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Everything can change in the blink of an eye. One moment life seems calm and peaceful, the next moment you find yourself in a whirlwind and you have to get your bearings really fast to save yourself and others.
photo by jdurham
We see how this happens in crises like the tragic mass shooting at the Washington Naval Yards this past Monday. Those directly involved who were able to escape did not leave the scene unscathed. They experienced the shock and horror of the unimaginable actually happening right before their eyes (or within earshot). Their families and friends, when they learned of the tragedy, also experienced a moment of shock that may have shifted quickly to relief, but not without leaving an imprint of fear and the possibility of terrible loss.
At those moments, each of these individuals reacted differently in keeping with their unique biology and life experiences, but they all shared one reaction. Their brains almost certainly lit up in the areas that seem to be designed to protect us from danger, the brain’s limbic system and especially the alarm in the brain, the amygdala, within the emotional part of the brain. That reaction was entirely adaptive. It was a wake-up call amplified to many times higher levels than normal by the intensity of the actual emergency. The reaction was geared to survival.
That reaction became less intense as they put distance and time between themselves and the incident, but for most it won’t go away entirely. That’s why it’s normal and expectable to have post-traumatic stress reactions for hours or days after a life threatening experience. This is not a disorder; rather, an adaptive way for the brain and body to gradually downshift back to normal reactivity if the danger does not persist.
However, some will experience a persistent alarm state that can become post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Why is that, and what can they do about it?
There are a number of risk factors that, as the term implies, place an individual who experiences the shock of a traumatic experience at risk for developing PTSD. These include having a history of prior exposure to trauma, having a biological or psychological tendency toward anxiety or distress, and/or living or working in unsafe or adverse circumstances.
There also are protective factors that increase the likelihood that an individual will recover from trauma without developing PTSD, including having a strong and reliable social support system, having access to economic and social resources, and persistent optimism.
It may seem difficult to see any common denominator in this wide range of risk and protective factors, but one key thing that they have in common is that they either reduce or increase our ability to do the one thing that is most difficult during or after a traumatic shock: to draw on our brains’ incredible capacity to shift from reacting to focusing.
This is a shift from a purely alarm-driven reaction to the mindful choices that are possible when the thinking center in the brain, the prefrontal cortex, is activated and frees us from being hijacked by the instinctual automatic survival demands of the brain’s alarm.
Focusing is what we do when we stop, step back, and think clearly. In a shocking trauma or crisis, most of us will react without focusing, because our brains don’t have time to stop and think when we need to act fast to survive. Relatively few individuals have the natural ability or training (such as emergency first responders) to be able to simultaneously react based on the brain’s alarm and also focus based on input from the brain’s thinking center.
Fortunately, all of us have the ability to shift from being in an alarm state to becoming focused, as long as the survival threat or trauma actually does end. That’s what effective psychotherapies for preventing or treating PTSD enable us to do; they help us to regain the ability to stop, step back, and think clearly when our brains’ alarms are triggered by normal stressors, so that we’re not always reacting to manageable life challenges as if our survival is still being threatened.
What’s the best way to make this shift from a brain in survival alarm mode to a brain guided by a focused thinking center? It’s very individual for each person, but the common denominator is learning to catch moments in our lives in which we can choose to focusing rather than react.
These are moments of transition when we enter a new place, meet someone, or begin (or end) an activity. These moments of transition usually pass without our noticing it, and that’s a missed opportunity. We can’t catch every moment of transition, but when we catch even a few every day we can begin to make those ordinary “blinks of the eye” a cue to activate our brains’ thinking centers by simply being mindful of what is happening at that moment that is important to us.
It could be remembering that the place is one that we value, or the person is someone who makes our life more worthwhile, or the activity is one that we’ve enjoyed or in which we’ve learned something worth noting.
Practicing focusing on a day-in and day-out basis can, over time, strengthen the ability to mobilize the brain’s thinking center in this deceptively simple way, essentially by teaching ourselves to intentionally focus on what’s most important in the present, instead of being stuck on autopilot, reacting to every trigger.
We all tend to spend most of our lives on automatic pilot, whether we’ve experienced trauma or not. But when trauma has made our automatic pilot a state of constant reactivity, it’s essential to reclaim the choice of being focused. Every blink of the eye is an opportunity to do that.
