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 World's Strongest Man
“I woke up in a massive pool of blood,” he recalls. “I had blood coming out of my nose, my tear ducts, my ears. I remember paramedics having to race to the scene to assist me. I had burst blood vessels in my brain during the lift. My heart rate was through the roof, my blood pressure was unreadable. I couldn’t see, I lost my vision for a few hours and for about two weeks I forgot my kids’ names. That nearly killed me”.
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Eddie Hall didn't just break the Deadlift record. He smashed it. 500kg. 1102 pounds. Half a metric tonne.
The previous record was 465kg. And the world record typically improved by 2-3kg at most each time it was broken. Eddie Hall broke it by 35kg. And he did it despite never lifting more than 457kg before that day. The story of how Hall managed this is incredible. He literally went all out to engage himself in fight or flight mode, to trigger the maximal amount of adrenaline.
He explains the incredible process behind how this was done in the video below.
(The video has been set to start at 12min 23 secs, when Hall starts discussing the deadlift attempt. The video is filmed with Brian Shaw, himself 4 times World Strongest Man).
(Adrenaline is a hormone, triggered by our sympathetic nervous system. You can find out more about hormones at the endocrinology page. You'll also find the page on fear interesting.)
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Pretty incredible huh? He practised for months and months to be able to force himself, literally, into a do-or-die situation, that shocked his body into recruiting all the muscle fibres he had.
These World Strongest Men might seem like so far removed from most of us. And because they are so outwardly distinctive - so enormous and bulky, it is easy to think of Strongmen like Eddie Hall and Brian Shaw as just big slabs of meat. But many of them are incredibly interesting people, with intriguing life-stories.
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It's hard to believe, but Eddie Hall was once earmarked by the United Kingdom as a potential Olympic Swimmer.
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He fell out of the swimming program because of disciplinary issues. In 2007, as a 19-year-old, he entered his first strongman competition. He placed 5th. On the way back home, he wrote on Facebook that he will become the Strongest Man in the World.
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9 years later, in 2016, he broke the Deadlift Record.
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10 years later, almost to the day he wrote that Facebook post, Eddie Hall won the 2017 World Strongest Man. He fulfilled his promise to himself.
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But what did it take for him to become World Strongest Man?
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“I didn’t care about my well-being. I didn’t care about anybody around me – my wife, my kids, my family, mum, dad, brothers – I didn’t give a fuck. I was training four hours a day, physio - two hours a day, stretching an hour a day, hot-cold treatments an hour a day, hyperbaric an hour a day, meditation, I was sleeping 13 hours a day. Then there was food prep and eating. Honestly, no joke, I would see my wife and kids for an hour or two a week at most. And that put so much strain on me mentally because, if I failed, all that fucking sacrifice would have been for nothing. And that in itself made me very anxious and very depressed. I was paying my wife no attention. I would fuck up Christmas, birthdays, meals out, I wouldn’t do anything because I was obsessed with Strongman."
"It just got to the point where my wife just didn’t have a husband and my kids didn’t have a dad. My son Maximus didn’t know me. I’ve got a nine-year-old daughter as well whom I don’t know. I’m getting to know her now but I didn’t because I spent so much fucking time obsessed with Strongman"
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And then there was the physical strain he went through. He tore muscles and detached ligaments. He trained so hard that once, an eye popped out of its socket. To get stronger, he needed to get heavier. He would consume 12,500 calories a day. He would have to wake up in the middle of the night just to eat. Eventually, he got up to 196kg at 1.91m. His BMI was 53.7. And it was miserable being so big.
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“Five weeks before I won World's Strongest Man 2017, my wife was basically packing her bags... she was going, she was out the house. I had to beg her to give me five more weeks just to let me win the World’s Strongest Man. I promised her I’d win it and that our life would get better. And thank fuck I won it because, honest to god, that saved my marriage. You see, because of my depression I didn’t really give a shit if I died doing it because, unless I won the World’s Strongest Man there was no point in me living anyway. In a way, it was my suicide. It was a win-win for me; if I died along the way, I died, and if I won, I’d achieve the dream."
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Does Hall's selfish pursuit turn you off? As I shared, his story was not so simple. For a long time, he suffered from depression and anxiety attacks. It's quite hard to imagine someone so big being so vulnerable, but we often make impressions that are convenient but not necessarily accurate ADD LINK LATER.
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“When I was 12 or 13 my nan was diagnosed with cancer. I was having a really hard time at school, I was thrown out of the swimming club – which was going to be my career – I was always in trouble with the police, in trouble with my parents, my family, always getting into fights and, I don’t know, it just fucking hit me hard. I got huge anxiety attacks where I couldn’t leave the house. Sometimes I just couldn’t go to school and ultimately that’s why I got expelled because, when I was there, I just didn’t want to be there. I was always in panic mode. I’d always be wanting to go to the toilet to sit on my own and just rock back and forth and just calm down and get the anxiety out. If I had to go out for a family meal or go out with mates, I’d be throwing up before I went out, I’d be that anxious. Doctors put me straight on Prozac and straight into counselling. I was on them for about four years and it did help. Then I started doing strongman and it just disappeared.”
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Strongman was an escape for Hall. There were no other alternatives that he knew of. It was the one thing he was good at. And because of that, he was able to forge the discipline he needed to do well in it, discipline - perhaps to the extent of full-blown obsession - that was previously missing. In turn, this drove him to be able to overcome all the obstacles to being able to his dream. If he had not found Strongman, well who knows what would have happened to Eddie Hall.
Hall would retire in 2018, in his prime at just age 30, for health reasons and to spend more time with his family. Was it right for Hall to have made his wife and kids go through all that they did for his own personal dream?
I would leave you to decide.
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Edit: Behind the scenes footage of the physical price it takes to pull 500kg
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