THE FIVE LOOKS*****
By Don Elium, MFT ©2025
Five Looks helps you understand how your brain actually works so you can work with it instead of fighting against it.
1. FIRST LOOK — AUTOMATIC PROCESSES
Your First Look is what happens before you think.
It's your body's immediate reaction to everything around you - that instant gut feeling about a person, the automatic emotional response to a situation, the split-second assessment your nervous system makes 0.5-7 seconds before conscious awareness arrives.
That means the "you" that you most identify with—the aware you is late to what is happening. The Aware You meets thought, emotion, and body sensation that are already in motion. Your body senses and reacts just a little bit before you are aware of it. That is why, in The Five, the appearance of your brain and nervous system is referred to as “automatic.” There are many systems involved in that automatic response, and the First Look systems are intertwined and complementary to the other Looks you have. However, the main point here is this: I drives for you, it walks for you, it scans for danger for you, it reacts to perceived threats for you, and it is sometimes in error in its reactions, but it is trying to keep you functioning as best it can, all while using your metabolic energy as efficiently as possible. It is always active, performing many tasks that often go unnoticed.
Core Function: First Look neural processes evolved initially for survival and the performance of automatic daily tasks. Your First Look instantly matches current situations to familiar past patterns stored in your brain and nervous system, generating immediate emotional, physical, and behavioral responses that reduce the need to understand everything from scratch and save metabolic energy.
As long as a familiar pattern meets the present moment circumstance well enough, they say in place. Only when the amount of energy to keep them in place becomes greater than the energy required to change the patterns do the automatic responses update. This system operates through mental shortcuts that prioritize speed over accuracy, creating your initial "take" on any situation within milliseconds.
Speed Over Accuracy
Your First Look appears to have evolved to help your ancestors survive in perilous environments where hesitation could mean death. When a rustling bush might hide a predator, the ancestors who paused to analyze whether it was wind or a lion might not survive; those who instantly jumped to safety were more likely to pass on their genes. This system developed mental shortcuts that prioritize speed over accuracy because, in survival situations, the cost of being wrong was low (causing unnecessary alarm). Meanwhile, the cost of being slow was fatal (becoming prey). Your nervous system has inherited this survival response programming, which can sometimes be inaccurate and lead to overreactions or underreactions to modern threats, such as frowns, eye rolls, and specific gestures.
Supported by Neural Networks include:
The Amygdala - This is your almond-shaped emotional assessment center, located deep within each temporal lobe, that functions as an integrative hub for emotions, behavioral responses, and motivation. The amygdala receives inputs from all senses, as well as internal bodily signals, and coordinates both emotional reactions and autonomic responses, such as adjustments in heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing.
The Reticular Activating System (RAS) - This network of connected nuclei in your brainstem regulates wakefulness, arousal, and sleep-wake transitions. The RAS is composed of cholinergic, noradrenergic, dopaminergic, and serotonergic nuclei in the brainstem that modulate cortical arousal and coordinate your overall level of alertness and attention.
The Brainstem Networks - These complex networks serve as major integration and relay centers, coordinating functions necessary for adaptation, including regulation of reflexes, autonomic functions, pain processing, and behavioral responses.
The Thalamus Routes and integrates sensory signals, participating in cortico-cortical coordination that supports memory, planning, and emotional responses. It sends rapid signals to both adaptive circuits and thinking areas simultaneously.
The Insula - Your interoceptive processing center that integrates signals from throughout your body, creating the felt sense of internal states and bodily awareness that inform immediate responses and gut feelings.
The Autonomic Nervous System - This vast network controls unconscious processes throughout your body, including breathing, heart rate, blood pressure, digestion, pupillary response, sweating, and muscle tension. These systems operate automatically and adjust continuously based on what your nervous system detects, providing both rapid responses and ongoing regulation of your internal state.
Intuitive Processing Networks - Your brain continuously integrates vast amounts of experience, sensory input, memories, and emotions to generate rapid judgments, gut feelings, and immediate insights without deliberate reasoning. This unconscious processing draws on learned sensorimotor regularities, allowing intuitive responses to emerge before you can articulate your reasoning—what often appears as 'gut feel.'
Additional Limbic Structures - Including the hypothalamus (maintaining homeostasis), hippocampus (memory processing), and various other interconnected structures that work together to assess patterns, opportunities, threats, and meaning.
What Your First Look Does:
Your First Look generates the immediate impressions that feel absolutely true - the instant comfort or unease when meeting someone new, the automatic emotional reaction to your partner's tone of voice, the gut sense that "something's not right" in a situation. It creates your rapid judgments about safety and threat, your spontaneous likes and dislikes, and your automatic behavioral responses.
This system handles many daily routines without conscious effort, following familiar routes, maintaining social scripts with different people, and coordinating basic life functions, such as breathing and heart rate. Your First Look also manages your survival responses - the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn reactions that activate when your nervous system detects potential threats to your physical or emotional safety. It also reacts to more openings when feelings of safety are present or perceived.
Your First Look operates on prediction, taking the form of subconscious expectations and assumptions, constantly scanning your environment and internal state to anticipate what might happen next. It draws on stored experience patterns, emotional associations, historical events, and evolutionary programming.
How It Works: Your First Look processes information through well-established neural pathways that require minimal energy. Like water flowing through a familiar channel, these responses follow routes your brain has used repeatedly. The system activates protective circuits, coordinates emotional and physical reactions, and prepares you for action—all before conscious awareness can analyze what's actually happening.
Metabolic Energy Demand: Lowest per-decision cost; runs continuously using established neural pathways that conserve glucose and mental resources.
When Your First Look Becomes Available: Always operational - this system remains active at all times. It works during sleep, routine activities, focused tasks, and any other state, providing the automatic foundation that keeps you responsive to your environment. It is most noticeable when it activates in response to a perceived threat; however, it remains available at all times.
The Integration: Your First Look establishes the baseline conditions that significantly impact the resources available for your awareness, agency, and metacognitive systems. When it detects familiar, safe patterns, your other systems have greater access to their capabilities. When it activates survival responses due to perceived threats, it temporarily constrains higher-order processing to prioritize immediate safety to varying degrees. This adaptive response serves survival, but it can limit access to more complex thinking until the perceived threat has passed.
2. SECOND Look — AWARENESS PROCESSES
Your Second Look represents awareness—the fundamental capacity to notice what's happening in your First Look responses, your environment, and your internal state. This awareness creates the foundation that enables all subsequent deliberate processing. It is the neurological process of noticing. As in "What is this?"
Core Function: Awareness/Noticing - The essential ability to observe and recognize what's occurring in your automatic responses, thoughts, emotions, body sensations, and surroundings. This awareness creates space between automatic reaction and what comes next, allowing you to notice rather than being completely absorbed in your First Look processes. Without this capacity to see, the other deliberate systems—Look three and four become more available.
Supported by Neural Networks:
The Prefrontal Cortex (PFC) - Particularly the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which supports the sustained attention necessary for awareness and provides the neural infrastructure for maintaining conscious focus on what you're noticing.
The Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC) - Networks that help detect conflicts between different responses and support the attention necessary to maintain awareness when automatic responses are pulling for immediate action.
Attention and Focus Networks - Systems responsible for directing and maintaining conscious attention on specific aspects of your experience, inhibiting irrelevant stimuli, and sustaining the focus necessary for observation.
Working Memory Systems - Networks including connections with the parietal cortex that allow you to hold what you're noticing in awareness while other systems are processing it.
Conflict Detection Networks - Systems that alert you when automatic responses conflict with each other or with situational demands, creating the signal that awareness is needed.
How It Works: Your Second Look engages when awareness first notices that your First Look has activated, when familiar patterns create conflicts, or when situations require observation. This noticing establishes the possibility for other systems to engage. Still, the Second Look itself is purely observational and more immediate and present-moment focused - it's the capacity to notice what's happening right now. For example:
Second Look (Awareness): "I notice my heart is racing and I'm feeling anxious right now" - direct, present-moment detection of what's occurring. Therefore, the Second Look is more like a spotlight that illuminates what's already happening. Other systems and processes determine how to process the information and what to do about it when conscious choice is available. This requires mental energy to maintain, making it a selective rather than continuous process.
Metabolic Energy Demand: Moderate cost; requires sustained attention to notice what's happening, making it unavailable when attentional resources are depleted or overwhelmed.
When Your Second Look Becomes Available: Your Second Look becomes available when you have sufficient attentional resources and your nervous system isn't completely absorbed in First Look automatic processing. This capacity depends on having enough mental energy and not being overwhelmed by immediate survival demands or cognitive overload.
The Integration: Your Second Look provides the essential detection function that enables higher-order processing. It notices what your First Look is doing and creates the awareness that other systems—your Third Look agency and Fourth Look metacognitive functions—can then work with. This system allows you to become aware of your experience without necessarily taking any action, creating the space where conscious participation becomes possible but not guaranteed.
When sufficient attentional resources are available, your Second Look provides the noticing that enables your other systems to engage with what you're experiencing rather than being carried along by automatic responses. Your Second Look doesn't necessarily reveal what's actually happening in objective reality—it shows your experience of what's happening, which may still be filtered through First Look interpretations and predictions.
Second Look creates the pause; Third Look spends the energy to make a choice; Fourth Look steps back, monitors, learns, and tunes performance over time. This awareness function serves as the bridge between automatic processing and deliberate participation, making conscious choice possible when your nervous system has the resources to support it.