Have you ever been triggered by an experience and felt a flood of emotion that came out of nowhere and made it hard to carry on with your work? Do you have workers or learners in workforce development who lash out when they receive feedback? …or who look like they would like to flee from the room or climb under a table? These reactions often originate from what has been referred to as “amygdala hijack.” It turns out that the amygdala is a part of the brain that remembers in ways that we don’t have explicit awareness of. The memories have the potential to commandeer our emotions, cognition, and physical reactions. It impacts all of us and especially people who have experienced trauma. The Next Level Lab has been mining the research on amygdala hijack and considering how it can inform workplace dynamics and learning in workforce development.
It can be puzzling to observe someone in a case of amygdala hijack. We may be inclined to punish maladaptive behaviors or expect people to “just get them under control.” Unfortunately, it is not that simple. Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux distinguishes memories of emotion from emotional memories. The first set uses the higher-order parts of our brain and are the ones that we can recall and reflect upon such as being happy at a birthday or sad upon the death of a loved one. The second set, emotional memories, are stored in the amygdala and we cannot directly recall them, however, they influence our bodily and emotional reactions. This leaves the higher-order parts of our brain at a loss to explain our behaviors and trying to make connections between what just happened and how we are feeling or what we did. Amygdala hijack may trigger perceptions such as “I just can’t stand this job,” or “I know that my boss hates me.” The complex dynamics of work environments can complicate interpretation of what is going on. However, when these feeling arise repeatedly across job contexts or when you think your boss is frowning at you on a Zoom screen before realizing that you are seeing their profile picture, it is time to consider amygdala hijack.
Next Level Lab researchers are especially interested in “fast fish learning” approaches to amygdala hijack. Fast fish learners are agentive and modify the social, emotional, cognitive, and physical contexts around them to enhance their performance—just as fish create vortices in water to push off from to swim fast. We view amygdala hijack as an especially promising focus for fast fish learning because of how inaccessible the emotional memories can be and the important realizations that come with figuring out what the triggers are. It is an especially important target given the trauma burdens that so many vulnerable workers hold.
What might a fast fish approach to amygdala hijack sound like? Here are some examples. “I realize that, like many people who have experienced trauma at some point in their lives, it works better for me to absorb feedback over time before responding. I asked my manager to give feedback on my work performance that incorporates this delay whenever possible. This helps me to be open-minded towards feedback and to use it well.” “I knew that I would have a hard time giving the final presentation, so I told the other students that I felt that way and asked them to smile when I was speaking. They did and I gave a much better talk.”
We are beginning to research the impacts of adopting a fast fish perspective on amygdala hijack and look forward to reporting our results within the next year. In the meanwhile, if you are interested in learning more about amygdala hijack and fast fish approaches to it, we invite you to visit a set of self-guided learning materials that we have developed (see links below). The set begins with a PPT tour of the concepts. It invites consideration of the experience of amygdala hijack, what it is, and research on what is known about why it happens. It then introduces the stories of three individuals and a set of guiding questions to consider how amygdala hijack may be interacting with their ability to engage in workforce opportunities and what can be done to support them. These materials can be used individually or in a group discussion. If you use the materials, please feel free to reach out to share how you used them and to offer us feedback on how it went.