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
Compressing evoluton - Foxes to Dogs
This is part 2 of the 2-part series on "What appears cute to us, and what doesn't?"
The pictures above show the results of a remarkable but somewhat crazy experiment.
In 1958, Dmitri Belyaev and his intern Lyudmila Trut travelled to fur farms from Siberia to Moscow to Estonia, and selected 130 foxes (100 vixens and 30 male) who were friendlier and more docile around humans, to be first-generation parents for a breeding experiment.
When the cubs from these 130 foxes were born, Belyaev and Trut introduced human interaction, hand-feeding and petting (foxes would normally have no human interaction). Cubs which continued to show aggression, even after significant human contact, were discarded (i.e. sadly slaughtered and made into fur coats). The 10% of the second generation that was tamest were used as parents for the third generation; the tamest 10% of the third generation were then bred as parents for the fourth generation, and so on.
By intense selective breeding, an evolutionary process that might have otherwise require several millennia to unfold was compressed into a few decades. Within 4 generations, the cubs began to behave more like dogs. They wagged their tails and eagerly sought contact with humans. After 40 generations, the foxes were playful, friendly and behaved just like domesticated dogs. The foxes could "read" human cues and respond correctly to gestures or glances. Their vocalisations became different from wild foxes. And most incredibly, their appearance changed dramatically - legs and snout shortened, the jaw and skull grew wider, their tails, just like domesticated dogs and pigs, grew curlier. Remarkably, even they're fur had changed to a lighter, friendlier colour, instead of the more menacing and aggressive black and grey.
In short, they grew cute.
Isn't it wondrous these foxes that were specifically bred for human interaction evolved not just in behaviour? Sure we can imagine that animals can be trained to trust humans and become playful. But it was more than that - they evolved in appearance for no other functional purpose, except to be more attractive to humans.
How does nature know what is attractive to us?
How could foxes, genetically different, become so much like dogs?
The answer lies in the field of epigenetics - how we can become very different not because of the genes themselves, but because of how genes are expressed based on interaction with the environment.
You can read more about epigenetics here.
In this piece, we examined how nature changed in a very fundamental way, a deliberate compressing of what would have been centuries or millennia of evolution into just a few tens of years.
In part 1, we examine how this happened in a human-designed world - the evolution of Mickey Mouse.