The Amygdala and Relaxation

Imagine the following scenario. You suddenly remember you forgot to do your taxes, and you already filed for an extension. Now you have to leave work, where an important project is due today, and hustle. Due to extensive healthcare outlays the previous year, extensive investments, and a corporation you set up on the side, you know this will take all day, and you might not even get it done on time. Your computer just broke, so TurboTax isn’t an option – especially since you barely have this month’s rent money, if you manage to keep your job after flaking on your project.

As you are about to leave, your best friend calls you. All your buddies have bought ten cases of beer and rented a yacht and five jetskis out of Palm Beach for the day. At the docks they ran into a group of girls from the San Diego Dance Academy, enjoying their own vacation, and they want to ride along on the yacht. It sounds like they are going to have a blast. But you have to do your taxes.

That is your amygdala, displeased. It doesn’t like failing to finish your project at work by the deadline, it doesn’t want to be denied the fun with your friends, and it is in a constantly heightened state of irritation due to your tight finances, but above all, it wants to avoid dealing with the IRS. It is picking the least worst of several bad outcomes within a harsh environment, so there is substantial aversive stimulus floating around within your brain. However, as a result of all of those aversive sensations, what will look to be good, in the cold hard light of logic will also feel good to do, or at least it will feel least bad. Your logic and your emotions will be in sync.

Now imagine that as you go to grab your keys, you pull a lottery ticket out of your pocket. You remember hearing something about the jackpot being about $400 million in a lump sum. You also remember hearing there was one winner. Just on a lark you grab the newspaper off the counter in front of you, and check the numbers. You won.

Just as research shows that dopamine shuts off the amygdala, that dopamine rush from your winning ticket will shut off your angst. All the things which would have bothered you, all that aversive stimulus, will just disappear. Suddenly you will figure, screw your job, you’ll take the penalty on your taxes, and there is no way you are missing that wild boat ride with your friends. In a moment, your amygdala will stop driving you with aversive stimulus. What you will know is good, and what will feel good to do will become two different things. Logic and emotion will diverge. Hopefully you won’t lose that winning lottery ticket along the way.

That is an extreme example of how resource availability can reduce the motive force applied by the amygdala.

I think of that when I read this article. More and more in our society, the deadening effect of dopamine is leading us to allow all sorts of amygdala triggering conditions to arise and persist.

What will be amazing is how mankind begins to behave in the presence of all this irritation once we no longer have the dopamine produced by free resource availability deadening our senses.