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
Our brains are wired for survival.
Our favourite tool for survival? Fear.
We've all heard the sabretooth-tiger story. (Fun Fact: even though this example has been used for decades, we've only just recently confirmed that our early ancestors did indeed overlap with the existence of sabretooth tigers before they went extinct). But now we know for sure, we can confidently go back to our favourite story.
Imagine if you lived 10,000 years ago. It's nightfall, and you're lying on a soft patch of grass about to fall asleep. Then you hear a rustling in the bushes. You spring up from your sleepy state,
Fear hits you. Your mouth goes dry (as it does today before we deliver an important speech or have a difficult conversation). Your heart-rate increases. Unconscious to you, hormones (epinephrine, testosterone) are being cued up and produced. Your eyes dilate to see better. Your blood pressure increases and your heart beats faster.
Fear causes you to spring up from a sleepy to a heightened state, ready to make a run for it. It could be a sabretooth tiger, waiting to make you dinner.
Fear - keeping us and our ancestors alive (mostly our ancestors though). Since we've been... alive.
Fear and anxiety are the free advisors that life bestows on us.
They stick with us tirelessly through thick and thin,
always eager to yell advice so loudly that we cannot but hear it.
In fact, fear and anxiety have been so important for evolution that we have a major part of our brain - the Amygdala - just dedicated to it.
But why does fear play such a big part in our lives? Exactly what causes us to feel fear? And how does fear affect us?
For most of our history, staying alive was not an easy task. Or as the neuroscientist Beau Lotto puts more succinctly, "it was easy to die in the past". There were many things that threatened us:
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We feared for our basic survival: necessities like food, water and shelter were not guaranteed.
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We feared what was uncertain and what we couldn't control: What was the weather going to be like? Will a shooting star hit us? Are eclipses the end of the world? What is that noise coming from the bushes?
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We didn't share means of communicating. We can't tell if the tribe over the next valley is friend or foe. But if we treat them as friends when they are foes... the cost could be death.
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We had limited medical abilities, so illness or injury carries a high risk.
On one hand, fear and anxiety motivated our ancestors to find better solutions: to gather food for later consumption or to find safer locations to live in. It kept our ancestors from doing something stupid, like jumping down from a high place because it's faster than climbing down.
On the other hand, the number of threats meant that fear and anxiety were triggered often and easily. We worry about uncertainty and a lack of control. We worry about change - in the status quo we are alive and well, we don't know if we will still be alive and well if something changed? We grew fearful of the things that caused us pain and avoided these. Resources were scarce, and we feared losing what we owned. Fear was a means of self-protection, and we grew really good at generating fear (qualities which remain till today - we often feel fear at the slightest
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Fear and anxiety have played an important role in allowing the human race to survive and thrive. There is nothing more important than staying alive. And so we have gotten really good at developing fear and anxiety.
We now live in a different era.
If we just look around, our lives have obviously changed massively, mostly for the better. Many threats we faced in the past do not exist now. We have no predators. Most of the developed world never needs to worry about food or clean water. We have much better healthcare. And we have access to a lot more information with the advancement of technology.
But even though our living environments have changed so much, the wiring of fear and anxiety, developed over so many generations of evolution, is not so easily unwired. (You can check out pieces of how easily fear can trigger in us, even when
We still
We are still wary of uncertainty and lack of control. Most of the time, we still fear change. We might We continue to have loss aversion - the agony of losing $10 is much greater than the joy of gaining $10. We try to avoid things that are painful.
Even though the
6 major characteristics of fear | Describe your image | Describe your image |
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