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
Reducing Drink Driving - the positve effects of labels
Who's Bob? Why do all these women look so happy carrying a "Bob" sign?
We'll come back to that.
First, a very awkward and abrupt segue to celebrate my inadequate writing skills.
Drink driving is a serious problem in many countries. In the US there are over 10,000 deaths per year because of drunk drivers - one death every 50 minutes. In South Africa, about 10 people are caught drink-driving every hour.
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What's more interesting though is examining the behavioural science of drink driving and why efforts to reduce drink driving is rarely successful.
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Almost everyone will agree that drinking and driving is dangerous. So people don't drink and drive because they don't know it's dangerous. They just can't resist the temptation.
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This might seem quite hard to fathom. Why would people put their own lives, and the lives of others at risk, by drinking and driving? They could kill themselves! But this behaviour is extremely common, including for you and I. We are actually quite adept at harming ourselves because of temptation - think about the number of health diseases that come from over-eating or respiratory conditions from smoking, or other accidents from texting while driving, or not observing proper hygiene. Or ignoring the possibility of getting the coronavirus because we want to go to the beach.
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Additionally, the decision of whether to risk drink-driving by definition comes after people have drunk alcohol. This means that their decision-making ability has been compromised by alcohol.
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So people don't drink drive because they don't know they should be drink-driving, and yet we try to solve drink-driving by using methods which are the easiest and most comfortable for us - by giving information that is already known. We can't resist the temptation.
We tell people they might die. They already know this.
We tell people they might kill others. They already know this.
We tell people they face harsh penalties if caught. They already know this.
We tell people the ones who will really suffer if anything happens are loved ones. They already know (admittedly, this is more effective than the others because it triggers an emotional response)
So we really shouldn't be surprised that telling people what they already know doesn't work out. But what is it that we can do instead? Time to bring in the ladies' man - BOB.
The Bob campaign was developed by Belgium in 1995, which aimed to tackle the drink driving issue in a different way, by promoting the role of a designated driver - "Bob"**.
The Bob campaign has been reasonably successful. Before we examine why this has been the case, let's look at some of its achievements:
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Based on figures from the Belgian Road Safety Institute, more than 1/3 of Belgians have performed "Bob" duties, and close to half of the population have been driven home by a "Bob". 1/4 of Belgians say that they do not speak to people who do not have a designated Bob.
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The number of drink driving cases has decreased by about 20% overall since the Bob campaign was launched.
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After Belgium, Netherlands, France, Germany and Luxembourg all adopted the Bob Campaign (in different names)
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In the Netherlands, "Bob" has entered popular language. "Bob jij of Bob in?" or "Do you Bob or am I Bob" was such a widely used phrase that it has been included in Dutch dictionaries.
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Since the start of the campaign in the Netherlands, the number of drunk drivers out of all motorists checked dropped from 4% at first to 1.7% in 2015.
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2/3s of people polled in the Netherlands claim they always make Bob arrangements.
While drink driving rates have decreased in every country that has introduced the Bob campaign, drink driving does still remain an issue. This indicates that several solutions are needed to solve a complex problem like drink-driving.
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**(Contrary to popular belief, BOB does not stand for "Bewust Onbeschonken Bestuurder", Dutch that translates to "consciously non-drunk driver" or 'deliberately sober driver'. It was just a random name picked by the Belgian government. But the fact people developed the association themselves is an indication of how much awareness the Bob campaign has raised).
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Why has the Bob Campaign worked?
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There are 2 major reasons why the "Bob Campaign" has been more successful than traditional campaigns:
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It offers a solution and not admonishment. Think about all the traditional campaigns to discourage drink-driving. It's very starkly negative. It's about people dying, and you being irresponsible, and heavy penalties if caught and so on. This triggers your amygdala (find out more here) - the part of the brain responsible for fear, anger, anxiety, and aggression. It feels like you are under attack, and you need to do something about it. And what you do is to simply ignore the message coming in. You cognitively already know that drink-driving is not right, but when you're looking forward to a good time out an then this wave of negativity hits you and judges you, you tune out. (find out more about examples where we simply ignore painful advice here)
In contrast, the Bob Campaign offers a solution. You don't need to face a barrage of negativity and dying when you're out for a good time. You just need to find a designated driver. And you don't always need to be "Bob". You can take turns, it's not that painful.
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It introduces a positive label. It might be very difficult to resist drinking and to be the designated driver for the night. Think about it, everyone is having fun, and you're not. But the positive label helps tremendously. When people ask you why you're not drinking, you have a perfect answer - you're Bob for the night. And not only can you justify to others (and yourself!) why you're not drinking, you probably get some positive affirmation for being on "Bob" duty as well. The folks you drive back will probably acknowledge your "sacrifice".
But the question is, why is the label "Bob" so important? Why not just call it "designated driver"? The answer is because "Bob" introduces a personality to an otherwise dull term of a designated driver. The designated driver sounds official and solemn, it sounds like it's part of the narrative of death and responsibility. Instead, Bob is a positive label that people can start using without the association to all the previous negative information campaigns.
This is also an example of how useful labels can be, or as Gen Z might say: when you label something, it becomes a thing. "Laugh out loud" and "LOL" are the same thing, but one resonates much more. Autonomous sensory meridian response is a turn-off, while ASMR is common language among YouTubers.
The "Bob" campaign is more successful than traditional campaigns, and this should be yet another reminder that our natural inclination to just give information to solve problems tends not to work. Instead, we have to examine other ways to make that message more prominent and acceptable.
But that drink-driving remains a serious issue also shows how powerful our subconscious tendencies are. Even when our own lives are at stake, we cannot resist immediate temptations. We over-value short-term gain/pain and under-value what happens in the long-term. We also over-value explicit outcomes over the prevention of an uncertain eventuality. Finally, we carry, to different extents, optimism bias - we recognise that some action might be risky, but we think that it would never happen to us.
Driving home after drinking provides immediate convenience. Not diving creates immediate pain - inconvenient and perhaps a higher cost of taking a taxi home. Our optimism bias causes us to believe that while others might get into accidents, we are able to drive home safely even while we are drunk. And we find it difficult to register that over-time, the risk of drink-driving greatly accumulates into a probability of an accident. While we see the inconvenience as a certainty, we think that drink-driving accidents are not.
And this is the same reason why:
- people refuse to observe safe distancing during the coronavirus
- why people struggle to finish a dosage of unpleasant medicine that is life-saving
- why doctors have to introduce incentives to get people to take their medicine on time.
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