Don't listen to your lizard brain

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A friend of mine told me that a therapist once told him, ‘don’t use the lizard brain’. What a nice little phrase. My first thought was if it had something to do with the ‘Reptilian Conspiracy Theory’, that the world is being led by lizard people. But he went on to explain that actually it refers to how lizards are skittish, quick reacting, creatures that respond to stimuli in a seemingly frantic way. Have you ever seen a lizard moving and thought it looks relaxed? No. Your lizard brain is when you behave in the same way. If you have 5 minutes, let me tell you a story.

Once upon a time in my old flat in London I was working on a product launch. I wasn’t leading the launch but I supporting. We were going to launch software that you could put on a device like a raspberry pi and it would ‘just work’ as whatever the software was intended for. You would be able to run that device as a sound system device, or a streaming device, or a gaming device, or whatever.

We were probably three weeks out from our targeted launch date and frankly, we were months away from being ready. This became clear when during a check-in with the engineers we learnt that the software we were looking to bundle into one thing was just no where near complete. The support for the range of devices we wanted to wasn’t there, there were bugs in some of the apps that meant they just wouldn’t work in the right way, and there were features of the technology we were trying to use that meant it just rejected some apps out right.

It was a shit show. On top of that preparations elsewhere in the company weren’t going well. The team behind the product weren’t working on the actual applications themselves but on the technology that bundles it together, so if there was something wrong with the apps we had no guarantee it would be fixed in time. Marketing had other fish to fry and so gave the launch of something they knew was incomplete very little attention, and the web team had been making space to work on the pages we knew we would need for weeks. But we weren’t ready.

All this is to say, 3 weeks out, it started getting real stressful. A lot of it was self imposed, or imposed by my colleague who was leading the launch. But then more came in spades. The boss wouldn’t take delay for an answer. We put in the time on the weekends to get the web pages written and the messaging right. Along the way we decided to make it part of a wider community based initiative, and so started that work too. All the while, since I worked most closely with the developers, I was getting pushed to put more pressure on them, to get something fixed that they had no control over.

I can’t remember the exact trigger, but this is when lizard brain kicked in. It probably wasn’t the first time, but it was definitely the worst time thus far. I started making bad choices. Thankfully the world was in a lockdown so it didn’t affect my personal life much, but at work I was just reacting. And not ‘just reacting’ in a ‘things are busy let’s get through them’ kind of way, more in a ‘anything comes my way and I either ignore/drop it on the floor, agree to just get it done, or bat it somewhere else’ kind of way. Suddenly everything that was incoming was more weight on my shoulders.

If I ignored something, I was guilty if it screwed up. If I took it on, I had to go fast. If I batted away, who knows where it would land and who it would hit. I think I lived with lizard brain for more or less 2 weeks, right up until 4 days before the proposed launch date when I heard words to this affect: ‘Well you can’t launch, you’re not ready, things are half baked, you fucked up. We’ll extend the launch another 3 weeks. I’ll see you on the weekend.’

Now in hindsight there was a lot of responsibility to be shared around for what happened. In my personal opinion a large portion of blame the first time an initiative goes bad in a ‘business’ setting is on leadership. But at the time, that’s not how it felt. I’d put all this time in, I’d been working frantically (lizard brain) to get things done, and it had all failed.

That following Saturday, scheduled to work for the next launch date, I fell sick. Was it stressed induced? Probably. Did I think of that at the time? No, I just thought how shit I was for missing the Saturday work and leaving the colleague who was leading the launch to do it alone. But I used the time to disconnect, I left my phone at the flat and walked through Holland park, to Hyde park, and just walked laps.

To start with I was going over the choices I’d made and thinking about how we could do better, how we would meet the new 3 week away launch date. And then I saw some ducks fly by, and a squirrel run up a tree, and I was taken out of my head. And I realised the park was almost empty. The biggest park in central London, almost deserted. Of course it was, you weren’t allowed to be in public places like that for very long, this was lockdown.

I started to think about my perspective. No, actually, it would be more accurate to say I started thinking about other people’s perspectives. Admittedly, I think I first thought about the ducks and the squirrels’ perspectives, but then about the other odd person in the park, and then about my colleagues around the launch.

If I was feeling this way, the lead was probably worse. I thought about how the engineers were having this pressure put on them and yet for them it was literally impossible for them to fix the bugs. And the marketing and web people who were also undoubtedly feeling the pressure but couldn’t do their parts until we’d done ours anyway.

The following week I opened each call I had with people related to the project with ‘How are you doing? What’s the thing that’s making this whole thing shit for you?’ I wrote them all down, including the lists of missing features and bugs the engineers were dealing with, and all the unreasonable expectations. I put it all in a nice neat bulleted list. Under each item I wrote what I thought we could/should do about it, and then the next chance I got it showed it to the lead colleague and the boss.

When I did so, there was obviously a lot of frustration. I was literally coming with a list of everyone’s problems. But we had something to work with, things we could breakdown and solve. During the months leading up to that point we had known what we had to do. Product development can be done a lot of ways but it follows a certain path. We all knew the path, this wasn’t our first rodeo (it was my second, or third, but whatever). But while we were going through the motions and following the process, and while my lizard brain kicked in and I was working just reacting, we’d stopped thinking about the people.

The issue was the bugs and the difficulties with getting the technology to work, but the problem wasn’t really that. If you break that down the problem was that the people behind that technology were stuck, or blocked. The issue was the pitch and the messaging wasn’t complete yet so marketing and web couldn’t do their thing, but the problem wasn’t really that. The problem was we couldn’t write or prepare that stuff without a fundamental understanding of the product and the software we were trying to bundle.

The launch was delayed at least another month after those extra three weeks. It was ultimately a failed initiative once we launched too. Adoption was abysmal and the good press that we got was short lived and rode almost entirely I think on half decent story telling, not on the product itself. For the company, it was a huge waste of time. For me, it was a huge learning experience.

Once I realised what I mentioned before, the lizard brain went away. That doesn’t mean I was completely free of stress, or even that the things I did were exceptional compared to what I had been doing, but it meant that when it was all said and done, I could point to exactly where we went wrong. Exactly how we ended up in the spot we were in, and where the issues actually were. I.e I’d learned something, I hadn’t just reacted like a lizard.

And I think I could do that because I didn’t listen the my lizard brain. Instead, I listened to other people’s brains. That is, I think, why lizards seem so frantic and skittish. It’s because they can’t even try to understand other lizards or people. They can’t empathise, they can only react.

For me, lizard brain is not an instinct or a fight or flight reaction, its a little more complex than that, less binary. When someone runs at you, or jumps out at you, you either don’t move, or you jump out of the way (hopefully you don’t punch them). Not a lot of brain work going on there, its instinct, subconscious, not lizard brain. Lizard brain is a mode of thinking, probably stress induced, that is not binary or immediate, but a state of thinking. When you’ve got so much on top of you, so much cognitive load that you can’t think straight, questions come at you, decisions need to be made, and you can only react under the circumstances. That’s you using your lizard brain.

It really comes down to the fact that when you’re using your lizard brain, you’re probably making bad decisions. If you’re self aware enough to notice your lizard brain, during or after the fact, what can you do about it?

Well, as with most things, recognition is probably a good first step. Noticing you’re using your lizard brain means you’re aware that its happening and at the very least you can try to stop making decisions. Then, in my experience, it means you need to take a step back, pause, go for a walk, play a game, cook some food, or generally do something else, for as long as it takes for you lizard brain to settle down and for your normal brain to stop being afraid. Once that happens, you can stop reacting, and start asking. Find the real issue and start thinking up solutions.

That’s it, that’s all I’ve got. I’ve got too many article ideas at the moment that are just too big to get done in a week or a weekend, so while they’re cooking I thought I’d tell a story. Almost 2000 words, not bad for one sitting. If you read this far let me know.

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