When I was a small child, I had a record player. The old kind, you know? Long-play vinyl records. Thirtythree and a third rotations per minute. Shellac. The whole deal.
It was an old thing, and old method of storage. And it worked for me at that time. The physicality of it seems archaic now, a holdover. But the way it worked at the time, I would take my little kid fingers and delicately place the record on the turntable and start up into a world of wonder and imagination.
A favorite album of mine at the time was a crazy little thing called How To Think, written and performed by the singular and incomparable Steve Allen.
The album was split into two thematic halves. The second half—side two of the album—talks about the rules of logic. It gives you information about things like non-contradiction, relativism, the need for honesty… those sorts of ideas that Allen believed little boys and girls needed to learn in order to be useful and functional citizens within a democracy.
The first side, however, was a guided tour through the various parts of the brain and central nervous system.
And I should mention, each of the various parts of the brain and rules of thinking are accompanied by catchy little ditties that Allen plays on the piano.
One of the ditties, there on side A of How to Think, is a somewhat slow ballad about the limbic system. Here are some of the lyrics:
The limbic system tells when you’re sad
when you’re afraid, and when you’re glad
When you’re fierce as a lion, or peaceful as a dove
and best of all, it helps you love
I’ve been thinking about my limbic system this week, because it is home to a little system known as the amygdala.
Like my old record player, the amygdala is a very old apparatus. And like my old record albums, it stores information with a limited number of retrieval options.
To put it simply, the amygdala controls our fight—flight—play dead responses. In other words, it is part of the very old neighborhood of our skulls that we share with the muskrats and the lizards and the bears. It is the hardware that drives the immediacy of the antelope and the subdued way the ‘possum plays.
And so the amygdala has been both on my mind, as well as being in my mind, this week.
For most of my life, I have had a constant companion in depression. Sometimes waxing, sometimes waning, but a regular visitor through every season and every clime.
This week, my depression has flared up again. My energy has been down, and I have felt an increased pull towards sleep and disengagement. This bout of depression is not as acute as some have been, but I finally had to admit to myself (after the third day) that it is the most reasonable explanation for why my focus has been shot and I have felt so down.
But why on earth should I be depressed at a time like this? I mean, just look around.
Why on earth, indeed. Of course we all know why we should feel off our game these days. But I got hit this week with a more-than-ususal case of the blues. As my 12-step sponsor might say, the emotions I am feeling are not quite right-sized to the situation, which is more chronic. My feelings at the moment are acute.
But thanks to Steve Allen and some supplementary courses in college, I know that—while my emotions might not be right-sized to my context, they are perfectly well right-sized to my amygdala.
Think about it: The amygdala has three settings: Fight, flight, and play dead.
Given the situation we are in right now with COVID-19, “fight” does not quite make sense. It’s a disease, and infection. There is no target for me to run out an hit (no matter how much I might want to). There is nothing in that respect to fight.
How then about “flight”? Well, any running I do would need to be socially-distanced, and in many ways it is just safest to stay at home. If I could flee, where would I run? There really is not a safe harbor, anywhere, to which one might retreat at the moment. So, like the “fight” option, the “flight” option is pretty much eclipsed for now.
So what does that leave?
I did want to fight at one point. It was a couple of weeks ago, and I was in the checkout line at the grocery store. A man got in line behind me, with his mask pulled down around his chin (the store, like all stores in Illinois right now, had a mask-up policy for patrons in the store).
So I politely asked him to raise his mask. He proceeded to shout at me, and to yell profanities and insults at me. Then he turned and yelled at the young mother who asked him to stop cussin’ in front of her kids.
My amygdala went into hyperdrive.
My cooler head prevailed (which is why I am typing this from the comfort of my bed rather than a jail cell) but there was an assuredly animal part of me that flared up in that moment. I was certainly capable of doing some real harm in the face of that provocation. I was flooded with adrenaline and, frankly, I think my amygdala had been keeping things on lockdown for so long, it was kinda itching for a fight.
But I didn’t throw a punch. I held myself together and stepped up to the cashier and got myself out of the store as fast as I could.
I am proud of the restraint, but I am also aware that restraint takes a toll.
If you cannot run, and you cannot fight, then increasingly your limbic system falls back on the only other trick it knows, namely, play dead.
And when you are a depressive, that fall-back position leads to weeks like the one I’ve had the past few days.
It’s not ideal. I wish there was a bypass switch I could flip to get my brain to just skip the whole reptile brain set of responses altogether, but that does not seem to be an option.
So all I can do is just remind myself (and I am grateful that others remind me, as well) that I am not ruled by my feelings (they are important, but they are not omnipotent oligarchs).
And this leaves me where you find me, at the end of a hard week, made harder by an antique information retrieval system that, like my old record player, has a limited set of options to play for me.