Logic vs Lizard Brain (And Why I’m Pro-Lizard)
If you’re AuDHD, late diagnosed, high masking, and have been to therapy, chances are high you’ve heard something like “You’re so self-aware! You’re doing so well!” when it super doesn’t feel accurate.
I’ve found over and over again, with myself, my clients, and my loved ones, that us high-masking AuDHD folks are really good at hyper-analyzing what’s happening in our brain, and not as good at allowing ourselves to be present in the experience and somatically (soma=in the body) processing emotions as they arise. Which is why the years of my therapists telling me to “feel my feelings” led to just intellectualizing the heck out of my feelings and bringing back the summary of what I think happened like I’m writing a scientific paper about my brain.
This trait led me (and many folks like me) to get so much praise from therapist after therapist of “you’re so self-aware!” But knowing what’s happening in my brain isn’t the same thing as processing it, and I still felt stuck in the same harmful patterns.
This drive to analyze our brains and rationalize away our feelings makes a lot of sense on so many levels. Autistic brains on average tend to thrive with analytical thinking and pattern recognition, and can struggle with things that feel less concrete and structured like emotions. ADHD brains tend to have so much happening at any given moment that summarizing the brain state is a lot easier than having to ignore everything in my brain to actually focus bodily awareness. Most of us also learned about a thousand lessons as young children that our emotional responses were wrong or too much or inappropriate: not just because of our neurological differences, but also because society’s baseline for the “right” way to express emotions is deeply gendered and usually involves repression, masking, and pushing through it.
Before I climb onto the soapbox of the deficits in emotional socialization, capitalism and Puritan roots and all that jazz, let’s just summarize with this: if I was never taught how to feel emotions safely in my body, OF COURSE the first hint of an uncomfortable emotion is going to lead to me tapping the heck out of that unsafe sensation and lean heavily into analysis brain.
This is where most clients start, only ever listening to logic brain and discounting or deflecting from emotion brain. But under every logical analysis, our childhood wounds and flawed conditioning are still running our emotional responses, and if we never pay attention to them, we can’t change them. So one of the first bits of language we bring into coaching is starting to differentiate between what I like to call “logic brain” and “lizard brain.”
Lizard brain:
Emotional brain centers (amygdala, mainly)
Emotion-driven
Super convinced the emotional story is true
“I think I’m probably getting fired tomorrow and I’m doomed”
Logic brain:
pre-frontal cortex
Hyper-analytical
Recognizes objective fact
“Logically I know this e-mail from my boss isn’t a big deal”
Disclaimer: I learned the term “lizard brain” from a teacher of mine, because the danger responses (i.e. fight, flight, freeze) date back evolutionarily to the primitive parts of the brain that we have in common with our lizard ancestors. Technically our limbic system where emotions live wasn’t fully developed until the “mammal brain” days, so if you want to be accurate most of these responses will be mammal-brain driven, but I love the image of a little lizard running around in my brain pressing buttons at random so much that I’m sticking with it personally.
Your logic brain is driving the show most of the time because it wants to keep you safe in a world that wasn’t designed for you. It does a pretty darn good job of that. No shame at all, thank you logic brain for doing that hard work! And also, you’ve probably tried to “logic brain” your way through feeling super activated or a meltdown or executive dysfunction plenty of times before. How often does that work well?
If I’m mid-meltdown and logic brain chimes in with “I should just be able to take a deep breath and get over it,” all I’ve done is introduced an extra shame spiral about how I should be able to detach myself from the emotional experience. Lizard brain is running programs constantly under the surface based on all of my socialization, personal experiences, nervous system states, and a whole bunch of shortcuts to help me process the world. And if I never listen to those programs, I don’t have the chance to change them.
Okay, great, so what do I do instead?
The first step is to notice and actually acknowledge lizard brain. When we’re processing thoughts for thoughtwork, we start with noticing the balance between logic and lizard brain, and the thoughts that make it into deeper processing are almost always the lizard brain thoughts that are causing emotional distress or resistance. Those are the thoughts holding us back when logic brain is on board.
But what the hell does this even look like? Let me offer a couple different excerpts from my own journaling as an example:
My brain is really struggling with the transition to having [my partner] home in the middle of the day. I had a plan to be productive in the living room, and now they've taken it over to play video games, and autism brain feels trapped and like the plan is ruined. I'm reluctant to ask them if I can have the living room for the next couple hours, because it feels unreasonable to take control of a room and not allow them to exist wherever they please to relax.
The first passage is removed from my emotional experience. It’s often in third person relative to my own body (“autism brain feels trapped”), it’s full sentences, it describes emotions relatively impartially (“I’m reluctant,” “it feels unreasonable”). These are all signs for me that my logic brain is trying really hard to keep me safe from an emotional flood by summarizing the experience into a neat little acceptable package.
I’m stuck and hemmed in. I had a plan, and having [my partner] home without warning and taking up space that was supposed to be my safe, productive space is SO FRUSTRATING, but I don't want to have to ask them to move and stop the thing they're enjoying, that's unfair to them. That would make me a bad partner, but they’re being a bad partner already. I should just be more flexible and find a workaround, or be content to exist in the same space as them, my brain is ridiculous, I hate feeling this resistant and reactive to small things. It takes too much energy to recover from this, there's no point to planning to be productive at all if my partner is just going to ruin the plan, they should have checked with my plan first, I don't even want to do these things so I should just give up and scroll TikTok anyway. How could they put me in this position without a second thought? They should know better by now.
The second passage is more emotionally charged. The sentences are stream-of-consciousness phrasings, there’s lots of self-judgment and resentment and all caps, and I’m “in it” reporting from inside my experience instead of reporting what happened like a third-party scientist. These are the thoughts that I wouldn’t tell my loved one out loud, they can be mean and hurtful to myself and others, and they can be SO uncomfortable to put on paper, because there’s a lot of social guilt around things a “nice” person should and shouldn’t say (i.e. good people don’t think their wife is being a bitch for sitting on the couch).
I’ll note here that we’re very rarely going to get 100% one brain or the other, even in these passages. Like many other things, it’s a spectrum of which part of my brain is primarily driving the show, but both are in the car. Your lizard and logic brain will likely have different tones and markers than mine, so don’t fret if your journals look different, just play with it!
Even though these lizard brain thoughts are uncomfortable as hell, looking at these thoughts head-on does a couple of important things:
Writing them down helps me to process the emotion through my body so the emotion doesn’t get trapped and feed into my already chronically activated nervous system (imagine how you might feel better after a good cry or scream, similar concept).
Naming these emotions as “lizard brain” can help give me some emotional distance from them: instead of buying into the story my panic is telling, I can notice that this is just one part of my brain, and objectivity gets a little easier.
If I can get comfortable with looking at these emotional outpourings, I can start to feel safe allowing myself to experience negative emotions, and my window of emotional tolerance increases the more often I practice this processing. (I can’t accomplish huge scary things like starting a business or having hard conversations about boundaries unless I’m okay having some uncomfortable feelings!)
These emotions, when we drill several layers down through the “so what” and “why is it a problem,” tend to uncover the deep-seated roots of core thoughts that will keep hurting us until we heal them. Things like “I’m not worthy of love,” “I’m not allowed to rest,” “people will leave me if they see the real me.” I can’t get down to the core stuff until I can listen to lizard brain, and I can’t fully shift my reality without lizard brain on board.
Okay, so there are a lot of complexities here that I could write a whole dissertation about, it’s tricky to unpack all of this in a blog post. Which is part of why it’s one of the first things I introduce, because it takes a while to settle into listening to lizard brain and play with all that complexity. But it’s also the tool I come back to again and again in basically every conversation these days. There’s something in that complexity about how neurodivergent brains often conceive of the self in several parts, like the lizard brain is an entirely separate entity from the logic brain “overseer.” So the work is worth doing, and is a helpful framework for unpacking your messy human brain.
We don’t just stop once we’re aware of what’s happening, this awareness of the core thought helps us actually reprogram the thought to a thought that serves me better, which is the bulk of thoughtwork. But I don’t like to skip too quickly to the subsequent steps, because your brain already desperately wants to skip over this step. Awareness and acceptance of what lizard brain is up to are, I would say, the most important tool to make thoughtwork successful and build self-compassion.
So! Some journal prompts to play with next time a big feeling comes up. This work can flood your nervous system, so please take care if doing it solo, and allow yourself so many breaks when your brain wants them to keep yourself safe and centered!
Journal Prompts
Write down stream-of-consciousness every thought in your brain, especially the ones you’d never say out loud
Underline what phrases sound pretty logic-driven, and circle phrases that feel particularly emotional
Dial in on the most emotional thought in the outpouring, the one thing that lizard brain is yelling the loudest
And then the uncomfortable part:
Read that thought several times, write down what comes up, any thoughts about self-worth, what it means about you, and what you feel in your body
Only do this for as long as it feels safe and supportive, listen to your brain when it taps out! More emotional processing tools to come, and reach out if you want 1:1 support.