Discovery: Amygdalae

I am in the process of writing an essay about habits. Many of my habits are of no use to me yet they continue to plague me. My attempts to change my habits are met most often with discomfort on a mental and physical level. I was juggling around this idea of changing habits as creating not only mental pathways but physical ones that I negotiate in the world. The ideas are still amorphous, but they focus on moving with the discomfort to create new eddies of movement in my life.

While these ideas were swirling around trying to find solidity, I learned about an aspect of the amygdala that may shed light on this obstructive sense that occurs when I try to bring new events or ways of being into my life. So, what is the amygdala? First of all, the amygdala is not alone. It is amygdalae, plural. They are two regions deep in the brain, in the temporal lobes, that are characterized by their almond shape. They are part of our limbic system and have been shown to be responsible for processing memory and emotional reactions.

What I learned is that the amygdalae respond to novelty in the environment. There is a rise in whole system awareness when something familiar does something novel or something completely unusual is found in any environment. Where this connects to habit and discomfort is that most of us have limbic systems and additionally, autonomic nervous systems, that are primed towards fight or flight because of unresolved trauma (and that is a huge topic that is amazing and interesting as well).  What that means is that amygdalae that are responding to something new are activating channels throughout the body towards a fear response, rather than curiosity, which is probably the original purpose of this dense collection of neurons.

So what do we have going on? We have a need in our lives to make a change. We have a body that has unresolved trauma and on-going stress. We move our bodies into a novel situation and the amygdalae activate in response to this novelty. Our body that is primed for fight or flight tenses up, shuts down essential functions like digestion, and our heart rate speeds up. Our brains are looking for ways to make this discomfort stop. The best and easiest solution is to return to a familiar way of moving, being, acting, whatever-ing. We do that and our system relaxes back to a lower level of stress and we continue along as before.

The key seems to be untying this connection of novelty from fear response and replacing it with intelligent curiosity. What I mean by that is an ability to investigate novelty without the whole-body assumption of danger. That seems like it would increase our ability to face new challenges with the least amount of fear, obstruction and stress. When I figure out how to do that, I’ll let you know.

By the way, there are plenty of dedicated people working on how to do that. One place to start to learn more about easing trauma in the body is at SomaticExperiencing.com.