The human emotional system is shaped by an evolutionary history we share with our fellow mammals. The psychologist Paul Gilbert has shown how we share three key emotional systems: Threat, Calm and Drive. Mammals have evolved to move between these three systems depending on the situation they find themselves. We will begin in this article with the Threat system and discuss Calm and Drive in future articles.

The Threat system has evolved to keep us safe. When confronted with danger, say a predator, the Threat system is activated and an animal will react with a fight, flight or freeze response. We can see this with our pets. If there is a sudden loud noise at the door, a dog may rush towards it barking (fight), a cat may dart away (flight) and a hamster may be rooted to the spot (freeze).

We humans do not respond so dramatically in everyday life, but internally our bodies will be responding in the same way as our pets. Our muscles tense ready for action, our heart beats faster to send more blood to these muscles and our breathing changes to provide more oxygen for energy.

The Threat system does a very good job in saving us from danger in the real world. If you stepped out in front of a speeding car it would cause you to leap out of the way before your conscious mind had realised what was happening.

But most of the time there is no real danger, yet we are feeling these Threat responses. This is because the Threat system cannot distinguish between messages from the real world and those from our minds.

Cavemen learned the hard way …

Photo by NEOM on Unsplash

Why have we evolved this way? Imagine our caveman ancestor has just escaped a tiger. He is more likely to survive in future if he can remember what happened, where he saw the tiger, and think about keeping safer next time. This capacity for thought and imagination works to alert our Threat system to increase our survival chances.

So fearful thoughts, “what if this goes wrong? … what if that happens”, activates our Threat system, causing us to be on the lookout for further danger. Let us imagine our caveman ancestors noticing a rustle in the bushes. Their Threat system starts looking for danger: is it an enemy? Is it a tiger?  Those cavemen who think, “it’s nothing, just the wind in the bushes”, are in the long run more likely to be killed by an enemy or eaten by a tiger. So evolution has produced a Threat system with the strategy: “better safe than sorry”.

Hours, days, weeks later the caveman can be thinking “that was a lucky escape, I must be on the alert for that danger in the future.” The caveman is now kept in the Threat state not by any real present danger in the moment, but by his fearful thoughts of what might happen.

Fast forward to today and we see that our fearful thoughts about what might happen, which we call worries, keep our Threat system activated and result in a state of anxiety. But most of the time there is no need to be in the Threat system, there is no real danger present. Our Threat system is responding to our fearful thoughts, not to the real world.

Refocusing your thinking…

We can lessen the anxiety caused by an inappropriate Threat response by bringing our emotional brain back in tune with the real world. We do this by turning our attention away from our thoughts towards our senses. We simply focus our attention on what we can see, hear, touch, feel or taste right now.

This shift of focus starves the worrying mind of attention and tunes into what is happening here and now, which is almost always not dangerous. This sensory information tells the emotional brain that the present moment is safe and it can switch from the Threat system. Not only can the emotional brain switch from the Threat system, but it can move into the Calm system.

Practical steps to take:

We can bring our emotional brain back in tune with the reality of here and now by:

• Going for walk in town or in nature, focusing on what we can see (people/animals/traffic/trees), hear (traffic, people, birds), feel (weather on our face, our feet on the ground, our arms moving).
• Doing something at home such as cooking, cleaning or exercise and focusing on what we can experience with our five senses.
• Giving ourselves visual tasks as we look around the room or out of the window. How many things can we see that are moving/straight/curved? How many different colours/shades can we see?

Next Topic: Moving to the Calm system.