Calming Your Brain During Conflict

by Diane Musho Hamilton
posted Jan 11, 2016

The Harvard Business Review featured this article by Diane Musho Hamilton, about how to practice remaining calm during an emotional conflict, perhaps to help its readers regain reason and control in heated business arguments. But of course arguments that escalate to that place where we become seething cauldrons occur in personal relations all the time too, if not more so. Hamilton offers a method for keeping our higher intelligence available to restore order when our more primitive emotion centers hijack our communications.

“Conflict wreaks havoc on our brains. We are groomed by evolution to protect ourselves whenever we sense a threat. In our modern context, we don’t fight like a badger with a coyote, or run away like a rabbit from a fox. But our basic impulse to protect ourselves is automatic and unconscious…”