Threat Bucket
We’ve been discussing how the brain translates inputs and creates motor outputs. I’d like to offer an analogy that helps explain the different factors that can go into injuries and/or pain. The threat bucket is a concept from applied neurology that describes how the brain perceives and manages stressors (or "threats") to maintain a sense of safety and control. The idea is that your nervous system constantly monitors various inputs—physical, emotional, and environmental—and categorizes them as either safe or threatening.
Let’s imagine your nervous system as a bucket that collects different kinds of stressors. There can be physical stressors such as a lack of sleep, illness, exercise, or poor nutrition that can be in your bucket.
There can be emotional and mental stressors coming from relationship issues, work stress, lack of confidence, and so on.
There can also be environmental stressors in the bucket such as loud noises, bright lights, uneven or bad floors, temperature variations in the studio.
Remember your brain’s number one job is survival and safety so when the bucket starts overflowing with too many large or small threats, your nervous system is going to respond in some way to protect you.
Pain is a common response. So is increased muscle tension, poor coordination, fatigue, immune system dysfunction, brain fog, anxiety - all or any of these could be a response to the overflowing threat bucket.
Let me give you an example from my own life. I went through a period of having chronic wrist pain. This was during a period when I did a lot of manual work with people in my private practice as well as my teaching. Sometimes it made sense that my wrist would start hurting after working with clients, but other times it just didn’t make sense. This went on for almost a year.
I'm a pattern person - but it wasn’t until I started looking at the bigger patterns in my life I realized that my wrist started hurting when I was in overwhelm and stressed out about money, my children, big illnesses in my family, and so on. Somedays I felt like I barely took enough time to drink water and go to the bathroom! (I know some of you can relate)
I realized my wrist pain was very effective in making me change my behavior! It made me slow down - there were times I had to cancel clients or take breaks to ice it. The pain at my wrist was real - AND - after this epiphany my wrist pain shifted. When my wrist started hurting I would take some time to sit and have a cup of tea - or take some deep breaths and acknowledge I wouldn’t get everything done that day. It became clear that my particular wrist problem was an overflowing threat bucket problem.
There are different ways to manage the threat bucket. First the goal is to reduce threat levels and increase feelings of safety in the nervous system, and then ultimately to increase the size of your bucket so you become more resilient and adaptable to stressors. We all will experience stress in our lives and stress is not always a bad thing. Stressing our muscles makes them stronger but too much of the wrong type of stress isn't healthy.
Thinking about the concept of the threat bucket, here are some possible strategies to explore.
Talk about sleep, nutrition and hydration and their importance to training. Students need to hear this multiple times and in multiple ways. As teachers, we also need to be aware of this as many injuries occur during the heavy rehearsal periods.
Add in some of the neurology exercises you’ll learn from me such as eye motor drills, or different vestibular or mobility drills.
Remind them that pain is always an indicator that something is out of whack and that it should be listened to. It doesn’t automatically mean they have to stop training, sometimes it means they need to find a different way, or map the movement first, etc.
Remind dancers that failing is learning how not to do something and that is part of the process of becoming successful. In other words, you are encouraging a growth mindset. (Carol Dweck’s work is awesome to read!)
Teach a few breathing techniques such as box breathing, or making the exhale twice as long as the inhale. Taking a moment to focus on the breath or literally shake things out, or take a brief walk around the studio can all be useful to calm the nervous system down.
Be aware of overloading movement sequences too quickly . It’s easy to see the frustration and overwhelm that occurs in the students who are not quick picker-uppers! That’s a skillset that takes time for many.
I find the concept of the threat bucket incredibly useful when pondering ways to change a motor outcome. It also is important for our students to realize that their success is dependent on more than just what happens in the studio. I’m not minimizing the importance of good training — simply offering another perspective on changing motor outputs.
To your success,
Deborah