Overview: Un-Hijacking the Brain: Listening When Emotions are High

Not everyone with a problem needs you to solve it. Sometimes all a person needs is to feel like they’ve been heard. Listening without judging can be more effective than injecting your opinions or trying to solve a problem that doesn’t have an easy answer.

— Zero Dean, Author of Lessons Learned from the Path Less Traveled

In this module, we tackle another challenging listening situation: when someone is upset and you’re trying to help.

As listening expert Mark Goulston says in his book Talking to Crazy: How to Deal with the Irrational and Impossible People in Your Life, everyone acts crazy from time to time. That includes you!

And as we’re sure you know from experience, it’s hard to talk to someone when he’s “losing it.” In fact, the other person is usually so wrapped up in his own emotions that he can’t process anything you’re saying to him.

It’s important for you to understand what’s going on inside the brain of a person who’s out of control—something called an “amygdala hijacking” by neuroscientists. Knowing what’s happening inside the other person’s head will help you stay cool and allow you to be of most help.

Luckily, there’s a proven, step-by-step process for “talking someone down” in these situations, and it’s a process you can turn into a valuable skill if you practice it often enough.

Once the person has calmed down, you can then move into problem-solving mode and focus on finding a way to avoid future meltdowns when she faces the same triggering event. The process looks a little different depending on whether the triggering event was something that you in some way caused or whether the event was unrelated to you. We’ll look at both processes in this module.