The limbic system is a set of brain structures that plays a role in emotions, particularly those that evolved early and which play an important role in survival.

Research has linked the limbic system to feelings of motivation and reward, learning, memory, the fight or flight response, hunger, thirst, and production of hormones that help regulate the autonomic nervous system. The autonomic nervous system supports automatic, non-conscious functions such as thirst, hunger, heart rate, and regulating the body’s internal clock.

What Is the Limbic System?

The limbic system isn’t a specific organ or part of the body, but rather a group of brain structures that work together.

It includes the hippocampus and amygdala, each of which is actually a pair of organs on either side of the brain. The hippocampi play important roles in memory, learning, long-term information storage, and spatial reasoning. The amygdalae help the body process emotions. They also help attach emotional meaning to memories. Problems with either of these organs can affect memory, learning, and emotional regulation.

The limbic system also includes the hypothalamus. This organ plays a role in myriad functions by releasing hormones hat help sustain homeostasis—the ability of the body to maintain relatively consistent conditions. Other limbic system organs include neurons, the basal ganglia, portions of the prefrontal cortex, the cingulate gyrus, and the ventral tegmental area.

What Does the Limbic System Do?

The limbic system acts as a control center for conscious and unconscious functions, regulating much of what the body does. In some ways, it connects the mind to body, bridging the gap between psychological and physiological experiences. For example, by activating the fight or flight response, the limbic system triggers a physical response to emotional experiences such as fear. The limbic system acts as a control center for conscious and unconscious functions, regulating much of what the body does.

1. Reward, Motivation, and Addiction

Research suggests that feelings of motivation and reward originate in the ventral tegmental area (VTA), a group of neurons that connects to the nucleus accumbens in the basal ganglia. Those neurons release dopamine, a neurotransmitter that supports feelings of pleasure.

In a healthy brain, dopamine helps people feel motivated to learn, meet new people, or try new experiences. Drug and alcohol abuse, however, can change the functioning of the limbic system. Drugs act on dopamine, and over time, the release of dopamine can become addictive. Over time, addiction can deplete the brain’s dopamine stores, making it difficult to feel pleasure without drugs. This is why many people with addictions find little relief from activities that were once pleasurable.

2. Emotional Responses

The amygdala and hippocampus work together to regulate emotions, especially evolutionarily “old” emotions that play a role in survival—love for one’s children, aggression, fear, and anxiety.

Together, these two organs also help the brain interpret the emotional content of memories. The amygdala assigns emotional meaning to memories and helps the brain form fear-based memories. The hippocampus helps form sensory memories, which are memories associated with sensory input. When the smell of a crisp apple or warm beach air brings back memories of a long-ago summer, the hippocampus is responsible.

3. Fight or Flight

The limbic system helps the body respond to intense emotions of fear and anger by activating the fight or flight response. This response is also sometimes called the fight, flight, or freeze response, thanks to new evidence suggesting the role of freezing in response to danger.

When the amygdala perceives a threat, it activates the limbic system to prepare to handle the threat. The adrenal glands release hormones such as epinephrine that raise blood pressure and heart rate, improve blood flow to muscles and organs, and elevate breathing rate.

In the short-term, the fight or flight response can be life-saving. Over time, however, chronic stress can activate the limbic system in a way that damages the body. Long-term release of epinephrine and other hormones can damage blood vessels, cause high blood pressure, and change appetite.

4. Memory

Both the amygdala and hippocampus help the brain form new memories, store those memories, retrieve them, and make sense of their emotional content. The hippocampus is particularly important in long-term memory formation. It also supports spatial memory and spatial reasoning.

5. Hormones Affecting Automatic Functions

Hormones are the body’s chemical messengers, sending a signal from one area to the body in response to environmental input and other information.

The hypothalamus releases hormones that play a role in a wide range of emotions, including pain, hunger, thirst, pleasure, sexual feelings, anger, and aggression. It also helps the body maintain a state of homeostasis by regulating the autonomic nervous system. Some examples of this function include:

• Getting information from the vagus nerve about blood pressure and how full the stomach is. Using this information, it releases chemicals that regulate appetite and blood pressure.
• Gathering information from the reticular formation of the brain stem about temperature and then using that to manage the body’s response to heat or cold.
• Regulating the body’s internal clock, the circadian rhythm, based on light, darkness, and other sensory input.

6. Attention and Learning

By helping the brain form new memories, the limbic system helps the body learn and remember information. It also plays a role in regulating cognitive attention. Research suggests, for example, that the cingulate gyrus focuses the brain’s attention on emotionally significant events. The anterior cingulate may also help with conscious attempts to control emotions.

Some research suggests people with attention-deficit hyperactivity (ADHD) have enlarged hippocampi. This may be the body’s attempt to compensate for issues with the hippocampus’s ability to regulate attention.

The brain makes new neurons from stem cells in the hippocampus, suggesting the hippocampus and the feelings and memories it supports can change with new experiences. This ability of the hippocampus to change with time supports the ability to learn new things. Research on the brains of people with Alzheimer’s and other dementias has found the disease attacks the hippocampus. This may explain why dementia so quickly compromises the ability to learn new things, even as long-ago memories remain intact.

The limbic system is dynamic, changing with input from a person’s environment. Experience changes this important brain region, and that may help explain why people’s psychological and physiological experiences change over time. Therapy, too, may change the limbic system by training the brain to process information differently, assigning new emotions to old memories or supporting a client in managing chronic stress.

Many disorders can damage the limbic system. Memories and experiences matter, too. Therapy can help people make sense of these experiences, ameliorate some effects of chronic stress, help a person better manage their emotions, and potentially even reduce the risk of stress-related disorders such as cardiovascular disease.

References:

1. Boeree, G. C. (2009). The emotional nervous system. Retrieved from https://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/limbicsystem.html
2. Bonner-Jackson, A. (2015, October 15). Alzheimer’s and a shrinking hippocampus. Retrieved from https://blogs.biomedcentral.com/on-medicine/2015/10/15/alzheimers-shrinking-hippocampus
3. Drugs and the limbic system. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www1.udel.edu/chem/C465/senior/fall00/DrugAddiction/Parts.html
4. Rajmohan, V., & Mohandas, E. (2007). The limbic system. Indian Journal of Psychiatry, 49(2), 132-139. doi: 10.4103/0019-5545.33264
5. The limbic system. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://qbi.uq.edu.au/brain/brain-anatomy/limbic-system
6. Understanding the stress response. (2018, May 1). Retrieved from https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/understanding-the-stress-response

People enter psychotherapy with the desire to feel better, but they are often unsure how therapy will help them accomplish this goal. A common refrain from people hesitant to enter therapy is, “How is talking going to help?” People are used to talking to other people to get practical solutions to problems, and while problem-solving does have a place in therapy, change also occurs on a much deeper and unconscious level. This process has to do with the way the human brain is programmed and cannot easily be mimicked outside of a relationship with a psychotherapist.

Our brains are always evolving unconsciously through our relationships. People who experienced painful relationships growing up have been trained to expect hurtful experiences with others. It takes a new type of relationship—in particular, a therapeutic relationship—to retrain the brain to expect more positive experiences, which is a big part of ultimately feeling better.

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Why Can’t a Therapist Just Tell Me What to Do?

To understand why the therapeutic relationship can be so valuable and cannot be mimicked by, for example, advice in a self-help book, it is instructive to look at how the human brain has evolved. Broadly, there are three parts of the human brain that represent different phases of evolution: There is the reptilian brain, which evolved first and is responsible for the automatic control of vital bodily functions such as breathing; the limbic brain, which evolved second and is responsible for the regulation of emotion and behavior; and the neocortex, which evolved last and is responsible for higher-order functions such as symbolic thought, language, and reasoning.

When a person asks their therapist or a friend what they should do about something, they are essentially asking for a neocorticol solution—something that is rational and can be consciously implemented. Often, however, their problems are a result of hurtful experiences in their earlier relationships that have caused changes in their limbic brain, and only a new type of relationship can alter their limbic brain to produce fewer negative emotions and more positive ones.

Brain Wiring in Our Youth: How Emotional Issues Begin

Our emotions are meant to help us survive in a world in which we need the help of others. Over time, our limbic brains evolved to automatically create emotions, such as anger and sadness, that are meant to help us navigate the social world. When someone mistreats us, evolution has programmed us to become angry to try and change their behavior. When someone rejects us, we feel sad so we can mourn the loss of what we wanted with them and move forward with our lives.

However, when we are young and particularly dependent on others for survival, whether our emotions actually help us navigate the world has a lot to do with how other people—our parents in particular—respond to them. A child who responds to unfair or disappointing experiences with anger and is further punished for doing so may, over time, come to unconsciously pair the expression of anger with pain. As this occurs, rather than directly experiencing anger at times of unfair treatment or disappointment, they may instead experience anxiety about having anger because their brain has been trained by their social environment to expect that anger will hurt rather than help. Their limbic system is in effect attempting to prevent further emotional pain in the form of being punished, but the cost is another type of emotional pain in the form of persistent anxiety. This can be particularly problematic when people enter into new relationships (friendships, romantic relationships) where there would not be the same costs associated with the open expression of an emotion like anger, but earlier experiences still create anxiety and inhibit its expression.

Retraining the Brain with Psychotherapy

A psychotherapy relationship allows a person to essentially retrain their limbic system to no longer expect negative reactions to the expression of certain emotional experiences, and in doing so can alleviate the anxiety and unconscious emotional suppression their earlier experiences programmed into them. The therapeutic relationship does this in part because the parameters of psychotherapy recreate the type of relationship in which a person was first forced to suppress their emotions: one where they are dependent on another person to meet their needs.

A successful course of therapy helps restore a person’s emotional flexibility and empowerment so they can have greater agency in their relationships.

Just as a parent has a daunting task in meeting all of a child’s needs, so too does a psychotherapist, especially since many people arrive to therapy wanting a conscious, rational solution to their problems when such a solution often does not exist. Therapy presents a unique opportunity to heal and feel better by the way the therapist solicits and responds to feelings such as disappointment, anger, and sadness that emerge over the course of treatment. Rather than punishing a person for having these emotional experiences in the same way that may have occurred when they were younger, a therapist can actively solicit, explore, and normalize their feelings. This helps to retrain a person’s limbic system to no longer pair the expression of those emotions with punishment. As this de-coupling unconsciously occurs, the person becomes more easily able to tolerate the experience and expression of emotions.

Thriving in Adulthood

This shift in tolerance for emotions naturally causes a person’s anxiety level to diminish because their mind is no longer fighting to ward off their innate emotional impulses. In addition to symptom relief, the beautiful part of this process is it restores a person’s ability to constructively access their emotions for their original purpose—as a way of helping to navigate the social world. It is hard to thrive in relationships when we have been programmed to believe we must accept the mistreatment of others or that we cannot show others when we are hurting and in need of care. As adults, this is often no longer the case, but our early experiences may make such underlying beliefs unconsciously feel true.

A successful course of therapy helps restore a person’s emotional flexibility and empowerment so they can have greater agency in their relationships. The result can be genuinely transformative, and studies suggest people who have been through therapy show less activity in the areas of the brain responsible for creating negative emotions. Talking, it turns out, can help quite a bit when the person you are talking to is a skilled and compassionate therapist.

If you’re struggling, reach out to a therapist in your area for help.

References:

1. Bowlby, J. (2005). A secure base: Clinical applications of attachment theory (Vol. 393). UK: Taylor & Francis.
2. Cozolino, L. (2010). The neuroscience of psychotherapy: Healing the social brain. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company.
3. Damasio, A. R. (2006). Descartes’ error. New York, NY: Random House.
4. Grecucci, A., Theuninck, A., Frederickson, J., & Job, R. (2015). Mechanisms of social emotion regulation: From neuroscience to psychotherapy. In Emotion regulation: Processes, cognitive effects and social consequences, pp.57-84.
5. Karlsson, H. (2011). How psychotherapy changes the brain: Understanding the mechanisms. Psychiatric Times, 21.
6. Lewis, T., Amini, F., & Lannon, R. (2007). A general theory of love. New York, NY: Vintage.
7. MacLean, P. D. (1990). The triune brain in evolution: Role in paleocerebral functions. Berlin: Springer Science & Business Media.