WHEN YOU CAN’T THINK

In writing about Executive Thinking and the cognitive make-over that we work on in the Brain Camp, my focus has been exclusively on those states of non-thinking— when you do not think. I have focused on the mindlessness of reactive thinking, automatic thinking, passive thinking, borrowed thinking, etc. Then someone asked me what about the people who can’t think. My first thought was that they are just not thinking, choosing not to engage in the effort of thinking. But the person then talked about Daniel Goleman’s “amygdala hijacking” and states wherein one’s emotions get so overwhelming that one cannot think.

True enough, there are states wherein we experience emotional flooding which, when they occur, a person literally and physically cannot think. When emotions get strong enough and intense enough, they can flood conscious awareness to such an extent that, at those times, a person “loses control.” Then typically that person may say things which he will later regret or do things that she may later find extremely embarrassing. Some people talk about “seeing red” when they get so angry that they “cannot see straight.” Others have had the experience of actually losing consciousness and fainting.

In such stressful moments, people literally cannot think. I’ve seen it here this week at NSTT as we challenge people as they engage in one of the most stressful activities for we humans— standing up and speaking in public. There have been moments when a person, wanting so much to do well and to be seen as highly competent, gets interrupted by the person giving feedback and for that moment of surprise or shock goes into a state of blanking out ... unable to gather one’s thoughts or words.

Now while thinking and emoting are not dichotomous functions and they do operate systemically so that as thinking influences emotions so emotions also influence thinking. Given this, the intensity of one’s emotions can be amplified in such a way that they can become overwhelming. In NLP language, when this occurs then we say that the person begins to experience state- dependent thinking, perceiving, remembering, speaking, behaving, etc.

With the intensity of emotions, especially the negative emotions, our brain-body system is activated to respond. And depending on a person’s level of development, the responses that occur often regress to much more primitive responses. As the sympathetic nervous system becomes increasingly activated, a flood of energy may bombard the mind and take over a number of processes including rational thinking, social consciousness, the more highly developed coping skills, etc.

In The Developing Brain (2012), Daniel Siegael writes,

“One’s thinking or behavior can become disrupted if arousal moves beyond the boundaries of the window of tolerance. ... Outside the window of tolerance, excessive sympathetic branch activity can lead to increased energy-consuming processes, manifested by increases in heart rate and respiration and as a ‘pounding’ sensation in the head.” (281-3)

Depending on a person’s “window of tolerance” and emotional development, the person may become highly irritable, given to emotional outbursts, find himself unable to gather his thoughts and talk very coherently, etc. All of this can be amplified by being physically exhausted, suffering from sleep deficiency, emotionally worn-out, etc. Enough about the problem. We all know about moments where it seems that we cannot think. So what can we do about such moments?

Here your meta-cognitive cortical capacities can come to the rescue. After all, you cannot control what you’re not aware of. So the simple step of stepping back and identifying the moment starts activating the parasympathetic nervous system. It enables you to have a moment of mindfulness. “Oh that’s what’s happening!” This is the “if you can name it, you can tame it” idea.

For flexibility in responding, great self-regulation, embracing an experience with acceptance initiates a subtle change. That’s because you can then change what you’re telling yourself about your experience. And that changes the meanings that you then apply to it. You are meta-stating yourself with some of the most profound states of all —awareness, acceptance, seeking-to- understand, patience, etc. and that sets the state for critical thinking, mindfulness, resilience, and much more.