When you are afraid, you start going into fight or flight mode. Your body starts prioritising what is needed for immediate survival - screw routine body functions, if you don't make it past the next few moments there won't be a routine to return to. You stop digesting food. Cell repair slows or stops. You stop producing saliva, which is why your mouth goes dry when you're nervous just before making a speech or going into a difficult conversation. Your heart rate and breathing increase to ensure better blood flow. A cocktail of hormones like epinephrine and oxytocin are cued up and produced, which amplifies your body's ability to act (and remarkably, in the case of oxytocin, reminds you to seek help).
Don't be mistaken about what happens when you feel fear. Your body is readying itself to help you face what you fear in the way it knows how.
What causes us to feel fear?
1) Fear occurs to us unconsciously. Do you pause to think, hey, very angry looking snake! Maybe I should be scared. Of course not, it would be too late! Fear becomes much clearer when we examine what happens inside your brain. When you are afraid, the fear/anger/aggression/anxiety centre of your brain - the amygdalas (get used to this name, it's gonna keep popping up) lights up. And we've covered all the changes that happen in your body: your blood pressure, your hormones, your heart-rate. But remember how amygdala is like a train interchange with direct routes to different parts of your brain? There is a direct neural link between our amygdala and your pre-frontal cortex, the rational thinking part of your brain. And if we look closely enough or we think things through, sometimes we realise, argh! it's not an angry snake, it's just a prank toy that your annoying friend had thrown at you. Or if you've handled angry snakes enough times, your amygdala does not light as much. Your blood pressure and your heart rate do not increase as much, you realise what you need to do is to stay calm and slowly back away.
Finally, notice how fear, anger, aggression, and anxiety are processed by the same part of the brain, the amygdala. This is no coincidence. These 4 emotions are closely tied to one another; aggression maybe triggered because one is nervous, angry, or fearful. Being fearful may cause one to react angrily, as a self-defense mechanism. Fear, like all our emotions, happens to us. Mostly, we can't control how it originates. But we can control how it develops by understanding what exactly is causing fear and by choosing the response that dispels it
2) We fear what we are unconfident or uncertain about. Think back on your ancestors doing something they weren't confident or certain off - hunting a massive animal without a weapon, or eating a berry they've never seen before. Doing so would mean a very high chance of seriously harming themselves. Today, after many cycles of evolution, we have been wired based on these experiences.
Think about it. Are you ever fearful of something you've done before, and are good? Brushing your teeth, putting on your clothes, indulging in your favourite hobby (whatever it is)? Of course not. You know you can perform these functions easily. You are confident.
But many of us would have felt fearful and anxious the first time we ventured into something new: using a pair of chopsticks, riding a bicycle, swimming, going on a first date. We were uncertain about these functions, and we were not confident about performing them. However, once we have demonstrated to ourselves that we are able to perform these tasks, we are no longer afraid. The same applies to more challenging tasks. Some of us struggle with: public speaking, starting a business, having a very difficult conversation with the CEO... You are uncertain and unconfident if you can succeed. But once you have proven to yourself you are able to do it, even for the more challenging tasks, you are no longer afraid. People might start off feeling scared about public speaking, but after speech 3797, you're pro The catch, of course, is that sometimes, we are too scared to start.
Even if we were certain of something OR confident about something, many of us will still feel some amount of fear. We might be theoretically certain how we should use a pair of chopsticks, but if we have never succeeded in using them properly, we remain unconfident and will still feel nervous if we had to use them, especially when others are observing. You might also be confident about
3) we fear what is painful. Boxer. climbing 100 flights of stairs or doing 100 burpees. But pain is not just physical but mental. Failure is painful. Being judged is painful.
This is why you procrastinate. You either fear what you have to do bevause you don't know how to do it (you don't fear brushing your teeth for example), or you fear doing something becaue you know it will be effortful
4) we fear what we cannot control
Learn more about your amygdala, the amygdala hijack, the thalamus, the pre-frontal cortex, and how your brain works here.
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Summary:
- Fear and anxiety (and anger + aggression) are always
Are we all racists?
Where are the aliens?
the doppler effect
The myth of being in the present (it isnt always useful to be in the present, and being int e present isnt what we think it is).
What differentiates human from animal?
Part 2: chimp, bonobo, human -do we lose our innonence as we gain our consciousness. The catcher in the rye.
PArt 3 alpha males and politicians carryin babies. WHy only the males?
A nuanced view of life: Einstein; Mandela, Ghandi, Mother teresa. Margaret thatcher as a character whose both sides are explicit, and allow sa neutral to see
I cheat because I don't think it's wrong. The disneyland entry.
Earth is our only perspective yet earth is but a small speck
Why I'm atheist.
She's been possessed by the devil. No, it's just neuroscience. (Epilepsy and Tourette's)
the changing foxes; the changing dogs
The amygdala hijack - why we fear, first.
We went to the moon before we had wheels on our luggage.
Red or white? Black or white? Still or sparkling. Are you sure you made the choice?
The tired judges.
How can I get someone to agree with me?
The Ikea effect. The converse effect. The Lego effect.
Climate change is a bigger threat to a peaceful way of life than war.
Criticism of Steven Pinker.
MAndela. Einstein. Gandhi. Mother Teresa. We love our heuristics.
The vampire bat, the stickleback fish, and the silverback gorilla
The queen bee.
explaining dopamine
explaning oxytocin
Dopamine and revenge
Frog in boiling water; crab in the basket myths.
Frederik the great and the potatoes. Ataturk and the veil
Rokia and the Malawis.
Why i enjoyed history when i was in school - it tackled interestng problems, compared to F=MA or the electron shells. If physics wasnt about pushing the box across a surface, but about why we are all made of stardust, or why blackholes defy gravity, and how we know the universe is expanding, i think we would all be more interested.
WHere do elements form? We all have stars in our blood. We are made of star dust.
Even electricity had to be marketed to people.
Unwelt - you don't know what you cant see (or hear or feel or touch or smell).
There is too much narcissism. It's not about how nice we are or what not. But how much we think everything is about us.
We are not part of the nature cycle
You are breathing the same breath as your idols
how you see - there is no yellow photons in your tv; there is no such colour as purple
fairness and empathy in animals
the science of pain -nocicpetion; 2 types of pain; men fainting from seeing wife in labour pain; phantom limb; hand pricked on computer; like everything else pain helps you survive
2 signals required to bend your finger - evolution
Jerusalem syndrome is a group of mental phenomena involving the presence of either religiously-themed obsessive ideas, delusions or other psychosis-like experiences that are triggered by a visit to the city of Jerusalem.;Florence syndrome
why zebras dont get ulcers
Ondine's curse
Why is the sky blue? (walter lewin)
Frederik the Great and the potatoes. Ataturk and the veil
It's ok for people to die, as long as it's not our people. Churchill and the grain duing WW2 that caused bangalore famine where 4 million people died.
Creatives - of genius and daemons
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Confirmation bias + cogntivie dissonance + dunning kurger. You always want to suspect you are wrong. But tis sounds so difficult in life to keep suspecting you might be wrong. ti will drive you crazy.
So what? realise there are different decisions in life. Some are not impt: where to eat lunch. Some are reversible: you an try to do first, and this is by itself another way to get information.
For impt decisons, you want to find diconfirming evidnece. This is in fact more impt than confirming evidence.
Plato and the woman's womb - he thought it was a live animal (and this influenced medicine for hundreds of years. We take a long time to change our views)
Plato's cave allegory - we think shadows are the real thing. We dont want to step into the light because the darkness is too comforting.
"Most people are not just comfortable in their ignorance but hostile to anyone who points it out."
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