Red/Green Brain: Activating the Stress Response
A couple of years ago our clinicians were fortunate to welcome Kathryn Berkett to speak to them for a training day. Kathryn is with Engage, which offers training in communicating neuroscience information.
One of the concepts that everyone found very useful was the idea of the red/green brain and understanding stress response. In November 2021 she updated a short video that explains the concept using animation. It's fast and teaches a lot in a short amount of time, so it’s very worth watching more than once. We recommend you have a watch but if you’d like to read a summary, see below.
Video: Red / Green Brain: Activating the Stress Response
Summary of the concept and video
The red/green brain concept explains what happens in our brain when something stresses us or we have a trigger and then lose our temper at the smallest things and sometimes the large things.
All of us are using something called neuroception all the time. It’s an internal radar in your brain that scans your environment asking, “Am I safe?”
It does this in small ways – am I hungry or thirsty, am I late to a meeting – and large ways – am I worried about something in the future or am I worried about something in my history? All day, every day, it’s scanning my environment looking for what might be making me unsafe.
Most of the time, Kathryn says, the scan comes back and says you’re safe. This means the balance of energy supplied to the red brain and the green brain is fairly even.
The red brain is the part of your brain that is in survival mode, it manages your emotions. It is always engaged in scanning for survival, for life or death. It’s trained to protect your life.
The green brain is the part of your brain that overrides impulse, is logical and rational, manages time, is systemic and sequential.
When the red brain scans and determines you’re safe, more energy is supplied to the green brain. If the red brain scans and finds a trigger or a stressor, it activates. Because the red brain is the part of the brain focused on keeping you alive, it feels an urgent threat at any trigger.
When you are triggered, more energy goes to the red brain and you start reacting. Your brain scans more, is over-sensitised, and starts catastrophising. You freak out! And then you start to think and act irrationally. Your flight/fight response is turned on.
When energy is taken from the green brain – your rational self – and put toward red brain, you become impulsive, irrational, and selfish. You’re focussed on the here and now. That means you’re going to say unhelpful things to people who approach you in that mode. Your body is in a semi-automatic response. Your scanners are up and the only thing that will calm you is to increase your safety.
Because red brain is focused on keeping you alive, increasing your safety is how you start to balance out red/green brain once again. Take away the triggers, increase the safety, keep the continuum in balance. Increasing safety is the best way to increase good behaviour.
