Threat Brain
Is your threat brain harming your relationships? Oxford Psychologist Nelisha Wickremasignhe says many of us spend too much time living in a state of ‘threat brain’, when we are in survival mode and we react, rather than respond to situations that make us stressed, upset, angry or nervous. Left uncontrolled, she says, it is the cause of many relationship breakdowns and unhappiness. Here’s all you need to know.
Many of us deal with the problems and challenges of life by trying to get other people to fix them for us. In many ways this is an understandable response. When we feel alone, insecure or vulnerable, being with other people can help us feel better. But it also means that we are often pinning our hopes on others and expecting too much from them.
The difference between a healthy and unhealthy friendship or relationship lies in our motivation. When our threat brain emotions are dominant, our relationships with others are driven by fear and the need to be valued, loved or looked after. However, when our safe brain emotions are active, we are motivated to nurture mutual growth in our relationships through compassion, openness and trust. Learning to stimulate our safe brain – and calm our threat brain – helps us find the most effective ways to deal with the challenges of being with others at home and at work.
What is threat brain?
Threat brain is our oldest emotion system and it enables us to recognise and respond to danger. As we evolved over many millions of years, other emotion systems developed: our drive brain emotion system motivates us to seek out pleasurable and rewarding experiences and our safe brain emotion system motivates us to rest, recover, and form loving relationships with others. We need all three systems working together to balance and regulate each other. Unfortunately, many of us get caught in unhelpful or destructive habits (especially when we are with others) because our emotion systems are out of balance. Usually the cause is an overactive threat brain.
How to spot an overactive threat brain in your relationships
Our basic ‘animal’ fight-flee-freeze response has evolved into three complex relational patterns. These patterns or threat brain habits come into play when we are under stress and each of us tends to have a particular habit, usually learned in childhood, which has become our preferred way of dealing with others when we feel fearful, anxious or in danger. The three habits are:
Moving against other people – this represents our ‘fight’ response and we see it when our reaction to others is controlling, domineering, argumentative and aggressive.
Moving away from other people – this represents our ‘flee’ response and we see it when we become disengaged, avoidant and isolate ourselves from others.
Moving towards other people – this represents our ‘freeze’ response which shows up in highly compliant, ‘people-pleasing’, submissive, dependent behaviours.
Underneath our habitual response the other patterns are still available, and we may resort to them when our primary response is not working. So, for example, a submissive, moving towards response can sometimes suddenly turn in to an aggressive, demanding and rejecting response if we feel that our people-pleasing efforts are unappreciated, and others are not responding to us and making us feel good in the way they think they should. We call this very common ‘swing’ the passive-aggressive tendency and it is another sign we are caught in threat brain.
These three patterns of relating to others can be healthy when we are not in threat. Moving against can be confident, assertive and proactive. Moving away can be independent, self-sufficient and impartial and moving towards can be collaborative, compassionate and adaptable. However, when our threat brain is overactive, our bodies become flooded with a cocktail of stress hormones and chemicals that shut down our ability to think clearly or moderate our behaviour. When this happens, we believe others are more hostile, untrustworthy and dangerous than they really are. Threat brain limits our ability to see the whole picture and takes a very closed, ‘better safe than sorry’ approach to life, which stops us seeking new experiences, learning from them and maturing.
Threat brain and the pandemic
Over the last eighteen months all of us have experienced an unusually high level of threat due to the pandemic itself and the implications of lockdown, isolation and major changes in the way we live. Whether we are aware of our responses or not, our bodies will have detected and responded to these threats. Physically (because of the virus), psychologically and socially (because of distancing and isolating) our relationships have become problematic in a way that our threat brain is highly sensitive to. For many of us, lockdown has disrupted our intimate relationships, made us fearful of returning to old routines and instilled a deep feeling of uncertainty and mistrust in us. Just being – and not being – with others has activated our threat brain response.
Luckily we don’t have to rely on our threat brain to get us through life because, in the course of our evolution, we have developed safe brain and drive brain emotions which support our newest brain centre (the pre-frontal cortex) to come up with more accurate and effective insights and solutions than fighting, fleeing and freezing in our relationships.
How safe brain revives and restores relationships
Our safe brain emotions release feel-good hormones and chemicals which make us feel calm and relaxed. The best known is oxytocin, sometimes called the love or ‘bonding’ hormone. When our safe brain is active, we sleep better, think about people and situations with more clarity, are less likely to fall into addictive behaviours and less prone to exhaustion and illness. Safe brain supports our immune system and enhances our concentration by regulating stress in our bodies.
Five top tips to stimulate your safe brain
Pay more attention to your body and how it reacts to things. Notice when people and situations trigger threat in you. If you notice these reactions – for example, when your breathing changes or when you feel angry or panicky – you are less likely to be caught in those threat brain habits I described earlier.
Use your breath to control the physical symptoms of threat brain. If you pay attention to your breathing when you are anxious, you will probably notice that it is ‘shallow’ (high up in the chest) and that you often hold your breath. This ‘short, sharp’ breathing is appropriate when we are in danger as it helps us stay hyper-alert, but rhythmic breathing helps us to reduce stress by ensuring regular and continuous air flow at a steady pace. Start by taking a few regular breaths in your normal way. Then alter the rhythm so you breathe in for the same number of counts as you breathe out (count them slowly in your head). For many people, five breaths in and five breaths out works best.
Brain scans show that the more self-critical you are the more you trigger your threat brain and that people who are self-compassionate experience safe brain states more often. So, practise talking to yourself kindly and find at least one thing every day that you appreciate about yourself. If this is difficult, imagine that you are talking to a friend who is having a difficult time. Can you be as kind to yourself as you would to your friend?
Practise self-compassion by reminding yourself that making mistakes, failing, feeling inadequate and uncertain are shared, and inevitable, human experiences. When we understand this, we stop taking our faults and problems so seriously or personally. After all, we see our friends and family being thoughtless, sulking, getting into arguments and other relationship difficulties often enough – why should we be perfect.
Develop a mindful approach to life which means not getting caught up in the extremes of our emotions and experiences – be they joyful or painful. Do this by simply saying to yourself ‘I notice that I am anxious/excited/angry. What do I need to do right now to soothe myself?’ It may be that just stepping outside or paying attention to your breathing or talking to yourself kindly can interrupt a familiar threat brain pattern.
Nelisha Wickremasinghe is a Psychologist, Associate Fellow, Oxford University and author of Being with Others: Curses, spells and scintillation (Triarchy Press), out no, amazon.co.uk.