We've had a lot of rain this week. I can only imagine that's why I saw so many animals we rarely see here. As you may know, I live with my partner in a quiet area south of the Brisbane river, in Queensland, Australia. We have a big chunk of bush nearby and we walk in there almost every day.
But the other day @new.things had had a very big day of work and when he got home he wanted to fix something in his work ute and that was going to use up the rest of our daylight. I'd been home alone all day mostly working on the screen and really needed some exercise. So I went for a walk without him.
Gosh, was I gifted a treat!
Not only did I get to see a Mummy, Daddy and juvenile Magpie, I saw a plucky Kookaburra who had just scored itself a meal, and also the biggest mushroom I've ever seen in my life.
I didn't think to photograph these as I was just busy saying hello to the birds and admiring the mushroom.
Later I saw a Blue Tongued Skink but it did a disappearing act into a big clunk of grass before I could take a photo. I was impressed! Very clever indeed.
I kept walking.
I got a message from a friend.
I kept walking.
At some point soon after, I noticed a noise over my left shoulder. It was a juvenile Lace Monitor, also known as a Goanna. While they have big, strong, sharp claws and could do serious damage to my skin, they are pretty scared of humans and they always scurry up a tree anytime one hears me.
In awe, as I said "hello" I carefully and calmly walked closer so that I could get a good photo. Not wanting to scare it too much, I left soon after, walking up the big hill in front of me and quickly found myself lost in my thoughts about a friend whose Mum just died.
I was so busy thinking that I was glad my brain has an automatic survival override because the next thing I knew my body had stopped suddenly before my thoughts even knew what had happened.
I was standing a metre and a half (about five feet) away from a snake that I would have stepped on moments later if I'd kept walking.
Far out!
I looked at the snake. It looked at me.
I managed to regain enough composure to take a big step backward and it slithered into the grass just off the track. I stayed where I was noticing my breath and trying to calm down as my brain tried to figure out if it thought it was venomous (and therefore dangerous) or not.
I decided to carefully walk past, on the other side of the track, while staring into the grass hoping to see it. After all, I love snakes but I'm pretty sensible about them too. We have soooooo many highly venomous snakes in Australia that unless I can very clearly identify that a snake is a python (and therefore non-venomous) I treat it as if it's a beautiful but deadly creature.
As I looked for the snake I realised that not only could I see it, but it was standing up and looking at me! I guess it was trying to work out if the threat (this big human that could hurt it) had passed or not. I carefully took one tiny step closer (I was about three metres or 10 feet away) to see if I could take a photo of it.
I managed to snap this one just before it slithered away to greater safety. Maybe it was a harmless green tree snake. But my brain and my body couldn't tell. So as I walked home more quickly than I walked out in the first place my heart continued to beat fast!
So, let's talk about what happened for me from a nervous system perspective. This is both useful and important because this happens for all of us all the time.
Inside those big heads of ours we essentially have three different brains. We have the forebrain, that does all our clever, human thinking. We have the midbrain, that we share with mammals that allows us to do all the touchy, feely being kind to each other stuff (like dogs and cats often do with us). And then there's the hindbrain, that's all about survival. We share this brain with our reptilian friends and its job is to keep us alive.
This is the brain (or part of my brain, depending on how you classify all that grey mush inside my skull) that took over when my eyes spotted that snake. It did what's called "pattern recognition": it identified a known threat and made my body freeze on the spot until it could assess the danger properly.
It probably took me a full one or two seconds to realise that the snake was probably too close for my liking and I would be better served to take a step back. Taking the step back required me to "unfreeze" enough to choose to move away from the threat.
Sometimes our hindbrain will just make us run ("flee" or take "flight") if that's the most appropriate survival response. This has happened for me before when I saw a snake in this same chunk of bush. I was running along a very narrow track and was only inches away from standing on a snake and my body (hindbrain) automatically made me jump off the path. (Ironically, into the long grass where I couldn't see a thing - but this part of the brain isn't logical, it's 100% guided by fear and trying to keep us physically safe. That's it).
Not the actual snake a saw but it demonstrates the point well!
Sometimes the most appropriate action to take to keep ourselves safe will be to fight and for some people, this is their go-to automatic reaction; they'll fight when someone else would flee.
A person whose go-to is fight might punch, push, kick or shove a snake away if it was too close to their body. Of course, this may or may not be the most appropriate reaction but we don't get to consciously choose this, our hindbrain is wired to do whatever it "thinks" will keep us safe.
So the next time you notice that you automatically run away from a threat (or a conversation), or notice that you fight back when you perceive a threat (which could be as seemingly harmless as something someone says to you) or you realise you're frozen in place and can't move forward (for any reason at all) know that it's your hindbrain running the show.
And that is functional and useful and may well have saved your life a huge number of times that you won't have even remembered, except in situations where it is not. That is, if you find you're frozen in your business and can't do what needs doing, then you need some help getting unstuck.
If you find that you're constantly fighting with your partner over stupid little things, then you probably need some help safely releasing old anger.
And if you find that you constantly run away from things that don't scare other people but do scare you (like public speaking opportunities or dating or ________insert thing here you really want to do it scares the crap out of you________) then you probably need some help resolving the underlying fears.
I've been learning about this stuff for more than a decade now and the most useful information I've learned on how the body works, why it does what it does and how to make it all work better I've learned over the last two years from a woman named Irene Lyon.
This year I'm going to embark on a $2000, 12-week, in-depth program and I'm delighted that I get to dive deeper. But it's not where I recommend people start.
If topics like "how to function better" or "how to understand the mind-body connection" or "how to stop f*cking up your life" interest you then a good place to start will be at the upcoming, first-ever Health Transformation Summit. It starts in just under a week from now.
It's a free event with a paid upgrade option (that gives you even more goodies). Irene is one of a whole host of speakers who were all invited to speak at this event due to their expert knowledge on how to improve our health and make our lives work better.
Her talk will be a beautiful introduction into the stuff I've spent the last two years studying that allowed me to understand what happened when I saw this snake and how and why the body does what it does. You can join for free or choose the paid upgrade option here.
Some of my posts include affiliate links that help cover the huge amount of time I spend learning new and useful things and then re-teaching these life-changing concepts. If you choose to buy something through one of my links I may get a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you so much for your support. I really appreciate it.
