Filters

People lament about how the youth of this social media generation are developing a skewed view of reality through the filtered images they see as they scroll. A valid concern! However, there seems to be less awareness that your nervous system also uses filters that influence our perception of the “real” world around us.

So far, we’ve been focusing on the stress response system, and hopefully this, combined with your SSP experience, has helped you reflect on and begin to address your own patterns of stress response.

Your tendency to shift into a stress state is more complicated than simply knowing whether you have stress in your life, or not. Even the number of stressors, or the degree of intensity of the stressors, don’t necessarily equate to your level of dysregulation.

Sometimes your nervous system response is a good match for your circumstances. You’re at ease when it makes sense to be, or you’re having a stress response, but you understand why you’re feeling that way. Other times, your response seems like a mismatch. You might activate or shut down when you don’t really need to. Or you may feel emotions pop up unexpectedly, like anger, sadness, or defensiveness, and you can’t quite pinpoint where those feelings came from.

Why are we sometimes baffled by the way we feel – and, by how those feelings make us behave? It has to do with the way our memory system works.

Let’s back up for a minute. Remember that the automatic part of your nervous system works like a surveillance system. Each second, you are exposed to about 11 million bits of information from inside and outside of your body, but you can only process about 40-50 bits of information per second. So, the nervous system is rapidly filtering through a ton of information to decide which bits are worth noticing.

In order to filter out approximately 10,999,950 bits of information per second (whoa!) your nervous system creates shortcuts. Your memory system is involved in this sifting process so it can use past experiences as a guide for what to pay attention to.

There are different ways that we store memories. Some memories are conscious, and we can think or talk about those experiences as if we’re telling a story. But the vast majority of our memory data is stored below our awareness, and links sensory experiences with emotional and bodily responses.

What does this mean? Let’s imagine someone enjoyed baking gingerbread cookies with their grandmother as a child. 40 years later, they walk into a kitchen and the smell (sensory experience) of warm gingerbread cookies is still linked to the way their body felt and the emotions they experienced while baking. Immediately, their nervous system triggers an internal chemical reaction that creates a pleasantly warm feeling in their chest, an emotional experience of safety and contentment, and a bodily response of relaxed muscles and steady breathing and heart rate. This can happen even if this person has no recollection of the experience – but their body remembers how it should feel based on past experience.

However, we are very likely to override signals of safety if there are also cues of threat happening at the same time. If the smoke alarm is going off in the kitchen, this person’s nervous system will override the pleasant response to the smell of the cookies and they’ll produce an activated response instead, to help them handle the potential danger.

Our emotions and bodily sensations may shift, seemingly out of the blue, in response to things we perceive in our environment. The smoke alarm is an obvious one, but subtle cues - a look on someone’s face, a song that’s playing in the background at the grocery store - can also have a powerful influence on how we feel.

Remember the negativity bias? That can significantly influence our filtration process. Our nervous system stores memories of negative experiences very carefully, to ensure that we’ll be able to respond appropriately and protect ourselves in the future. As we are scanning and sifting through the millions of bits of information, we will let a lot of pleasant cues flow right through our awareness, but the negative ones are caught. And those, too, have sensory, emotional, and bodily feelings all wrapped up together, so something we sense in our environment might make us suddenly feel uneasy, sad, tense, anxious, or even angry.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be building on this topic. In the meantime, you might start to notice examples of how your emotional state and your body feel different in certain places, with certain people, or when you see, hear, smell, taste, or touch certain things throughout your week. Without judgment, just be curious. Notice how your internal state changes, where you tend to feel certain emotions in your body, and how they feel (hot? cold? tight? tingly? chaotic? achy?) This helps you have more awareness of the messages your nervous system is sending, which can support more mindful responses in the future.

Also, you can actively override your negativity bias by “sifting for gold.” Keep your attention on a positive experience for at least 10-20 seconds. This helps you avoid so many of the positives slipping past you. You can consciously imprint more positive experiences to your long-term memory, particularly if you think or talk about the details and link sensory aspects of the experience so you can re-connect to those positive feelings later on.