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
Is there a rabbit running down your arm?
Stunningly crazy question. Of course, there is no rabbit! Why are you wasting my time?
There is an important point to be shared, but first, let me introduce to you the Cutaneous Rabbit Illusion, a simple experiment.
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Step 1: Get someone to stand upright, with his/her eyes closed
Step 2: Get him/her to extend one arm straight out away from his/her body.
Step 3: Tap him/her three times on the:
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Wrist
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Elbow
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Shoulder
Just like in the pictures below. Make sure to tap quickly. ​
Now, ask the person what he/she felt.
Obvious right? Three taps on the wrist, three taps on the elbow, and three taps on the shoulder - 9 taps in all.
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Not quite.
For most folks, you will not feel the sensation of tapping at 3 discrete locations. What you would feel instead is a sensation of taps moving up your arm, from wrist to shoulder, even though there were no actual physical taps on other parts of your arm, Or, as the experiment's name suggests, it feels like a rabbit hopping up your arm
This is the Cutaneous (this means a sensory effect on your skin) Rabbit Illusion discovered by Frank Geldard and Carl Sherrick of Princeton University.
There are some important implications from the Cutaneous Rabbit Illusion.
We covered in other chapters some characteristics about your brain.
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First, a lot of the processes in your brain are unconscious - meaning the processing happens whether you are aware of it or not. Because we can, by definition, only become aware of what we are aware of, we naturally assume that every decision and thought we made was done consciously, that we thought through everything and came to a conclusion. Mostly, the converse is true, the thought is developed in your brain unconsciously or there are unconscious influences, and you later become aware of it.
(At the end of this page, you can explore examples of how a change in name can make something taste better; a company ca change whether you want something or not just by adding another option; why people would do things that they know are bad for them, etc)
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Second, one of the sub-conscious ways in which your brains works is its need to formulate stories to view and understand the world. The Cutaneous Rabbit Illusion is one example of how this occurs. When it receives the stimulus of physical taps, these taps are meaningless. Your brain takes this stimulus and edits it into a story based on past experience - ah the series of taps feels like a rabbit travelling up your arm. This provides an explanation for what has just happened. The implication here is that reality isn't what you think it is. It is the meaning attached by your brain to explain it. Of course, sometimes, your brain explains wrongly. Think of a time when you judged someone by an action - you formulated (unconsciously) a story to explain why he or she acted in the way they did. But could it have just been something random? Or that the intention is completely different from your story?
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Read more about:
- the unconscious processing of your brain
- how your brain thinks in stories, and how this affectsyour life