How Your Brain Works
Hi there!
Welcome back to the MoodiNews. Every Thursday, we discuss a variety of matters related to mental health and self-improvement.
I’m so glad you’re here.
This week, we are going to discuss: HOW YOUR BRAIN WORKS! YAY!
Over the past several weeks, we have been discussing emotions—why we have them, how they work, and how to regulate them.
Emotion serves a useful and important purpose, but operating in an emotional manner that’s void of reason is like driving a race-car with no brakes—it’s a disaster waiting to happen.
So, over the next couple of weeks, we are going to talk about bringing your ‘logical’ brain online when you are emotionally activated, in order to think more clearly and stave off purely emotional decision-making.
In order to have this conversation, we must first discuss how the brain works:
Essentially, the human brain operates much like an emergency-room triage system (i.e., urgent care). In the ER, people are treated based on the severity of their issues, according to a 5-tier categorization system:
1. Seen first are people with immediate needs (i.e., airway blockages, heart attack symptoms, etc.)
2. Seen second are people with urgent needs (i.e., unstable vitals, a potential threat to limb or organ, etc.)
3-5. Seen last are people with non-urgent needs (i.e., everything else—these people will wait)
Your brain works in a very similar way.
When it comes to regulating behavior and keeping us safe, the brain also operates in a triage-like fashion, from the bottom-up:
1) Located right above the neck (at the bottom of the brain) is the brain stem. You can think of this as the Base Brain.
The Base Brain functions to meet our immediate needs (i.e., sustaining heart rate, breathing, core temperature, etc.). Similar to triage category no. 1 from above, the body receives signals from this part of the brain first, which is critical for sustaining the involuntary, physiological functions that keep us alive.
2) Next is the limbic system, which is located in the central region of your brain. You can think of this as the Middle Brain.*
* Not to be confused with the midbrain, which is a region of the brain belonging to the brainstem.
The Middle Brain functions to meet our urgent needs—it is responsible for emotion, memory, and the fight/flight/freeze response. As we go about our lives, our body responds second to signaling from the limbic system.
3) Last is the cerebral cortex—the ‘cortical brain’—which spans across the front, top, and back of your head. It includes the gray matter (i.e., outer lining) that you see when visualizing the outside of a brain. You can think of this as the Top Brain.
The Top Brain functions to meet our most advanced, non-urgent needs. The cerebral cortex helps with high-level, executive functioning—it is responsible for things like decision-making, problem solving, language formation, and attention/awareness/consciousness. It is the newest addition to our brains in terms of evolution, and it operates the slowest because it’s located the farthest away from the spinal cord, which is how the brain communicates with the body.
So, why concern yourself with any of this?
Well, it’s quite simple, really: it’s important to know that the brain resorts to sub-cortical functioning under stress. Put simply, the brain likes to triage, and it will always focus on survival and imminent threat before wasting precious time on critical thinking, language processing, or self-awareness.
In other words, we are emotional creatures before we are logical creatures.
Recalling last week’s discussion on reaction vs. response, humans are therefore, by instinct, more likely to react than to respond to stress. It’s simply how we’re wired.
Therefore, it's important to know that your biology automatically works against the generation of Wise thought under stress, because it’s hard to access your cortical faculties once your brain get locked into survival mode (i.e., your ‘thinking cap’ gets relegated to the ‘waiting room’ when your brain is stuck sub-cortically.)
However, once you know how your brain operates, you can leverage your biology intentionally, in order to improve how you respond to stress.
Next week, we will explore this idea further, and discuss specific tools that can be used to achieve more logical engagement during moments of heightened emotionality.