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
Sleep for better learning
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Have you heard the advice that you "remember what you learn better after a good night's sleep?"
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This is absolutely true for several reasons:
First, neuroplasticity - specifically the re-wiring of your neurons, occurs when you are sleeping. This is analogous to how you build muscles
Second, the And we found out about this somewhat by accident.
Matt Wilson from MIT was tracking a lab rat while it was going through a maze. The rat was wearing a head sensor, which allowed Wilson to observe the firing patterns of neurons in the rat's brain. When the rat had finished the maze, Wilson removed the rat and left it in a resting area, and went to write a report.
Shortly after, he heard the firing of neurons over the speaker - connected to the head sensor. In his rush to start writing, he had forgotten to remove the sensor.
But to his surprise, he found that the rat was sleeping!
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Even in sleep, the neurons were firing.
Wilson repeated the experiment several times, to compare how the brain worked while awake vs when it as sleeping. And his findings were astounding.
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|| The rats were replaying the experience of the maze even while they were sleeping!
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This is particularly important because as studies have shown, repetition, even if it was just playing the action over and over in our minds, creates neural patterns that are similar to if we were actually performing the action physically. We get better at something through mental imagery as well as actual practice.
How the rats replayed their experience differed across the sleep cycle.
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At the start, during the slow-wave cycle, brief segments of the experience were replaying in the hippocampus at very high speeds. Something that was covered in about 4 seconds in real-life was repeated in just 100-200 milliseconds during the slow-wave cycle. Additionally, this replaying during the slow wave cycle only occurs in the period of sleep immediately after the experience. It was not detectable 24 hours later.
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(you might wonder how do we actually know that what was replayed in that 100-200 milliseconds is actually what took place in the 4 seconds in real life? The answer is in the pattern of neurons firing. The researchers monitored the firing activity of networks of neurons in each rat's hippocampus as the rat ran on a simple track for a food reward. During each lap, individual brain cells would fire as the animal ran back and forth on the track. Repeated over many times, the researchers then identified a pattern for how the neurons fired, corresponding to the different positions on each lap.)
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In the REM cycle of sleep, the experience is replayed in a different way. REM replays are longer, lasting for several minutes at a time. The speed of replaying is also very similar to what happens in real life. Finally, unlike the slow-wave sleep cycle, REM memory reactivation was robust even after 24 hours. represent the more gradual reevaluation of older memories."
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What this suggests is that the slow-wave cycle of the sleep is largely invovled in the initial storage and processing of the memory. This is followed by REM cycle where there is renactment of the experience in real speed, which acts as a rehearsal that subsequently improves the level of performance of what was learnt or experienced.
So the old adage is true. Sleep more, remember more, perform better.