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.
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.
Your mouth goes dry (as it does today before we deliver an important speech or ). 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 which enable you to take defensive action.
You spring up from a sleepy state, ready to make a run for it. It could be a sabretooth tiger, waiting to make you dinner.
Fear - keeping you and your ancestors alive. Since we've been... alive.
Fear and anxiety are the free advisors that life bestows on you once you're born. They stick with you tirelessly through thick and thin (whether you like it or not), always eager to yell advice so loudly that you cannot but hear it.
For most of our history, humans were not at the top of the food chain. Hey, think about it. It was pretty easy for our ancestors to die in the past. If fear had not kicked in immediately, your ancestor would have been wounded or killed by the predator before he/she was even able to make sense of it. Fear and anxiety motivated our ancestors to run and 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.
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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.
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Fear is such an important part of human evolution that we have a part of
our brain dedicated just for it.
Fear is so important to us that biologically, there is a part of your brain (and quite a major part at that) specifically dedicated to fear and anxiety (together with their close cousins, anger and aggression). This part of your brain is called the amygdala, which functions like a major interchange, with priority routes to many other parts of your brain.
When the amygdala is triggered, you feel fear. And, if our amygdala stops functioning, we lose the capacity for fear. As with the fascinating case of S.M., aka the woman with no fear.
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It's quite likely that at least one of the photos above freaked you out a bit. And it just happened. You didn't need to tell your brain to feel fear. You just felt it.
(In fact, the last photo was that of Philippe Petit, who walked across the twin towers 110 storeys high, over an inch thick wire. Quite the sensational story. "The Walk", was a movie re-enactment of Petit's feat. A movie which literally made moviegoers vomit and leave in fear. )
Here's the interesting bit though. You are safe and sound where you are. It's not likely that some bug or snake or spider or ghost is going to attack you. And you are in no danger of falling off a building. And all these people in the photos above survived unscathed. So why do you feel fear? Why is your heart beating a bit faster, your pupils dilating, and you emotionally feeling more agitated?
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Well as it turns out, fear (and anxiety and aggression and anger) are emotions, and this is just how emotions work.
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Emotions, like fear, just happen to you. You don't need to tell your
brain to feel scared. Your brain decides to be scared first.
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Superman Grounded
In the photo above, we have all 3 of Charlie's Angels with some random dude. Random dude happened to be the director of Charlie's Angels, Joseph McGinty Nichol, more commonly known as McG. (Sadly, this next story is not about the Angels but McG; sometimes I do question my choice of stories but ok, let's move on).
In July 2004, McG sat in his car outside the Burbank Airport. Following the success of Charlie's Angels, Warner Brothers had hired McG to shoot the new Superman movie. He spent a year preparing for the movie, during which Warner sunk in more than US$20 million into the project. That day, a private jet bound for Australia was prepared for the director, where 1,000 people (actors, production crew, etc) were waiting for McG to arrive and start filming.
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McG never got on the plane. He was paralysed by fear.
His team did everything to convince him. They told him the statistics. Only 1 in 11 million people are killed in flight accidents, compared to 1 in 5,000 in a car crash. McG was more likely to die driving home from the airport than taking the plane to Australia (statistically, driving home was actually 2,000 times more likely to kill him).
But fear is a formidable beast not easily tamed. No statistic was more real than how he felt. This applies to us too, in our daily lives. Fear is paralysing. And sometimes, fear overpowers our logic.
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But what exactly triggered the fear? Was it really flying? Or was it something deeper? McG took some time to think:
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“In reality, it was a control issue: Whenever I got outside my comfort zone, I just felt like I was going to die. When you get on a plane, you transfer your destiny, at least for the next few hours, to the pilot and crew. You cannot control the plane’s path or its speed. You cannot leave the aircraft at will if you get tired of the crying children or your seatmate’s elbow shoving. In fact, the only choice available to you is pretzels or peanuts. Moreover, you have very limited information. You don’t know if those bumps you’re experiencing are from routine turbulence or something to be concerned about. You don’t know if the pilot is tired or alert, or if you’re going to arrive on time. The loss of control is a disturbing sensation."
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So:
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People are stressed and anxious when their ability to control their environment is removed.
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More importantly, what causes fear might not always be what it seems to be. Would McG had been afraid if he was trained as a pilot like he trained to be a driver? In the same way, could we sometimes misunderstand what is it that we actually fear? Are our fears justified, especially since they happen to us so naturally?
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Understanding fear:
1. Emotions, like fear, just happen to you. You don't need to tell your brain to feel scared. Your brain decides that for you (and usually very quickly), and you are merely informed about it.
2. We fear what is uncertain
3. We fear what we are not good at
4. We fear what we know is painful
5. We fear losing what we possess