Fear Part 2: Taming the Lizard Brain

Anger, dread, frustration, anxiety…  If you have been feeling any of those emotions of late you have your lizard brain to thank (or the presidential primaries).

While certainly not enjoyable states of being these emotions have played a key role in your survival thus far into adulthood.  Survival in our modern age, though, is very different from the world that we originally evolved to inhabit. For many of us this leads to a persistently overactive lizard brains. Or as we like to say:  lizard brains that need taming!

You’ll be happy to hear that the human brain has additional brain regions that can learn to regulate fear and other negative emotions in a way that the hapless lizard cannot.

The brain area that is wired to regulate negative emotions in the human brain is called the prefrontal cortex, or PFC. This is the part of our brain that allows us to make decisions, plan for the future, be flexible and control our impulses.   It is unique to mammals but is most developed in primates (note: humans are primates and generally the larger the forehead the bigger the PFC)

Because the PFC is the part of the brain controlling impulses, this is also the region that can quiet a fear response.  When it is engaged, or active, the PFC can turn down, or inhibit, an initial fearful reaction and allow a secondary, more measured and human response to occur.

Maintaining rationality in a time of over-active lizard brains, is not only possible it gets easier with practice. So, how do we activate our PFC and start quieting a life-or-death response in our every day non-life-threatening times?

Here are two simple steps:

1. Identify the physiological sensations and label the emotion that you are feeling (note: the emotional label does not have to be spoken out loud): This is a principle known as “name it to tame it”. Simply naming these emotions activates our PFC and then helps quiet the lizard brain.

2. Think rationally about the problem:  Fear levels actually decrease when we have a rational conversation with ourselves about why those sidewalk grates should not be so scary.

Even when we are entirely unaware of the role that negative emotion is playing in our interpretation of the world, if we’ve practiced regulating and soothing, we are more likely to default to PFC engagement and rational behaviors.

For those of us that work with or parent young children, building these skills early on, when the brain is the most flexible and adaptive, can yield tremendous rewards. Research has repeatedly informed us that managing your lizard brain does more than make you a calmer, nicer person to be around.  Lizard brain self-management actually predicts academic and social success more reliably than IQ.

In our next post we’ll explore the link between lizard brain self-management and success along with providing suggestions for how to make your home, school, workplace or classroom culture one that supports the practice of “taming” the lizard brain.