I have long noted – and personally experienced – that when I am stressed, anxious, or overwhelmed, I literally cannot connect in a heart centered way, problem solve or think clearly.
I only see the problems or the threats and cannot seem to see options for solutions or see the perspective of others.
So I don’t even try.
Instead, I focus on activating on my parasympathetic nervous system.
The minute I calm my “fight or flight” impulse and begin to feel safe, I can calm down and effectively problem solve.
I have spent years trying to find the science to explain what I am personally experiencing and I finally think I found it – just in time for Valentine’s Day, the ultimate celebration of love, compassion and connection.
How Fight or Flight Blocks Connection
Your ability to connect to others, show compassion and practice empathy is correlated with your parasympathetic nervous system.
When you sense danger or fear your safety is at risk, your nervous system kicks into the “fight or flight” survival mode (sympathetic branch of the nervous system), which allocates resources toward survival.
This means that your body prepares for immediate action: your heart rate and respiration increase, blood flow is routed to your limbs to help you fight back or flee, your muscles tense and your vision narrows, allowing you to narrow your focus and pay close attention to signs of danger in the external, physical world. Your pupils dilate and peripheral vision is reduced to focus solely on the potential threat.
This tunnel vision response shuts down your ability to focus on anything that isn’t necessary for solving the problem at hand -including intimate connections, empathy and compassion for yourself and others.
Just as the sympathetic nervous system turns off all functions not critical to survival, including your ability to digest food, it also turns off your capacity to access connection and problem solving skills, by shutting down your ability to focus on anything outside of the pressing danger so as not to overwhelm you with options and compromise your ability to hyper-focus and fight or flee from danger.
In a dangerous situation, this tunnel vision can help you focus on and survive a perceived threat. However, when danger is only perceived but not actually present, this tunnel vision prevents you from spending time or energy on anything not critical to immediate survival, including love, connection and relationships.
I personally experience this as feeling so anxious in certain moments that I am either unaware of how I am interacting or so hyper focused on potential danger that I am unable to relax into the moment and focus on my loved one.
This has to do with the fact that you are constantly bombarded with sensory information. If you focus your attention on everything going on around you, you will go into sensory overload and be unable to maintain your focus on safety.
Unfortunately, when the sympathetic state locks you into a state of constantly scan for threats, it shuts down your ability to thoughtfully experience compassion, empathy or connection with others that might distract you and feel threatening to your safety.
Stress Trumps Empathy
Empathy – or the ability to understand and share the feelings of another — helps you foster and maintain social and emotional connections.
That said, your empathetic response is affected by your focus. Under stress, resources are allocated to cope with the stressor(s) which results in a narrowing of attention where you focus on potential dangers in your environment and not the feelings or experience of others.
Research on The association between acute stress & empathy found that acute stress can block affective empathy/emotion contagion.
“In addition to this narrowing of attention, it is thought that acute stress elicits a shift from more cognitively demanding information processing to more habitual response patterns. This shift should enable more rapid information processing and, thus, might be beneficial for dealing with stressors (and ultimately, survival), especially when quick decisions are necessary. However, this shift can also come at a cost, as mental flexibility is diminished. This shift may have important consequences for social information processing in general, and for empathy in particular.”
Parasympathetic Activates Safety to Support Empathy and Connection
Activating the parasympathetic branch of your nervous system can help you improve connection.
When your sympathetic nervous system is active, you release stress chemicals like cortisol and adrenaline that narrow your focus and dampen connection to keep you on high alert and ready for intense physical activity.
Your parasympathetic nervous system does the opposite – helping you feel safe and turn on your ability to think rationally, reason and connect with empathy.
The parasympathetic state helps you feel safe which allows you to activate the neural connections necessary for healthy cognitive and emotion regulation. When you are able to shift out of the high alert state into a mental and emotional space of safety, your mind can relax, allowing you to calm your emotional state, expand your focus, and connect from a place of love and compassion.
In fact, research from the University of Oregon found that “greater parasympathetic activity is a marker of increased selective attention and neurocognitive function.”
In other words, you can heighten your selective attention and your ability to understand and share the feelings of your loved ones by activating your parasympathetic state. Your parasympathetic nervous system activates the relaxed physical and mental state that allows you to consider and integrate new ideas.
In the parasympathetic state, your vagus nerve releases the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, to help enhance attention, and learning. In your brain, acetylcholine activates and inhibits communication between different brain regions to properly store information, by speeding up or slowing down nerve signals. In your brain, acetylcholine is mainly excitatory, allowing your neurons to communicate so you can think clearly, learn new information and connect with your loved ones.
It is critical to shift out of the Sympathetic, survival mode, branch of your nervous system as it is not conducive to making thoughtful, heart-centered and empathetic connections. The easiest way to do this is to literally force yourself to pause and activate your Parasympathetic nervous system. Inhaling or topically applying Parasympathetic® behind the earlobe on the mastoid bone where the vagus nerve is closest to the surface of your body helps stimulate your vagus nerve to activate the parasympathetic state and calm your fight or flight response to enhance love and connection.
