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
Why do we think or behave the way we do?
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Why do we do things which we know are not good for us?
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Yet, why is it so much easier to tell others what the right thing to do is, and be disappointed when they don't do it? For example, why are there so many doctors who don't take medication, smoke, or end up obese?
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Ever known someone who
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Why do doctor Shaking a hand can be the firmest display of trust and cooperation, or it could also be the beginning of the deepest betrayal.
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The most incredibly selfish person at work who is a conniving backstabbing colleague could also be the person who donates almost all his income to charity.
One can be very kind to stray dogs, yet be very unkind to stray cats.
One can be committed to a New Year’s resolution, only to break it the very next day. And yet still
Doctors who know of their own health dont take medcation, or smoke or end up obese.
Divorce lawyers believing they will never get divorced.
We say something we were so sure of at that moment and then regret it massively – why did we ever say something like that?
The blood pressure of 2 chessmasters locked in battle
Why do we use “locked in battle”, and why do we name teams vikings, tigers, lions, bears. We might claim we dont like violence, but do we cheer for superheroes at the mvoies when they beat the villains? Will we cheer our own soldiers when they win the war? -
An act of violence can be a physical exertion, or it could be as simple as pushing a button or pulling a trigger, or it could be a carefully chosen word to hurt, or it could simply be deciding to look away and not notice what is happening.
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Human thought and behaviour is really complex, as you will soon see. Naturally, the answer is also not simple; it is not an equation but more like a jigsaw puzzle, coming in different connecting pieces.
The value of this chapter doesn't come in just the information on each piece of the puzzle, but also the frame to think about how all these pieces come together to give us the answer. So we do have to w
Why did the chicken cross the road?
Believe it or not, the problem is not that we don't have a legitimate answer. The problem is that we have too many answers that are legitimate:
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Geneticists would claim that there is "a gene" in chickens that cause them to cross a road when they see one
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Endocrinologists would claim that there is a particular hormone that causes the road-crossing behaviour
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Evolutionary psychologists would claim that over the years, chickens that cross the road were more likely to survive and reproduce. And in turn, their offspring also learnt to cross the road.
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Sociologists would claim that one day, an influential chicken crossed the road, and everyone followed, and this became a social norm.
Seconds to minutes before;
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It’s easy to see how the sight of a knife, the sound of a voice calling your name, a touch on your hand can rapidly alter your brain. 5 But crucially, tons of subliminal sensory triggers occur—so fleeting or minimal that we don’t consciously note them, or of a type that, even if noted, seems irrelevant to a subsequent behavior. Subliminal cuing and unconscious priming influence numerous behaviors unrelated to this book. People think potato chips taste better when hearing crunching sounds. We like a neutral stimulus more if, just before seeing it, a picture of a smiling face is flashed for a twentieth of a second. The more expensive a supposed (placebo) painkiller, the more effective people report the placebo to be. Ask subjects their favorite detergent; if they’ve just read a paragraph containing the word “ocean,” they’re more likely to choose Tide—and then explain its cleaning virtues. 6 Thus, over the course of seconds sensory cues can shape your behavior unconsciously. A hugely unsettling sensory cue concerns race. 7 Our brains are incredibly attuned to skin color. Flash a face for less than a tenth of a second (one hundred milliseconds), so short a time that people aren’t even sure they’ve seen something. Have them guess the race of the pictured face, and there’s a better-than-even chance of accuracy. We may claim to judge someone by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin. But our brains sure as hell note the color, real fast.
There is a point to the chicken story.
What causes us to think and act in the way we do? That's the million-dollar question, isn't it? If only we knew the answer. We can then examine how to change it, and make ourselves think and act better.
But in our eagerness to find an answer, we keep falling into the trap of accepting simple answers. We keep searching for "the gene", or "the hormone", or "the evolutionary development" that cause us to behave the way we do.
Shaking a hand can be the firmest display of trust and cooperation, or it could also be the beginning of the deepest betrayal.
The most incredibly selfish person at work who is a conniving backstabbing colleague could also be the person who donates almost all his income to charity.
One can be very kind to stray dogs, yet be very unkind to stray cats.
One can be committed to a New Year’s resolution, only to break it the very next day. And yet still
Doctors who know of their own health dont take medcation, or smoke or end up obese.
Divorce lawyers believing they will never get divorced.
We say something we were so sure of at that moment and then regret it massively – why did we ever say something like that?
The blood pressure of 2 chessmasters locked in battle
Why do we use “locked in battle”, and why do we name teams vikings, tigers, lions, bears. We might claim we dont like violence, but do we cheer for superheroes at the mvoies when they beat the villains? Will we cheer our own soldiers when they win the war?
An act of violence can be a physical exertion, or it could be as simple as pushing a button or pulling a trigger, or it could be a carefully chosen word to hurt, or it could simply be deciding to look away and not notice what is happening.