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With the nation anticipating the spread of COVID-19, our emotional brain is telling us something, that this is a fork in the road. The wires in our brain that determine our unconscious responses to life, whether or not we become stuck or triggered are "hot" or "online." These basic wires are open to change.
How do we make the most of this change? As individuals and as a nation, we can work together to respond to stress effectively. The most natural route to this is connecting emotionally with ourselves and others. Our emotional brain is the stress brain, in that stress activates strong emotions. If we can process those emotions effectively, we can switch off over-reactions and activate wires of resilience. We can connect with others and help each other deal with this stress.
New approaches are needed, as stress is so high now that it's hard to "think" our way out of it. In developing a simple system of emotion regulation and rewiring, over the last 30 years, my colleagues and I at UCSF discovered that we can express emotions and release stress.
This five-point system of emotional brain training is based on needing five different emotional techniques as five different brain areas are in charge of our responses based on our level of stress. This is operationalized by asking ourselves one simple question, "What's my number?" Once we know our number, we can use the corresponding resiliency pathway in our brain to clear stress and update our wiring. We become more resilient, and our set point or habit of the brain can improve.
In a back to basics approach, this is a way of honoring our natural emotional processing, which is based on circuits. For years, we have separated our emotions, thoughts, and behaviors, but in the world of the brain's stress response, they are all tied together. So we can develop strategies that play by rules of the emotional brain.
Every stressful moment is a moment of opportunity to rewire, and we have far more power than we know. If we can process our strong negative emotions, they flow from anger to sadness to fear to guilt in about two minutes, then we can deeply feel our gratitude, happiness, security, and pride.
During the next weeks or months, we will have many moments of intense negative emotions, stress overload, and stress eating, and if we know how to process our emotions ("What's my number?") we can make challenging times like these easier, and could even raise our own setpoint and the setpoint of our nation.
References
Mitrovic, I., Fish dePena, L., Frassetto, L. A., & Mellin, L. (2011). Rewiring the stress response: A new paradigm for health care. Hypothesis 9(1), e1-e5.
