Mark Kohler describes how anger during a marital breakup can push someone to destroy a shared business instead of negotiating fairly. When the amygdala hijacks the brain, the prefrontal cortex shuts down and survival mode takes over. Breathing and meditation can restore rational thinking and prevent self-sabotage.
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Someone here listening or is going to have that friend is going to have so much hate in them or anger against their spouse they're in this fight with that they will burn the business down rather than give them half of it. It's tough. For my ex wife, it was tough, I recognize that. But I didn't get to that point where I was ready to destroy everything to hurt her. I don't know. Do you have any advice or what do you want to tell them? Just to shake them and go, don't do this. What do you do to try to get someone off that cliff?
Well, those are the people that really tend to have the more narcissistic tendencies, to be honest with you. And now that we know more about brain science, which the brain science is that those people tend to have a more hypersensitive amygdala. So their amygdala gets hijacked very quickly, very easily. And when their amygdala is hijacked like that, that's when that limbic brain turns on and the prefrontal cortex literally shuts down because they're in survival mode. They think that this is what they have to do in order to survive, but they don't realize that what they're actually doing is self sabotaging. So what I tell people who have the ability to understand that breathing techniques, meditation, whatever you need to do to calm your nervous system so that you can get back into your prefrontal cortex, that thinking, judgment, rational brain, instead of being in full on emotion, fight or flight adrenaline, cortisol levels off the charts. You're not thinking clearly if that's where you are.
