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
The difference between winners and losers
Is there a difference between winners and losers? Is there something that just makes some people "winners" in life?
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It turns out, there is.
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Before we get to this, let's take a look at the picture below. This is commonly referred to as the tube test.
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- 2 rats are placed in a single tube. Rats naturally only go forward, unless they are physically forced backwards.
- The 2 forward-moving rats eventually meet at the centre of the tube.
- And this is when a pushing contest develops. The 2 rats start to push each other until one starts pushing the other backwards, all the way out of the tube.
- We call the rat that pushes the other out the winner; the rat that gets pushed out the loser.
Stay tuned, the exciting bits are coming up.
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We notice a few things about winners and losers.
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winners tend to keep on winning, while losers tend to keep on losing. (There are many, many papers on this, I've attached just one here, for information)
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Here you might argue that it has to be something innate about the rats - some are stronger or just have a winning mentality. But this is not true. The experiment has been repeated so many times over the years controlling for many variables. Experimenters had chosen rats from a similar genetic strain, and almost always control for environmental factors like upbringing, food, the cages they were in, the interaction they had before the test, and so on. But the results are very consistent. The biggest determinant of whether a rat wins or not is the results of the previous test.
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More importantly, it doesn't matter if the winning or losing outcome is engineered.
Experimenters can push a rat from behind, making it the winning rat. And it goes on to display the same winning tendency in subsequent trials. The win doesn't need to come from itself - even if it had a lot of help along the way, or even if it won only because of experimenters' help, it doesn't matter - it becomes a winner.
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These observations on winners and losers have been made for over 30 years. But it is only with recent advances in neuroscience that we've been able to more deeply understand what is happening. This understanding is the crux of this chapter.
Terrific work by Zhou et al show a major difference between the brains of winners and losers (this paper is worth reading). A specific brain region in the pre-frontal cortex (for those interested, the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC)) triggers at the point of competition. If you overstimulate the dorsomedial prefrotnl cortex ( you do so by inducing small amounts of electrical current), losers become winners. Conversely, if you shut this region off (you do so by magnetic scanning), winners become losers.
What does this brain region do? Most of the time, stress is debilitating, making us feel troubled and worried, preventing us from taking our next step. This brain region, however, leverages on the stress and agitation created. It redirects this build up so that the animal becomes more compelled to moving forward. (If you're interested in the technicalities, read more in this article)
It turns out that this forward motion is absolutely critical. When we feel fear or stress, one of the best ways to alleviate it, to feel less fearful and less stressful, is simply to take the next step, the next constructive action moving forward. Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman explains:
"When you move forward towards a threat, and it’s not always a physical threat of the sort like a big object coming at you or moving across a narrow beam across heights over between two buildings; it can also be public speaking; it can be confronting an irate boss in an intelligent way, in an adaptive way. But the forward movement itself revealed something really interesting to us - moving forward is a high anxiety, high arousal response. And yet when an animal or a human takes that step forward, it triggers what we call a courage circuit - the activation of the release of a neurochemical called dopamine. We often simply dopamine as a reward mechanism, making us feel good when we do something. But dopamine also tends to reinforce; it changes the structure of neural circuits so that we’re more likely to engage in that behavior again. In part, because it’s desirable, but in part, because the circuit itself gets wired up in a way that it’s more likely to get triggered in the future."
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This winning mentality translates to other areas outside the tube-test. It translates to social dominance. If we take 2 rats - one winner and one loser - and put them in a cold enclosure, with just one tiny spot heated up by a table lamp. The "winning" rat is always the one that gets the best position under the lamp.
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So, a few major takeaways from all of us from the understanding of these tube-test experiments.
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Winning breeds winning. A previous winning experience is critical for future winning chances. It fundamentally rewires our brain, leveraging on instead of being crippled by stress, to move forward and take action.
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But winning can be engineered. Sometimes we win not because we are better than someone else, but we had more help, or more luck, or more resources.
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At a broad societal level, this raises all sorts of questions on equality of opportunities. But that's a bigger discussion for another time.
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More importantly, at an individual level, we can help others we care about "win" by simply believing in them and giving them a figurative push. Similarly, it is so precious to be able to find folks who will do the same for you.
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One way for us to overcome our fears or a stressful situation is simply to plan out how to move forward, no matter how small this step is.
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Related Links:
How we achieve our most difficult goals
Fear-setting
Pre-frontal cortex
Why we should help others when we are stressed
Dopamine - almost always misunderstood
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