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Pop Neuroscience is Just a Fancy Way of Saying 'Calm Down'

4 Apr 2026

Pop neuroscience theories are elaborate scaffolding around trivial advice. They’re attractive because they give us something to point at, make us feel scientific, and—crucially—make our problems someone else’s fault. The scaffolding is mostly harmless, but it hides the stuff that actually matters.

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Below is a lightly edited transcript. For the article that inspired this one, see Overengineering ‘Calm Down’.

Welcome to the btrmt Lectures. My name is Dr Dorian Minors, and if there is one thing I’ve learned as a brain scientist, it’s that there’s no instruction manual for this device in our head. But there are patterns—patterns of thinking, patterns of feeling, patterns of action—because that’s what brains do. So let me teach you about them. One pattern, one podcast, and you see if it works for you.

I’ve done a couple of lectures now with this thread running through them: the way that pop psychology uses, or rather misuses, brain science. I’ve spoken about how people malign one of the most valuable biological technologies we have available to us—the human stress response—confusing it with trauma responses mostly, and how we should actually think about stress to make it useful. I’ve talked about where that bit of misinformation came from—how the amygdala isn’t the fear centre of the brain, but people use it as a shorthand for stress, hiding what’s actually interesting about it. And I’ve talked about how people are now really getting into the idea of cognitive bias, construing it in a similar way—how these biases mess up your thinking, when really they’re a pretty useful tool, so long as you understand what they’re trying to do.

I thought what I’d do today is pull on that thread more explicitly. I’m often struck by just how much of the pop-psych advice you see for the average working person boils down to little more than something like “just cool the fuck out and you’ll be better at stuff.” And more to the point, I’m left wondering why we feel the need to overengineer this stuff so egregiously, using brain science to justify our emotions. Because these theories produce as much bad advice as good advice. So in this lecture, I want to show you three different flavours of this and see if we can work out what’s so attractive about dressing up simple advice about how to be less stressed and anxious in these complicated brain-sciencey clothes.

It’s good timing too, because I’m planning an overhaul of the ancient positive psychology module that we teach at Sandhurst, and I think this is going to be the basis of it. So if positive psychology—getting your stress and anxiety under control, these sort of things—speaks to you, then maybe this is a good place to get started in updating your understanding.

Though, of course, since I’ve mentioned Sandhurst, I should say that my opinions here are my own, as an academic, as a clinician. Not Sandhurst’s, not the military’s. It’s just Dorian doing his little podcast.

¶Overengineered theories everywhere

If you’re someone who pays any attention to wellness content, or to self-help, or business leadership material, you’ll have encountered a bunch of different theories about how your brain and body sort of conspire to mess up your day. I’m going to rattle off a few of them to try and capture you as a listener. I’ve already mentioned amygdala hijack. There’s also polyvagal theory. You might have heard of the lizard brain, or the monkey brain, or the reptilian brain. Some people talk about alpha and beta brain waves. You might have heard of positive intelligence with its saboteurs and sages. And finally, I guess, the chimp paradox, or its predecessor, Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2.

All of these things are examples of what I would call overengineering advice around how to calm down. They all superficially look like different theories about different things. Amygdala hijack is about your emotions taking over. Polyvagal theory is about your nervous system shutting you down. The lizard brain or the chimp paradox is about evolution leaving you with outdated hardware. They look like different and sophisticated toolkits for understanding human behaviour from different angles.

And they’re everywhere. I’ve seen them in consulting firms, at military conferences. I’ve had them raised in therapy rooms, obviously on infographics on Instagram and TikTok, TED Talks, and even Psych 101 classes. They’re very popular and they’re very sciencey-sounding. And they’re all the same theory. They’re just wildly overengineered versions of the same advice, which is that if you’re too stressed, you’re not going to perform well.

¶The fight-or-flight trend

Let’s start with the old favourite, amygdala hijack. This is this idea from psychologist-cum-journo Daniel Goleman’s pop-science book in the 90s on emotional intelligence. He basically says that when something stresses you out, your amygdala—this little almond-shaped bit of the brain—hijacks your more rational brain bits, the frontal lobes or whatever. And as a consequence, it makes you behave in silly ways. I went through why that’s not how the amygdala works in a previous lecture, so I’m not going to rehash it much here. But suffice to say, with a bit of poetic licence, it goes something like: once we were running from tigers on the savannah and we needed to escape, so we had this fight-or-flight response to help us. But now we use the same brain to deal with being late to work. The amygdala takes over, makes us freak out, and we’re in the same sort of fight-or-flight state.

A similarly overengineered theory is polyvagal theory, which is this idea that we can break the autonomic nervous system—that’s all the nerves in the body that aren’t the brain and the spinal cord—into three groups. One mobilises you in response to stressors: fight-or-flight. Another immobilises you when you’re too threatened: you freeze up, you shut down. And then there’s this third sort of Goldilocks branch of the nervous system that lets you function normally. Just like in amygdala hijack, you want to do less of the other two branches and more of this Goldilocks branch.

Now, I’m not going to get into this in more detail, for a different reason than amygdala hijack. The Wikipedia page itself is pretty clear about how unfavourably it’s been received as an academic theory. I don’t want to accidentally spread it by giving it more airtime. It’s already popular enough. What puzzles me about this theory and about amygdala hijack is that they’re both really complicated. Polyvagal theory, even more complicated than amygdala hijack. And they both say the same thing: too much stress puts you into a super-stressed fight-or-flight mode. I never really understood why people would want a theory that gets into the nitty-gritty details of neuroanatomy, of dorsal and ventral distinctions in the vagus nerve and endless detail on nucleus bundles—all this terminology—just to tell them that if they’re too stressed it’ll be unpleasant, but if they’re normally stressed they’ll be fine.

Speaking of the vagus nerve—you have people now online doing breathwork and ear massage and cold plunges, all in the name of “toning their vagus nerve.” The vagus nerve, from a brain scientist’s perspective, is just the biggest nerve in the body. It is, you’d hope, related to the nervous system as a result. And the stuff people do to stimulate it—the breathing, the groundwork, the cold exposure—all of this is just stress reduction that shows up in the vagus nerve because it’s the biggest nerve, it’s easiest to measure. It works, but it works because stress reduction works, not because you’re doing something magical to a particular nerve.

So we have to ask ourselves: what’s going on? Why overcomplicate the stress response? Why don’t we just do what I like to do and use the stress curve, which says the same thing in simpler language: too much stress makes your body respond like you’re being too stressed, and less stress makes you respond more normally.

As I’ve been lecturing and consulting on this for a while, I’ve come to a conclusion. These theories all make it clear that the negative outcomes of being too stressed aren’t because we’re doing something wrong, but because our bodies are doing something we can’t control. And that, I guess, is a pretty interesting insight. It’s not your fault, per se. It’s your amygdala, your vagal tone. It’s this mechanism inside you. You can name it, you can fight it. It’s not you—it’s some sort of enemy. The part of you that shuts down or gets too angry when you’re super stressed doesn’t represent you. I think hearing this is a pretty liberating sort of thing.

But another aspect is this sociology of the interesting that I like to talk about a lot. It’s the idea that a theory doesn’t get popular because it’s true, but because it violates your weakly held beliefs. “Stress isn’t characteristic of me—it’s because of a misfiring dorsal-vagal complex” is exactly the kind of thing you’d want to tell people down the pub. It would surprise them.

And all of that seems fine, I guess. But I think it has an important cost. Fight-or-flight, freeze, fawn—all these Fs—originally described something quite specific. It’s called hypervigilance. A severe physiological response to genuine threats, to life-or-death kinds of threats. And when we steal that term for everyday stress, we run the risk of alienating or marginalising people who actually experience hypervigilance. People with trauma, people with PTSD, people with acute stress. And it might not surprise you to learn that these theories are very popular in, and often originating in, exactly these communities—trauma circles, self-help circles—where the incidence of actual hypervigilance is higher. It doesn’t really seem ideal to me to be encouraging people who are having life-or-death physical reactions to trivial daily stressors to just sort of push through and carry on. These people should be encouraged to seek support.

And more importantly, stress isn’t really an enemy. The sympathetico-adrenal response recruits resources to tackle the task at hand. As stress goes up, your performance goes up. It’s only when stress becomes too great or lasts too long that it starts to produce really negative outcomes. Emotions are motivators. We don’t act unless there’s an emotive reason to act, at least not as far as anybody can tell. So when we demonise our more stressful emotions, it doesn’t exactly seem like it’s going to get us very far.

¶The old-brain trend

We talked about polyvagal theory before, and it actually bridges us nicely to the second flavour embedded within this class of theories, because it claims that its three nervous-system branches have an evolutionary order. According to polyvagal theory, the immobilising one is oldest, followed by the mobilising one. The Goldilocks branch of the nervous system is the newest feature of the mammalian nervous system. And obviously the older branches are a bit shit, the logic goes. So we should try and tap into that human new one.

This “old equals bad” trope is embedded in a lot of these. The main offender is the lizard brain, which comes from the now-discredited 1960s triune brain model. It fundamentally views the brain as an onion. Very old “reptilian brain” at the core, a newer “early mammalian brain” around it, and then the shiny new “neomammalian complex” on top. The original author, MacLean, was a bit more thoughtful about this than modern takes. He just suggested that older structures handled instinct, middle ones handled emotion, and the newer ones handled higher-order thought that we associate with humans. He wasn’t really interested in making one seem worse than the others. I suspect he thought that all were necessary. But psychology in the popular sense ran with it: set aside your lizard impulses, get out of your monkey brain, evolve past your outdated wetware.

The lizard brain is going out of fashion a bit, and we’ve moved on to the monkey brain more recently. The chimp paradox is one theory that talks about this explicitly. Although, as far as I can tell, Peters is pretty careful not to touch the discredited theories that claim the same thing—I don’t think that would be very good for his sales. But the chimp brain in his formulation is posed against the human brain. The emotional chimp brain versus the logical human brain. And the emotional chimp brain, he says, is more evolutionarily ancient. So we should try and override this stupid chimp brain with our sensible human brain. A bit of poetic licence there, but I think you get it.

This overlaps anywhere people are comparing our behaviour to chimps or bonobos or whatever close evolutionary relative, with the same message: evolution gave us a load of useless and maladaptive behaviours, and you’d be better off setting these ape-like impulses aside in favour of the newer stuff built into your superior human brain.

But of course, phylogeny isn’t really this tidy. There’s no evidence that polyvagal’s branches correspond to evolutionary phases. And in fact, the earliest animals from which we descended had neocortices—these so-called “new brain structures.” One of the most remarkable things about studying the brain is discovering just how capable even very small neural circuits are at producing extremely complicated behaviour. I have an article on my site about how honeybees—just little tiny honeybees—do abstract concept learning. Stuff we thought only humans could do for a really long time. All of that with a brain smaller than a grain of rice.

So again we should ask, what’s going on here? And I think it’s essentially the same thing as with fight-or-flight. Distance from responsibility—it’s not you who are close-minded or oversensitive, it’s your lizard brain or your inner chimp. You’re liberated from this aspect of yourself. There’s the “interesting” quality—an inventive evolutionary narrative that makes for a cool story you can tell people, including yourself. And then there’s a secret bonus: these theories make us feel special. Having studied cognitive ethology for a bit—the study of how non-human animals think—you see this theme crop up a lot. We like to think that humans are special, that we can do things other animals can’t. And every time we discover an animal can do what we do, can think how we think, just not as well or at the same scale, there’s always about 20 years of flustered argument. There’s a great journal called the Journal of Animal Sentience that demonstrates this pretty regularly. I’ll link to a very funny thread—well, I think it’s funny—with academics arguing over whether fish can feel pain. It’s the closest you’ll ever get to academics writing in caps lock.

And the cost is similar. Equating old with bad ignores all the times these systems have gracefully navigated the world for us. So much of what we do occurs under the surface of our awareness. The assumption that the newest and least developed aspects of our nervous system are somehow better adapted to the world is pretty optimistic—that something battle-hardened over evolutionary time is going to be as helpful as something that cropped up in just the last little while.

And you’ve probably seen examples of how silly this is, even if it feels right when you’re hearing these evolutionary theories. Because the same books and blogs and podcasts that demonise our evolutionary brain bits will also pretty regularly rail against this unfulfilling modern life, tell us how the modern world is making us sick, and wax all nostalgic about our healthier palaeolithic tendencies. Can we have it both ways? We’re either well adapted to the modern world or we’re not. Our past ways are helpful or they’re not. Your evolutionary brain is probably doing just fine, on average. Somewhere between the healthy past and the problematic present.

¶Brain bits as enemy agents

When you step back, all these anti-old-brain-bits and anti-fight-or-flight tropes point at something more general: using neuroscience to identify psychic enemies. This liberating idea that we can separate ourselves from these mental bad guys.

Quick tangent. There’s a class of psychological models we could call “parts work.” Internal family systems, schema therapy, gestalt therapy. All of these share the idea that within us, there are many different forces. Sometimes they’re helpful, sometimes they get in the way. You work with these internal parts—these mental parts—to achieve your goals. You tame the troublemakers.

Modern pop-science usage of brain bits is indistinguishable from this therapeutic kind of parts work. The amygdala is a bad guy for hijacking your frontal lobes. Doesn’t really matter that this isn’t how the brain works. The role these brain bits play is psychic enemy. Same with brain waves. I’ve been asked to review professional development work for companies a few times now that speaks about beta brainwaves as bad stressed states and alpha waves as the relaxed state we should aim for. Brainwaves don’t really function like this, but it puts a name to the psychic enemy.

Rather than talk about that in more detail, I want to talk about a fairly popular consumer version of this parts-work style called positive intelligence. What they do is explicitly pair your psychological parts with brain bits—brain bits, actually, that I’ve studied myself, so I find it particularly offensive. Their white paper singles out two well-studied neural networks: the default mode network, associated with more reflective thought, and a fronto-parietal network associated with more task-oriented thought. They recast these as “saboteurs” and “sages.” You can probably work out which ones are the bad guys. That these networks bear very little relationship to the simplification in their white paper is clearly not relevant to the task at hand, which is naming the enemy.

And there are other examples. The complete domination of the business world by Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, where he talks about System 1—the fast, naughty, emotional system of thinking—and System 2, the logical, slow, and sensible one. And then more recently, the chimp paradox, which is essentially the same thing but with mascots. All of these things put names to brain bits. Naming the bad guys: the saboteurs, System 1, the chimp brain.

So again, what’s going on? Hopefully it’s obvious by now. This is the most explicit form of the self-liberation I’ve been talking about—distinguishing us from the mechanisms that cause us problems in how we think and behave. Most parts work spends time naming the parts. Call it a saboteur, or call it the amygdala, call it System 1, call it the chimp. The result is the same. You’ve isolated an aspect of yourself and you can now have a dialogue with it. You’ve created something you can point at, something with a name and a shape. And frankly, that’s what we do with a lot of complex features of the world to make them more sensible or more legible to us.

I suspect this is the least troubling of the three trends. Making abstractions into entities seems pretty helpful to me. It is the most irritating for me personally, because one thing brain scientists love to do is talk about the brain, which is made very difficult when people think random psychological concepts are literal brain bits. Am I supposed to just nod politely and wince through this kind of brain-word salad? Because then we can have fun engaging with the often pretty interesting psychological stuff underneath. Or I could try and steer them into actual brain stuff, with the risk that they’re the ones nodding and wincing, or worse, glazing over. Tough questions. But the thing itself seems largely harmless, or maybe even beneficial.

The only risk is overemphasising these enemies. Spending a great deal of time calling out parts of your mind for messing up your day seems a bit rash. These parts are usually doing some pretty important stuff for you that you’re not really giving them credit for if you name them something like a “saboteur.” You wouldn’t spend much time trying to restructure how your lungs work, because typically they’re doing the job just fine on their own. Same is probably true of whatever you’re calling a saboteur. But by and large, this third flavour—naming the bad bits—seems pretty good to me. Something worth encouraging, as long as it’s done right.

¶Work with yourself, not against

All right, so we’ve got three flavours of the same thing. Fight-or-flight theories, evolutionary brain-bit theories, and brain-bits-as-enemy-agents theories. They all dress up pretty straightforward psychological phenomena in complicated neuroscience clothes.

And I think they do it for three pretty predictable reasons. They create distance from responsibility—it’s not you, it’s your amygdala or whatever, and now you can work on it. They tap into the “interesting” quality—brain bits are sexier to talk about than just calming down. And they make us feel more scientific and more special. They sort of emphasise our humanity, which I think is important to us.

And the alternative—simply telling somebody to cool out—gets the same message across, but it doesn’t isolate the problem. It doesn’t tell them how. It doesn’t make us feel rational and special. And it makes us the problem rather than creating the distance we need to work on it. Not to mention that it’s not particularly sexy.

So I get all of that. I think the point of this lecture is just to express that I wish we didn’t keep picking shit ones. Messages that confuse us or make things worse.

Because here’s the thing. These convoluted narratives don’t just describe our troubling behaviours. They shape how we think about ourselves. And when the narrative says that your emotions are enemies, that your stress response is an enemy, that your evolutionary inheritance is baggage, that parts of your brain are saboteurs—then you’re going to start treating yourself accordingly.

Emotions aren’t the bad guy. Stress is a useful biological tool. Your unconscious processes are doing an enormous amount of graceful work underneath your awareness, all the time. The parts of you that these theories demonise are the parts that got you to where you are. They might not always be convenient, but they’re not malfunctioning. They’re doing exactly what they were built to do.

So rather than fight with these features of your system, concentrate on how you can work with them. Celebrate them, even. At least as often as you correct them. Don’t just surrender to the comforting story of saboteurs in your brain. Do the work to make them work for you. It doesn’t require that much of you. Just a little thoughtfulness.

Anthologies: Betterment, Somatic Architecture, Thought Architecture, Karstica, Neurotypica, Noetik, No Action Without Emotion, On Thinking and Reasoning, On the Nature of Things, On Being Fruitful

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