Managing Your Brain

The week before Thanksgiving I presented at the Healthcare Business Women’s Association Annual Conference in San Francisco on the topic of Neuroleadership. I’m been learning about this fascinating field for the past three years. Knowing how our brains work can help us develop our emotional intelligence (EQ). One part of EQ is knowing how to control your own emotions.

So here’s a very quick and very basic lesson on the brain. The prefrontal cortex, located at the front of the brain, is the executive center or decision-making part of the brain. It’s the most recently evolved part of the brain. The amygdala is the emotional fear center of the brain located deep within the brain and is an ancient, older part of the brain. It sends warning signals about danger (either real or imagined) out to the rest of the brain and starts the chain reaction for getting us ready to defend ourselves in some way. The problem is when the amygdala fires it flushes the rational prefrontal cortex with arousal chemicals and we literally experience “brain freeze” — you know that feeling when you can’t think of what to do or say. Well, it’s because you really can’t. The logical, reasoning part of you has been hampered. The original purpose of the amygdala is protection, but we have to be careful about how we respond to its signals and make sure that we don’t react in someway that might not really be helpful or constructive.

With science now telling us more about how the brain works, we are finding out how to manage our brains and our behavior better. But good management takes practice. With regard to the amygdala, here are several suggestions for managing its impact. First, you must become aware of being triggered so you can say “no” to how you might otherwise have responded and substitute a different and more appropriate behavior. Therefore, you must be highly observant of yourself. And you must have a supply of familiar mind/body techniques or healthy behaviors that you want to use in that split second you have to respond. Second, with lots of practice, particular behaviors can become the automatic response to the amygdala (which is basically what training in the military does since the danger is generally real and present and calls for the right automatic response). Third, you can be more proactive and practice mind/body techniques to keep you generally more calm and centered.

I’ll continue providing quick peeks into the brain in these short blogs and future newsletters. For more about the brain and neuroleadership, see past issues of my newsletters at my website: www.columbiaconsult.com/newsletters-ginny-obrien.html.