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
Learned Helplessness
Imagine yourself doing a piece of work. You give it everything you have. And then you submit it to the boss. The boss looks at it and gives you a lashing. “It’s absolutely terrible”, the boss bellows. You are asked to revise it. You go back, find new information, and revise your work. You resubmit it.
Same reaction. The boss flies into a rage. “This is not good enough!”. This process repeats itself a third, fourth, and fifth time. Finally, it is the end of the day. Your boss passes the work on to another colleague.
The next day, the boss gives you another piece of work. You give it everything you have. But the process repeats itself. You try to do what you can. You get constantly scolded. And the day ends.
On the third day, you are again given a piece of work. What would your reaction be? Would you still believe that you can do it well?
Even though the work on day 3 is completely different from days 1 and 2, you might have been scarred by what happened. And you might give up, you might no longer try as hard, and merely brace yourself to be scolded. You no longer believe that whatever you do can change the outcome.
This is one version of what we term learned helplessness, coined by Martin Seligman from UPenn, from an experiment he did with dogs in 1967. Seligman found out that when dogs were conditioned to believe that they had no control over the outcome, these dogs would give up and bear through pain. This is despite the belief not being true - the pain these dogs go through could have been avoided by a simple action.
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The crux of the experiment is elaborated in the pictures below
When we believe that there is nothing we can do to change an outcome, it becomes debilitating. Not only might we give up on trying in that area, we might extrapolate this into other parts of our lives. We might feel inadequate, lose confidence, and are more inclined to view our experiences negatively, where more of our lives feel like defeat.
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There are several ways in which we can overcome learned helplessness. These range from examining our experiences and re-wiring our interpretations, changing thinking patterns, engaging in other activities to build confidence, pleasure, and satisfaction, therapy combined with pharmacology, involving drugs that rebalances neuromodulators in our brain.
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All of these methods deserve a chapter by themselves.
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But it is also important to recognise how challenging it is for someone who has reached a stage of learned helplessness to really snap out of it by themselves.
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To examine this, we go back to Seligman’s experiment with the dogs. Eventually, Seligman managed to help the majority of dogs to snap out of learned helplessness.
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How?
He did so by helping and guiding these helpless dogs to go through the correct action that would save them from pain. After several runs of Seligman literally directing the dog through the right sequence of steps, the previously dogs eventually managed to help themselves.
Sometimes, we need that initial helping hand, to save us from drowning. But once we have gotten out of state of completely giving up, we are then in a much better position to help ourselves.
Sometimes, that little helping hand we give truly changes a life.