“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”
-George Lucas-
Fear hijacks your brain. It takes over your ability to access free will and to make conscious choices about your actions and behaviors.
When you experience difficult or traumatic experiences in your life, especially on a chronic basis, your brain becomes wired with a sensitive default setting that can get stuck on, or easily triggered into, fear.
Ideally, you are designed to spend the majority of your life with your prefrontal cortex online and functioning consistently. This is the upper part of the brain located directly behind your forehead.
Prefrontal Cortex is the area of the brain responsible for all your higher brain functions. This includes empathy (the ability to connect to emotions), compassion (the ability to extend kindness toward self and others), creativity, innovation, focus, and discernment.
When you experience a triggering situation, your brain switches off the prefrontal cortex and you lose your ability to connect with that higher brain function.
Instead, you’re thrust into the primal survival center of the downstairs brain where the fight, flight, freeze or fawn response takes over. This reaction of the sympathetic nervous system is the reason why you run away, yell, get aggressive, have no response at all, suck up or engage in people pleasing behavior to get your way and keep yourself safe.
Once this process is engaged, your ability to think clearly and judge a situation fairly is severely compromised for a minimum of 15 minutes, often longer depending on the strength and severity of your emotional reaction.
So next time you feel yourself shifting mental gears or crossing the line into your survival mind, take a step back, take yourself to a calm environment and chill for at least 15-20 minutes before taking action to respond.
Want to learn how you can retrain your brain and take back control of your nervous system?
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