Why Your Brain Treats Social Threats The Same As Physical Ones | David Rock

0:00What is the mystery that you think that hasn't been fully explained about understanding ourselves when it comes to our human behavior? I've probably been thinking about it since I was like 14 years old. When I first kind of discovered like meditation and mindfulness and started noticing I had a brain and it was doing weird and wonderful things all the time. I was a mindfulness practitioner really, really young. But actually I've been like really focused on researching this question, doing proper research for 28 years. um now so that's how old i am um and uh i've got this brain that just loves to like find the pattern i just like i can't stop once i start on something i'm probably obsessive i probably have you know all sorts of obsessive traits but but i spent years and years early on trying to like uh unpack this one particular puzzle that i found um it was around the year 2000 actually 26 years ago.

0:57And there was this whole raft of research started to come out that was kind of saying the exact same thing, but no one knew it was the same thing. And it was when social cognitive neuroscience kind of first emerged and you started to see studies about feeling left out of an exercise activates similar brain networks as physical pain. Or if you've got your hand in ice water, but your loved one is there holding your other hand, you can hold that pain much longer, right? Or maybe one of your favorites, if you feel treated fairly in any kind of activity, it's activating your reward centers, similar to being given chocolate or money.

1:43So there are all these different studies basically saying this kind of primary threat system, which is pain and primary reward system, which is pleasure, was actually being kind of piggybacked on by social situations that we never realized were so important to the brain. And it just kind of set me on this path. It took three and a half years to kind of find the pattern and sort of put it together. And it came to me actually at a sudden insight when I wasn't working on it at the bottom of a swimming pool in the Philippines. Well, I mean, I'd been working on it for three and a half years. I'd been thinking about it.

2:20But in that moment, I was just kind of at the bottom of a swimming pool. And the whole kind of pattern came to me. And I'll tell you that story in a minute. But the basic thing that I realized was that everything in life is defined in the brain anyway by basically being a threat or a reward. And it's not like a metaphor or something I made up. It's a deep, deep truth about how the brain functions all the way down to like neurons and even deeper than neurons. but it's like fire more or fire less, right? You know, approach, avoid, toward, away, zero, one. It's like it shows up everywhere. But essentially the brain is always making this decision about the world to do more of something or do less of something in every axis.

3:10So in, you know, smell and taste and color and movement and ideas and everything. and these two kind of dynamics are shifting like five times a second. The brain makes a determination about danger and opportunity five times a second, mostly unconsciously. And I realized that all of life is kind of driven by this like do more, do less and it's really the organizing principle of the brain. So that was something sort of early on I realized and then I was able to kind of put that together into a framework framework that I kind of got it in 2003 and then spent till like 2006 like validating it testing it and then published it in 2008 and it's a framework that's now got I think almost 2 ,000 academic citations so it's quite real and it's the it's the basis of a new book that I'm working on called Good With Humans.

4:09And it sort of explains basically why we do what we do all the time. And speaking of which, I've completely forgotten what your question was, because I've gone down so many different rabbit holes here. Well, I guess it's like what drives the human behavior. And you're saying the kind of threat reward system, which I think a lot of us will kind of connect to. But how would you connect that to somebody listening now? Like, how would they know if they're living in the threat system or reward systems. I think about reward systems and I think about dopamine and I think about our phones. And I sat down to you just before and I said, how do you cope with not having a phone around you 24 seven as a neuroscientist?

4:46You know, that to me feels like a reward system, but it's the short term reward system, right? It's not the long term. So how can someone like sitting here listening to threat versus reward understand if they're working with it correctly? Yeah, and that's a really big question. We've started with an easy question. Why do people do what we do? So essentially we're always trying to minimize threat, like avoid bad things, or we're trying to maximize reward, right, have as many good things as possible. So a lot of this is unconscious. Like we do this with staying seated. We do this with what we pay attention to.

5:23We avoid bad things, pay attention to good. We do this with our friends. We respond much faster to friendships that have rewards in them. So it's mostly unconscious, but some of it becomes conscious. And it's really kind of driving behavior all the time, like avoiding bad things or moving towards good things. Of course, the moving towards good things, dopamine is very central in that. Dopamine is the expectation of reward. So imagining something good is coming, thinking about your goal, thinking about a good meal later, thinking about a great interview. like you're expecting something good and that creates interest.

5:58So dopamine is like the neurochemistry of interest, whereas cortisol is more the neurochemistry of alertness or noradrenaline sometimes, noropinephrine it's called technically. We'll try not to get too sciencey, but brain adrenaline is kind of the threat response and cortisol. Dopamine and some other things are more the toward response. But essentially a little bit of a threat response is adaptive in a lot of situations if you need to focus. But we get to sort of more than just a little bit and it becomes a problem and we're spending too much time in the threat state. And you can be using your phone thinking you're getting dopamine responses but actually you're getting threat responses from the news.

6:42You're getting threat responses from feeling left out of things. And so we're spending too much time in a stronger threat response. And it's bad for our mental health. It's bad for our productivity. But it's also bad for our digestion, right? Oh, absolutely. We published a paper. So I run an institute. We publish original research. A lot of it is synthesizing things. And we found a pattern in the threat research that we found really helpful. And I'll actually answer your question now. that there's sort of three levels of threat. It's not like all threat is good or all threat is bad. There's a sense of danger that's actually pretty adaptive for trying to focus.

7:23It's gone by the name eustress, EU stress before, or positive stress, right? And essentially, if you're trying to like, you know, write a proposal that you don't really want to write, but you kind of want to focus, it's maybe good to imagine like missing the deadline and, you know, just getting yourself slightly anxious so you can focus. and then you'll shut out external stimuli. If you're trying to focus on something and you're basically happy and open in a towards state, you'll be super easily distracted by things. I attended TED earlier this year and I found myself in conversations with the founders of NoWatch.

7:58You've probably seen me wear something on my wrist and lots of you have messaged me asking me what this is. It looks like a classic watch, but it's actually quietly tracking something much more meaningful, your autonomic nervous system. This is a system that governs everything from how you respond, from excitement to anxiety, calm to overwhelm. Most wearables just give you a score, but if you're anything like me, that score can sometimes make you feel worse, like you're already behind before your day even begins. No watch works differently. There is no judgment and there is no dopamine chasing dashboard.

8:32It simply reflects what your body is already experiencing and also helps you notice what it might be missing. It gives you minute by minute timeline of your stress responses and your recovery. The recovery is the most important part and is the part that no one talks about. And it is often the most revealing marker of our long-term health. In just five days, it calibrates to your body and it builds your personal health fingerprint. You can try for free now for 30 days. And if you use the code LWBW, you can also get 15 % off. If you want to understand your body, not just through performance, but through self-awareness, then this is where I'd begin.

9:13That's why I like the crunching before exams. People tend to end up maximizing because they're like, I've literally only got a finite amount of time. So I literally have to focus. Now I'm anxious. I have to focus. So some people need a little bit of threat to actually focus. Is that why some people thrive under pressure? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We can dig into the neuroscience of that. But essentially, we call it a level one threat. We like simple labels so you can remember them easy. So a level one threat is use stress, good for focusing, healthy for getting work done as long as you're not chronically there, as long as you're also in the towards state quite a bit, which is the positive state which calms your nervous system and improves your immune system.

9:51Is that resting more? It's resting. It's just doing positive things, things that are interesting, things that just create a towards state. The obvious thing is like listening to comedy puts you in a towards state. Novelty puts you in a towards state. being around loving people, having a good meal, having a rest, doing something literally that just puts you in a slightly positive mood is a towards state. And when you're in that state, it's going to improve your digestion. It's going to improve your immune system. And whereas if you're always in the chronic like level one threat, it actually does switch off your immune system a bit and, you know, puts your digestion on a bit of a pause.

10:28So it's okay in short bursts to actually use threat. The problem is level two threat, which is – I don't want to get too science here. There's a complicated thing that happens in the brain. But essentially it's level one is a potential threat like way off in the distance. Right. Right, like a potential danger, maybe a big, big storm that's maybe coming. You're like, okay, I just better keep an eye on the weather. Yeah. A level two threat is you're pretty sure the storm is going to hit you but not for another day. But now you're like, okay, it's hard to focus now. I think about the LA fires in that moment.

10:59Oh, my gosh, that's a whole thing. But then level three threat is the storm is like overhead. It's her, yeah. So level three is the full amygdala hijack where you can't open your computer, you can't think any long-term thoughts, right? And the amygdala for people that don't know what that is. The amygdala, it's sort of a famous term, the amygdala hijack. The amygdala is a little almond-shaped object deep in the brain that is really interesting because it's one of a small number of brain networks that it's a little bit of like a thermometer in that the intensity of activation of that region correlates to something.

11:30There's not many of those networks because the brain's not really regional. It's like a city. It's incredibly complex. Things are not in one place. But the amygdala is one of those few things that when we know the amygdala is more active, we know people have stronger emotions. It turns out there could be stronger positive emotions or strong negative emotions. it's just that negative emotions are more likely and also when someone's probing your brain you're generally not happy.