This is one of 12 artifacts from season 2 of Labyrinth Library. This is an excerpted sample of the full artifact, which is 25 minutes long.
Trailmarker Word: Aliveness
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Purpose:
To embrace the desire for intensity as something to design for deliberately — working with a creative metabolism that needs the pressure of extreme focus and release, in generative, sustainable cycles.
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Guiding Question:
How do we use the biochemistry of activation to create containers for peak creative aliveness?
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Excerpt of Artifact (7 min of 25 min)
Practice Guidelines
included in the full artifact
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Hi friends, welcome to the second artifact of Aries season, Adrenaline Shot.
I'm super excited to talk about this artifact because it's an opportunity to grapple with how we work consciously with intensity and activation in our lives.
If you're like me, then maybe you relate to thriving creatively when there's deadlines or pressure or the feeling of getting an adrenaline rush. I want to unpack how adrenaline works, literally and metaphorically, the cycle of adrenaline and how we can soften the cultural implications, guilt and shame around being someone who is thrill seeking. To give us a framework to experiment with and how we relate to and deliberately create the feeling of adrenaline in our day to day lives.
Adrenaline or epinephrine is a hormone released by your adrenal glands as a response to stressful situations in the mechanism of fight or flight. And it's an instantaneous physical response. It's like a bolt of electricity that can happen within seconds or minutes. Some physiological changes include increased heart rate, blood rush, a sharpened sense of vision and a slowing of your metabolism and digestion. In extreme examples, adrenaline overrides pain sensations. It enables you to do great feats of strength.
What I find most fascinating about adrenaline is its impact on your relationship with the body, with your sense of time and presence. During an adrenaline rush, you can feel that there's only this moment. The body is primed for movement, whether that's running from a tiger or running into a deadline. There's no energy or time for overthinking, so you're riding the wave of pure instinct and response.
The purpose of this artifact is to be in conscious relationship with adrenaline and examine the complexities of fear, stress, fight or flight. To think about how we can work with it as a biochemical tool and how we can embrace intensity as something to design for and be deliberate about rather than happening by accident.
The guiding question is: how can we work with the bodily chemistry of activation and intensity with awareness and intention?
So let's talk about the biochemistry behind adrenaline. I think it's fascinating that both fear and excitement feel the same way in the body. They both activate adrenaline. You experience the racing heart, the sharpened senses, time distortion, hyper focus.
The main difference is the story that your mind tells you about these sensations. Is it something that you're excited about and looking forward to, or is it something that fills you with panic and dread? What's also different is the chemical cocktail that occurs in your body afterwards. With fear, there's a long tail of experiencing cortisol or the stress hormone. And with excitement, it triggers a long tail of dopamine or the feeling of a reward.
When we think about mapping on these biochemical messengers to the creative arc, I'm noticing a really fascinating story.
I've been thinking about how we can work deliberately with brain chemistry as kind of like tweaking the dials in your brain, how each of these messengers have a bodily sensation to them that we can become better at discerning and recognize.
And therefore, we have agency. We have practices. We have ways to experiment and play with each of these elements. It's more than just telling a story of, "I'm doing this hard thing and I'm framing it as excitement rather than fear."
It's also why these grounding somatic practices are just as important. To think of the body as the direct pathway — through breathing, through yoga, sleep, exercise — that affects how we experience these sensations in the brain, which feeds back into the creative cycle.
So, fear is the major emotion associated with adrenaline. How do you face fear? I think most of us have some combination of fight and flight and freeze. Do you notice your activation thresholds? When does being activated by fear feel like it's a challenge that you're excited to meet? And when does it tip into anxiety or panic or avoidance? What's happening in the brain is the composition and relationship between adrenaline, cortisol, and how much serotonin you have as a baseline.
Adrenaline specifically needs a challenge to activate and fire it. So, the arc of feeling adrenaline in your body is that you are activated like a lightning bolt and the body wants to spring into action. And once the challenge is released, the recovery begins. The problem, however, is when there is no specific challenge or channel, when you feel adrenaline with nothing to do or nowhere to direct it. And then what happens is that you accumulate cortisol, which builds up as a low-grade sense of anxiety, dread, restlessness, and this chronic background hum.
I find that oftentimes the advice for being over-activated is to just calm down and find some stability and settle, do something in a very routine, rhythmic way. But I'm not sure this actually works for every type of nervous system. Sometimes what we need is not to calm down. What we need is specific channels of release so that the energy has somewhere to go.
And so, I want to begin to unpack and explore how we can reframe our relationship to adrenaline.
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This is an excerpt of this artifact. The full artifact is 25 min.