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
True or False?
Boiling Frogs, Darwin's Evolution,
Wise Owls
Boiling Frogs
We've all heard this tale. Put a frog in a pot of boiling water, and the frog jumps out. But put a frog in a pot where water gradually heats up, and the frog doesn't escape, slowly boiling to death.
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Except, of course, it isn't true. Frogs are not able to regulate their own body heat - they depend on their environment to warm-up or cool-down body temperature. So our froggy friends will jump out of the pot as soon as the temperature gets too warm.
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While inaccurate in reality (and it's pretty amazing how many people actually think this is true), as a metaphor, the tale of the boiling frog is indeed a very good one. It very neatly captures 4 major characteristics of human behaviour. Find out more about:
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As humans, we do not like change, and uncertainty is something we fear so much that we would often pick discomfort.
Charles Darwin came up with Evolution / Evolution is about Survivial of the Fittest
The theory of evolution was a major breakthrough in helping us understand the natural world, including us as humans. Evolution is goddamn remarkable and plays a role in explaining everything - from why you feel the bad taste in your mouth when you see something morally disgusting; how and what you fear; why people tend to follow what others are doing... really an endless number of examples (many of which you can find on this site!)
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But while everyone has heard of evolution, there are 2 common misconceptions.
1) Was that Darwin came up with the theory of evolution. Darwin did not. We knew about evolution before anyone really knew about Darwin, from the works of naturalists like Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, simply because they could observe changes that occurred from evolution.
What Darwin came up with was theorising the process through which evolution happens - natural selection. And even then, Darwin didn't do so alone. The original paper on natural selection had a co-author - Alfred Russell Wallace. who had somehow gotten screwed by history, and has simply just never been recognised for his part. So let's give Wallace some props, he was right there with Darwin in developing our understanding of evolution.
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2) The second misconception is that evolution is survival of the fittest. It isn't. We've just gone through this in the paragraph above - evolution occurs through natural selection.
What's the difference?
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Put simply, an animal does not need to be the fittest in its group to survive. Instead, it needs to have adapted best to the condition at that time. For example, a long time ago, there might have been very fit and strong ancestors of giraffes. But no matter how fit or strong they were, it didn't matter if they couldn't get enough food. Along comes a giraffe whose neck was slightly longer than the rest. He was able to reach leaves on trees which others could not.
Hence, he has a higher chance of surviving the conditions, and to mate and reproduce. In doing so, he passes on copies of his genes which affects the next generations, who are more likely to possess the same trait of a longer neck. And many, many generations pass, the longer-necked giraffes continually survive and reproduce at a higher rate than other giraffes (no matter how fit or strong they were). Eventually, through this natural process of selection, the giraffes end up with longer necks.
So put to bed the second misconception - evolution is not survival of the fittest.
Are owls wise?
"This guy is as wise as an owl". But are owls really wise? Well they might look wise, and they might appear in Harry Potter, but there is no evidence that owls have shown any advanced levels of intelligence.
Ravens and crows, on the other hand, have shown some remarkable levels of cognition - ranging from facial recognition, problem-solving, understanding analogies and commands, and even tool-making. A whole breed of crows, the New Caledonian crows, have evolved to make hooked tools from soft twigs as part of their usual foraging activity. They make these tools from very specific plants; when scientists tried to disguise the plants, the crows saw right through it.
It's often thought that birds are dumb, hence the term "bird-brained". The reason behind this is that birds have very small brains, and their brains do not have a neo-cortex like humans and primates, which is responsible for higher-level though. However, crows and ravens have adapted by packing in neurons into another part of their brains, which is then able to perform similar high-level thinking. They have also shown plasticity, i.e. the ability to learn new things and adapt to new environments. And quite amazingly, it seems that their problem-solving skills are very close to primates. Check out more in the video (3 mins long) below.