Alicia had just arrived home from dropping off her husband at the airport. It was the first time he had to go on a business trip since their first child was born. Although she was glad that her husband hadn’t traveled during their son’s first 5 months, she was nervous about the whole situation as she had no other family in town or close friends since they were new to the area. “Have to go honey, we’re leaving the gate for take-off. I’ll call you as soon as I arrive. Love you.”, her husbands tells her while on the plane, getting ready to depart. “Love you too honey and take care.”, she responds then ends the call. She looks at the clock then picks her son up from the floor to take him a bath. “What do you say we start our first evening alone with doing your favorite thing, bath time!”, she tells her son as she snugs her nose on his tummy.

She sits him in the tub and starts filling it with water. As she’s doing this she starts thinking about how hard the next few days might be, how she wishes she was closer to her parents, how she still feels like a stranger in her neighborhood. She then catches herself drifting into depressive thoughts and starts thinking about all the things she’s grateful for. She thinks about her son and how he amazes her every day. She thinks of the beautiful house they had moved into, small but perfect for starting a family, with amazing details such as solid wood interior doors, hardwood floors with custom patterns, and amazing looking custom cabinets throughout the house. She thinks about the great opportunities that have brought her and her husband to this new place she now calls home. Her thoughts get interrupted by a ring on her phone, it’s a notification that someone is at the front door. “A doorbell with a camera, another thing to be grateful for.”, she thinks to herself. Since her phone is within sight in the bedroom, she decides to quickly get it to check who it is. As she’s stepping out of the bathroom she trips over one of her son’s toys and as she’s falling she instinctively grabs on from a shirt that was hanging from the door knob and accidentally pulls the door shut. As she tries to open the door she realizes it’s locked. She quickly goes into panic, knowing that the water is still running in the tub with her son in it, “Oh no, oh no, oh no! Why is the door locked!? How am I going to get in!? Don’t worry Baby, mommy is right here! What am I going to do?! What am I going to do?!”. She starts hitting the door as she screams, “Open, open, open!”. She hears her son now go into a loud cry and now with a desperate cry she once again says, “Don’t worry Baby, mommy is right here, mommy is right here!”. After a couple of seconds of silence, which feels like an eternity, she then tells herself, “OK Alicia, you need to calm down. Think, you just need to figure out how to open this door, you can do this.”. She remembers where her husband keeps his tools and quickly runs over to grab his set of small screw drivers. The hole on the door knob is small so she tries the smallest screw driver she can find but it doesn’t fit. She starts drifting into panic again then catches herself. She gets up, runs to the kitchen and gets three paper clips and some tape. She bends out each paper clip so that the point sticks out on each, she then tapes the ends together to form a small flat screw driver and sticks the paper clips in the door knob. After the third attempt she manages to get the door open! She finds her son just as she left him, except crying and with water covering his legs now. “I am so sorry Baby.”, she tells her son as she gives him a big hug.

So how was Alicia able to go from trying to open the door by breaking it down to making a key out of paper clips? We all have heard of similar stories where it’s better to calm down and think about the situation and not panic. So why is that and what exactly is going on in our brain during these type of situations? Our brain has an amazing complexity, this is why there are entire volumes of books written about how the brain works. It would be foolish of me to attempt to summarize it in one post so instead I will share some of the main points throughout several.

To simplify this explanation, you can basically divide our brain into an upper level and a lower level. Our lower level is what many call our animal brain, the primitive part of our brain. This is where the emotions come from. This is also our subconscious. Our initial responses come from the lower level. The upper level is the more developed part of our brain. This is where logic and reason come from. If you’re aware of how these two parts of your brain work you can actually catch when one part of your brain is talking to the other. For example, remember the time when you thought back about something foolish you had done based on an emotional response and told yourself, “what was I thinking”. This is your upper level talking to your lower level. OK, so to recap, lower level is emotions, subconscious, animal instincts, survival. Upper level is logic, reason, ability to calculate and analyze. Now that we have that down, lets go back to the story. Can you figure out now what part of Alicia’s brain was in full gear when she was trying to break down the door? It was the lower level, there was no logic here, just pure emotions and survival instincts. So when did the upper level take control? The moment she told herself to calm down.

Even though our brain’s upper level is more developed than our lower, it doesn’t mean it’s always best to act based on what our upper level is telling us. In many cases it will, and one could argue that in most, as we can all probably think back on bad decisions we took because we let emotions get the best of us. But a good example of cases where it was better to act per our lower level is in these amazing survival stories we read about where people do these extraordinary things to survive, things that our upper level would tells us that logically they are not possible and so keep us from being able to do them. If we go back to the story, even though Alicia’s upper level had taken control to analyze the situation to figure out how to open the door, the idea of making a key out of paper clips, something that might be considered illogical, came from the lower level.

Having an understanding of these functions of our brain can be very powerful in better understanding ourselves and the people around us. These two levels of our brain are constantly fighting to take control. Try practicing identifying what part is in control, or was in control, within you or in others during certain situations. Being able to identify this will allow you to go to the next step, knowing how to engage the other level, which opens a door of possibilities.

If you want to learn more about this specific topic I recommend the book Incognito by David Eagleman, one of my top ten books. And for the parents out there, No Drama Decipline by Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson, which teaches you how to apply this knowledge to become better parents.