Amygdala: Gate Keeper For Your Thoughts – Imagine you are trekking through a forest and suddenly come across a huge bear. What would you do? Would you choose to run for your life or would you face the bear and fight it? Our brain acts like a superhero and creates a series of natural responses that are genetically hard wired into our brain whenever we are in a similar stressful situation. This combination of reactions to stress is also known as the “fight-or-flight” response because it evolved as a survival mechanism, enabling people and other mammals to react quickly to life-threatening situations.
These sequence of stress response starts with the Amygdala “Gatekeeper of our thoughts” known as Amygdala. It is a small region of our brain, primarily associated with emotional processing, which sends the distress signal to other parts of the brain to act upon it.