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
Free vouchers for internal travel - why doesn't it work?
It was recently reported that Singaporeans have used less than 1/4 of the total value of Singaporediscovers vouchers.
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This is not unexpected. When the procedure for using the vouchers was announced, behaviouralists had already observed that the transaction costs were too high. It required multiple steps, there is additional effort to go through a 3rd party booking partner, and it was restrictive (e.g. it couldn't be combined).
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But surely these are minor inconveniences to pay for what is essentially a $100 voucher? Not at all. Consider the perception that forms in most Singaporeans' minds in planning to use the voucher - there so much effort and time required, potential frustration that something might not work, and fear that you are in fact getting a poorer deal with one partner vs another vs going straight to vendor, etc.
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These are invisible transactions costs, which accumulate to make a free deal far less attractive.
We have always known (though repeatedly underestimate) this. Picture 3 shows an experiment done by Ogilvy, working with a telecommunications company selling telephone products in the 1990s. They tried 3 different methods:
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a. customers can order by a paid-for return mail,
b. customers can order by phone
c. customers can order either by phone or by mail.
Method C got as many responses as methods A and B combined.
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Just the convenience of ordering is sufficient to persuade a customer to buy a product, independent of the product itself.
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But we really don't need an experiment to show us this. We have plenty of life experience.
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How often have we gone shopping and came back with more than what we wanted? Anyone who has been to the supermarket would attest to this. How many times have left buying more items than we planned, simply because we saw something at a convenient location and just grabbed it?
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We can understand why some of this bureaucracy was introduced - to outsource backend workload to 3rd parties, to ensure that the vouchers are used in the targetted areas, to prevent abuse etc. But just imagine having gone through all that planning, and the hope that these rediscover vouchers will give a much-needed boost to travel sectors, that eventually most of these vouchers were never used.
Do we take into account these costs and opportunity costs?
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How different would it have been if the choice of vouchers were by default, and the process simplified? You book a hotel or a tour, and the customer is then asked if they would like to use their vouchers, with the default being yes. The customer is then asked to provide some details so that a check can be made that he/she still have sufficient credit. The customer experience becomes positive and pain-free.
But this piece isn't a slight on STB. Around the world in meeting rooms where ideas are evaluated and decisions made, both bosses and staff tend to favour the most defensible idea, the one that ostensibly covers all the bases. It is the format of meetings that encourages this bias, and it's more prominent in organisations that are less flat.
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For the staff, safer ideas invite less criticism. People in meeting rooms all around the world feel the need to want to look smart, and the easiest (and ironically, most convenient) way to look smart is to point out something that could wrong. By choosing solutions that at first instance appear safe, staff are saving the trouble and agony of having to explain and defend themselves. Moreover, too crazy an idea and the boss might think you're stupid. Very few bosses ever think that a safe idea is stupid because, by definition, it is harder to attack.
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For the bosses, the safer the idea, the easier it is to account for it in the event that something blows up. Again, imagine the repercussions if it was reported that 5 people had been abusing a glitch in the system and spent $400,000 in vouchers. How would they explain that? (It should be obvious to you that even if someone had cheated $400k or even $4mil worth of vouchers, it is still a tiny amount compared to all the unused vouchers currently)
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Whereas a safe solution is far easier to defend. Singaporeans are lazy, Singaporeans are still worried about the economy, Singaporeans need more education and information, Singapore is boring. Yeap, sure, so it's not really our fault.
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Source: The Straits Times (national newspaper)
But in doing so, most meetings miss out on a critical question. What do we lose, if we went with the safest option? Our fears force us to remove risk.
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But could we manage risk instead? What if we had dared to ask: what is the worst that could happen? Is it really that bad? Is it worse than what we could potentially lose with the safe option?
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Ogilvy's vice-chairman, Rory Sutherland, who also heads the company's behavioural insights team, observed that what works best tends to be unusual. He realised that if he wasn't the vice-chairman, people would probably not have listened much to him. For example:
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- nothing increased the customer base of an energy company more than a cute soft-toy. The soft-toy outperformed a year free energy deal by 600%. In fact, people wrote it protesting that didn't want free energy, they would sign up with the company if they could get the soft toy.
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- Or that sometimes, the best way to sell the best product is not to tell people how good it is. It is to introduce an inferior product, so people can compare for themselves.
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- Or the famous example of organ donation. When organ donation upon death is by default no donation, rates of organ donation is less than 10% in almost every study. By just changing the default to yes (unless you opt-out), organ donation rates average 99% across many different countries.
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We evaluate many of our problems "logically", which is by itself illogical because people aren't logical, to begin with. Instead, many of our challenges are psycho-logical in nature. How can we get people to stay healthy? How can we get people to be vaccinated? How can we get people interested in climate change? How can we get staff to continual learn? How do we get departments to digitalise? These are not logical problems, they are psycho-logical ones.