Our Troublesome Amygdala & How Meditation Can Help Calm Our Nerves

The amygdala is the part of the brain that is responsible for setting the alarms bells off when the brain senses danger. This amygdala is primal and it is said that it hasn’t yet adapted to modern day living. When humans were hunter gatherers, this amygdala was extremely effective, aiding us when we had to run from predators for the sake of survival.

In modern day society, this sensitive amygdala can be problematic, as we don’t face life threatening situations as often as what we might have when we were living in the wild.

Research suggests that we can shrink this amygdala through things like mindfulness meditation. If we manage to shrink the amygdala, this creates less of an issue as it becomes less dominant over other parts of our brain that are responsible for reason and logic.

This is important, as we need reason and logic to help with making sense of situations through the process of thought. If we are completely ruled by our primal emotions, this can lead to things like chronic stress, where by our emotions run their course longer and more aggressively than what is required for survival – This can leads to illness in the mind and body.