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
Context context context
your late developing pre-frontal cortex
The pre-frontal cortex is the most cognitive and logical part of our brain. It is responsible for thinking through all our mot difficult decisions. But did you know that your pre-frontal cortex only develops fully in our mid-twenties?
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In your heads, some of you are already internally judging, wow no wonder teenagers are the way they are. But there's a good reason why the "smartest" part of our brain has a longer runway to develop.
And it has far less to do with "smarts" as we generally think about.
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Rather, it is because the social context that we encounter every day of our lives is incredibly complex. The same exact action can carry many different meanings. And interpreting the meaning wrongly can mean putting ourselves in negative positions.
Our brains need time and experience to figure it out. Let's look at some examples:
Let's start with payments.
Everyday, we pay many strangers to perform services for us. We pay folks to prepare our food, to the drivers of our transport, to companies that provides us with entertainment, to the army of civil servants that keeps the country running.
Here's a question. If we pay strangers to do things for us, why don't we pay people we know and love when they do the same?
Why do we not pay our mom when she cooks us a meal? Or our dad when he gives us a lift somewhere? Or when our friends help us with something we can't manage on our own?
Here we see the complexity of context. Payment can be the greatest respect for a service, rewarding the effort and skill with a monetary value.
However, payment can also be the greatest disrespect to a person, because you assign a monetary value to an emotional relationship.
With enough experience, we get better and better at understanding different nuances of social context. Say you're buying something from a store-owner that you have known for a long time, and you were short of 10 cents.The friendly store-owner tells you, don’t worry, it’s nothing. But you insist, and you go to another store to change money so that you have right change to pay for what you bought. You paid the store-owner the right amount. But even though you have avoided short-changing the store-owner, you might have hurt him in the deepest way, by devaluing his goodwill, and denying him the chance to do something for you.
Paying the right amount sounds like the obvious thing for us to do. Yet, sometimes, it might not be the right thing to do? There is no genetic code or specific intelligence that tells us when something that seems obviously right can be the wrong answer. We need to experience it for ourselves, and to build our ability to assess different social contexts.
Another seemingly obvious act - a handshake.
We know what this means.
A handshake is the beginning of trust, a positive first meeting.
It could even be an unspoken word of honour, 2 parties committing to something with absolute certainty.
Or it could be something mundane, a perfunctory act that 2 people do just because... that's what people do. It really has no meaning, just going through the motions.
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Or it could be the start of the deepest betrayal, a conniving plan built on the facade of trust, where the handshake is the first block laid down in a most elaborate trap.
We pay top dollar for the skill of top chefs, who combines all sorts of different ingredients in the right proportion, cooks for just the right amount of time, and completes it with beautiful presentation.
So can you imagine if we had to fork out large sums of money for a meal where the chef does none of the above? Where the food is raw and uncooked, and has no other ingredients and no other preparation?
Yes, we will. As sashimi places around the world will attest.
In most circumstances, we want a chef that actually cooks. But on some situations, we can accept exceptions, like a chef that "just" slices, albeit with great skill
And perhaps the most relevant and striking example:
Humans can have a very complicated relationship with violence.
Violence can manifest in different ways.
We can commit an act of violence by deliberately and viciously putting down someone in front of others, preying on their weakness and crushing their self-belief. Or we could engage in actual physical violence, swinging our fists at others repeatedly, aggressively, until blood is drawn, and then celebrating our dominance.
Yet sometimes, violence is nothing more than pulling a trigger.
Sometimes, violence is nothing more than merely pressing a button.
Sometimes, violence is merely choosing to look the other way.
In one instance, our heart rates are through the roof, our blood is boiling, and our blood pressure reach new heights, and on the other, it's just a job, just an order, just indffierence.
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This is then further complicated by our judgment of violence. Most of the time, most of us generally reject violence. As you are reading this, you probably think it is usually better to talk things out instead of getting into a fistfight. We gear towards more humane punishment for criminal offenders. And we get upset when we see the violence against animals.
And yet when it is the right type of violence, we absolutely love it.
We are eager to watch sports or movies where the "right guys" deal out the "right type" of violence.
In one instance, when someone pulls the trigger it is an appalling act of violence. In another, it is an act of heroism - that person is pulling the trigger to keep me safe from the enemy. We applaud the bravery and we award medals of honour. We might even vote for regimes that provide us with the "right type of violence".
Except the "enemy" is also thinking the same thing about the soldiers on his side.
We seem to have ea problem with violence. but only if it is the violence we don't want to see. When it is the right kind, we love it.
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The same action can have drastically different meanings, depending on who is performing it, when it is performed, and why it is performed, and how it is perfomed.
||| It is not by accident that the most rational and cognitive part of our brain takes the longest to develop. It is also the part of the brain that is the least shaped by genes, and the most shaped by experience.
There is no gene that can code for any of these, We need to learn about social context through observation and experience. And it takes time to figure all of this out.
While solving for the theory of everything, getting to mars, and understanding how te brain works are some of our toughest cognitive challenges, equally so are some of our people challenges. Think about the most difficult moments in your life. Inevitably, some of them have to do with social context, how to interpret and respond to people in different settings. And this requires more than emotions it requires cognition.