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.
Summary:
- Fear and anxiety (and anger + aggression) are always
Even experts try to avoid difficult decisions
One of the beliefs we have is that more choice is better. If we have more options, we are able to compare the options and make a better decision.
Or is it? Do more choices really enable us to make better decisions?
Redelmeier and Shafir investigated this with a group of about 650 doctors:
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Doctors were split into 2 groups
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Both groups were presented with the case of a 67-year-old patient with chronic right hip pain
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The patient had tried several treatment methods, all of which had not worked.
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For group 1, doctors were presented with 2 options, and asked which they would recommend:
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Referring the patient to an orthopaedic consultant for hip replacement surgery; or
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Taking a course of ibuprofen, one medication that the patient had yet to try out
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For group 2, doctors were presented with 3 options, and asked which they would recommend: -
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Referring the patient to an orthopaedic consultant for hip replacement surgery; or
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Taking a course of Ibuprofen, one type of medication that the patient had yet to try out; or
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Taking a course of Piroxicam, the second type of medication that the patient had yet to try out.
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And the results?
When there were only 2 options - hip replacement surgery or Ibuprofen, 72% of doctors picked Ibuprofen, while only 28% picked surgery.
The interesting finding is when there were 3 options. What happens? Now, almost half of the doctors send the patient for possible hip replacement. Only about 53% of doctors now prefer their patient to try oral medication.
With 1 medication choice, the majority of doctors picked the medication. With 2 medication choices, we might expect that an even larger majority would pick the pills. Minimally, it should at least still be 72%?!
But the opposite effect occurs. Woah. What's happening?
If we think about the options, hip surgery is pretty major. In comparison, both medications are simple oral tablets.
When only Ibuprofen was available in group 1, half the doctors referred patients for medication. In group 2, when doctors had a choice between Ibuprofen and Piroxicam, surely there should be at least half the doctor picking medication? Even if they didn't like Piroxicam, Ibuprofen was still available for them to pick.
Quite remarkably, what happens is that the attractiveness of oral medication drops when a second option is added. Why? Because doctors find it very difficult to differentiate between Ibuprofen and Piroxicam - the 2 drugs are similar such that it doesn't seem to make sense to pick one over the other.
So what do these conflicted doctors do? They choose to avoid the question. Instead of picking between 2 similar drugs, they went with the third option - hip replacement surgery.
This turns on its head that more choice is better. Sometimes when the choices that are available are too close to each other, it leads to decision paralysis. Instead of finding it easier to make a better decision, we find it difficult to even make a decision in the first place - we become paralysed. Additional choices similar to one another reduces the attractiveness of these choices. And this applies even to experts: even doctors struggle to make difficult decisions.
Even more interesting would be if we asked the doctors in group 2 why they had picked surgery. Imagine what their answers would be. Probably that surgery is the right choice. Yet if the same doctors were put in group 1, some of these doctors would change their decision, purely based upon the number of options available.
The patient does not change. The only difference between the 2 groups is that 1 additional option of pain management pills.
And this case is one of many examples of how we are subconsciously influenced by many factors. By definition, we don't know we are being influenced. Yet, no matter what decision we make, we can always find reasons to justify ourselves. Are these reasons really true? How do we know they are true? Which doctor would have noticed and admitted that he/she picked surgery because he/she couldn't decide between the 2 types of medication?
What other examples?
- How you gauge personality is influenced by the temperature of the cup you are holding
- What choice you make depends on what is the default option
- You become more generous after going through a superhero simulation
- Fish tastes better with a different name
We want to think that we are purposeful, that we don't do things without a reason. But do we actually reason what we do instead?
This experiment bears a close resemblance to a classic philosophical problem - what is termed Buridan's Donkey. A donkey is equally hungry and thirsty and is placed exactly midway between a stack of hay and a bucket of water. The donkey is unable to decide whether to satisfy its thirst or hunger first and eventually, it makes no decision and dies. (there're various permutations - in another, a hungry donkey is placed between 2 identical piles of hay, and, unable to make up its mind one again, dies of hunger).
Buridan's Donkey served as a hypothetical image for a debate on free will. But it's not a very good debate, and the main takeaway for us is, difficult choices make people freeze, tend towards the default or the safest choice, a characteristic that has been observed since the time of Aristotle in ancient Greece.