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 power of "how do you know"?
What causes stomach ulcers? How do you cure it?
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We know the answer. It's stress. Irregular meals. Spicy food. These are causes. And if we reduce or avoid these, we will be fine. And here's a graphic that we would all probably have seen (in this context, peptic ulcers are stomach ulcers)
Except this is utter rubbish.
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Stomach ulcers are almost certainly not caused by any of these factors.
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Almost all stomach ulcers are caused by the bacteria Helicobacter pylori, or more commonly known as H.Pylori.
We have Dr Barry Marshall and Dr Robin Warren to thank for this discovery. They produced some remarkable work, literally almost giving their lives for their research. Eventually and most deservedly they won a Nobel Prize in 2005. And they were able to make this discovery only because they asked a very simple question: "how do you know?"
As a young resident in the 80s, Marshall was treating gastritis with a pathologist, Robin Warren. They noticed a pattern. Stomach ulcers seemed to occur in the presence of spiral bacteria. They took a sample of this bacteria, and cultured and studied it. This bacteria will be later be named the H Pylori, which we introduced earlier. Warren and Marshall then decided to administer antibiotics that tackled the bacteria infection as a treatment for gastric ulcers. The patients recovered. Warren and Marshall believed that this was proof that H Pylori was what caused gastric ulcers.
However, Warren and Marshall found it very difficult to convince their colleagues and bosses. When they pointed out the presence of the bacteria, the community refuted that H Pylori was not the cause, but a result of the gastric ulcers. Warren and Marshall pushed back -
"How do you (the senior doctors) know that it is the effect and not the cause?"
The explanation they got was unanimous. The belief was that no bacteria could live in the stomach for long due to powerful stomach acids. Since bacteria will be eliminated quickly by stomach acids, there was no possibility that bacteria can cause ulcers. However, this belief was premised on research done many years ago, where technology was much poorer.
In 1983, Warren and Marshall submitted their findings to the Gastroenterological Society of Australia. The reviewers rated the paper in the worst 10% of those they had received. Fellow colleagues mocked and ridiculed them.
But Marshall was adamant. In 1984, Marshall had a baseline endoscopy done.
And in the ultimate demonstration of his beliefs, he then drank cultured H. pylori bacteria. He expected that the bacteria would take effect some months later. But within days, he suffered from nausea and severe vomiting. After one week, he did a second endoscopy. The endoscopy showed a grotesque sight of severe inflammation. His stomach lining was studded with stomach ulcers, filled with the H pylori bacteria. Marshall then took antibiotics and fully recovered from the stomach ulcers. He and Warren were proven right.
But as we have undoubtedly experienced in our own lives,
It's one thing to be right,
but it's quite another to persuade others they are wrong
Even when the evidence was so overwhelming, it took another 10 years before the National Institutes of Health finally stated that ulcers were almost exclusively caused by H. pylori and could be treated with antibiotics. And it was more than 20 years after Marshall had risked his own well-being, that he and Warren were awarded a Nobel Prize for their research.
Even today, there are still physicians and medical institutions recommending changes to diet and stress. as treatment for stomach ulcers, as the esteemed neuroscientist VS Ramachandran comments:
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