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Law enforcement are no strangers to threat and danger. It’s essential to the job. Officers sign up to confront violence and crime and often find themselves in harm’s way. When they do, a stress response is activated in the brain.
The stress response is familiar to most of us. We’ve all felt threatened at one point or another. There is an intensity of emotion, a tensing of the body, a compulsion to defend or protect. When we feel threatened, our bodies seem to separate themselves from our minds and react to keep us safe. This reaction is critical in life-or-death situations. It focuses our attention on defeating or escaping whatever the threat might be.
The vigilance we have to survive and be successful in the face of threat has a lot to do with the stress response.
How does this happen?
When we perceive or predict threat, that perception triggers a neurological response. Even before our brain’s visual center has a chance to fully process what is going on, let alone our critical thinking centers, our amygdala — the emotional center of our brain — triggers the hypothalamus to activate a stress response through our sympathetic nervous system. It does this by signaling the release of adrenaline into our bloodstream.
Adrenaline is responsible for all the sensations we feel under threat — the increased heart rate, the hotness from heightened blood flow, the rapid breathing, the sharpening of senses — all to facilitate the body’s access to the energy it needs to survive and respond with fight, flight, freeze or fawn behaviors.
When our initial perception of threat in the amygdala is verified in other regions of the brain, based on what we see, hear, etc., a second phase of arousal is activated, and cortisol is released to keep our bodies on high alert. With cortisol, our energy sustains our protective behaviors and lasts until we feel that we are no longer under threat, at which point the parasympathetic nervous system kicks in to dampen the stress response.
The upside and the downside
We can be grateful for this stress response in situations when danger is imminent — when taking down an armed individual, when saving a person from a car fire, when apprehending a suspect. The vigilance we have to survive and be successful in the face of threat has a lot to do with the stress response.
However, there is a key downside.
When cortisol spikes, it shuts down our ability to think clearly and critically. As part of the stress response, cortisol prevents the amygdala from relaxing. And when the amygdala is in full activation mode, it cuts off information flow to our prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that’s responsible for critical thinking, reasoning, planning, problem solving, decision-making and impulse control. This makes it so that we stay on high alert, rather than ready to consider information that might reduce the feeling of threat. And when we are on high alert, we are more likely to succumb to errors in thinking — like tunnel vision, selective perception and confirmation bias — that skew the information we use to process our situation.
Interestingly, perceptions of threat are triggered not just in cases of physical danger, but also in situations that lead to conflict — when we perceive threats to our sense of self, to what we need or want, to our expectations for how people should interact with one another. The stress response is activated in the same way.
Think of the individual who refuses to comply with a lawful order and ends up arrested or Tased because their behavior escalates. The threat, in this case, isn’t to their survival, but to something else. Nonetheless, the stress response kicks in to put them in a defensive fight mode. The stress response doesn’t protect them as their body may have intended, but instead exacerbates the situation and gets them into more trouble.
Think about these scenarios and the way our bodies respond: when someone is chasing us; when someone cuts us off in traffic; when we’ve asked someone to do something and they refuse. The adrenaline and cortisol get going and we react. The stress response in the brain is the same whether the threat is to our physical safety or to something else.
Since our stress response is primal and almost instantaneous, it can feel almost impossible to regulate. So how do we gain control over it so that we are able to use it to our advantage, when necessary, but rein it in when not?
Critical thinking in response to threat can lead to better decision-making that relies less on instinct and more on experience and training.
Knowing what’s happening can help
Understanding the mechanics of the threat response is critical to overriding some of the survival safeguards that can be counterproductive in our interactions with others when they are not life-threatening. It also helps us understand other people’s actions and gives us the opportunity to de-escalate rather than get pulled into an escalating dynamic.
The first step is being aware. When we know what is happening to our bodies when we feel threatened, we can interrupt the disruption of our critical reasoning and be purposeful in understanding the source of the threat. We can start to pay attention to the physical cues that adrenaline initiates — when our bodies begin to tense, when the heat rises, when our hearts start pounding. These physical responses tell us that our stress response is kicking into gear. When it does, we can take a few moments to self-regulate, starting with a few deep breaths, then asking ourselves: What’s the threat here?
If it is a physical threat that you need to combat for the protection of yourself or others, this moment gives you the time you need to think through a tactical response.
If it is an interpersonal threat, this moment gives you the time you need to engage strategic communication skills.
Critical thinking in response to threat can lead to better decision-making that relies less on instinct and more on experience and training.
When we can recognize clues of the stress response in other people, we can engage more productively with them as well. Typically, when someone is in fight, flight, freeze or fawn mode in response to us or something we need, it is challenging not to let our stress response take over and escalate in kind. But if we understand what is going on in the brain and are on the lookout for stress-based behaviors and heightened emotions in others, we can avoid getting sucked in and instead focus our energy on getting the other person’s parasympathetic system going to calm them down. We do this by helping them focus on what they are feeling or doing and direct them to think about how and whether their reaction is going to help them. When they start to consider their feelings and actions, the prefrontal cortex engages, and the stress response begins to diminish. Reasoning, listening and dialogue become possible.
So next time you notice either yourself or another person reacting to threat — physical or nonphysical — take a moment to pay attention, regulate and re-engage critical thinking so that you, rather than your stress response, are the one in control.
Dr. Megan Price
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