Amygdala Hijacks – Part 2

Last year, around this time of the year, I did a radio talk on VoARadio Network on a topic of  Quantum Physics of Belief – Emotions  and also followed up with a blog article in response to a listener question on Amygdala Hijacks. (You may want to click on the hyperlinks, to refresh your memory on those events.) This week, I thought it appropriate to extend this discussion to shed some more light on this topic. 

Let me illustrate a scenario to make it easy to understand and also set a suitable setting for this discussion. You have arranged a status meeting on a marketing campaign that you are leading. You have got a full agenda to cover so you get to the conference room a few minutes early to make sure the PowerPoint is ready. Some of your team members are already there, and they are obviously grumbling and moaning about something. You hear some of their mumblings, while they snarl and shake their heads. But, you need to get them focused on the meeting agenda, so you avoid getting into their conversation. Just as you are ready to start the meeting, a few more people show up and now you see even more snarling and hear even more derogatory remarks about the managers who are meeting in another conference room down the hall from where you are.

You know there is absolutely nothing you or the team can do to influence what’s happening down the hall, and spending time discussing it will just put your project behind. However, you also know the team is emotionally panicked by this threat, and you need to do something to get them to refocus on the project. What would you do?

So, you tell them that they have got fifteen minutes to talk about it, and start by saying you have no idea what’s being discussed down the hall, but lots of companies are moving to the cloud and the company needs to position itself to meet the challenges that are considered a real threat.

Give a 15 minute air time. Spending fifteen minutes on it won’t resolve anything, and those fifteen minutes of team time are precious to your project. You are not being cavalier with the team’s emotions but rather you are skillfully helping them process their fear.

You know that acknowledging a threat will make it less distracting than having it loom as a possibility. Our emotional system, the amygdala (section of the brain, see picture below) in particular, is designed to continuously scan our surroundings for potential threats and warn our conscious mind if one arises. It’s part of our survival instinct. We are always subconsciously looking for patterns that could warn us of danger. We may subconsciously hear someone say “quarterly sales are down” and suddenly our amygdala sends a warning that puts our body on red alert and tells our conscious mind that our job is in danger. If our conscious mind ignores or denies it, our emotional system keeps sounding the alarm. This keeps our amygdala active and makes it difficult to concentrate on anything else. You can imagine how vital this would be if you were hiking in Alaska and a Grizzly bear were approaching.

  

Not only does the amygdala warn us of possible danger, it also heavily influences our thinking. If there is a looming potential threat, our amygdala becomes more active and extra vigilant to determine if the threat is real. It can shift our entire brain into a withdrawal orientation, where all of our attention is focused on the threat. This can raise mental filters that bias subsequent information processing, causing us to look at the world through a filter that interprets ambiguous events as possible dangers. We see the managers walk into a meeting and we jump to the conclusion that they are talking about getting rid of our job.

Acknowledging a threat brings it into consciousness where it can be processed. If our conscious mind acknowledges the threat and either takes precautionary action or decides that none is needed, our amygdala can let up. It can stop scanning for the threat and the mental filters can be dropped. We can then concentrate on something else.

When you acknowledge something as a threat; it then becomes recognized in the consciousness of each person, rather than looming as a potential threat triggering their amygdala. You also give your team some time to determine if follow-up action is needed. The team, as well as each individual, can consciously decide how they are going to process this threat. They may decide to have a follow-up discussion to assess realistic alternatives or they may make a mental note to reconsider their personal career path. Whatever they decide in those fifteen minutes will ideally be enough to satisfy their emotional mind that the threat has been acknowledged and will be handled.

This doesn’t mean the threat is resolved in that fifteen minutes, but rather there is a plan in place to resolve it. This is one reason why solid issue and risk management in a team is so powerful. They tell our emotional systems that they don’t need to be constantly on duty scanning for the threat because we have a conscious process to deal with it.

If you had tried to squelch the conversation and get the team to focus on the project at hand, the team would have had difficulty moving past the fear. Their emotional systems would have kept surfacing it to get their conscious minds to pay attention. You shifted the fearful potential threat into a conscious thought that could be processed, which helped each person put their attention on the project at hand.

As we learn more from neuroscience about the incredible power of group emotions, we see reasons to adopt techniques beyond the ordinary. How are you dissipating the Amygdala hijacks in your daily life? I'd love to hear your stories (please use the comments section below.)

Namaste.

Quantum Physics of Belief - Emotional Hijacks

Following my radio talk on Quantum Physics of Belief – Emotions last Saturday on #BlogTalkRadio, a former coaching client of mine (who wishes to remain anonymous but, nevertheless permitted me to share his story) reminded me of his experience and posed a question on Amygdala Hijacks. I thought it appropriate to extend this discussion to shed some more light on this topic. BTW, the response for the radio talk was overwhelming. Thanks to all of my listeners and eMBC Blog readers for your continued support and helping to inspire me to write more.

Most of the books I read about the brain and emotional intelligence talk about an emotional or amygdala hijacking, which is what you see when the boss loses it and goes on a rant. It’s not pretty, and almost always makes the hijacker look pretty stupid. Amygdala hijack is a term coined by Dr Daniel Goleman in his 1996 book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ.

My good friend, Dr Joel Bomane from Sunny Southern France often talks about Amygdala in his weekly radio shows, ‘The Brain Odyssey’ series as part of the VoARadio Network on #BlogTalkRadio. According to Dr Bomane, the amygdala is the brain’s radar for threat. It is very handy when hunting for food: it triggers a survival response faster than you can say “hungry tiger.” The problem is that we no longer run into tigers, but instead encounter angry coworkers and bosses on the prowl. But the amygdala makes no difference between a threat to our survival and a threat to our ego. Same response: fight or flight. And for many of us, we don’t think it’s manly to turn and flee, so we engage in verbal jujitsu akin to World Heavy Weight Wrestling. But when in the grips of a hijack, the amygdala makes mistakes. It only receives a fraction of the data available.

The term amygdala hijack describes any situation in which a person responds inappropriately based on emotional rather than intellectual factors. The amygdala is the emotional center of the human brain and can create split-second responses when a person is threatened. An inappropriate emotional response to a perceived threat is thus called an amygdala hijack.

The amygdala is part of the brain for many of the higher vertebrates. It regulates the fight or flight response that is key to the survival mechanism for many animals, including humans and other primates. At the moment a threat is perceived, the amygdala can override the neocortex, the center of higher thinking, and initiate a violent response. In the wild or in the presence of actual physical threats, this can be a life-saving function. In ordinary day-to-day living, however, this amygdala hijack can inspire impulsive responses the person will later regret.

On some levels, the human brain does not distinguish between a genuine threat to life or health and a subjective threat, such as loss of job status. While the latter might not even result in a change of income, a person who values a job highly may respond to such a status change as if it were an actual threat. If he or she takes inappropriate action against a co-worker or supervisor, however, the result could be a demotion or even the loss of the job. This illustrates Goleman’s three-stage definition of the amygdala hijack: emotional reaction, inappropriate response, and later regret.

And in today’s workplaces, most of our dangers are symbolic, not physical threats. So we react in ways we often regret later.

Let me give you an example of an event that took place sometime ago with one of my coaching clients and this could vividly explain what we really mean by an Amygdala Hijack.

I was working with an executive who found himself flooded by his emotions and was pleased with himself for adopting a recovery strategy whereby he cut himself off from any emotional content. He was surprised when our coaching conversations explored the downsides of both behaviors and opened the door to a third way of behaving.

One day, my client was planning to work at home, in order to make a medical appointment in the morning and to avoid a two hour round-trip commute to be in the office for the afternoon. That noon, he received a call at home from one of his peers, another member of the executive committee, who said he had to come to work. The firm had to decide how to address employee concerns about leaving early due to weather risks from hurricane Gustav [August 2008 in Florida]. The situation was complicated because the management team in the parent office, located in another state, did not want their distribution operations disrupted and were insensitive to the weather potential and the employee concerns.

My client reacted strongly and rather rudely to his peer. He did not like to be told he had to come in and was acting out his indignation. He was not attuned to his peer or to the employees. To his credit, he caught himself when he remembered the principle that leaders are expected to lead by example and chided himself that he should not be asking others to do something he was not willing to do. He shared this with his peer and then went to the office, checking in on the various departments and being visible.

As we debriefed this event, it became clear that he had been triggered by being told “he had to.” He got flooded by his emotions, driven by his implicit memories of being told he had to do things. Once flooded, his only strategy to regain control was to go for a full tourniquet block on his emotions. While he prided himself on being able to “shed his emotions” and then make a principle-based decision, we discussed how much he lost by both his initial reaction and then by his secondary reaction. The initial reaction, blasting a peer with his emotional outburst, cost him relationship points with this peer. His secondary reaction, shedding all emotion, left him incapable of being empathic with his peer and left him devoid of any curiosity. My client described himself as being in a state of “brain lock.”

Another pathway would have been for my client to be aware of his emotions without acting out on them. This requires a certain detachment. He then could be curious about the context. It turns out that his peer was the only company officer on-site and that she was very uncomfortable with the decisions that needed to be made. He could have learned more about the issues, as she saw them. An empathic conversation, one that did not happen, could have built relationship and provided insights into alternative courses of action.

Following the pathway of keeping perspective and not acting out on emotions could have provided my client with access to other ways of creatively thinking about the situation. Leading by example is great, but other factors also come into play. Ironically, his emotional flooding left him starving for data.

This is a classic amygdala hijack. Dr Daniel Goleman, noted for his work on emotional intelligence, explains how the flood of hormones from the amygdala leads our brains to bypass the normal pathways for higher functioning and throws us into an escalating pattern, where we see things through our fight/flight/freeze lens. When this happens to us, this flood of stress-related hormones leaves us feeling like we have lost 20-30 IQ points. That is not something most of us can afford to do without!

Here are the five top amygdala triggers in the workplace, from Tony Schwartz’ book The Way We are Working Isn’t Working:

1.    Condescension and lack of respect

2.    Being treated unfairly

3.    Being Unappreciated

4.    Feeling that you are not being listened to or heard

5.    Being held to unrealistic deadlines

Especially in today’s climate of economic uncertainty, on the tail end of an ugly recession, there’s a lot of free-floating fear in the air. It doesn’t take much to trigger fear of family security, which is enough to get anybody seriously upset.

If you find yourself struggling with on-the-job stresses that are triggering either the emotional flooding or the emotional tourniquet responses, Goleman advises mindfulness training, such as meditation, to reduce the likelihood of an amygdala hijack. Meditation and similar exercises, such as tai chi, encourages a person to focus on his or her surroundings and process mental data in a calm state of mind. With practice, this kind of thinking will become second nature and can allow a person to retain a sense of calm focus even during crises. Here are some specific steps that one can incorporate in your training to minimize such Amygdala hijacks:

1.    Pay attention. Notice when you are in the middle of a hijack.

2.    Use deep breathing to gain time and space. This lets more oxygen into your brain and lets your rational brain begin to work.

3.    Use a mantra or self-talk, like “I’m okay; this isn’t a real threat. Give me a second to come out of it.”

4.    Ask for a few minutes, a time break, as in: “Let me get back to you on this.”

Hijacks can last a few seconds or a few minutes, but the sooner you break its spell, the better you’ll feel. You’ll learn you can keep in control without losing face.