Which Comes First Your Emotions or Your Reaction to a Dangerous Situation?

Here’s one of those conundrums like the chicken or the egg except this one does have an answer.

It used to be that scientists thought our emotions were hard-wired. You see a danger and you have an emotion of fear, and you react by fighting or fleeing.

Well, that seems to no longer be true. Neuroscientists have realized that our brains are malleable and that we have more influence over them than we’ve previously thought.

You see a danger and the body starts a whole range of physiological responses by increasing your heart rate, releasing adrenaline, increasing your breath rate and the flow of blood to your muscles. All this happens first, and then you have an emotion.

The emotion is an interpretation of what’s going on inside and outside the body. The body’s picking the best way for you to survive the dangerous situation. To do that it accesses your past experiences and your memories.

An example is you see a bear. With your body having the physical reactions I’ve described above, your brain may find news reports in your memory of bear maulings, so you go into fear and with fight or flight being triggered, you choose flight.

However, if you hunt bears (which I’m not supporting), then the emotion attached to your physical response might be the emotion of excitement!

All this means is that your emotions are not hard-wired into your body, and you can change your emotional reaction to negative situations. 

For example, when you have feelings of anxiety, your brain has been wired to continue to have that response. If you can develop feelings of calm, you’re changing the wiring response in your brain, so you’re not triggered by the same situation.

The researchers are suggesting that you can do this just like you would practice playing on a piano. It’s through repetition that you learn how to play so that what was difficult becomes easy. 

They suggest the same thing with emotions. You need to practice positive emotions to those stressful situations. And they suggest that you only need to practice a few minutes a day.

I teach this concept in some of my virtual and live programs by showing attendees how to change their response to a negative situation in 2 minutes by using 2 Brain Gym exercises. 

The change in people’s physiology when they go from a negative thought to a positive one is very dramatic. Their breath rate can be very different, their positive can change and even having pain in their body can disappear. Using the Brain Gyms changes the negative response of your body so that it’s closer to a positive response.

So…the bottom line is – you have the power to change your reaction to a negative situation!
(Reported on NPR Morning Edition – June 29, 2021, by Michaeleen Doucleff)