Too Many Tabs - DelveOD

Do you ever respond to a stressful situation, by completely ‘shutting down’? Do you sometimes find that when you are pushed outside your comfort zone, you can no longer perform even seemingly routine tasks?

Well, you are not alone. One in four UK workers struggle with Stress, Anxiety, and low mood (Myths and facts Time to Change, 2020).

Furthermore, this reaction might even be a completely normal and even healthy response to threat that lies beyond your control. So, let’s take a closer look at the chain of events that happen in our brains that cause us to shut down and underperform under stress.

Is that a snake or a stick?

Since the Old Stone Age when man lived in caves, our brains have been trained to constantly scan our environments for threats. We have become so great at this that today, our brains continue to do so almost subconsciously. We have evolved from scanning and registering every stick as a snake, from looking for predators that are larger than us to fend from, to now equating the high levels of stress that we face at work as threats to us.

Let us take a closer look at how our brains function under stress.

Our brains as a whiteboard

The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is a small part of our brain that is located just behind our forehead. It is the region that is responsible for our cognitive control functions and influences our attention, impulse inhibition, prospective memory, and cognitive flexibility.

To picture how our thoughts might be represented in our PFC, imagine a clean whiteboard. Now in little speech bubbles, start putting in the various thoughts that are going through your head at a given time. Here are a few examples of the thoughts might have

I need to exercise
I need to cook
I need to go grocery shopping
What am I wearing to that event on Saturday?
Did I remember to turn off the gas at home?

Now add in a couple of other work-related thoughts and tasks as well. What we end up with is a cluttered whiteboard!

However, our PFC is small and, it can only really fully focus on and hold attention to a maximum of 4-5 thoughts at a time.

Now in a stressful situation that our brains perceive as threat, our PFC gets hijacked by our amygdala.

The is a very useful reaction as the amygdala take control and sends information to different parts of the brain which then enables our Flight or Fight reaction to kick in. This is probably what has enabled our species to survive all these years.

However, what this also means is that your body is incapable of thinking clearly or arriving at a well reflected decision, causing you to ‘shut down’ or ‘freeze up’ in a way.

Zone out or run away?

If you are having a difficult conversation with a colleague at work, their amygdala gets activated and takes over their PFC functions as they are going into threat mode. We cannot make a proper decision when we are in threat mode and its best not to pressurise them to do so. It would be pointless to say ‘… and what are you going to do about this now?’ as they will not be able to think clearly, elaborate or give you a well thought about response.

Instead, they may need to be able to lessen their amygdala activity by taking a break, or even sleeping over it in order to then think clearly. Therefore, it might be more effective to say ‘… why don’t we take some time and come back to this at a later date when you have had a chance to think it through?’

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