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
We are made of the stars - where atoms come from
The charismatic astrophysicist Carl Sagan once said:
“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”
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What does he mean exactly? Or was he just a scientist with poetic flair?
To understand this, we go back to a table which turns many of us off. The Periodic Table*. I know I know, it's a really ugly table filled with random letters and numbers. A lot of them. The audacity of the universe to produce so many different types. Why can't there just be oxygen and hydrogen?
Don't worry. There are just a few broad was in which atoms have formed, which are very easy to remember:
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The Big Bang produced just 3 elements - a lot of Hydrogen, a little bit of Helium, and a very tiny amount of Lithium. It is no coincidence that these are the first 3 elements on the periodic table, the 3 lightest.
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The stars that formed after the Big Bang, like our sun (our sun is a relatively tiny star), produce the next batch of elements. The heat from the star causes the initial 3 elements to fuse together, becoming bigger and heavier elements. (Btw, this is also how atomic bombs are designed, from nuclear fusion of elements). Nuclear fusion is responsible for many gases which make up a lot of our bodies, such as Oxygen and Nitrogen. This fusion of lighter elements into heavier ones can create elements all the way up to Iron (Fe on the table, atomic number 26). Iron is too heavy and dense to be created by nuclear fusion. It has to formed in a more explosive setting.
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Supernovas occur in the last moments of huge stars, where the star burns out leading to a massive supernova explosion. Supernovas are so powerful that for a short period of time, the amount of light produced from that one star is equal to the light of an entire galaxy. This explosion creates sufficient energy to produce heavier elements, Iron​, Copper, Zinc, which are our bodies also contain. We've touched on Iron as being this sort of inflexion point, where nuclear fusion no longer works. All our red blood cells contain a protein called haemoglobin; it is only with iron that haemoglobin is able to bind onto oxygen, which is needed by all our body parts. No iron, we simply cannot use the oxygen we breathe in.
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Neutron star collisions are what creates the heaviest of our elements. Neutron stars are the collapsed core of giant stars. At the end of its time, these giant stars explode in a supernova (as we covered above), and the star undergoes gravitational collapse, where the gravity of the star compresses all its matter into a super-dense core (equivalent to compressing an entire Mt Everest into one squared cm). Because of how dense these stars are, 2 neutron stars colliding creates even greater energy, that forges all these tightly packed neutrons and protons into heavier elements like Gold and Platinum. Astrophysicists often remark that there is plenty of gold in space - indeed so. In 2019, the collision of 2 neutron stars created 10,000 times the mass of Earth in gold. Most of us also have some traces of gold in us.
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So Carl Sagan wasn't making a metaphor or writing poetry. He literally means what he says that we are made of stardust. Must of our bodies come from stars, in different stages of a cosmic cycle of immense size and time. Whether it is from its burning or from its eventual death, we are made of stars, you and I.
Even though we are this tiny organism on a tiny planet, located in one of 100 billion solar systems in our Milky Way galaxy, itself one of hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe, the atoms in us might already have been to far-flung corners we would never be to reach, having existed for millions of years, and having experienced being in the cores of some of the biggest stars that no longer exist. How remarkable.
Related links:
We share the breath of every person who has ever lived
Just how big is the universe?
(quick note: in case you're wondering - what's the difference between an atom and an element? Atoms are the smallest form of matter containing protons, neutrons, and electrons; as can be seen in the chart above, each atom has a different atomic number starting from 1 (i.e. 1 proton) and going up to 118. elements contain only 1 type of atom. Read more here)