Your Brain on Crisis and What You Can Do
What happens to your brain when you are stressed out or in crisis-mode? A lot actually. Stress, such as you may be experiencing now coping with the COVID-19 pandemic, has a large impact on our brain’s ability to function. You may notice it is harder to: concentrate, think of alternative strategies or options while you are problem solving, learn anything new, or remember something. When faced with a stressful situation, our nervous system reacts. Let’s take a closer look at this.
Stressful situation happens. You are in it and impacted by it. Your sympathetic nervous system gets going. Your brain is taken over by the amygdala and the survival center. The sole focus of your brain now becomes survival. And a cascade of reactions then occurs. In your brain, the prefrontal cortex (the part of your brain directly behind your forehead that is in charge of things such as executive functioning including problem solving and abstract thinking) gets switched off. You cannot take in new information related to anything other than survival (there goes learning). The parts of your brain in charge of memory formation are impacted, too. You cannot concentrate on anything other than survival. Your brain’s complete and total attention is on keeping you alive. It triggers the release of neurotransmitters and causes the endocrine system to release stress hormones such as cortisol.
As we branch out along the nervous system, let’s visit stress’s impacts on the rest of our body. Our peripheral vision narrows until we are only focusing on what is in front of us (this mirrors what our thought patterns are like). Our blood flow begins to shift to vital organs only (cold hands and feet). We may feel like we have to go to the bathroom as our body triggers a need to empty itself and our muscles tense as our body prepares itself for flight or fight.
In short, your brain on crisis is 100% completely and totally focused on survival to the exclusion of everything else. So, what can you do?
A lot, actually. The first thing to remember is that as soon as you notice this happening, jump into the use of coping skills to help re-regulate and keep the connection between your survival center and your thinking center (pre-frontal cortex) turned on. This activates the parasympathetic nervous system to begin calming things down. Breathing slowly and fully, and bringing your thought attention onto how this is experienced in your body is a very effective tool. It may take a few minutes of using a coping skill for it to have an impact, so don’t give up on the skill right away!
Now, focus on expanding your peripheral vision. Notice that you are only looking at what is in front of you. Coach your eyesight to look out to the sides and see how far you can see. What are the things you notice “out of the corner of your eye,” so to speak? This gives your brain the message that you are not in immediate danger and that it is safe for you to calm down.
Continuing on towards calm, we allow our body to move or shake. Sometimes people try to turn off the shaking their body is naturally wanting to do. It is actually better to allow your body to shiver or shake, or to stand up and shake-it-off as this is what your body is wanting to do naturally. Moving rhythmically, such as rocking side to side or walking slowing around in a circle, can help bring your body back to calm by listening to its urge to move and doing so in a slow and steady way. Slow is the name of the game for getting yourself back to calm.
Now that you’ve slowed your body down and started to slow your brain down, the next piece to get you back to calm is to slow your thinking down. Take a deep breath. You can do this. Focus your thoughts on the things that you can do, the things that you can control. The things that you can control may be small but they are there. Sometimes all we can control is our body, but this is something. Chances are right now there are a few more things that you can do than just breathe. (If all you can do right now is focus on breathing, that’s okay- do that!) There may not be immediate answers to pressing questions. And some of your pressing questions may be pretty large. Bring your attention onto what you can control, and do something about that. As much as you can- breathe, put one foot in front of the other, focus your thinking on the things that you have the ability to control, and remind yourself that the other questions you have will have answers to them soon. We are all in this together. And we will get through this by sticking together.