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
Dread - I can't bear what is coming up next
Almost all of us are familiar with the feeling of dread. We have a sense that something unpleasant is ahead. And it makes us anxious, fearful, edgy, and unhappy.
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As I write this, it is the last evening of a 3-day long weekend, and already, some friends have been expressing their dread of a return to work tomorrow. It's worth noting that most of us have been through many (long) weekends, but we never quite overcome the dread of the first workday back.
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What's interesting too is the extent to which dread shapes our thoughts and actions in the moment.
Gregory Berns et al from Emory University ran a rather unpleasant experiment with 32 participants. The participants would periodically receive minor shocks while sitting in the experiment room.
2 observations:
- When given a choice, all participants chose to receive a shock sooner rather than later, even though it is the same shock and they cannot leave early after getting shocked. Waiting for something unpleasant creates an additional pain that people wanted to avoid.
- When given a choice between receiving a larger shock now and a smaller shock at an uncertain later, 3 in 10 participants preferred a larger shock now!
For these participants, the dread of that uncertain negative stimulus exceeds the negative stimulus itself!
The pain from dread is real. It's tangible, and it's no different from the pain of something negative itself. We confirm this when we take brain scans participants were scanned playing Pac-man, the dread that comes as they are about to be eaten activates the pain centre of the brain: the periaqueductal gray. This brain region activates when we are dreading something, just like it would when we are hit by bad news or when we get punched by Mike Tyson.
When we are stuck in dread, we are more inclined to alter our thoughts and actions to avoidance, to try to escape, which could lead to poorer consequences.
What's an example?
Lowenstein, Karlsson, and Seppi studied the number of logins of American investors and plotted this against the value of the S&P 500.
The black line in the graph above plots the S&P 500 index.
The grey line in the graph tracks the number of times American investors login into their investment accounts over the same period of time.
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What do we notice?
There is a broad congruence between the 2. When the stock market is doing well, we login more (to get the good news).
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But when the stock market is doing poorly, logins drop drastically, even though it is the period we should be logging in more to consider changes.
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The pain from dread and the expected pain of the future leads to us being more inclined towards avoidance. It makes us want to escape from the problem. We want to protect ourselves, and the easiest (even if mostly ineffective) solution is to try and hide.
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And this could lead to poorer consequences, just like the investors, who should be logging in and taking corrective action on their stocks.
So what can we do about dread? How can we lessen dread (especially with a dreaded workday coming up after a long weekend)?
Here, it is useful to understand that dread comes from uncertainty and awfulising (tendency to overestimate the potential seriousness or negative consequences of events)
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So any attempt to reduce dread has to address these 2 things. So what are some possible actions?
1) Uncertainty is uncomfortable. We usually can't change the negative future completely, but we can introduce our own certainty. Instead of dreading the next workday, we can break it down into mini finish lines: you just need to get through the first hour or the first 50 emails. And then you can set a new finish line. Breaking up an uncertain day into certain milestones makes it easier to bear.
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2) The second is leverage on how dopamine works. Dopamine makes us feel good, but it is often wrongly described as being associated with reward. In actuality, dopamine triggers in anticipation and in pursuit of a reward. You can introduce your own anticipated rewards on dreaded days: maybe it is a lunch appointment with a close friend or a favourite snack which you prepared beforehand.
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3) You can create clarity, to reduce awfulising. The greater clarity you have over what is coming up, the less fearful you are. A simple way to do this comes from Tim Ferriss, what he calls fear-setting. This is a short set of questions:
- what really is the worst that could happen? So what if it happens?
- What can you do to prevent it from happening?
- if it happens, what can you do to mitigate the negative consequences?
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4) Finally, we can distract ourselves from awful thoughts by concentrating on the present, on what we can control.
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Instead of worrying about what could happen when work restarts, plan out what you can do tonight, and enjoy yourself while you can. The act of planning itself is important, and reduces dread because you signal to yourself that you actively doing something.