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.
​
Summary:
- Fear and anxiety (and anger + aggression) are always
Entertainment
Make this yours. Add images, text and links, or connect data from your collection.
Lifestyle
Make this yours. Add images, text and links, or connect data from your collection.
Sports
Make this yours. Add images, text and links, or connect data from your collection.
Technology
Make this yours. Add images, text and links, or connect data from your collection.
Libre Baskerville is a classic font with a modern twist. It's easy to read on screens of every shape and size, and perfect for long blocks of text.
Seconds to Minutes before:
Sensory stimuli that affects our behaviour. And once again, it is largely unconscious to us.
For example, paste a pair of eyes at a bus-stop, people litter less. flash a pair of eyes subliminally for less than 1 second when someone is playing an online game, and they cheat less, and they are more generous.
Give someone a tablespoon of something horrible tasting like cod-liver oil, and for minutes afterwards people will be more punitive about norm violations - they confuse a bad taste with a bad act. Put someone in a room and ask them to fill a poitical questionnarie. If the room has the stench o smelly garbage, people become more socially conservative, without noticing so. Your views on the economy and foreign affairs and anything else doesnt change, but different lifestyles begin to seem more disgusting, becomes wrong wrong wrong because visceral disgust alarms go off.
Sit someone on a hard wooden chair and give them resumes of job applicants, and ask them to evaluate the applicants. If you sit on a hard wooden chair, you are more likely to assess applicants as having a rigid inflexible personality.
Parole board - 5,000 parole hearings. The single bigges predictor of whether or not a prisoner got parole or not is: how many hours ahs it been since a judge had a meal. If you went to a judge right after a meal - 60% chance of being parole; 4 hours later -0% chance. The biology of this is not complicated. Blood glucose levels affect how hard your neurons can work. You brain requires a large amount of energy and resources. And what really taxes the brain? thinking from someone else's perepective, about their mitigating circumstances. that's hard work. And the biggest thng: if you ased the judge why is it that you granted this person parole and not the other, the judge isn't going to say blood glucose, he isn't even aware if this is the case. They will come up with some justification narrative, when all the wile it is the intraceptive, the internal sensory info that shapes the decision.
Put people in a brain scanner - flash faces at high speeds. And when the face of someone from a different race pops up, the amygdala activates. hardwired on a tenth of a second for a racial impulse. Same thing for someone who is a fanatical supporter of ABC baseball team. again - flash different faces of people wearing baseball caps, and again different reaction if it's someone wearing the baseball cap of an opposing team. So i's not racism. It's this culture thing we invented - "us" vs "them". And what's us and them cna change very quickly.
We are constantly buffeted and swayed by sensory information that seems irrelevant and hardly noticeable... as well as by sensory information that is entirely subliminal.
when sensory information enters the brain. Most is funneled through that sensory way station in the thalamus and then to appropriate cortical region (e.g., the visual or auditory cortex) for the slow, arduous process of decoding light pixels, sound waves, and so on into something identifiable. And finally information about it (“It’s Mozart”) is passed to the limbic system.
As we saw, there’s that shortcut from the
thalamus directly to the amygdala, such that while the first few layers of, say, the visual cortex are futzing around with unpacking a complex image, the amygdala is already thinking, “That’s a gun!
Hours to days before.
Hormones. And here we have a common hormone we blame - teststerone. Does Testosterone make you aggressive?
Again, we haven't gotten this quite right.
Hierarchy of 5 monkeys. Pump the 3rd ranked monkey with testosterone - what happens? He gets into more fights, but only with the 4th and 5th monkeys. testosterone doesn't cause aggression - testosterone exaggerates pre-existing social tendencies. When your status is being challenged, testosterone drives you to do whatever it takes to maintain your status. For example, have an economic game where winners (and hence status) is premised on how generous players are to others. And guess what, people with more testosterone become a lot more generous in the game. In other words, if you shot a whole bunch of Buddhist monks with testosterone, they would run amok doing random acts of kindness all over the place. The trouble isnt that testosterone makes us aggressive- it's that we reward aggression with status so readily.
Oxy-tocin. "grooviest hormone". Encourages parent-infant bonding, pair bonding, trust expressivity, cooperation, generosity. Give fruitflies oxytocin they become better listeners. Oxy-tocin seemigly promotes pro-social behaviour. But again if we look a little closer, we realise oxytocin does no such thing.
Netherlands, volunteers given the classic philosophical problem of the runaway trolley. trolley is hurtling down the tracks and will kill 5 people. Is it ok to push 1 person onto the tracks which will stop the trolley from killing the other 5? How you frame the problem matters. IS it ok to push a person vs pull a lever that dumps the person on the track - you get vastly different answers. But back to oxytocin. Participants were as
For example, paste a pair of eyes at a bus-stop, people litter less. flash a pair of eyes subliminally for less than 1 second when someone is playing an online game, and they cheat less, and they are more generous.
Give someone a tablespoon of something horrible tasting like cod-liver oil, and for minutes afterwards people will be more punitive about norm violations - they confuse a bad taste with a bad act. Put someone in a room and ask them to fill a poitical questionnarie. If the room has the stench o smelly garbage, people become more socially conservative, without noticing so. Your views on the economy and foreign affairs and anything else doesnt change, but different lifestyles begin to seem more disgusting, becomes wrong wrong wrong because visceral disgust alarms go off.
Sit someone on a hard wooden chair and give them resumes of job applicants, and ask them to evaluate the applicants. If you sit on a hard wooden chair, you are more likely to assess applicants as having a rigid inflexible personality.
Parole board - 5,000 parole hearings. The single bigges predictor of whether or not a prisoner got parole or not is: how many hours ahs it been since a judge had a meal. If you went to a judge right after a meal - 60% chance of being parole; 4 hours later -0% chance. The biology of this is not complicated. Blood glucose levels affect how hard your neurons can work. You brain requires a large amount of energy and resources. And what really taxes the brain? thinking from someone else's perepective, about their mitigating circumstances. that's hard work. And the biggest thng: if you ased the judge why is it that you granted this person parole and not the other, the judge isn't going to say blood glucose, he isn't even aware if this is the case. They will come up with some justification narrative, when all the wile it is the intraceptive, the internal sensory info that shapes the decision.
Put people in a brain scanner - flash faces at high speeds. And when the face of someone from a different race pops up, the amygdala activates. hardwired on a tenth of a second for a racial impulse. Same thing for someone who is a fanatical supporter of ABC baseball team. again - flash different faces of people wearing baseball caps, and again different reaction if it's someone wearing the baseball cap of an opposing team. So i's not racism. It's this culture thing we invented - "us" vs "them". And what's us and them cna change very quickly.
We are constantly buffeted and swayed by sensory information that seems irrelevant and hardly noticeable... as well as by sensory information that is entirely subliminal.
The days are long but the months and years fly by.
What does the world need? Well, the only thing that is broken is human beings, every other thing is fine (isn't it?)
A PhD gives you knowledge but takes away 70% of your intelligence. You become a knwoledgeable idiot.
Are you prepared for the university or the universe?
Entertainment
Make this yours. Add images, text and links, or connect data from your collection.
Lifestyle
Make this yours. Add images, text and links, or connect data from your collection.
Sports
Make this yours. Add images, text and links, or connect data from your collection.
Technology
Make this yours. Add images, text and links, or connect data from your collection.