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
Transient Hypo-Frontality
Why do we get some of our best ideas in the shower?
We've all had this experience:
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You've been thinking about a problem or trying to understand something for some time.
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And it's just not working out. No solutions. No progress in understanding.
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Finally, you give up. You take a break. You go for a walk or a jog or a swim or just a shower.
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And that cliched lightbulb goes off in your head:
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You saw the problem in a way you hadn't before​
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You came up with a new idea that never struck you, no matter how hard you were thinking before. In fact, you might have developed more than one idea.
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You suddenly recalled a past concept or solution that you seemed to have forgotten
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You are able to draw links between different fields that did not seem related. Some view or advice from someone or some knowledge you learnt in the past suddenly comes to mind and can be applied to your current situation.
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Ah, you've just experienced transient hypofrontality, a concept developed by Dr Arne Dietrict
At this point, every article you can find on the internet starts making a big fuss over the name. There's nothing really that complicated about transient hypofrontality - it pretty much self-explanatory:
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Transient is a fancier word for temporary
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Hypo is a lack of (just like hypothermia is simply a lack of heat); and
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Frontality refers to our pre-frontal cortex
Recall some of the best ideas you had in life. Were you really thinking about them? Or did they just appear in your brain suddenly, they just came to you?
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Chances are, you will recall more cases of the latter.
Why is this so?
The reality is that our consciousness is merely a small part of larger machinery. Think about how even when you sleep, you produce some of the most remarkable dreams - some are quite weird, but others play out like an actual movie, transporting you to a different world.
Similarly, in coming up with an idea, we assume that we thought about it on the spot. But what usually happens is that your brain had been subconsciously thinking and wiring different concepts for some time. This wiring gets triggered when there is a stimulus like a question, and the idea comes to you.
The consciousness is merely when we become aware of what has already gone on in our heads.
When we agonise over a problem, what is also happening is that we are concentrating our brains on what is conscious to us. As this is taking place, we are leaving fewer resources for our subconscious to think, to redefine, to draw links which we might miss.
This works well if the solution we are seeking is well-defined, something we have good knowledge about, and requires concentrated thinking. But for creativity - coming up with something novel and new - concentrating too much can ironically make it worse.
If we periodically stopped concentrating on our problem, it allows for transient hypo-frontality to kick in. Remember what it means? A temporary lack of usage of our pre-frontal cortex. Or to put more crudely, taking a break from conscious thought. Let whatever you were thinking about gestate and ferment in your subconscious. And then come back to it.
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Here's an experimental example. Wharton's Adam Grant invited people to submit business ideas, which would be evaluated by an independent panel for their creativity. The people were divided into 3 groups - 1) those who had to start right away with no distractions, 2) those who could play games (i.e. minesweeper) for 5 minutes while they were thinking and, 3) those who could play minesweeper for 10 minutes. And as the picture below shows:
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People who went straight into coming up with ideas with no distractions had the least creative ideas.
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People who played the game for too long was just marginally better. But the risk of playing for too long is that your brain starts tuning in to the playing instead of the thinking.
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Those who played the game for a moderate period of time before getting back to their task was judged to be on average 16% more creative.
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By distancing ourselves from a problem for a short while, we in fact boost our ability to come up with a better answer.
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3 final things to note about transient hypo-frontality:
1) You should take a break after thinking about your problem for some time, having taken in some information. It's not going to work if you just randomly go for a walk hoping for lightning bolts of brilliance to illuminate your brain.
2) It seems to work best when you do something routine, which require little conscious thought. For example, running, swimming, taking a bath, smoking, driving, taking a walk, ironing. Something repetitive. Something easy.
3) There is individual difference in this. Some folks get better ideas when they take a walk or they go for a run. For example, I find running excruciatingly boring and meaningless, which causes me to feel frustrated and... no ideas. If I am taking a walk or driving while listening to a podcast, it also doesn't work. So I try to dedicate time to walking or driving later at night where there are fewer people/cars around, in silence, without any stimulus.