Micro Class: Limbic-PFC Seesaw

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another micro class. This one's on your limbic PFC seesaw, inspired by your brain at work. David Rock, Neuroscience of showing up at work and crushing it. How your brain works at work. So one of the sections in the book is on staying cool under pressure. If you want to stay cool under pressure, this is a really big idea to help you solve that. So here's a short story. Your brain has many different functions, right? But let's grossly oversimplify and talk about your limbic system and your prefrontal cortex. Your limbic system is essentially the home of your emotions, and the PFC is home of your rational thinking. Now, when you start feeling intense emotions like fear or anxiety or overwhelm or shame or anger or whatever, your limbic system goes nuts, right? So if we were imagining a seesaw, your limbic system would go up, right? Go way up and be super hot. And what researchers have found is that when your limbic system is hot, your PFC is cool. Kind of like a seesaw, right? So what's exciting is if you want to cool off your limbic system, what you need to do is engage your prefrontal cortex. So you need to kick off the ground on your prefrontal cortex and boom, push up here, which brings your limbic system down. How do you do that? Well, there are a lot of different ways to do that. One of the ways he talks about. Two primary ways. We'll talk about quickly here. One way is to simply label your emotion that you're experiencing. So when you experience an intense emotion like fear or anxiety, you can do a lot of different things, right? You can try to suppress it and basically say, no, I'm not thinking that. I'm not feeling that. No, no, right. Deny it. Not a wise idea. You can express it, which is basically, you're feeling anger. Well, just express your anger. Not a particularly helpful idea. And then you can also kind of create drama around it and really indulge in it, et cetera, right? What research has found is that the optimal way to approach these intense emotions when they're just arising is to label them. Dan Siegel says, name it to tame it, right? So you engage your prefrontal cortex when you say something as simple as, wow, I'm noticing fear arise. I'm feeling fearful or anxious or angry. Simply saying that symbolically labeling, naming your emotion tames it. It reduces your limbic arousal state, and you're able to perform at a much higher level than if you did any of these other things right now. Important distinction. We're not talking about, well, I'm feeling fear. And I think the root of that fear is probably because my father was an alcoholic and I had this rough upbringing and I failed so many times at this particular thing. And I remember that time. And this time we're not talking about archeological digs and kind of over analysis here. We're talking about simple one or two word labeling of your emotion. If you do the other stuff, you're actually going to heighten this, the arousal state. It's not effective for performing in that moment and staying cool under pressure. So that's a really cool look at the limbic PFC seesaw with that idea of labeling. The second idea is reappraisal. So we talk about this all the time. This is the here's your stimulus, here's your response. You can choose in that gap how you're going to respond that researchers call in this context, reappraisal. This happened. You may have an initial appraisal of da da da da. It's because of something negative. And then you can reappraise it. That ability for your director to reappraise data that's coming into your consciousness is a great way to engage your PFC and reduce your heightened emotionally aroused response. Limbic PFC Seesaw this is big. I hope you enjoyed let's Stay Cool Under Pressure. Hi, this is Brian. I hope you enjoyed that micro class. 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