How the Threat State limits your life

Imagine you’re a hunter 50,000 years ago, walking across the African savannah as you scan the distance for wild game. Suddenly a lion comes charging at you.

Would it be best for your brain to:

Stop and creatively problem solve?
Feel an open-hearted connection?
Immediately put every resource your body has to escape and survive?

Of course the answer is (c). And if it wasn’t, you wouldn’t be around very long.

That’s the brain’s threat response in action. It’s how we evolved, and it helped us survive.

In today’s world, most of us aren’t faced with regular impending peril, but that threat response is still active. And the brain isn’t picky about what it perceives as a threat. Money troubles, a critical comment, someone cutting you off in traffic, stress at work – to the brain, they’re all threats.

And that’s bad news for both how we experience life and our ability to access our inner resources.

In our brains, an area called the prefrontal cortex is responsible for a range of functions like planning, decision making, abstract thinking, analysis, and the ability to regulate emotions. The threat response effectively takes that region of the brain offline, shifting the focus and energy instead to areas of the brain that serve the more immediate focus of, “how do I survive this threat?”

The Threat State is great for not getting eaten by a lion, but if you want bring the best of what you have to offer to your work, your relationships, the difference you make – pretty much anything – it is severely limiting.

Threat state characteristics

Yesterday I introduced the Threat/Thrive Continuum. Today I want to look at the Threat end of that continuum, and how it reduces our ability to access the best we have to offer in our lives. Some of the ways that manifests include:

Tunnel vision: The threat response has a narrowing effect on your perception, creating a constriction of awareness that makes it harder to, for example, see the bigger picture.

Diminished reasoning: One higher brain function taken offline by the threat response is reasoning and critical thought. If you have ever said or done something in anger and thought, “What was I thinking?” after things cooled down, you have experienced a version of this.

Reduced ability to manage emotions: In the threat state, you have less access to the part of the brain that manages emotions.

Diminished problem-solving: This is the result of multiple threat state-induced effects, like tunnel vision and an inability to see the big picture, diminished critical thinking ability, and diminished creativity.

Diminished creativity: One of the higher brain functions the threat response reduces is creativity. Expansive modes like creativity get suspended in favor of shining a more focused spotlight on the stressor.

More me and less we: The threat response also has a constricting effect on social focus. Put simply, our focus becomes increasingly more about “me” and less about “we.” We’re more prone to “othering” as our circle of who we see as “like me” shrinks. As our self focus ratchets up, pro-social tendencies like altruism, empathy, and compassion decrease.

Worse interactions and relationships: Shrinking into a more constricted “me” space – and the things that accompany that, like reduced awareness of others’ experience, diminished empathy, increased self focus, and a smaller circle of “us” – makes us less effective in our human interactions.

Less resilience: Too much time in the threat state is both emotionally and physically taxing. The result is a lower ability to surf challenges and bounce back from difficulties.

Try this: On the Threat/Thrive Continuum, any step away from the Threat State is inherently a step towards the Thrive State.

That threat state is often such a constant (e.g., because of a continual low-grade hum of stress), that we don’t even notice it. So that first step away from threat and towards thrive is often simple awareness. Noticing that it’s happening.

Try keeping a list over the next week of what kinds of things cause that threat response (remember, this includes experiences with a constricting effect, like stress, irritation, anger, and anxiety). You might keep an ongoing list, or do an end-of-day review. Start cultivating an awareness habit.

With awareness comes a greater ability to intervene and influence your state.