Part 1 – The Alarm System: What Happens in the Brain When We’re Overwhelmed?

The Brain and Regulation trilogy

If you’ve ever tried “counting to ten” or told yourself to calm down and found it useless, you’re not alone. In my previous post, “I Tried Counting to Ten. It Doesn’t Work,” I explained why many classic self-regulation tricks fail. This first part of the trilogy takes us deeper – into what actually happens inside the brain when we feel anxious or overwhelmed.

When we understand how our brain operates, we start to see that these strong feelings and moments of overwhelm are natural and normal, not a problem or a fault. Just like fitness of a muscle, there is no fault in weakness – but there is room to strengthen, and understanding how it works is the first step. When I explain this to clients, I often start by saying that the word anxiety covers a lot. It’s not only fear. Anger, panic, agitation, even that racing feeling before a hard conversation – all of these come from the same biological system. They all belong to what I call the alarm system.

This alarm lives in the older, lower part of the brain, just above the neck. It’s an evolutionarily ancient structure that we share with other mammals. It keeps our body alive – heart beating, lungs working, digestion flowing – but it’s also the generator of emotion. This system operates in two basic modes: safe and danger. When the body is in safe mode, we rest, eat, play, and connect. When it shifts into danger mode, everything changes: muscles tighten, heart rate rises, attention narrows to focus on the threat. The energy goes to the body, to our limbs. It gets us ready to fight, flee, freeze, cling, submit, or cry for help. These responses are fast, powerful, and completely instinctive. Our thinking and process of choice becomes blurred, racing, less clear and efficient.

But there is another level of complexity: we are social animals. Social animals in the wild don’t live in equal or gentle systems. Their safety is built on power and hierarchy within the pack. The pack stays organised through dominance, threat, and submission. A cub who reaches the food at the wrong moment will get smacked; a lower-ranking ape learns its place through a warning glare or a shove. That’s how order – and therefore safety – is maintained. There’s also affection, grooming, closeness – but it’s all built around power and sensitivity to others’ signals.

So when we talk about danger in the modern world, most of it isn’t about physical threat, but rather these same social dangers inside the group. We’re constantly reading faces, tones, pauses, emails, silences. When someone higher in the hierarchy – a boss, a parent, a partner – seems displeased or withdrawn, our ancient system lights up exactly as if a big ape had just turned its head our way. We duck, apologise, over-perform, freeze, or choke with tears – that same ancient cry for help. The lower brain doesn’t know the difference between a lion’s snarl and a disappointed look. To it, both mean threats. And the body reacts first – tightening, sweating, heart pounding – long before our thinking mind has a chance to work out what’s going on and choose the best response.

The difficulty is that, in human life, most dangers are more complex and nuanced. Of course, there are still places and situations where danger is real and physical – war zones, hunger, persecution – where survival truly depends on fighting, hiding, or acting from instinct. I haven’t lived or worked in those conditions, and that’s a different kind of human experience. In the world I write and work in, most dangers are psychological or social, and even when they affect our safety or our body – such as illness or threats to human rights – the way we need to respond is through the higher brain: through thinking and planning that depend on language, symbols, and complex systems, and the connection and cooperation that come from them. The solutions are multiple and usually depend on careful choice of complex language, wording, or actions. And the result is long-term, not immediately determined. An animal knows within minutes whether it escaped. We humans can stay in that half-danger state for months – waiting for feedback, worrying about a promotion, fearing illness or rejection. Each of us has a slightly different sensitivity to this system – shaped by genes, early experiences, and current stress. Some people’s alarms go off easily; others are slower to react. But we all have it. It’s part of the equipment. This system evolved to protect us, yes – but it’s not the one we want to run our lives from. It belongs to a different world, one where survival depended on quick body reactions to danger. Today, most of our challenges require thought, planning, language, patience – all of which come from a completely different part of the brain. So the goal is to bring the whole system back to safety so the higher brain can do its work.

In the next post, we’ll look at how this alarm system interacts with the thinking brain – and why it can so easily hijack our clarity, decision-making, and sense of control when we most need them.