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Human beings have competing influences that govern their behaviors.

On one side, we have the neural networks

and regions of the brain that guide us towards survival, pure and simple. The earliest structures in the brain, the brain

stem and the midbrain, create behaviors associated with fight,

flight, shutting down when we're in shock and so forth.

The sympathetic nervous system

and the ancient dorsal parasympathetic are structured to guarantee our survival at all costs.

And those inclinations are generally

to take care of oneself, to disconnect whenever

there's conflict or stress to avoid anything that in our life has previously been wounding or and so many of us will have these very strong inclinations to run, bolt, or fight or confront.

And there's, when we're in these states when the sympathetic nervous system is activated

we might become very hypervigil. On guard, feeling threatened, the blood starts to, the heart rate goes up, the blood

pumps harder, our blood pressure climbs and our thoughts race but it's repetitive thoughts not new

thinking outside of the box it's just repeating the same thoughts over and over again.

Now competing with these systems to guide our behavior

is the far more recent social engagement system,

which is one of these previous systems I talked about are

literally hundreds of millions of years old the modern social engagement system

which uses the cranial nerves of the face to express emotions and ideas in language and facial emotions is very very new.

...