Your amygdala doesn't care whether you get embarrassed or not.
If you are going to learn to handle anxiety, this is crucial to understand: when the amygdala is centre stage, excitedly setting off alarms like this to save our skins, it is so powerful that it can actually shut down our higher intelligence completely.
It is as if it has a simple on|off button that it can use to deactivate the thinking part of our brains. When our bodies are in a state of high emotional arousal (whether we are angry, terrified or head over heels in love), we are not thinking straight. High emotional arousal makes us temporarily stupid. Or, to put it more politely, it reduces our options to a simple choice to force us to take action.
It has to be this way.
For example, if from down the street you see a motorbike up on the pavement, accelerating towards you, you don’t want your thinking brain weighing up the odds and wondering, “Surely he knows he shouldn’t be on the pavement? Maybe it’s a film stunt? In that case, where are the cameras? Is that a Harley-Davidson he’s riding? Hmmm … actually he is going very fast. And he is driving straight at me! I wonder if I should just step out of the way in case he hasn’t seen me … ?”
By that time, you might well be dead.
So, in such life-or-death circumstances, we don’t want a highly intelligent system that can carry out reasoned analysis. We want an excitable (and therefore stupid) system that can terrify us and make us dodge the bike and run for it before we even know what we are doing!
So sometimes panic is the right response. In other circumstances, however, the ‘threat’ might tum out to be harmless and, if you have already legged it, you might well feel a prize fool.
But your amygdala doesn’t care whether you get embarrassed or not. It knows that you can get embarrassed a hundred times and it won’t kill you; but fail to act on a genuine life-or-death threat just once, and you are likely to end up never needing this wonderful survival mechanism again.