Welcome back to the Insight Framework. Today’s lesson is on flooding. Not the water in your basement kind…the flip your sh*t kind.
There are lots of different kinds of ways our brains flip out and I wanted to give you some insight into the gremlins wreaking havoc in your brain, causing you so much trouble!
Firstly, let’s remember that in order for our brains to flip out, they have to have some stimuli. Something sends us over the brink. That something could be lots of different things, so let’s first start with a review of how our brains get input.
We have different systems for gathering input from our environment. They include our 5 senses, first and foremost, sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell. Now, there are a couple of others that you might be less familiar with, like our proprioceptive system, which measures our position in space relative to our environment, our vestibular system, which measures movement and our interoceptive system, which measures stimuli from our inner body, like our stomachs.
What’s even harder to conceptualize is that for each of these systems, we might be overly sensitive or less sensitive to the inputs. Both extremes can create problems. Let’s look at each system in order.
Your visual system includes everything you see around you. In fact, eighty percent of the information we gather from our environment is visual. If we struggle with this, it can affect our eye hand coordination, our balance and our ability to perceive where we are relative to objects and people around us. We use our eyes to identify the people and objects around us and to track movement.
What happens when our visual system gets overloaded? We might struggle with sudden changes in lighting or complain that lights are too bright. We might have a hard time with cluttered spaces and struggle to find objects. Some people are even sensitive to the type of light, so they might get headaches in bright light or hate the glow of fluorescent lights.
Let’s say the visual system is underactive. We might struggle with visual perception and hand-eye coordination. This could include difficulty with reading or writing, which you can imagine would be very frustrating for an early learner. Can you understand why kids who struggle with hitting the ball might throw the bat in frustration?
Now let’s look at your sense of hearing. Sound coming into our ears is relayed to our central nervous system as information. This information helps us assess threats, understand the intensity of the sound and guides our gaze toward the source. When our sense of hearing is heightened, you can expect an overall sensitivity to loud noises and an elevated startle reflex to unexpected sounds. Sometimes, we get distracted by background sounds or get a specific aversion to particular sounds, like lawn mowers or fire alarms.
For others who have a diminished sensitivity to their hearing, they may struggle with locating the source of a sound in a noisy environment or miss social nuances in tone of voice.
The next sensory system that can overwhelm our calm is the sense of touch. When this system is overactive, you may experience sensitivity to temperatures or sensations, like being touched or being tickled. Hygiene experiences like haircuts, showers or nail trims can be unbearable.
On the other end of the spectrum, lowered sensitivity to the sense of touch might mean a high pain tolerance or lack of personal space, especially when dysregulated.
The next system which has a long intimidating name is the proprioceptive system. That system helps us know where our body is in space relative to other objects and people. When that sensory system is overloaded, we might see clumsiness or falling, as well as bumping into objects. Both the heightened and desensitized levels of awareness in the proprioceptive system can look like slouching or poor attention.
The vestibular sensory system helps us with movement. When that system is overactive, we may see that people may feel dizzy and get motion sick. They may not be able to tolerate backward or side to side motion. Conversely, when sensations from this system are blunted, we may see extremely fidgety behavior or visual focus on moving objects (like ceiling fans). We also will see difficulty with attention.
The final sensory system is the interoceptive system. This is the system that monitors sensations from our inner body. Interestingly, this system includes receptors in all our organs and carry messages about hunger, thirst and heart rate to the brain. This system is closely connected to the amygdala and limbic systems.
When hyperactivated, we might see people with a very high tolerance for pain or a sense of overwhelm related to feelings of sadness, anger or happiness. Stress feelings can max out this system and render us frozen or unable to respond appropriately. The converse, hypo-responsiveness, sometimes looks like an inability to sense temperature, like wearing shorts all winter long or long pants and hat in the summer. It can also look like the inability to name specific emotions in the moment to create a relevant response.
So, we’ve covered lots of sensory systems in the body, so we know that we can overload our brain circuits in any number of ways, which will shut off our thinking brain and keep us fully locked in our alligator, feeling brains. Our nervous system includes two primary parts, the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems. The sympathetic, as the name suggests, responds to threats and stimuli with active responses throughout the body, like shutting down digestion, increasing blood pressure, increasing respiratory rate, and contracting muscles that make the hair on your body stand up. Your pupils may respond, you may sweat profusely you might even struggle to control your bladder or bowels.
So, when we feel threatened and our amygdala gets flooded by sensations, our nervous system reacts by preparing us to respond in our most primal reflexes, to fight, escape or freeze to avoid the perceived threat. Our body will excrete norepinephrine from the adrenal glands, as well as hormones cortisol, the stress hormone, and adrenaline which prepare our bodies for action.
Now, once these hormones are in the blood stream, the only way they are removed is through processing by our livers and kidneys. This takes time. For some adults, it can take upwards of 25 minutes for this process to complete and return us to sanity.
Why is this important to understand? Amygdalas are dumb. They act like cornered alligators. You cannot reason with a cornered alligator and the same holds for amygdalas. Your work is to begin to understand your own emotional regulation in order to mitigate your instincts before you make everything worse. Take the couple who starts a little fight over who is going to get the mail which then escalates, round and round, until both partners are seeing red and screaming at the other. Ultimately, the partners probably do not even recall the original source of the conflict, but what I can tell you reliably is that amygdala’s fight dirty. Your problem-solving brain is not online when you’re limbic. Delayed gratification, empathy and compassion are all upstairs functions. When your brain is flooded, none of these functions is accessible. The same is true for others when they’re limbic too.
This is why the saying about not going to bed angry can be completely ridiculous. Now you have two angry, tired, frustrated people acting like toddlers, lashing out at one another to see who can injure the other worse, like there’s some kind of damn trophy for it. Imagine how different things might be if cooler heads were given time to return to sanity. As I remind my clients, unless you live in Nevada, you couldn’t get divorced overnight anyhow. (I usually put it a lot more bluntly, saying you’ll still be married to their dumb ass in the morning.)
The urgency we feel to “complete” a conflict in the moment is completely imaginary. At a minimum, you must learn to recognize when you yourself are limbic and master the skills to regain your sanity.
We’ll cover those tools in a later lesson. Bravo to you for making it through this lesson and thank you for your attention.