Why You Shut Down Sometimes

if you ever have times when no matter what you do no matter how hard you push yourself mentally no matter how much you remind yourself I have so much to do today I need to go this is important my life is going to fall apart if I don't get all this stuff done you just can't make yourself do anything maybe you can't get off the couch maybe you can't get off your phone maybe you can't even get out of bed if this is something that happens to you frequently you're probably experiencing something that we in psychology have creatively titled the freeze response it is a response to either life-threatening danger or overwhelming cumulative life stressors unfortunately the part of your brain that commands the freeze response is really really bad at telling the difference between those two things and so when we are overwhelmed by a lengthy to-do list or a lot of General Life stressors our brain sometimes thinks we're being chased by a grizzly bear and it shuts everything down until we feel safe again today I'm going to teach you why that happens and I'm also going to teach you what you can do to reverse that response and get going again welcome back to the psychology of depression and anxiety I'm your host Dr Scott I run intensive outpatient programs in Iowa for people with moderate to severe mood and anxiety disorders I'm a licensed clinical psychologist and I've been doing this work for a while I am a big fan of Clinic literature and research so you're not going to get a lot of or any hopefully pseudo science or or new Agy stuff on here this is the real stuff this this is legitimate we know how this works kind of thing and and what the point of all this is is to help you understand the most complicated and frustrating thing that you will ever own in your entire life which is your brain brains man they just don't always do what we need them to do and the freeze respon response is a perfect example because it's something that a few hundred years ago made perfect sense we needed it to survive now it has become a massive liability that tends to hold us back from achieving our goals so in order to understand what this is and what you want to do about it we have to start with a little bit of a neurobiology lesson I'm going to keep this pretty short and pretty simple but I promise you really do need this information to understand why the things I'm going to propose to you will actually work so functionally speaking you can divide your brain into three sections based on like you have the front third the middle third and the back third the front third is an area called your frontal lobe that is the last part of your brain to reach physical maturity it doesn't actually finish growing until you're 25 the idea that you're an adult at 18 is probably made up for like World War II drafting purposes that's a whole another episode though your frontal low basically houses most of what you think of as you so pretty much all of your conscious thoughts the thoughts that you're aware that you're having and can kind of interact with or modify all of that stuff is just the front third of your brain most of what you think of as your thoughts or or your brain activity is all just actually the front third the middle third is an area called the midbrain we're so creative in Psychology the midbrain does many many things there's two things that I want you to understand for today that the midbrain does the midbrain is where emotional responses to things are generated the midbrain also is the part of your brain that houses the amydala the amygdala is sort of like your personal security system so you know how some people have security systems for their homes right with like doorbell cameras and window sensors and all that stuff you have a security system too you have a series of internal processes that are running constantly and always scanning for danger now most of what happens in your midbrain is subconscious meaning you don't realize that you're doing these things you don't notice the activity happening in this part of your brain for the most part but it is always working and it's always working very hard when the midbrain believes that it detects danger it mobilizes what we call survival responses I'll get back to that shortly the last third of your brain the the back third is an area called the hind brain that's very very basic keep you alive interpret sensory responses kind of stuff that part of your brain functions more like all your other organs you don't really have any thoughts back there it's just regulating basic physiological processes so those are that's the super brief segments of your brain now you have probably heard this common saying that we only use about 10% of our brains and if you're really into psychology you might know that that saying is at best a half truth we use about 10% of our brains at any given time and so when if you've ever looked at any kind of real time brain scan like an fmri for example where it's shown like hey this part of this person's brain lights up when they're looking at art and this part of their brain lights up when they're doing their taxes and this part lights up when they're falling in love what you're seeing is certain parts of the brain becoming more active and other parts becoming less active to compensate for that additional activity so it's sort of like a power grid so your brain when you're awake and alert has about the same amount of activity going on all the time there's not like a secret 90% of your brain that you can unlock and gain superpowers pretty sure the Limitless pill would kill you but again another topic for another day the point I want you to know from this is your brain is constantly redirecting resources to different parts of itself based on what it thinks you need most of the time it gets that right sometimes it does not when your midbrain your amydala specifically that's that security system I talked about earlier believes that you are in danger it will activate one of your four survival responses fight flight freeze or Fawn fight and flight are pretty simple they're fairly self-explanatory and you probably understand how those work already even if you haven't studied them a lot the freeze response is essentially sort of like a deer and headlights type reaction it's when you are so overwhelmed by either actual mortal danger or sometimes maybe more often for most of us a chronic accumulation of stressors so many things building up that your stress level gets so high that it actually feels to your amydala like you are in imminent mortal danger and sometimes when we feel like we're in imminent mortal danger we feel like the safest thing for us to do and this is not I'm going to sidebar for just a second here when I say we feel like I want to make sure you understand these are not decisions these are not conscious thoughts remember conscious thoughts take place in the frontal lobe so you like you decided to click on this and you decided to listen to it those are choices you made you had awareness of options and you had an awareness that you selected in option you don't have awareness with survival responses that you have an option they're meant to override your ability to think because they're survival responses they're they're reflexes they're instinctive reactions that we are born with so you do not choose them and so if you're s if you're thinking like oh I you know I had a I had a freeze response when I had a to-do list a mile long I am so stupid like why would I shut down when I was so busy that was so dumb of me you didn't decide that you did not choose that a subconscious and primitive part of your brain chose that response for you because it misinterpreted the situation and it thought that you were in danger now let me tell you a little bit more about what's actually happening during a freeze response remember that 10% active at once brain thingy I told you about before when you're a Ula which is again in the midbrain believes that it detects danger it becomes a resource hog and when I talk about resources that your brain uses we're talking about blood oxygen and caloric energy those are the resources that your brain uses so when you see a part of your brain lit up it's it means it has more of those things in it that's all it means your amydala becomes a resource hog when it thinks it detects danger and it starts pulling a bunch of resources away from the frontal lobe it's not going to pull resources away from the brain stem because that's what keeps your lungs breathing and your heart beating so when the midbrain becomes more active the frontal lobe becomes less active now I didn't really get too far into what the frontal lobe does for you let me give you a few examples of what types of activity happen in your frontal loes emotion regulation so your ability to feel a feeling especially a distressing feeling and sort of work through it like rationalize your way through it or figure out how to feel this feeling without acting on it like your ability to get angry and not yell or hit someone or your ability to be anxious and not run screaming out of the room that's emotion regulation behavioral inhibition lives in your frontal loes that's your ability to feel like you want to do something but choose not to do it and so if if you're in a like a class or a meeting that's really boring and part of you wants to say this is a complete waste of my time this is pointless why are we doing this then your frontal lobe kicks in and says hold on friend that's probably not the best idea right now that lives there complex social engagement lives in your frontal lobe that's your ability to understand sarcasm and and nuance and and correctly read body language and things like that your orientation to space and time is in your frontal loes your ability to know where you are and when it is and what you're trying to do your all your your planning your execu functioning basically all your complicated adult human skills that you need to navigate this maze Minefield of a thing we call Society all lives up here and so when that part of your brain becomes less active because the resources it needs to function are being drawn to a different part of the brain you start to lose all of those skills that's why you shut down sometimes that's why the freeze response results in a person who is just basically disabled and non-functional because the part of your brain that you need to do all those things you need to do it's not there I mean physically it's there but functionally it's not there it's not online it's not working and it's not giving you the tools that you need to get your stuff done or to go do something enjoyable or to connect with people and it's because you're amygdala has misinterpreted your stressors so often in life it's just this buildup of stuff like I I have a presentation I got to give tomorrow and I'm not ready I need to finish this paper I got seven text messages I have to respond to I sent seven text messages and nobody responded to any of them all this stuff just starts to stack up in your brain and everybody every human being has a threshold has a line it's it's not a physical location it's just a quantity of stress everybody has this threshold in their brains and when that threshold gets crossed you will shut down because that amount of stress feels like Mortal life-threatening danger to your amydala your amydala doesn't know the difference between all that stuff pushing in on you from all sides all at once and a grizzly bear chasing you emotionally they feel about the same hopefully that makes sense so what the heck do you do when you're in a freeze response let me do the annoying therapist thing here and start by telling you a couple things that you probably shouldn't do that seem like the right move so what most people do when they're in a freeze response this also applies by the way if someone else is in a freeze response and you're trying to help them get out of one it seems like the natural response the natural reaction would be to try to motivate that person because if you see someone in a freeze response what it looks like is that they're unmotivated it looks like that person just kind of gave up on life today they're just like H nope not doing it because in addition to the kind of lack of of activity like physical and motor activity that often goes along with this our social engagement tends to decline too and so someone in a freeze response like in extreme cases might be basically non-verbal or at least they probably are just going to give you a lot of really short um flat answers like a lot of yes no or maybe just like mm like they might not even use words it's just that that those functions again are regulated by the frontal loes which are not fully onlined during a freeze response and so if you don't understand what a freeze response is and you see someone in a freeze response it it looks like they've just lost interest in life and that's not it can kind of feel like that that's not quite accurate because it's actually a person who's completely buried by stress so trying to like remind them or remind yourself of how important it is that you get this stuff done how how let down everyone's going to be or or what all the consequences will be if you cannot get up and get out of bed and get going it's just one more stressor and I know it seems like it's the right move but it's actually going to make everything worse there's a little bit more explanation on that in my video on the jks Dodson law so if you haven't checked that out yet I would encourage you that'd be a good video to followed this one up with what actually helps people when they're in a freeze response are stacking small victories and when I say small victories I mean literally the smallest you can imagine because what happens when you when you have a victory in a freeze response actually two things happen one is you get a little dopamine boost you get a little bit of reward coming in that says oh okay I actually feel actually feel a little bit of something right now that's good and your to-do list also gets just the teeniest tiniest bit smaller so how do you do that let's say let's say that you're laying in bed and you have not been able to get out of bed yet today the smallest possible action that you could take in that situation that has the potential to eventually get you going and get you out of the freeze response would be to sit up like like not even to get out of you might have think maybe you thought I was going to say get out of bed no I mean sit up in bed like the smallest action you can think of but we're not done yet engaging in the action is only the first step and if that's all you do you're going to stay stuck the second thing you have to do is celebrate that tiny little action to the most ludicrous degree you can think of what do I mean when I say that I mean I want you to celebrate you're sitting up in bed like your Jim Ross and The Undertaker just sat up and for the 10% of you that understood that reference I love you thanks for being here for the rest of you what I mean is be incredibly excited for yourself make a really big deal out of it I know that that might sound kind of silly because you sat up most people sit up every day right but in a freeze response your body feels like it weighs 700 pounds your brain feels like it is encased in the thickest fog imaginable when you're in that state sitting up is a big win and you should celebrate it if the WWE reference went flat for you think about when you're potty training a puppy that's also a decent example you know when your puppy pe's outside for the first time you're supposed to just like throw a celebration in the middle of your yard because you want to make sure that that puppy does not miss the fact that it just did something that is actually kind of incredible when you sit up from a freeze response that's the first step in Breaking the Chain so I want you to just go above and beyond celebrating that and from there you just keep stacking the littlest things you can imagine but don't don't just go go go go go because that that'll get you up to that threshold again pretty quickly what helps you a pace yourself and B mitigate the accumulation of stressors is every time you do anything take that pause take that moment and that moment could be a minute could be five minutes it could be a little bit take that moment to celebrate what you just did celebrate yourself like you have never never celebrated yourself before because when you start to feel that reward coming in that starts to communicate to your amydala maybe we're not in danger right now that's how your amygdala can start to differentiate are we being chased by a bear or do we just have a really stressful day right now because what would happen when you're being chased by a grizzly bear or in some other life-threatening situation that would produce dopamine like nothing it it just wouldn't happen your your brain is not going to allow that in that situation because that could get you killed that would be a liability so when your amydala notices hey there's dopamine here we're getting reward from something that's really weird right now that shouldn't be happening in a life or death situation maybe we're not in a life or death situation maybe we've Miss I don't know why your amydala is a we but whatever don't don't read into it I'm just talking maybe we're not in danger right now now maybe we have misinterpreted this situation and maybe we don't need to be in a freeze response right now maybe we actually need to reallocate those resources back up to the frontal lobe and get going again because that's the only thing that's ultimately going to get you out of a freeze response is getting your frontal loes back online because then you have critical thinking and critical thinking can help you realize yeah this is really stressful but I'm not going to die like I'm okay this just sucks this just really sucks but I'm okay this is not going to kill me and in fact I need this part of my brain online to work through all this stuff that's going on to regulate these incredibly intense emotions to plan how I'm going to get myself out of this because things are a bit of a mess right now so I hope that makes sense do the smallest possible things reward the heck out yourself every time and after you stack a few of those your amydala should start to understand that it has misread the situation and basically erroneously erroneously had I don't I just realized I've never heard anyone say that word out loud so hopefully you know what I mean um triggered a freeze response that is actually unnecessary and is keeping you stuck and holding you back that's not the only thing that helps but in order to avoid overwhelming you with seven different options or however many I'm going to start with what I think is the most effective try that one let me know how it goes like like actually let me know how it goes tell me in the comments did this work for you or not if it didn't I'll make you another video and I'll teach you a different skill and I'll keep coming back until we make some progress fair enough I'll see you guys next time take care

Channel: Dr. Scott Eilers

Views: 2,108,495

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Id: m1Z2MQSRxyI

Length: 20min 51sec (1251 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 09 2023