Such emotional hijacks are triggered by the amygdala, the brain's radar for threat, which constantly scans our surroundings for dangers. When these circuits spot a threat (or what we interpret as one-they are often mistaken), a superhighway of neuronal circuitry running upward to the prefrontal areas sends a barrage of signals that let the lower brain drive the upper: our attention narrows, glued to what's upsetting us; our memory reshuffles, making it easier to recall any thing relevant to the threat at hand; our body goes into overdrive as a flood of stress hormones prepares our limbs to fight or run. We fixate on what's so disturbing and forget the rest.
The stronger the emotion, the greater our fixation. Hijacks are the superglue of attention. But the question is, How long does our focus stay captured? That depends, it turns out, on the power of the left prefrontal area to ealm the aroused amygdala (there are two amygdalae, one in each brain hemisphere).
That amygdala-prefrontal neuronal superhighway has branches to the left and right prefrontal sides. When we are hijacked the amygdala circuitry captures the right side and takes over. But the left side can send signals downward that calm the hijack.
Emotional resilience comes down to how quickly we recover from upsets. People who are highly resilient-who bounce back right away-can have as much as thirty times more activation in the left prefrontal area than those who are less resilient.18 The good news: as we'll see in part 5, we can increase the strength of the amygdala-calming left prefrontal circuitry.