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.
Summary:
- Fear and anxiety (and anger + aggression) are always
The appeal of Dalgona Coffee
Dalgona Coffee. Simple ingredients. Anyone can make it. Looks great in photos. What's there not to love?
Or as one friend shared with me recently, "It must be good eh? My kids have a 5-minute attention span. But they have no problems whisking coffee for 8 minutes."
In our chapter on "what makes food tasty", we examined how tasty food and drink is can be altered due to the seemingly irrelevant factors. The Chilean Seabass (fun fact: it's not even a seabass) is a popular dish in many cultures, but it was almost never eaten when it went by its original name, the Patagonian Toothfish. We think that wine tastes different in a glass compared to in a cup. And the same chocolates taste sweeter if they are round rather than in cubes.
Here are 3 reasons why Dalgona Coffee is so popular, which has nothing to do with taste:
1. Dopamine
Many popular personalities from billionaires to your random motivational speaker use dopamine to explain why we do something*. The popular example: I eat chocolate, brain releases dopamine, I feel good, I eat chocolate again. Of course, this understanding of dopamine is just wrong. Dopamine doesn't just spike after we have done or eaten enjoyable. Dopamine spikes even before we do or eat that something enjoyable. In fact, it usually spikes much more before rather than after.
The large spike of dopamine before you actually do anything enjoyable gives us important insight into how dopamine actually affects our behaviour. Dopamine isn't primarily a reward you feel for doing or eating something. Rather, it is the pleasure we feel in the pursuit of reward that has a good chance of occurring.
Think about gamblers in the casino - they don't always win, but why do they keep going back? Or let's say you posted something on social media and it gets a lot of likes. Do you feel great because of the likes, or do you feel the urge to make your next post? Same explanation for the need to constantly check email - it is because dopamine spikes before you actually open your mailbox that you are motivated (I use this word loosely - motivation in a biological sense is quite complicated) to open it.
Same thing with Dalgona Coffee. Even before you make it, you know you would probably be able to accomplish it. And it will look pretty good. And you inevitably will take a photo because you anticipate that you will get likes for your photo.
Now imagine if Dalgona Coffee is much more difficult to make - the success rate is only 30%. Or after many months of Dalgona Coffee photos, there is much less response on social media, so you expect that your next posted photo is going to get much fewer likes. The coffee tastes exactly the same, but would people still make it?
>> Find out more at our Dopamine page
*Ironically, the act itself - the persistent but inaccurate use of dopamine to justify explanations in popular culture - is a better example of dopamine than whatever is typically said.
2. Conformity
Remember this?
The ALS ice-bucket challenge. For a while on the internet, everyone was doing this. Ostensibly, it is for a good cause - awareness for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). But there are many serious diseases, and how many would actually pay attention to ALS if there wasn't such a challenge.
One of the reasons why the ice-bucket challenge was as popular as it was is explained above, with the effects of dopamine. But there's another major reason - conformity. We generally like doing what others do. Which actually is the nature of all fads. We actually go to quite incredulous extents to do what others are doing, even when we don't know why or when we know it is wrong. Find out more at our page on conformity.
3. The IKEA effect
Some of you might already be familiar with the IKEA effect. When you put in a lot of effort into doing something,
Simply put, the IKEA effect is the increased value we place on something because we have laboured. Or, we love it more if we made it. The name, of course, comes from the furniture company IKEA, who are able to charge lower prices since the customer had to assemble the furniture themselves. It turns out that there is a large and unexpected side benefit - customers, having spent some time to assemble the furniture, liked it more than if the same furniture had come already assembled.
Think about the projects that you spent a lot of time on. Or the cake which you baked. The food you cooked. Or... the Dalgona Coffee you made. Your brain tries to justify your extra effort by making you like the end-product more - I spent so much time on it, it must be great. Your Dalgona Coffee might or might not be tasty, but it tastes better because you stirred it.