Doom-scrolling and your brain

Psychologist Dr Sarb Johal was one of the first people Civil Defence called after Covid arrived. In his new book, Steady, he writes of his belief that a psychologist’s central task is to help people live with uncertainty.

Human beings are creatures of habit. We like predictability and routine, so our everyday lives tend to follow a familiar pattern: we go to work, we go to the gym, we take the kids to afterschool activities, we eat dinner, we watch our favourite TV shows, we go to bed. On the weekend we might play or watch sport, do a little DIY, catch up with friends, sleep late or attend a religious service.

In ‘‘normal’’ times, this predictability helps most of us to navigate everyday life on a fairly even keel. The trouble is, those normal times seemed to evaporate somewhere around March 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic began rapidly spreading across the globe.

To understand how our emotions can work for us and against us, we need to understand the three internal systems that govern our everyday behaviour: the threat system, the calming system, and the drive or motivation system.

When your brain is constantly responding as if you are in imminent danger, it’s very hard to do anything else. Your brain is focused on staying alive and you simply don’t have the mental space or resources necessary for creative problem-solving and strategic thinking.

These activities that are so crucial in a crisis get demoted to ‘‘nice-to-have-once-I-survive-thisthreat’’ status. Your brain doesn’t particularly care where you’re headed, it just wants to deal with the threat – and it’s exhausting.

Threat detection is a complex process involving the whole brain and, more specifically, the limbic system.

This system is a set of structures in the brain that deals with emotions and memory. It also governs our fight, flight and freeze behaviours.

Once activated, the threat system concentrates your attention and resources on doing something about the threat. It’s designed to save your life, by alerting you of the need to get out of danger immediately.

The threat system automatically fires up your sympathetic nervous system, which acts like an accelerator, preparing the body for ‘‘fight or flight’’.

It floods the body with hormones and sharpens your alertness and your senses, so that you can see and hear more clearly and make better sense of what is happening around you. It accelerates the heart rate and moves blood flow away from processes like digesting food, towards your muscles, so that you can strike back or get the heck out of that dangerous situation.

Sometimes, though, the ‘‘fight or flight’’ response can lead to paralysis. This is an evolutionary hangover, because we may have been predated upon by creatures that had extremely sensitive movement receptors in their eyes. Staying still can trick these predators into thinking there is nothing there to attack, because they aren’t detecting any movement. This explains why you see animals ‘‘frozen in the headlights’’ when crossing roads.

In this age of the pandemic, the ongoing unpredictability and uncertainty keeps your threat detection system firing a lot of the time.

This is especially the case if you’re checking the news a lot, or spending a lot of time thinking or worrying about the pandemic. The more time you spend looking at information that your brain finds threatening, like 24-hour news channels or doom-scrolling on your phone, the more you stoke the threat detection response. Your brain responds as if your life is at risk, even when that’s not true in the moment.

If you allow yourself to stay in threat mode the whole time, your brain creates shortcuts for dealing with stress and staying alive. You end up repeating these shortcuts without any conscious control, which will most likely end up less than optimal for you in the long term.

The key to bringing our creativity and strategic thinking back online lies in learning to intentionally calm ourselves. If the sympathetic nervous system acts like the accelerator in your car, then the parasympathetic nervous system is your brake.

This calming system brings your body back to equilibrium after a stressful situation, slowing your breathing and your heart rate, bringing digestive activity back, and relaxing your muscles.

You can activate your calming, parasympathetic nervous system by doing activities like deep bellybreathing. This calming activity presses the brake and eases the pressure on the threat detection system.

The threat detection system senses that the internal environment is changing, and eases back on the alert levels. As your alert levels drop, you can begin to devote your attention and resources to things other than immediate life preservation.

That’s why spending time on mastering your brake is so important. When you take intentional control of this calming system, you’re no longer driven by threat. It tells your brain that there is no need to limit your capacity to solving this life-threatening situation, so you are then free to do other things.

The third system is your drive or motivation system. Once you’re able to use that accelerator and brake more smoothly, you need to know where you’re headed, right? But what if your life destination looks completely different to where you were headed before the pandemic struck? You may think that you need the equivalent of a GPS navigation system in your brain to guide your behaviour. But a GPS can get confused if you lose signal, or if it hasn’t been updated as the terrain of the world changes around you in these unpredictable and uncertain times.

What you really need is something more basic: a compass. And the best compass to help steer you through troubled waters and uncharted territory is your value system... your motivation or drive system cannot be fully expressed when your foot is jammed on the accelerator. When you’re constantly revving the engine higher trying to escape a threat, you can’t live in alignment with your values or get to where you really want to go.

That’s why it’s so important to learn how to intentionally activate your calming system. When you can consciously choose to apply the brake, you can bring your body out of threat and back to an equilibrium. This allows your drive system to kick in, so you can take back a little control over your direction and move forward towards the things that really matter to you.

The best compass to help steer you through troubled waters and uncharted territory is your value system...your motivation or drive system cannot be fully expressed when your foot is jammed on the accelerator.

Steady: Keeping Calm in a World Gone Viral is available at bookstores or in e-book format. Equanimity Publishing. RRP $40.