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
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1. Fear, like all other emotions, simply happens to you. You don't need to tell your brain to feel scared. Your brain decides that for you.
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It's quite likely that at least one of the photos above freaked you out a bit. In fact, the collage of 3 photos you see above are of Philippe Petit, who walked across the twin towers 110 storeys high, over an inch-thick wire, with no safety equipment. The movie re-enactment "The Walk", literally made moviegoers leave the cinemas in fear; several ended up in bathrooms, generously introducing their semi-digested meals to unsuspecting sinks. Quite the sensational story.)
But also notice how it happened. You didn't need to tell your brain to feel fear.
Here's the interesting bit though. You are safe and sound where you are. It's not likely that some bug or snake or spider or ghost is going to attack you. And you are in no danger of falling off a building. And all these people in the photos above survived unscathed. Furthermore, fear strikes even when we know it is coming. The moviegoers above knew that they were going to watch scenes of a guy walking across a wire at extreme heights - yet they still got scared out of the cinema.
So why do you feel fear, even when we are safe, even when we know what is going to happen next? How can this be possible?
This brings us back to the Amygdala, the part of our brain dedicated to fear.
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Your brain has an established process* to accurately determine information. For example:
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when we see something, the signal from our eyes is sent to the Thalamus.
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The Thalamus is like a central control - all incoming information goes through the Thalamus.
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The Thalamus then decides which is the most suitable part of the brain to process this information, so that we can accurately make sense of it.
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In this case, since the signal comes from our eyes, the Thalamus sends the info to the visual cortex.
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But this process can be hijacked! When we see something that seems dangerous, for example, a snake, the Thalamus might decide that it would take too long to go through the normal process.
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Because there might be danger, the Thalamus decides to send the signal straight to the Amygdala (as we have learnt, the Amygdala processes fear, anger, aggression, and anxiety).
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The Amygdala can also process incoming information, but with much less accuracy. It is far more likely to perceive something as dangerous, so that your body is jolted into action to run away from the danger.
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The normal process that determines information is hijacked by the Amygdala - Accuracy is sacrificed for speed, so that faster, more urgent action can be taken.
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*Click here for a more comprehensive version of what happens when we see something, and how the amygdala hijack happens.
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The Amygdala Hijack is aptly displayed in the gif above. The lady was invited to be part of an animal show at the zoo. As part of the show, guests are given the chance to interact with animals up-close. One segment has zookeepers bringing out a large python- you can the lady's reaction. If the lady were to review this scene, she would realise she was in no danger - no zoo would have a routine where guests could be harmed; besides, there were so many people around including many zookeepers, and pythons are not aggressive animals. But as you can see, the fear had already kicked in, and it's "Danger! Danger! Run Away! Run!!!"
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In other words, the Amygdala Hijack is sort of a "better safe than sorry" policy. It would rather you run away (even to later realise that the danger was not real) than to risk not acting fast enough and getting harmed or killed. This explains why we jump when someone throws a rubber toy snake at us, or why we feel scared when we see a picture of a spider or watch a movie that deals with heights. In reality, we are not in danger.
But our reactions, our thoughts, and our behaviours are based on our perception of reality rather than reality itself. And our perception of reality is biased towards safety rather than accuracy.
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Is it really dangerous for us to try something we've never done before or to make a big change in our lives? That's something we have to figure out for ourselves. What we really must avoid though, is to be paralysed by our fears;
our fears which come so very naturally and quickly before we even realise;
our fears which are based on our perceptions rather than actual reality;
our fears which are very convincing, that wants us to always take the safest route even when there is no danger.
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