Susan Britton MCCICF Award-Winning Coach Educator, Neuroscience-Informed ICF/SHRM Coach Training, INSEAD Executive Masters in Change, Advocate for Evolutionary Shift from “Red Zone” to “Blue Zone” for Leaders, Coaches & Fellow Humans

Beneficial Role of the Red Zone

Name: Beneficial Role of the Red Zone
Uploaded: 2025-11-14T06:00:24+00:00
Duration: 1 min 5 s
Channel: Susan Britton MCC
Description: In this educational segment, Susan Britton MCC explains that the "red zone" is not merely a negative state to avoid, but rather the body's protective…

14 Nov 2025 · 1 min

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1:05

In this educational segment, Susan Britton MCC explains that the "red zone" is not merely a negative state to avoid, but rather the body's protective warning system that signals the need to act in order to stay alive, healthy, and thrive. She describes how the brain is evolutionarily averse to uncertainty, constantly trying to predict outcomes to ensure safety. When faced with unpredictable situations, the prefrontal cortex (PFC) becomes highly active as it attempts to escape uncertainty, even though the PFC typically goes offline under stress. This paradox—PFC activation during uncertainty versus its shutdown during stress—highlights the complex neural dynamics that underlie our responses to threat and ambiguity.

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The red zone is not a negative thing that we should always avoid and never be in. It is something that is just the body's protective warning system that says, hey, wake up, we need to be sure that we're going to stay alive and stay healthy and thrive. And so pay attention, we better do something with this. However, it does not like— the brain evolutionarily does not like uncertainty because it is always in this sort of predictive space to determine what's going to happen to me. Will I be able to navigate this? Will I be safe? And when things happen around us that we cannot be able to determine, will I be safe, then we start really kicking into the PFC, so the prefrontal cortex. And it's a little interesting because the very thing that goes offline when we're under stress is the prefrontal cortex. And yet, paradoxically, at the same time, when we face uncertainty, that part of the brain is amping up because it wants to get away from the uncertainty.