THAT MEMORY ISN’T HAUNTING YOU. It’s YOUR…

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]What if the reason a smell, a sound, a tone of a voice can instantly pull [music] you back into something that happened years ago is not because you're stuck, it's because of something called an amygdala hijack. And once you understand this, you will never ever speak to yourself the same way about those moments again. Normal memories get filed as past tense, and trauma memories do not. Here's the clinical name for why: an amygdala hijack. And it is the moment your amygdala, your brain's threat detector, it overrides your prefrontal cortex and it floods your body with a full-on threat response before your conscious thought can even intervene. And it is triggered by sensory cues, smells, sounds, tones of voice that your nervous system associated with danger years ago.

[00:00:46]And here is what is happening in your brain. When cortisol floods your brain during a threatening experience, it damages our hippocampus, which is the part of our brain that timestamps memories. And it files them as not now.

[00:01:00]When the hippocampus cannot do that filing, the memory goes into the amygdala instead, which processes everything in the present tense, always >> [music] >> with no timestamps. So, when a sensory cue triggers that memory, the amygdala hijack fires and your body responds as that threat is happening right now.

[00:01:21]>> [laughter] >> So, you are not living in the past, your amygdala is protecting you from something it still believes is present danger. And EMDR, which is eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, it works specifically by helping the hippocampus finally do the filing the amygdala hijack prevented. And phosphatidylserine and lion's mane mushroom both have published research for hippocampal support and neurogenesis, aka the hijack, it can be interrupted and the memory of ours it can start to be filed and the past can become the past.

[00:01:57]I would love to know what memories keep coming back for you. You're not broken and you're not stuck. Your amygdala is doing exactly what it was trained to do.

[00:02:06]The hippocampus can heal and the hijack can be retrained and the past can finally become the past. What memory keeps coming back for you? I would love to know below. Let's talk more about this. Bye.

[00:02:17]Have a great day, y'all. Bye.