Attitude Is (Not Always) a Choice

Attitude: Perceived social support shapes our capacity to choose our response.

Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

Key points

• We are social beings with social nervous systems.
• Our bodies do not allow for choice-making when we perceive a threat.
• Our nervous systems don’t differentiate between a perception of threat and actual threat.

If you’ve ever played a sport or stepped inside a middle school, you’ve probably encountered the phrase “attitude is a choice.” It’s well-meant, usually, and intended (I’d guess) to remind us that one of the few things we ever have control of in any given moment is our response.

Pausing between stimulus and response to be able to make that choice may be one of the hardest tasks most athletes (and humans) face and must be continually practiced. It also requires a regulated nervous system.

As social beings with nervous systems finely attuned to social relationships and interactions, our perception of social support has a heavy bearing on our ability to regulate our nervous systems. In other words, if our sense of belonging feels in some way threatened, our nervous systems respond to the threat.

When our body is responding to threat, there is limited physiological bandwidth for choice: we react to survive. Our nervous systems don’t really care if our perceptions objectively reflect the “threat” at hand: our ancestors, whose genetic material we carry forward, likely favored fighting or fleeing over waiting to see if they might be able to pet the approaching predator.

Perceived social support, or the subjective evaluation of the availability and adequacy of social connections may or may not be “accurate” with respect to the social support a person actually receives, and childhood maltreatment and trauma both acute (as in event-based) and complex (as in trauma that happens in the context of relationships and particularly relationships of trust) profoundly shapes how people perceive social support into adulthood.

A recent study published in the Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology by Tiana Borgers and colleagues both affirms that perceived social support shapes the activity of threat response equipment in the brain. It further finds that childhood maltreatment lessens the mitigating effect that perceived social support can have on our threat-response systems.

In other words, even if an adult who was maltreated as a child perceives social support in a given situation, their limbic system—parts of the brain highly involved in fight or flight activity—might still remain so activated that their brain will not allow them to perceive possibility for choice; instead these parts of the brain are demanding action in service of survival.

Athletes are humans first. Coaches, parents, referees, too.

More important than any bumper sticker phrases about attitude and choice may be—to the extent that we’re able—reminding ourselves, gently and kindly, of our own social nervous systems.

And doing the best we can to regulate our own nervous systems such that we’re able to offer care and support—and/or appropriate action—when athletes (and coaches and parents and referees) act in ways that we might not have chosen.