Freedom 

 

Freedom is the ability to respond rather than react. This means that the amygdala has detected a threat. And you become conscious that your body has detected a stressor.

Viktor Frankl says: “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” ( Often attributed to Steven Covey or Viktor E. Frankl )

What is this “space” that Frankl says is necessary for growth and freedom? That space that provides the power to choose to respond or react to a stimulus?

Neurobiologically, freedom is the pathway that connects the amygdala to the cortex. Those nerve fibers are freedom.

 

How You Detect a Stimulus

We are interested in the freedom that comes from nonreactivity to offensive stimuli. An example would be not getting triggered by something that used to set you off into full sympathetic cortisol storms- fight or flight.

All the fuss starts when your amygdala detects a stimulus that causes a response before the frontal cortex can down-regulate the fuss.

The Polyvagal Theory provides a unique way of thinking about how you notice stress in the environment around you. The theory’s creator, Steven Porges, coined the term “neuroception.”

Neuroception is how your amygdala detects a stressful signal from the environment. This allows your autonomic nervous system to kick in before you are conscious of a threat.

Neuroception is entirely subconscious. It is why you startle before a car wreck or when a bird divebombs. Your senses detect a threat, send the message to your amygdala, and your frontal cortex goes huh, what happened?

You detect stress unconsciously. Freedom is the process of bringing this reaction into consciousness.

 

Clinical Correlate of Freedom: The Amygdala Hijack

An Amygdala hijack is a clinical correlate of anti-freedom. When hijacked, the amygdala stimulates the flight or fight sympathetic response. Before you can stop it, you are “triggered.”

 

This emotional brain activity processes information milliseconds earlier than the rational brain, so in case of a match, the amygdala acts before any possible direction from the neocortex can be received. If, however, the amygdala does not find any match to the stimulus received with its recorded threatening situations, then it acts according to the directions received from the neocortex. When the amygdala perceives a threat, it can lead that person to react irrationally and destructively. (source)

 

Neurobiology of Freedom

We develop the circuits in our brain that allow our frontal cortex’s circuits to control the lower affect-generating ones better. We balance emotional arousal and regulation.

Teaching emotional intelligence can include the “relationship between the subcortical limbic amygdala and the prefrontal cortex,” the pathway to freedom. Also known as the orbital-medial prefrontal cortex: amygdala network.

There are direct connections between the prefrontal cortex and the limbic area.

“These linkages enable the prefrontal area to both assess the state of arousal in these subcortical regions as well as to modulate their firing.” This connection is mindful awareness of your arousal system. (source: The Mindful Brain)

Your frontal cortex experiences excitement, purpose, meaning, and emotional richness, balancing out chaotic stimuli, dullness, and depressing rigidity.

Ultimately, you regulate the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system. This is how the middle part of the prefrontal cortex shuts down your fight or flight response. Those fibers are nonreactivity; which is how your brain controls the stress response.

 

Summary—Neurobiological Correlates of Freedom

Through mindfulness and meditation, you find space and strengthen the ruts in your brain.

Space is necessary for growth and freedom and provides the ability to respond or react to a stimulus to the amygdala. Freedom correlates to the fibers between the cortex and amygdala.

In general, the left hemisphere is approach and the right is withdrawal. A “left shift” is the ability to approach even negative events rather than withdraw. Mindfulness can be seen as a left shift of the cerebral hemispheres. So, freedom is a connection between the left frontal cortex and the amygdala.

Your amygdala’s trigger point is set lower, and there are more inhibitory pathways from the cortex. Next, the pathways from your cortex to your amygdala become more active and inhibitory. This allows decisions in the cortex before catecholamines and cortisol’s dramatic effect on cortex function. Freedom. You respond rather than react. That space is neuroplasticity.

 

“The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance.”

― Viktor E. Frankl

 

Freedom also allows you to choose your attitude, even under stressful circumstances. After all, the only control we have in this life is control of how we respond to things.

The moment of freedom is when your amygdala decides to act, and you notice it and control your response.