How the Reptilian Brain Causes Anxiety and How to Retrain It
- Phil Lane, MSW, LCSW,
- 22 hours ago
- 4 min read
Primitive fear responses can be overwhelming and can worsen anxiety.
Key points
Learning to assess perceived threat versus tangible threat can help us to control physical anxiety responses.
Psychological threats are not necessarily soothed by animalistic physical anxiety responses.
The brain can be retrained to more accurately respond to perceived danger.
When I was a social work graduate student, one of my professors had the class perform an interesting exercise. For five minutes, she instructed us to clench our fists, close our eyes tightly and sit with our muscles tensed. She then had us observe our physical and emotional feelings. After that, she had us sit for another five minutes with our palms open, our eyes closed gently and our bodies relaxed and untensed. Needless to say, there was a significant difference in the physical feelings following each exercise. Not surprisingly, after the first exercise, I noticed that I was severely uncomfortable; my body felt constricted, my heartbeat tightly and quickly, and I actually felt an overwhelming feeling of fatigue and discomfort. Following the second exercise, I felt comfortable, at peace, and relaxed.
Though not scientific, this exercise was representative of the body’s fight response: In a tightened, constricted pose, we tend to feel boxed into our discomfort, like a suitcase packed too tightly or a cup filled to the very brim. When we experience anxiety, our body’s natural, automatic response is to shift immediately into a tightened, constricted state, much like an animal bearing down to protect itself from an attack by a predator. This mammalian response, though instinctual, can in fact be altered through cultivating mindful attention to the actual level of danger or threat rather than to the perceived threat. In his book, Waking the Tiger, Peter A. Levine puts it this way: “Today, our survival depends increasingly on developing our ability to think rather than being able to physically respond…the fundamental challenges we face today have come about relatively quickly, but our nervous systems have been much slower to change.” In simple terms, our world is complex and sophisticated, yet our bodies and nervous systems remain at some level, primitive and animalistic.
In my book, Overcoming Panic and Panic Attacks, I explain that “our bodies, as sophisticated as they are, struggle at times to differentiate between something that might happen and something that is happening. In these moments, they elicit an emergency response by releasing cortisol, the body’s naturally occurring stress hormone.” The psychological implications of this commonly experienced confusion of true versus tangible danger include panic attacks, chronic anxiety, disruption of daily life and functioning, and avoidant behaviors. So, if the crux of the matter is that if our bodies naturally, instinctually tighten, bear down, and constrict when we perceive a threat, then the antidote is to learn how to measure these “threats” more accurately, which in turn will retrain the body’s automatic stress response.
Were we to simplify things further, we might look at our lives as containing both safety and risk. A Buddhist might posit that this is, indeed, the nature of life and human experience: that two things can be true simultaneously. In some moments, we are completely safe; in others, there is risk or threat. But—and here is the larger point—the threats we face are not like those that our hominid predecessors faced: They are typically not immediate, tangible dangers such as predator attacks. They are, however, more sophisticated “threats” such as humiliation, failure, judgment by others, illness, aging, and other mainly existential threats. These are psychological, not tangible, threats and, therefore, are not necessarily soothed by an animalistic response such as tensing, gripping, or bearing down. In fact, this type of response my cause anxiety to worsen and bring about severe feelings of panic.
In his book The Untethered Soul, mindfulness guru Michael A. Singer writes, “stress only happens when you resist life’s events. If you’re neither pushing life away, nor pulling it towards you, then you are not creating any resistance.” In that graduate school exercise, we practiced both pushing and pulling at life (the first exercise of tensing) and allowing life (the second exercise of sitting comfortably.) What does this look like in daily practice? One section of Peter Levine’s book is aptly titled "When the Reptilian Brain Speaks, Listen!” Translation: When we notice our bodies having an automatic response, investigate what underlies the response. For example, if I am noticing my body tightening, my heart rate quickening, and my nervous system acting up, I can consciously take a look at what is going on in my life at that moment—perhaps I am stressed at work, maybe I am tired or dehydrated, maybe I have a pending deadline or something important hanging over my head. While Levine’s reptile is unable to think this way and must simply react, humans possess the ability to be curious about the body’s response and to apply logic to physical experience. And this is how we differ from the reptile and how we can retrain the brain to not unthinkingly jump to its reptilian stress response.
Using our sophisticated brains, here are a few questions we can ask ourselves when we notice our bodies entering into that tense, tight, uncomfortable state:
What is my body trying to tell me? What is it responding to?
What is happening in my life at this moment? What events or situations might be communicating to my body that it needs to tighten up?
What is the perceived threat or danger that my body might be responding to? How can I reassure myself that I am, in fact, safe?
In this moment, can I remind myself that while my body might be responding in a primitive way, this does not mean that there is an actual, tangible danger?
