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
What does it mean to be rich?
What does it mean to be rich? There is no shortage of answers:
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It's the freedom to travel the world constantly
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It's about being able to buy whatever we want
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It's never having to worry whether we will be able to pay for medical bills
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It's to be able to quit when we want to, or what the author Nassim Taleb puts more crudely, "F*uck You Money"
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It's about power and status
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And the list goes on. It seems pretty obvious, more money is better. Who would reject more money?
Yet, there's the other side of the coin. We also hear of other hackneyed cliches, the likes of "money cannot buy happiness" or "the best things in life are free". Both intuitively and empirically, we know examples of people who are wealthy and unhappy, while conversely
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Below USD$75,000, people are observed to be worse-off in general. Misfortunes like ill-health, divorce, loneliness, and unemployment occur at a higher frequency and cause more stress as people do not have as much resources to do deal with them. On average, the lower-income also find life's pleasures less enjoyable, such as weekends.
This seems to corroborate with the belief that wealth is important for well-being and happiness.
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But there is a signficant flipside. Above USD$75,000, higher-income no longer leads to an increase in happiness or relief from unhappiness or stress. There was no increase in measures of emotional well-being.
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Finally, life evaluation increased with income. This is the personal evaluation of how well each person believed his/her life. However, it is very difficult to really draw any conclusions from this. Income is such a quick and convenient measure of life that is applicable to everyone, and hence it is natural that people would use income as a measure. Yet, this does not corroborate with the fact that higher income does not seem to gel with higher happiness.
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So what it? What does it mean to be rich? How do we think about wealth?
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I think that being rich fundamentally boils down to one thing.
|| Being rich is about having more choices
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Wealth means that you have a bigger pool of options to pick from. There is a greater probability that the option you want is included in this bigger pool. Being wealthy means you have more choices of what to buy, what treatments or services to seek, what careers to choose (or not choose), what functions to go to, and possibly whom you can meet and know. The availability of a bigger pool of choices brings with it side-benefits such as assurance and confidence.
Conversely, as Kahneman's study finds, below a certain point, a lack of wealth means that the pool of options is uncomfortably small. People who do not have sufficient wealth might have limited options for health services or to buy gifts for or to celebrate with their loved ones, to travel, to have access to education, to meet certain groups of people. There are always options of the rich to meet the poor, but not vice versa. The lack of choices causes stress and anxiety. The comparative lack of choices could also cause a drop in confidence.
However, it is important to consider that more options don't always mean that there are better options. For example, friendship: having good friends is more dependent on factos other than wealth .
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Sometimes, more options bring with it its own problems. In some areas, the wealthy have so many opinions they might simply pick the most obvious ones. When the wealthy are unhappy or need a pick-me-up, there is always the option of buying or trying something new. Yet one of the best things we can do when we're stressed is actually to talk to someone or to help someone.
The wealthy might also be so comfortable with all the options and assurance that wealth provides, that they fight to keep this even at the expense of other areas. For example, wealth becomes so important that people might devote most of their waking hours to the job that ensures they stay wealthy, at the expense of relationships with spouse or family members. Having the option to buy any gift might not mean as much as being able to spend time or to really devote oneself to understanding and supporting one's spouse. While the absolute poor might struggle with having to work long and hard because they have no choice, the wealthy might feel like they have no choice but to continue a certain lifestyle.
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Most crucially,
|| the number of options become less relevant if we are able to pick the right one.
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The real questions that we need to consider in life are: What is important to us. Why is it important? What are we willing to give up for these? How are we going to achieve what is important to us? In other words, the benefit of wealth - the increased number of choices, matter much less if we have thought through deeply which is the choice we want to make.