The Sunday Morning blast and the whole day went for a toss. I had no idea why I acted / reacted to that small incident the way I did. This was not the first time.
While everything seemed normal on the face of it, I could feel the turbulence internally so clearly. I had started showing strong reactions and emotional outbursts to small things, leaving others and self too sometimes wonder what was there to react so bad to such a small thing. It had started occurring so frequent after a time that it had started bothering me too and it was now a situation of red flag.
Being a non medical student, I had never got any serious introduction to the subject of the human body and its functions. Barring few normal activities I had not much idea about the functions of this human machine. But now with a conscious effort I started remaining observant of my reactions to situations. I realized that my mind was reacting against its rational thinking and going with emotional impulsive reactions. It was obvious as our rationality takes a little longer to get activated than our emotions.
Reading and knowing the human body has always been fascinating for me. It was once that I was surfing through the internet, I came across this book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ by Daniel Goleman. It was like god sent for me at that moment. It spoke about a very interesting organ in our body - Amygdala - and its functions. More reading on it made me go curious about it.
Amygdala is a kind of an almond-shaped mass of grey matter present inside each of our cerebral hemisphere. It operates unconsciously. We cannot control its immediate, instinctive, automatic reactions because they happen much before our consciousness gets activated. It is that part of the brain that unites emotions and memory. It is involved with the experiencing of life situations and giving an emotional meaning to it linking it with our memories. It also helps in reward processing and decision-making to handle a particular situation faced.
Reading further, I came across the concept of Amygdala Hijacks. It is an emotional response that is immediate, overwhelming, and out of measure with the actual stimulus because it has triggered a much more significant emotional threat. If occurred, it could cause serious mental problems such as poor decision-making and impaired emotional memories. I was scared reading that damage to the amygdala can happen when any strong emotion like anger, fear, anxiety or even extreme excitement impairs the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain in the frontal lobe that regulates rational thinking. Symptoms of these can be seen in day to day life very clearly like reacting irrationally with anger, frustration or restlessness to simple situations or incidents.
The risk attached to this organ is that it gets triggered on a fraction of a second. It gives us the feeling of "fear" even before we understand what is that we are fearing of and why is it that we are fearing it. Instability of it can create body misfunctioning like increased heart beat, palpitation score, blood pressure, etc. This organ stabilizes itself if it senses safety around. Having said about its impulsive nature of reacting to threating situations, it is also interesting to note the good side of it. If our mind did not show such abruptic reacts to threats then how can one be saved from seeing a snake or a speed vehicle running towards etc.
Now, geared up with this understanding, if I look back, not to be surprised anymore, all this while I was having nothing but the Amygdala hijacks. I have shown so many such reactions and have suffered so many times silently in the past due to my own ignorance.
It is important to remember that this human mind is full of magical powers. It is a mix bag of problems as well as solutions. It is on us to keep it healthy, wealthy and wise. Yogic exercises like breath management, cultivating good habits of mind management or developing emotion control mechanisms etc can be good ways to calm the amigdala and keep it under a balanced state. The idea is to learn the trick of Self regulation of this human organism. i.e learning ways to regulate our mind ourselves with Critical and Rational Thinking instead of letting the mind get dominated by our emotions.
Exploring the human body is one fun activity that one can get into. It surprises me every time with something new. The more we know about this human body the less it is. Happy Exploring ! 😊
