Episode #42 Threat Based Drive and Why It’s So Important to Recognise It
This transcript is computer generated and may contain errors and not be an exact representation of the audio
Hi This is Welcome to Self® and I’m your host Dr Hayley D Quinn, fellow human, business owner, and coach for women like you who want to increase your own self-care and self-compassion, change the relationship you have with yourselves and your business and elevate your business to a new level so you can live the full and meaningful life you desire.
Welcome to Self® is a podcast for women business owners. It is a place where you can come and learn about the practices that will assist you as a business owner, get tips on how to engage in your business in a way that is sustainable for you, realise that you’re not alone in the ways that you struggle, and have your curiosity piqued on various topics as I chat to wonderful guests and bring you solo episodes.
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Hi and welcome to another episode of bite size business where I bring you a short episode with some helpful tips for you and your business.
As humans we are born with tricky minds and a complex emotional system, lucky us hey! In Compassion Focused Therapy, which is a framework that we can use, not just in the therapy room but for all aspects of our life, Professor Paul Gilbert developed what we know as the three-circle model. You can listen to Paul taking about compassion in Episode 4 and he has a lot of wisdom to share. The three-circle model is a model of the emotional regulation system. It talks about three emotional systems, those being Threat, Drive and Soothing.
The threat system, or red circle is a system that is on 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days of the year. It’s our better safe than sorry system. It’s like a default in as much as we don’t have to practice being in our threat system because our threat system will just activate as and when it’s needed, and sometimes it will activate when we don’t need it to. Tricky hey! The threat system motivates us to get safe. We have feelings that are associated with this system, which include anxiety, anger, and disgust. So it’s a good indication for you that if you’re feeling any of those, your threat system has been activated.
We also have the drive system or the blue circle, and this is the system that motivates us to acquire what it is that we need. So, if we’re thirsty, it will motivate us to hydrate. If we’re hungry it’ll motivate us to find food. If we are looking to uplevel our business, it’ll motivate us to pursue and acquire the things necessary for us to do that. The feelings that are associated with this system are feelings like wanting, pursuing, progressing, and achieving. This is a handy system when we’re wanting to get stuff done, but we can also find that we’re in overdrive sometimes and we’ll talk a little bit more about that later.
Finally, we have the soothing system or the green circle. This is our rest and digest, tend and befriend system. This is the system that when we’re not under threat and we’re not needing to pursue or achieve anything, allows us to be calm and grounded and connect with both ourselves and others. It moves us towards a caring motivation for ourselves and others. Feelings associated with this system would be things like contentment, a sense of trust and safeness, and feeling protected and cared for. Sounds nice doesn’t it.
So that’s a very simple and brief explanation of the three-circle model. Why I want to talk to you about this model is because I want to talk to you about something we call threat-based drive. Oftentimes as humans we have an underdeveloped, soothing system. Now this can be for a multitude of reasons. Your early life experiences, whether you had people that helped you regulate and soothe as a child, that sort of thing but the point being it’s not uncommon as a human being to have a somewhat underdeveloped soothing system. And as I said, the threat system is our default, it’s our better safe than sorry. It’s the reason your ancestors survived at least long enough to procreate enabling you to be here.
Some people have a very overactive threat system. So again, for a multitude of reasons. You may have trauma in your background. You may have had a particular thing that’s happened that’s left you feeling quite anxious, and you might be hyper vigilant to threat.
One of the things that can happen for us humans, particularly when the soothing system is underdeveloped and even when it’s not! our drive system can activate in order to manage our threat system. Now that can be really effective in the moment. For example, you could be feeling quite anxious about your business, maybe you’ve had a lot of cancellations recently, your diary isn’t as full as you’d like it to be, and you’ve had some bills arrive that need paying. Your drive system activates, and you start working harder, coming up with ideas and getting busy with tasks you think might help. You spend lots of hours figuring out how can you get more customers? And thinking about what you are going to do? You’re not feeling as anxious anymore, you’re feeling driven to solve the problem. Great yeah?
Unfortunately, not always, this can lead to a bit of a pattern where we bounce between drive and threat because you’re working harder and harder and maybe what you’re doing isn’t working. You’re not getting any more customers and certainly not immediately. So, you end up back in your threat system and maybe now you’ve noticed you’re being quite self-critical as well.
There’s lots more anxiety, worrying about why things aren’t happening. So, you start working harder again and then that doesn’t provide instant results so you’re back feeling anxious again. Are you starting to see the pattern?
Ideally, what we want to do, when we notice that threat, is to engage our soothing system and have some ways that we can down regulate our nervous system so that we can make decisions that are actually helpful for us.
We might want to engage in something like a gentle soothing breathing exercise. Slowing down the breath, making sure we’ve got some nice equal in and out breaths, checking that we’re not shallow breathing into our chest. It might be something like stepping away from your workspace and engaging in a walk so that you can settle your nervous system and start to gain some perspective, it might be reaching out to someone to talk over what the problem is so you can feel supported, and you may then receive some compassion from someone else who acknowledges that what you’re going through is hard.
What can happen then is our drive system can be activated but in a way that is motivated by our values and our goals. When we come from a place of feeling soothed, our decision making comes from a wiser place and we have more clarity in our thinking.
What we know about the threat system is when we’re in threat we have very narrow attention, and clarity, creative thinking and helpful problem solving aren’t necessarily on the agenda. All the threat system is interested in is get safe, get safe, get safe.
Like I said earlier, you may have had experiences in your life where you’ve been under real threat, and you also have a mind that is prone to getting caught up in imaginary threat. From an evolutionary perspective, your ancestors had times where they needed to make sure they weren’t going to get eaten by a lion. Now in most places around the world, we don’t have lions just wandering around. Although in Germany they did recently, but generally we don’t. But we do get caught up in imagined threats. The problem with our brain is we don’t actually know if something is real or imagined, so your nervous system is going to react to it being a threat no matter what.
If you are in threat-based drive, you are going to be making decisions for your business that are motivated by you feeling better in that moment. They’re just going to be decisions that help you remove the anxiety or the anger or whatever emotion is showing up. Which isn’t necessarily beneficial for the long term of your business.
One of the things that I will ask myself when I’m making decisions in business, and in life, is what is motivating this decision? Is the choice I’m making in this particular context, in line with my values and is it in line with the goals and outcomes that I’m seeking to achieve? Now sometimes the answer to that will be yes. And sometimes the answer for that will be well actually no, I’m just feeling really anxious about putting this new thing out to market or agreeing to talk at this particular event, or whatever it might be.
When this happens, I try to remind myself that I’m in threat-based drive and unlikely to make a great decision from that place. Now I say try because I don’t always manage to do this, I’m as human as the next person.
The time threat-based drive is really effective is when you are in a situation where it is unsafe, and you are acting from a place of needing to get safe. Your business decisions might feel uncomfortable but for the majority, if not all of the time, they’re not going to be unsafe. So, it’s important that you don’t make your decisions from this place, this place of threat, that you actually give yourself some time and space to down regulate your nervous system, feel more grounded, slow down so you can access and listen to the wisdom that you have inside of you and give yourself the opportunity to make decisions that are helpful not harmful to you and your business.
I really hope this has been helpful for you. Holding in mind this emotion regulation system, this three-circle model has been game changing for me in my life. It’s something I have used over the years with my clients in clinical and coaching sessions and it’s certainly something that I use for myself on a daily basis in my own life and in my business.
It’s been lovely chatting to you today. I look forward to bringing you more bite size business and if you did find this helpful, please share it with somebody else you think might benefit. Tune in next time where we’ll have another guest episode and, in the meantime, go well and go gently and remember thriving women create thriving businesses.
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