There is a way the brain listens for danger that feels almost insurmountable at times. It's ancient, automatic, precise, and deeply rooted in our evolution and survival as a species. I like to imagine-and share this with my clients via metaphor-this process as a kind of internal radar, sweeping across the deep and vast ocean of our lived experience. This radar is brilliantly loyal. It notices everything—from passing ships to migrating whales to the tiniest piece of drifting debris. It does this because our brain wants-needs-us to survive.
And yet, as many of us know or have experienced personally, this radar sometimes doesn't distinguish well between a distant ship and a plastic bottle floating on the surface. The brain begins to treat every piece of flotsam and jetsam as threat. And so in its abundance of care for our survival, the brain and very seat of our consciousness, becomes exhausting to live with.
This is how our perception transforms into reality. It's not that we are wrong or broken; our nervous system is doing exactly what it was built to do: keep us alive.
Sometimes what's good for survival is not what's good for mental health.
So what do we do when our brain is doing an excellent job of keeping us alive, but doing a poor job at helping us thrive? Therapy is an invaluable tool, because it uses evidence-based practices to help the brain fine-tune its radar, so it can notice what truly matters, soften around what’s safe, and return us to a deeper sense of capacity and connection.
The Brain Areas Behind Our “Radar”
Through rigorous research, we now know that the brain has certain regions that participate in this early threat-detection system. Before we consciously interpret anything, these systems are already online, scanning, evaluating, and preparing the body for survival. After all, taking time to cognitively logic out whether or not that big fish swimming our way is a curious tuna or a dangerous shark might not save us while deep sea diving.
Let’s meet a few of the inner navigators behind the radar—without the jargon, and with a deep bow to the wisdom they carry.
The Thalamus: The Radar Receiver
The thalamus is like the radar’s first listening post. Every sound, movement, sensation—almost every piece of sensory information—passes through this gateway.
Its job? Send the signal where it needs to go, and quickly. The thalamus routes sensory input both downward into the fast, instinctual fear centers and upward into the slower, thinking parts of the brain. This means our radar doesn’t wait for thoughtful reflection; it reacts first. It protects first. And it does this all very quickly.
The Amygdala: The Radar’s Alarm System
The amygdala is another part of our radar concerned with our safety, especially in the here-and-now. It reacts not to facts but to perception—to anything that looks, sounds, or feels like danger. And it reacts fast.
By the time we even realize we’re upset, the amygdala has already sent out alerts to other parts of the brain and body. The body needs this lightning reactivity to prepare for bracing, contracting, and preparing to fight, flee, or freeze. For this areas of the brain, survival matters more than accuracy.
The Autonomic Nervous System: The Ocean Beneath the Radar
When the amygdala sounds the alarm, it activates the body’s stress response system via the HPA-Axis, which is the collection of your hypothalamus, pituitary and adrenal working in coordination to power (or in fancy neuroscience terms, up-regulate)your autonomic nervous system in response to a stressor. Heart rate changes. Muscles tighten. Digestion pauses. Peripheral vision narrows. Attention and language expression/processing also narrow. Norepinephrine and epinephrine are pumping through your blood, bring these survival systems online to act quickly. Essentially, the HPAAxis helps the entire body reorient toward safety. And our perception of safety might not be entirely within conscious control.
None of this is a mistake or a weakness. This is the intelligence of a system designed to keep us alive without us having to think about it. These saved nanoseconds can and do sometimes make the different in our survival. It's why we inherited it from our early ancestors.
But when the radar is constantly detecting debris and detritus as danger, the body gets stuck in the choppy waters of hypervigilance. Long before we realize what’s happening, the nervous system becomes exhausted, rigid, inflamed—trying to solve threats that may no longer exist.
Why Our Radar Becomes Oversensitive
If you’ve lived through chronic stress, anxiety, or trauma, your radar may have learned that the world is unpredictable, or that danger comes without warning. So your radar amplifies, both in sensitivity and reach.
A few reasons the radar becomes oversensitive:
Past experiences taught the brain to prioritize survival. The amygdala remembers threat more readily than safety. It’s part of its design. A brain primed for threat is better destined to notice the shark fin cutting through the water in the distance. This natural ping! tells us to get back to the safety of the boat.
Perception becomes encoded as truth. If something felt dangerous once, the brain may treat anything similar as dangerous again. This is why certain sights, scents, and sounds can trigger flashbacks, dissociation, and distress or despair, even if it hasn't arisen to our conscious awareness. Objects, places, people, and even events become associated, but they lose context. So while we know we aren't back in the ocean, watching Jaws reruns from the comfort of our living room might still ping! our radar because it is similar enough.
The system was never given space to recalibrate. The body needs signals—movement, breath, relational safety—to know when a threat has passed, for now or for good. Without that, the radar keeps sweeping for danger long after the storm. The deepest parts of our brain are outside of our conscious awareness, but that does not mean those parts are unaware of the external world. But because our amygdala cannot distinguish a real, hungry shark from the one in the film on its own without the help of our prefrontal cortex and other more conscious, rational parts of the brain, the radar is going to ping! again.
Therapy as Radar Calibration
Therapy doesn’t try to shut the radar off. In fact, this is impossible, because we need the threat system to survive. But it does invite the radar back into relationship with the rest of the brain—especially the parts capable of nuance, context, and meaning-making, like the frontal cortical areas.
The thinking areas of the brain come back online when the amygdala settles, allowing us to integrate, reflect, and respond rather than react. Through practices that work with both mind and body—breathwork, grounding, titrated relaxation, memory reconsolidation, narrative reauthoring—therapy helps the radar regain its capacity for discernment.
Slowly, with compassion, we learn to notice:
- “Ah, that’s a ship—I can respond.”
- “That’s just a wave—I can let it pass.”
- “That’s debris from an old storm—I’m safe now.”
The goal isn’t perfecting your radar so you can set-and-forget; it’s reconnection to our most innate, instinctual systems. It’s helping the nervous system recognize that survival is no longer the only story, and that safety, rest, and relational warmth are possible as well, even in situations that bear the "whiff of the sniff of trauma," as world-renowned trauma therapist Linda Thai says.
Cultivating Capacity Within
When we begin to understand our internal radar, we can learn to steer it and anchor ourselves. We stop seeing ourselves as “overreacting” and start seeing ourselves as anchored, intelligent systems trying to survive uncertainty. We develop compassion for the parts of us that tense, avoid, anticipate, or brace. And as we practice, something shifts—subtly at first, then with growing confidence.
A well-tuned radar continuously refines its search, recalibrating as needed to watch for threats that match the context we're in. As a result, the internal ocean feels steadier, guided by capacity, integration, and embodied safety. This is the quiet, steady, and courageous work of healing through trauma-informed therapy.
References
The quote above is attributed to Dr. Jennifer Sweeton, clinical neuropsychologist, and is from her Neuropsychotherapy training.