The folks in Kagan’s study I referred to in my last posting are in their twenties now and those who were labeled as highly reactive at birth, “remain anxious just below the surface, their subconscious brains still twitchy, still hyper vigilant, still unable to shift attention away from perceived threats that aren’t really there,” writes Robin Marantz Henig in the New York Times piece.
Those of you who’ve been reading my blogs on stress know where this reactivity is coming from—our amygdala, which in high reactors is “prickly as a haywire motion-detector light that turns on when nothing’s moving but the rain,” explains Marantz Henig. “Other physiological changes exist in children with this temperament, many of them also related to hyperreactivity in the amygdala. They have a tendency to more activity in the right hemisphere, the half of the brain associated with negative mood and anxiety; greater increases in heart rate and pupil dilation in response to stress; and on occasion higher levels of the stress hormones cortisol and norepinephrine.”
When I first read this article, I burst into tears at the motion detector metaphor. I felt such a complex array of emotions: relief that an explanation exists for why I am the way I am; sadness that it has taken me fifty-eight years to fully understand what’s been going on; compassion for the suffering I’ve experienced which I now really understand is not “normal,” at least for 80 percent of us. Suddenly my whole life’s journey to cultivate the positive emotions—happiness, gratitude, generosity, patience, self trust—made even more sense. I’ve been trying to cope with a broken motion detector!
What about you? Does this resonate? If so, what is the effect on you of attributing how you’ve been feeling and reacting to life as simply part of how you were hardwired at birth?
