The Amygdala Hijack and Anxiety Management
All of us experience fear and worry, but what if this is a regular occurrence? What if otherwise straightforward decisions become plagued with overthinking and needless worry?
Anxiety disorders are difficult to handle because they involve a primal part of our brain whose sole purpose is to motivate us to not do something — making the thoughts invasive and feelings, uncomfortable.
Once a key part of our survival, our brains evolved in a way that supported anxiety when it arose; to take the power away from our free thought and into an automatic and reactive state that has us acting instinctively on our anxiety.
Think of a time when you’ve acted out of fear only to regret your decision later as the anxiety subdued. How your rational thinking can quickly turn irrational and all logic seems to leave the room.
This process is called the “Amygdala Hijack” penned by Daniel Goleman in his 1996 book, “Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ”. During a hijack, our primal, emotionally driven limbic system overrides our ability to think logically during fearful and high-stress situations.
The Amygdala Hijack
Suppose you are walking through a forest only to spot a wild Bear in the distance. At first, it doesn’t notice you but as you take another step, it catches your eye. Suddenly your heart begins to race, your eyes dilate and your mind is flooded with thoughts urging you to run away.
As if on auto-pilot, you respond immediately and flee in the opposite direction to safety; feeling dazed and breathless as the adrenaline that flowed through your body relinquishes its hold on you. What just happened? For a moment, you had little control, or thought, about anything other than your need to run. Your mind was hijacked.
In moments where our wellbeing is under threat, the primal part of our brain that houses our Amygdalae (the two almond-shaped Nuclei that govern our fear responses) is able to take control. Like a passenger grabbing hold of the wheel, we lose control over where our anxiety is driving us.
In terms of our ancestors, this was an incredibly valuable tool. Where danger was imminent, our brains had to ensure we responded urgently to threats (like that of a hungry predator) in order to increase our chance of survival. To achieve this, our primal brain is able to override our slower pre-frontal cortex (which governs rational thinking), to stop us from critically thinking as this would delay our reactions. In this, we act strictly based on our anxiety. After all, time is precious when danger is present.
Whilst important to early humans on Earth, physical threats like the one described above are now few and far between to most of us in modern times. Our Amygdala, however, has yet to lose the ability to hijack our awareness.
An inability to stop this hijacking can result in maladaptive behaviors that hinder our wellbeing if left unnoticed.
The Emotional Tole of The 21st Century
Our minds can’t distinguish between physical and emotional threats. As emotional creatures with studies showing that emotional pain occurs in the same brain areas as physical pain, our Amygdala can override our senses in response to emotional threats — not just physical ones.
Unfortunately, this is an issue in our current climate, where the potential for emotional stress is everywhere. From friends to work, to relationships, to social media, and the negative bias of the news, the potential for threats to our emotional wellbeing is all around us. Not only this but our PERCEPTION — that can be rooted in limiting beliefs and mental disorders — can skew our experiences into threatening ones even IF there are no real threats present.
Emotional Triggers and The Amygdala Hijack
Maybe you suffer from low self-worth and whilst dating you notice your love interest has read your message and not replied. There may be several reasons for this but your lack of self-worth and the anxiety disorder you suffer from turn the scenario, that otherwise could be innocent, into one where your emotional wellbeing is potentially under threat.
As our brains fail to distinguish between emotional and physical threats, your Amygdala is able to hijack your senses JUST as it would in the Bear scenario. Furthermore, maybe your love interest starts distancing himself. You’ve only been on a few dates and it shouldn’t bother you that much but now you find yourself engaging in chase behaviors.
You begin to reach out even though you know you shouldn’t out of FEAR that in them rejecting you, your beliefs of low self-worth will be confirmed. Just as your primal brain motivates you to run away from the Bear, so too does it drive you to reach out in the hopes that your emotional wellbeing is restored if they reciprocate your feelings.
After reaching out and soothing your anxiety, you begin to realize you reacted irrationally. If someone is unresponsive to you, that says more about them than it does of you. You don’t want someone who doesn’t want you, so why are you chasing? Because your anxiety lacks rationality and in times where you feel threatened, even emotionally, your prefrontal cortex is overridden. As a result, you lack logic and your irrational anxiety wins.
The problem with this sort of reaction is not only that it can be highly irrational, but that the problem is never solved. Our primal brains work on the short-term emotional repair. It doesn’t care that you’ll feel shameful for overriding your boundaries after you’ve sent the text, it simply wants you to feel better RIGHT NOW. This method of living can wreak havoc in your life if left unchecked.
It’s the same principle as someone with social anxiety avoiding social settings. The anxiety motivates you to avoid communication out of fear of judgment but does that truly solve the problem? No — in fact, it reinforces it. You still have anxiety around communication when the anxiety subsides, only your brain now thinks this is how you should act under those circumstances now.
It is a problem that we MUST bring awareness to.
Maneuvering The Amygdala Hijack
The key to out-thinking the unthinking Amygdala hijack lies in the development of our emotional intelligence. We can’t predict when we’re going to be triggered or when a hijack may occur but what we do have control over is our reactions in light of our triggers. Do we react instinctively — to relieve our discomfort, or do we intentionally place distance between ourselves and our anxious thoughts?
Awareness is essential for us to achieve the above. After all, without it, we have no hopes of stopping a hijack if unaware of its manifestation. The ability for us to observe our thoughts without judgment — a technique that you can develop through meditation — is one of the most essential skills you can develop in life.
On top of this, anxiety relief skills such as reframing negative thoughts, calming your nervous system through breathwork techniques, and stepping away from the triggering situation will help ease real-time discomfort so that you don’t feel compelled to search for quick fixes as a means to feel better.
Essentially, all of this is aimed at giving us time to assess and make proper judgments in regard to our anxiety. On a neurological level, it’s allowing our pre-frontal cortex -which naturally lags behind- to catch up to our current predicament in order for us to make less irrational, anxiety-driven choices, and more logical ones that will aid us in the long term.
As Goleman himself states;
“one key marital competence is for partners to learn to soothe their own distressed feelings…nothing gets resolved positively when husband or wife is in the midst of an emotional hijacking. “ — Daniel Goleman
Daniel Goleman writes of this extensively in his book “Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ” and I urge anyone who has trouble with anxiety to check it out.
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