Durable Dad with Tommy Geary
The Durable Dad podcast gives men the skills and tools they need to be rock solid for their family, their work and their community.
Durable Dad with Tommy Geary
083: Finding Balance in Stressful Moments
Why do we overreact?
Even when we know better.
We know it’s gonna piss someone off or upset the person in front of us, but our mouth takes a mind of it’s own and say the thing anyway.
The truth is, our brains have evolved to overestimate danger, loss, or rejection.
We’re a lot safer and more loved than our brain lets on.
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk breaks the brain down into three parts:
The cook - takes in all the ingredients and cooks up a narrative.
The smoke detector - decides very quickly if the stress signals need to go off.
The watch tower - takes a higher viewpoint of the situation and has better discernment if the alarm signals need to go off.
The problem is, our watch tower receives the information from the cook slower, and it takes longer to process the narrative.
The watch tower might have better judgment, but our smoke detector beat it to the punch and we’ve already lashed out.
This awareness alone can help us tune into our watch tower more readily, along with taking a look into our past to understand why the smoke detector is so quick to signal danger.
This is the Durable Dad Podcast. I'm your host, tommy Geary. This show is going to give you the skills and tools you need to be a rock solid man for your work, your community and, most importantly, your family. All right, what's up? Episode number 83.
Speaker 1:It is a Friday morning and this week has been one of those weeks where I'm pretty grateful for the schedule that Brenda and I have, the business that we've created and our girls have just been sick all week and we don't have any grandparents nearby that, like, have much kind of day-to-day support when this happens. So being able to shift our schedules is really helpful and so grateful for that. And at the same time, we have to pause some of the proactive things we're doing for the business, and that's not easy when the kids are sick. So, similar to what a lot of guys feel, this tug of should I be spending time working, creating money, creating a better bank account for my family, or should I maybe not work as much as I could so I can be present, be with the kids? And this constant balance swinging back and forth is what I've been working on this week, and with Brenda, I mean, I still coached all my clients, I still got coached myself, kind of prioritized those two things and prioritize this podcast, because that's how we're rolling and I'm excited about this topic. I got inspired in two ways.
Speaker 1:So one, coaching a guy recently, and he gets really pissed off whenever his daughters start fighting, and before we were working together, whenever they would start going at it he would turn around in the car, yell at them. At home he would physically separate them and he wanted to let kids be kids a little bit more. His girls are going to fight, let them fight, let them roughhouse a little bit If they do get hurt, because they're inevitably going to get hurt. He wants to be able to not tell them. I told you so. You shouldn't have done that. He wants to be there with him and be more nurturing, and he's more aware of the quick reaction he has and the overreaction, and it still pisses him off though. So the other night his girl started going at it and he left the room. He noticed himself getting worked up and he's telling himself that they're just kids, they're just roughhousing, not a big deal. They're supposed to fight, they're supposed to get banged up a little bit, and his heart rate's still up. He's still ready to react to them, ready to yell at them, ready to put an end to it as quick as possible. And this is all happening in the other room. He can hear them from the other side of the wall and he's still getting worked up, so he's like what the heck is going on here? So what's happening here is that our brains, over time, have evolved to overestimate the chance of danger, loss or rejection.
Speaker 1:In the book the Body Keeps the Score I'm going to say the author's name slowly Dr Bessel van der Kolk. I think I nailed that it's just how it sounds. I think I nailed that it's just how it sounds. He breaks down the brain into three different roles when it comes to responding to the environment around us and situations that are happening. So the three parts of the brain he calls the cook, the smoke detector and the watchtower. And this is simplifying how our brain works, because our brain is very complicated. But the cook takes in our surrounding environment what we see, what we hear, what we smell, touch, taste, all the senses. It takes it in from our current environment and the cook cooks it up into a narrative and then that information gets sent to two different places in the brain. It gets sent down to what he calls the smoke detector in the lower part of our brain and it gets sent up to what he calls the watchtower, the upper part of our brain. And the job of both of these parts is to determine if we're in danger or we're safe, and the information gets to the smoke detector first.
Speaker 1:The smoke detector, the lower part of our brain, it's the older part of our system and it's very simple. It's an on-off switch. It's either we're in danger or we're not in danger, and it processes the cook's narrative really quickly and to do that it uses similar situations from our past. So it takes information from our past and determines danger or not danger. This is the smoke detector, and if this part of the brain detects danger, it sends stress signals down into our body and we go into a fight or flight mode. Think about when you say something stupid to your wife that as soon as it comes out of your mouth you know it's just going to piss her off, but you said it anyway. It's usually because the smoke detector sends some kind of danger put your body in action before the information was processed by the watchtower, which we're going to talk about next. So that's how quick the smoke detector works. It gets the information, it processes it quickly. It uses past experiences to determine danger. No danger If there's danger. Stress signals puts the body into action.
Speaker 1:Now the third part of the brain, the other part of the brain that determines if we're in danger or not is the watchtower. So the watchtower is more reasonable, it has better judgment. This is the upper part of our brain, the prefrontal cortex. It is the part of our brain that's the most evolved, it's what makes us human, and the watchtower sees the scene from higher up and it takes a little bit longer to process what's happening than the smoke detector does.
Speaker 1:So back to the guy that his kids are fighting a lot. I asked him what was fighting like in your house growing up and pretty quickly he was able to describe some situations where his two older sisters would get into fights and they would get hurt and they'd be slamming doors and that it was always really scary. It was a scary experience for him. So this guy in 2024, he owns his own business, he's a marathon runner, he's a grown man in his 40s and there's a part of him, a little guy inside that remembers his sister's fighting and how scary that was, and that imprint is affecting how he's behaving in his relationships with his kids today. It's a little crazy, but this is how the three parts work. So his cook's cooking up the environment of his daughter's fighting around him, sends it down to the smoke detector part of his brain and the smoke detector part of the brain processes the information really quickly because it takes in what's there in the current environment that the cook cooked up and the past experience of girls fighting in his house. That was very scary Watchtower can process the actual scene and be a little more neutral about it, be a little more discerning of how much danger they're actually in, what to do with this information, why it's helpful to understand these three parts of the brain, how we tend to overestimate the danger that we're in.
Speaker 1:It helps us be more curious when we're trying to change. So this guy, when he is still gritting his teeth, trying to be patient with his daughters fighting, instead of asking himself like what's wrong with me, he can be like oh, what's going on with my smoke detector here? What information from the past is it using to sense a lot more danger than they're actually in? And that's when real change can happen, when we can be more curious with our current behavior rather than beating ourselves up. I should be further along. I shouldn't have this kind of reaction. So that's what I'm hoping you can take from this.
Speaker 1:Sometimes we overreact, we snap back at our wife, we send a passive, aggressive email back to a client or a colleague mail back to a client or a colleague. And when we have those quick overreactions, it's because something's off with our smoke detector. Our smoke detector is processing more danger than we're actually in. So the takeaway is that our brain works this way. It's evolved this way to overestimate the chance of danger, the chance of loss, the chance of rejection. And strong past experiences influence our current smoke detectors and how we evaluate the danger that we're in in our current situation. That we're in in our current situation.
Speaker 1:So next time you notice yourself getting worked up, notice your heart rate picking up, pause and just stop and ask yourself what danger is my smoke detector picking up right now? This is how you start to gain control over your emotions. To gain control over your emotions, you notice when you get worked up and then I heard this new term you do a U-turn, a Y-O-U turn. You turn to yourself Instead of blaming the outside world or pointing fingers. You get worked up what's happening inside, what's my smoke detector doing, what's my cook cooking up, where's my watchtower right now? Get curious. That's what I got for you guys this week. Use it where it applies for you. And the book again it's called the Body Keeps the Score. Highly highly recommend it and have an awesome week.
