by Kaela Judd | Jul 13, 2021 | Emotional Wellness

5 Steps to Reconnect to our Emotions and find Common Ground

Understanding Today’s Divisiveness

Everyone is speaking about how divisive our country is right now. But why? And how do we reverse course to find common ground? I suggest looking more closely at our own emotions and how we are behaving towards each other.

You see, there is a pattern that we can zoom in on. Every day we see chaos around us. We watch it on TV. We see it on our social media. We see just about everything in our society being politically used.

To really understand the ‘why’ behind the intense divisiveness, we really must stop and look at brain function (stay with me now!). We know that when our fight or flight system (the part of our brain that triggers a stress response that prepares the body to fight, flee, or freeze) is triggered, all logical brain functioning is lost. In other words, our logical brain has now been flooded with stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. These hormones shut down logical brain functioning. Now you may ask, what happens when our logical brain is offline? What takes over?  My simple answer is fear-based emotions.