94. Shifting Baseline Syndrome, Part 2
Changing your normal without peeing your pants
Let me pretend for a minute that I’m a high school biology teacher.
Everybody please turn to the front of the room, put down your phones and pay attention. Ms Bennage, Mr. Cosentino, I’m sure you can finish your conversation after class.
Thank you. Now where was I. Oh yes. Biology.
There is this thing called the amygdala. It is a little almond-shaped thinga-ma-bob at the base of your brain - for those of you that still have a brain.
The amygdala is the oldest part of the brain; it was there before we evolved into the type of complex creatures that could build an entire palace out of corn.
The amygdala controls our most basic human instincts. In particular, it controls the fight or flight response.
As you can imagine, this would’ve been super helpful if you came face to tusk with an angry woolly mammoth and needed to make some pretty speedy decisions.
As it turns out, the amygdala doesn’t just interpret angry animals as threats, it also interprets change as a threat. Once you encounter sudden change, like taking a bus to school for the first time or deciding to go bungee jumping, the amygdala releases the same exact hormones that create the fight or flight response.
Let me make sure all of you understand what I’m saying here:
Our bodies are biologically engineered to resist sudden change.
Interesting, right?
I thought so too.
Biology class over.
A Frog And His Comfort Zone
You may know the story of the frog in the boiling water. The basic gist is this: If you boil water and put a frog into it, the little feller will do everything it can to get the heck out of there before it dies.
However, if you put a frog in room temperature water and then slowly raise the heat, the frog won’t even notice the difference and will enjoy his day at the pool until such time as the water is so hot that he unknowingly boils himself to death.
Now, this won’t actually work, but the fable is the important part, so let’s run with it.
Like the frog, it’s incredibly uncomfortable to move out of our comfort zone. It triggers the amygdala, causing everything in our being to want to retreat back to the comfort of normalcy.
However, if we slowly change our environment, if we gradually (rather than suddenly) alter the baseline of our comfort zone, change can happen without waking up the sleeping amygdala.
And this brings us right back to that conversation we had last week about Shifting Baseline Syndrome.
Shifting Perceptions
As a reminder, the concept of Shifting Baseline Syndrome (SBS) is that every new generation, based on their real world experiences, will set a new baseline for what they perceive as “normal” environmental conditions.
Though the SBS concept is about the change in perceptions amongst different generations, it can also be applied to individual experiences within ones own life. At least, that’s what I’m about to do… in the next post.
Quote
“I didn’t fail the test. I just found 100 ways to do it wrong."
- Benjamin Franklin
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