Where did it come from, where did it go, in the days of the Jurassic age, the amygdala appeared and brought fear and rage.
By Jurassic we do not mean a tough guy, but the Mesozoic period, when 250 million years ago (+/-35) on a Thursday afternoon the dinosaurs appeared, their brain containing this nucleus that recognized and governed two emotions: fear and rage. It also knew three commands: attack, flee, and freeze!
After some time the dinosaurs died out and mammals took their place, whose brains were already substantially larger, more capable, and also governed a greater number of emotions; we can say that in terms of these states, primates and many others are not much different from us. What sets humans apart is the fact that they grew a cerebral cortex, mainly at the front, which can think, predict, and decide.
We can imagine the development as follows: we have an almond (=amygdala), we clench it in a fist (=reptilian brain), and on the fist we place a paper napkin representing our cerebral cortex, and we have a human brain. When we bring the left and right fist together, where the thumbs touch, are the cortical areas called the cingulate gyri, where – very loosely speaking – reason meets emotions and where we also feel how we are doing, whether well or poorly. But let us not forget that deep inside the amygdala still resides with its abilities, which it has been training for 250,000,000 years, and at its command the stress response is triggered, and that is damn energetically costly and, as far as energy is concerned, it really bleeds the organism dry.
The amygdala is essentially a flock of scouts that monitor everything happening around us and also inside us, and when things are out of order, it sounds the alarm and urges us to attack, flee, freeze, and, something the dinosaurs did not have, to faint. From birth it is the most active part of the brain, and to calm it down, there is a mother who is biopsychosocially programmed to know how. Meanwhile, the child's cerebral cortex matures and adolescents gather knowledge, experience, and ways to best handle dangerous situations. Instead of a mother who calms the amygdala or lets it run wild, we have the prefrontal (right at the front) cerebral cortex, which takes over this function.
From a developmental perspective, fear is a useful emotion; we are more likely the descendants of those who fled in time than of those who went into battle before they had children. Fearless heroes make up about one percent of us, and the fact that they have no fear makes them completely different in how they perceive, think, feel, and act compared to the rest. Nevertheless, the rest of us must learn to handle our fears. Fear overwhelms us, it is an emotion; courage is a decision that reason conceives and makes.
There is general agreement that anxiety is the state when I expect some danger, say a tiger, and fear is the state when I encounter it. Anxiety directs us toward various protective measures; fear bares its teeth with one of the aforementioned options. What is essential about them is that in such a situation instincts are at work and reason is switched off. In the brain it is like a seesaw. When I invest the energy I have for brain work into the rational area, emotions turn off; when I switch to the emotional brain, reason withers.
Emotions are bodily processes that set the organism up for some activity, which is why we feel fear from the roots of our hair, through muscle tension, the strenuous work of the heart, breathing, a dry tongue, to the embarrassing fact that we desperately need to urinate, because the organism wants to lighten itself for flight. Emotions govern us and in that respect have a much more powerful grip than reason. Telling ourselves at such a moment, don't be afraid, is not only useless but outright harmful, because it further feeds the fear. Similarly, shoo, shoo... does not help either.
Emotions overwhelm us; thoughts we can control. When emotions want to take over, they can only be set aside by fully engaging the rational brain. When people are hit by a panic attack, we recommend they give up the fight against fear and fully focus their attention, for example, on calculating 19x542 from memory, or remembering all their classmates from first grade, reciting a poem, or spelling the Czech national anthem backwards. Concentration, concentration, concentration! That is the bane of anxiety.
A legitimate question arises: what does this have to do with immunity? By simple mercantile reasoning we conclude that the organism currently has a certain amount of energy at its disposal. And when it throws it into the stress response, which is extremely expensive (and moreover there is terrible wastefulness, state contracts are nothing in comparison!), it will be lacking somewhere. The organism cannot run on credit; it runs on what it has. When it invests in stress, it must take from somewhere. Where: from immunity. That is why every stress response weakens us immunologically. And when stress starts eating into our needed portion of sleep – at least seven hours – the condition worsens further, because immune processes occur most intensively during sleep.
It is a simple equation: when we think rationally, we will not let unnecessary fears have their say, we will not open the floodgates of stress, and we will have enough energy for the processes that strengthen us.
MUDr. Radkin Honzák psychiatrist Author's blog: http://blog.aktualne.cz/blogy/radkin-honzak.php