Sitting in the teahouse this morning, I was immersed in re-reading Susan Cain’s excellent book Quiet. She was pointing to research that suggests that the underlying fears that we’ve experienced don’t ever go away completely. We can work to de-sensitise our reaction to these fears and the pre-frontal cortex can then help to suppress them, but the amygdala faithfully remembers them over time.
In moments of stress, when the pre-frontal cortex is busy on other tasks, our suppressed fears can surface again.
I view stress as an accumulation of too many pressures, like having five juggling balls in the air when you’ve only mastered juggling three… it’s inevitable that they will all end up on the floor. To function effectively, we need to deliberately park a couple of pressures, or juggling balls, when we’re trying to perform at our best.
This is important in our day to day lives, but doubly important for those of us who have experienced, for example, stage fright when faced with a daunting audience. Reducing the non-essential pressures allows the cortex sufficient bandwidth to suppress the underlying fear, which then allows us to excel… in this case in spite of the sea of faces seemingly ready to devour us.
This all seems to make sense from an evolutionary perspective… I’m guessing that it’s the amygdala which alerts us when things are out of the ordinary, like creaky floorboards or alarms of various kinds, irrespective of whether we are totally immersed in some task or even fast asleep.
So immersed was I in this topic that I had run five minutes down the road before I realised that I had forgotten my door key… thank goodness that we’re both homeworkers!
The run itself was similar to all my other recent ones… more adventurous than the running machine, but not by much. This is not to say that it was not enjoyable… I love allowing my mind to roam across the landscape of houses, cars, people etc that I encounter.
I also love it when the amygdala is obvious in kicking in… in this case to duck me underneath a bramble that was hanging across the pavement, unseen until the very last moment because i was so busy thinking about other stuff!
Just under 2 miles in just under 20 minutes & managed to catch Kim between virtual meetings so didn’t have to wait on the doorstep too long.
