flight from other more positive aspects of life including from work, friends, exercise, and healthy habits, as well as more extreme means of anesthetizing the heartbreak such as overeating and alcohol and drug use. In doing so, at a minimum, you remove yourself from other sources of meaning, satisfaction, and joy that might help buffer the pain of the breakup. At a maximum, you pay a significant cost to your psychological, emotional, and physical health and wellbeing.
Finally, will freezing help you with your heartbreak? The notion of freezing has two meanings for me. First, in the literal sense of staying in one place and not moving. Freezing will likely not prevent your ex-partner from noticing that you are still there. And a continuing unwillingness to leave the setting in which the breakup occurred, whether your former partner’s apartment or a streetside café, might lead to involvement by law enforcement. In either case, freezing won’t change the outcome of your ex-partner’s decision.
Let Your PFC be Your Guide
So, what can we evolved beings do when the least evolved part of our brain often plays such an outsized role in how we react to events that, though not physically life threatening, can be a threat to other important aspects of our lives? A better response would be to engage the more evolved part of our brain, namely our cerebral cortex and, more specifically, our pre-frontal cortex (PFC) which controls our ability to make deliberate choices.
I use the metaphor of “forks in the road” to describe our PFC’s capacity to look at the different roads we could take, be able to decipher which is the bad road (bad feeling, bad destination) and which is the good road (good feeling, good destination), and then choose the road that is most beneficial to us. As I hope I have demonstrated above, our fight-or-flight (or freeze) reactions clearly lack that capacity in the modern world and all most likely take you down a bad road.
But resisting millions of years of evolution is no small task. It requires us to marshal all of our evolved resources to prevent a knee-jerk instinctive reaction in response to a perceived threat (i.e., inhibit our amygdala and allow our PFC to take charge in these emotionally charged situations).
Once our PFC is engaged, we are then able to consider the different “roads” (i.e., choices) we have available to us, weigh their pros and cons, compare their immediate and long-term benefits and costs, and then to choose the best option for our given circumstances.
In the case of the romantic breakup, letting your PFC be your guide would likely lead you to a much better, though no less painful, outcome. After being told “It’s over,” you would probably feel a rush of emotions as your limbic system processes the unfortunate news and prepares to react to this threat to your “survival. However, your PFC would intervene and stop your amygdala from dictating a reflexive response. Instead, you would express your sadness, wish your now-ex-partner the best, and quietly leave. When you get back to your home, your PFC can switch into “monitoring” mode. In turn, your amygdala can take over, enabling you to fully process your emotions associated with the breakup and allowing you to grieve. At the same time, your PFC has to be ever vigilant in the background to ensure that your limbic system doesn’t attempt to trigger one of the three Fs and cause more problems in the future.
