If you have ever sat through, led or facilitated a meeting or event that you’d rather not remember, read on. I’d like to share a few thoughts and insights with you that shed some light on the role of our brain in producing or perpetuating great or horrible meetings, relationships and conversations.
I do not claim more than a superficial understanding of the neurochemistry of conversations, but what I have learned over the last 7 months has opened new worlds for me.
We don’t usually talk about meetings, relationships or conversations that have gone south, unless maybe with a trusted spouse, friend or colleague, where we can vent, spew our frustrations and be the hero of our story. I suspect with others we’d rather not advertise such meetings or conversations, especially when we were supposed to have managed them well, lest our clients, supervisors, or colleagues will lose confidence in us, give us a bad rating, and think twice about giving us a similar assignment in the future. Yet if we don’t talk about them we cannot learn or understand what happened, and in the process learn something about ourselves, our skills and what we need to better understand or work on, to avoid repeat experiences.
Events that produce stress, that are toxic and do not produce intended results are obviously costly. Even if all we wanted was consensus at the end and we believe we got it, consensus in such an atmosphere may not be consensus at all. I call this pseudo consensus. Pseudo consensus happens when people with divergent opinions don’t want to rock the boat, don’t dare to stand up to majority opinion, or simply feel too small to have an opinion at all.
The more serious costs associated with such events is what happens afterwards. We may feel less secure in our ability, lose confidence and experience stress that lingers, especially if we were already worried about how others see us.
This is what happens when we are stressed: we produce hormones like cortisol, adrenaline, or testosterone that bind to receptors all over our body. These hormones mobilize our energy, increase blood flow, increase our heart rate and breathing rate, heighten our awareness, enhance our memory, and prepare us to either fight or flee. Even if we do none of those things, these hormones think we will. And if they are not suppressed, the good work of these hormones turns bad.
What I have learned to understand is that in stressful situations, whether acute or lingering, our limbic system (buried deep inside our brain) determines quicker than the time to read this sentence what is necessary for survival, which today is more likely to be psychological than physical survival. When our competence is being questioned, or when we feel psychologically attacked, the body prepares to come to our rescue as if there is an emergency. The amygdala, a section within the limbic system, detects fear and prepares our body for such emergency events and the stress hormones start flowing.
Most of us have, at some point in time, experienced what Daniel Goleman calls ‘an amygdala hijack.’ This is when we experience an overwhelming emotional response that is out of proportion to the stimulus because it has triggered a significant emotional threat. After such a hijack we usually explain our behavior to others by saying ‘I wasn’t myself.’ If ‘myself’ is how we describe ourselves when the most developed part of our brain, the prefrontal cortex (PFC), is in control, than this is accurate.
The sooner we are aware of what is happening (the limbic system taking control and the PFC shutting down) the quicker we can recover. Our ancestors in their infinite wisdom knew exactly how to respond to this loss of control (and our grandson is learning this in preschool), which is to count to ten. The counting to ten moves the steering wheel back to the PFC and we can think with more clarity about our responses and actions and consider their consequences. But when the stress is significant this shifting of control gets to be difficult. As Amy Arnsten, Professor of neuroscience and Psychology at Yale University, describes “Under conditions of psychological stress the amygdala activates stress pathways in the hypothalamus and brainstem, which evokes high levels of noradrenaline (NA) and dopamine (DA) release. This impairs Prefrontal cortex (PFC) regulation but strengthens amygdala function, thus setting up a ‘vicious cycle’.”
For people living in toxic environments, either at work, at home or both, stress is a constant. This causes a continuous spraying of stress hormones in their bodies. These hormones, which are helping with survival in small doses, start doing the contrary when they are not turned off. We already know that stress makes us sick, but here is why, according to Dina Aronson:
“Cortisol functions to reduce inflammation in the body, which is good, but over time, these efforts to reduce inflammation also suppress the immune system. Chronic inflammation, caused by lifestyle factors such as poor diet and stress, helps to keep cortisol levels soaring, wreaking havoc on the immune system. An unchecked immune system responding to unabated inflammation can lead to myriad problems: an increased susceptibility to colds and other illnesses, an increased risk of cancer, the tendency to develop food allergies, an increased risk of an assortment of gastrointestinal issues (because a healthy intestine is dependent on a healthy immune system), and possibly an increased risk of autoimmune disease.”
For me the takeaway from all these neurochemical processes is that we need to be aware of our own fight or flight responses, and stop the limbic brain from being in control. When confronted with an environment that causes stress Judith Glaser, organizational anthropologist and author of Conversational Intelligence: How Great Leaders Build Trust and Get Extraordinary Results, suggests we move to a higher level of conversation. We can do this by:
Trying to silence the voice that judges ‘those others who don’t get it,’ because the judging causes reactions in the other that produce the kinds of hormones that will spoil the broth;
Stop trying to convince others that we know Truth, that we have the answer or solution that the others need and stop telling (or selling or yelling) to make others use our stuff;
Start asking the kind of questions for which we have no answers; questions that show we are curious, that we care, and that we are open to influence.
All these behaviors will shift the energy in the room and change direction to go to the proverbial north (as opposed to 'south'). By inviting others to share, to discover new possibilities and show that we truly care, we release oxytocin instead of cortisol (or adrenaline or testosterone). Oxytocin is known as the bonding or cuddle hormone. A good spraying of oxytocin invites others to care as well, to open up, which then bolsters their courage to give voice to what concerns them, to be candid and become vulnerable. And when that happens everything becomes possible, or to use Judith Glaser words, “To get to the next level of greatness depends on the quality of the culture, which depends on the quality of the relationships, which depends on the quality of the conversation. Everything happens through conversations.”