The Brain Science of Losing Control at Work
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Your brain is essentially a three-pound biological corporation where different departments usually work in remarkable harmony. The prefrontal cortex serves as CEO, making executive decisions and planning strategically. The hippocampus runs the filing system, organizing and storing memories. Various other regions handle everything from processing visual data to regulating breathing. And deep in the basement, the amygdala works security—an ancient alarm system scanning for threats 24/7. Most of the time, these systems collaborate seamlessly.
Until that one email notification changes everything.
"Hey, can we chat?" No context. No emoji to soften the blow. Just four words from your boss that transform your peaceful afternoon into a neurological crime scene. You just got amygdala-hijacked.
The 30-Millisecond Coup
The amygdala (Latin for almond) consists of two almond-shaped clusters that evolution installed as our personal threat-detection system.1 It's constantly monitoring incoming data: every facial expression, every sound while walking home late at night, every change in tone during a Zoom call, searching for anything that might signal danger.
When you see that ominous email from your boss, your amygdala doesn't politely request a meeting with your prefrontal cortex to discuss appropriate responses. In approximately 30 milliseconds it hits the emergency override button.
What happens next is a hostile takeover of your entire nervous system. The amygdala sends urgent signals through two pathways simultaneously.2 The fast path races directly to your hypothalamus, bypassing your “thinking” brain entirely. The slower path eventually reaches your cortex, but by then, the coup is already underway.
Your hypothalamus, now in emergency mode, triggers your sympathetic nervous system. Within seconds, a precise chemical cascade floods your system:
Glutamate spikes first, cranking up the volume on all neural signals. Think of it as your brain suddenly switching from normal conversation to SHOUTING IN ALL CAPS.
Norepinephrine (noradrenaline) surges through your brain via the locus coeruleus, sharpening your attention to laser focus on the threat. Every word in that email message becomes hypervisible. Time seems to slow. Your pupils dilate.
Epinephrine (adrenaline) dumps into your bloodstream from your adrenal glands. Heart rate jumps. Breathing quickens. Blood rushes away from your digestive system toward your muscles. Your body is literally preparing to fight or flee from... some words on a screen.
Dopamine joins the party, priming your motor systems and locking your motivation onto the perceived threat. This is why you can't stop thinking about that message, even though you know you should just reply quickly and move on.3
All of this happens before you've even finished processing the message. Your prefrontal cortex—the part that could remind you that your boss just wants to plan a colleague’s surprise party—has been effectively locked out of the control room.
But wait, there's more! The initial chemical surge is just Act One.
The Slow Burn: When Cortisol Enters the Chat
Minutes after that first wave, your hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis kicks into gear.4 This triggers the release of cortisol, the stress hormone that's about to make your evening miserable.
Unlike the rapid-fire neurotransmitters that spike and fade within minutes, cortisol is playing the long game. It can remain elevated for hours, sometimes even days. This is why a Friday afternoon email can ruin your entire weekend.
Cortisol not only keeps you stressed, it actively impairs the very brain regions you need to think clearly about the situation. It suppresses hippocampal function, making it harder to access context ("Oh right, they mentioned planning a surprise party, maybe they just want to chat about it…"). It weakens prefrontal cortex activity, reducing your ability to regulate emotions or think strategically.5
You're essentially trying to solve a social puzzle while your brain is still convinced you're being chased by a predator.
Why can’t you just think straight?
Email as Apex Predator
Your brain is hardware that hasn't received a major update since the Paleolithic period. It’s optimized for life in small tribes without much change. But that hardware now inhabits a vastly different world; one of abundant food, modern medicine, and indoor plumbing. Like an iPhone 5 struggling with the latest iOS, the brain gets glitchy when pushed beyond its design specs.
The amygdala evolved for binary decisions: you either escaped the predator or you didn't. To your amygdala, a threat is a threat is a threat. The ancient radar detector wasn’t designed to parse the difference between a saber-toothed tiger and whether "can we chat?" means you're about to get fired from your remote-work corporate job.
But most modern threats aren't mortal—they're ambiguous, social, and prolonged. Yet your amygdala responds to passive-aggressive emails with the same intensity devised for rustling in the bushes behind you.
This mismatch creates chronic activation. Your amygdala treats every unclear email as a potential threat, every delayed response as possible rejection, every interrupting Slack message as an incoming attack. It's exhausting your stress response system in a way it was never designed to handle. At least with a tiger, you know where you stand within seconds. With a colleague, you might stew for weeks.
The Biochemical Hostage Situation
By the time you realize you're having an amygdala hijack, you're already biochemically compromised. Telling yourself to "calm down" is like trying to stop a freight train with positive thinking. And someone else telling you to “calm down” is likely to set you off even more!
Your rational brain hasn't gone anywhere, it's just been chemically sidelined.6 The glutamate surge has amped up emotional processing while norepinephrine has narrowed your attention to the threat. Cortisol is already beginning its slow sabotage of your higher reasoning. You're not weak or unprofessional. You're experiencing a hostile biochemical takeover that would happen to anyone with a functioning nervous system.
There’s nothing wrong with you. Your brain is working exactly as it was designed.
In Part 2, I’ll talk about what we can do about our over-active amygdalae so they don’t get the best of us. Annoyed that you have to wait for a Part 2 that you didn’t see coming? Boom, you just got hijacked. (…please don’t unsubscribe, I beg you).
That's it for this edition — please reach out if I can be at all helpful.
Be compassionate and intentional.
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LeDoux, J. E. (1998). The emotional brain: The mysterious underpinnings of emotional life. Simon and Schuster.
Guzmán-Ramos, K., et al., (2012). Post-acquisition release of glutamate and norepinephrine in the amygdala promotes memory consolidation. Learning & Memory, 19(12), 558–563.
Osorio-Gómez, D., et al., (2016). Differential involvement of glutamatergic and catecholaminergic activity within the amygdala during memory retrieval. Behavioural Brain Research, 307, 184–190.
McGaugh, J. L. (2004). The amygdala modulates the consolidation of memories of emotionally arousing experiences. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 27, 1–28.
Lupien, S. J., et al., (2007). The effects of stress and stress hormones on human cognition: Implications for the field of brain and cognition. Brain and Cognition, 65(3), 209–237.
Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10, 410–422.
Morelli, N., Rota, E., Terracciano, C., Immovilli, P., Spallazzi, M., Colombi, A., & Zaino, D. (2020). The hidden face of fear in the COVID-19 era: The amygdala hijack. European Neurology, 83(5), 441–447.