Writing about overcoming fear is hard. It’s a giant beast. It touches every level of our being; physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. As any one who’s tried to detangle a ball of yarn knows, it’s not enough to pull at one string and do the trick…but we’ve got to start somewhere.
To be clear: fear is a necessary impulse. It exists to keep us alive. If you’re seconds away from a car accident, the last thing you want is a “wait and see” attitude. So we are dealing with a perfect evolutionary mechanism. We would not have survived without fear. However, our current urban style of living is only a few hundred years old, compared to millions of years of hunter-gatherer evolution. So while we may not need the ability to sense a tiger in the jungle, or sense when a neighboring tribe is coming to steal our food supply, our brain is equipped with these instinctive responses. That’s why when you see there’s only one bagel left at Starbucks and you have 5 people in front of you, you start to panic. Your brain feels its food supply is being threatened.
Mechanisms
The oldest part of your brain is called the reptilian brain. This manages your autonomic systems: heartbeat, breathing, temperature, hunger, procreation. Then there is the emotional brain, which processes memories, emotions, judgements. And then the “newest” part of the brain – the cognitive brain – which manages language, reason, hierarchical decision making. (Fun fact here: your cognitive brain doesn’t finish developing until 20-25 years old, which explains our more instinctual behavior leading up to that age). In the face of a fear stimulus, where “survival” is threatened, your reptilian brain takes over & SHUTS OFF your cognitive brain. This is the famous fight/flight/freeze syndrome. Think about one time when you were terrified & then a few hours later thinking about your behavior or actions. We can feel like completely different people.
What do we mean by survival?
Let’s consider for a moment Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The most basic is physiological needs: food, water, air, sleep. It’s difficult for many of us, obviously excluding those that live in severe hardship, to think about the possibility of not surviving due to absence of food. We simply walk into the grocery store which is frequently overstocked with an abundance of luxury foods. But if you’ve identified a product in your mind as “my” food and someone else takes it, or they’re sold out of it, or you don’t know when it will arrive…this is enough to trigger your reptilian brain. The food you decided you needed to survive has been threatened. “Hangry” is a thing. You know that person who freaks when you touch their plate? You’re threatening them.
The second rung is safety, security. If the first step was about surviving day by day, this step is about being able to survive over time. Shelter, health, material goods & storage of them. To an earlier version of mankind this meant firewood, today it means money. A person who lives paycheck to paycheck can be stuck in a hyperstate of fear because they can’t get to the second step. But a very wealthy man who has to hand over money to taxes/divorce will have the same fight/flight/freeze response. Because what we equate with safety is being taken away from us.
Now, the emotional brain, the part with the memories, adds a layer of complexity to this. This too, as an evolutionary tool, was meant to help us remember situations that had put us in danger, or remember how to respond in the face of that same danger. But here’s where the brain is tricky. It creates associations. Kind of like casting a wide “cover your ass” net. In a seminal 20th century fear conditioning research, scientists were able to create a fear response in a child about white bunny rabbits. But the fear response extended to ANYTHING that was white and fluffy, not just rabbits. You see how this can get tricky in modern life.
Consider this quote from a book called Attitudes & Attitude Change:
“Regardless of whether research participants were presented with familiar or novel stimuli…response latencies for deciding whether the stimulus was good or bad were BELOW ONE SECOND. This suggests that determining favourability may be an automatic process.”
We have subconscious mechanisms that determine for us in less than a second whether something is good or bad. Some of these mechanisms are physiological, as we’ll see in a moment, and others are conditioned.
The image you believe you are seeing of the world is a piece-by-piece sequential reconstruction of hierarchical visual information. Where you are not able to focus your visual attention, the brain fills in the rest based on its memory of what has proved to be useful in the past (notice that I didn’t say accurate). Have a look at the image above and tell me what it says. Around the 2nd to 3rd time you process it, chances are you’ll read The Cat. But that’s not what’s written there, is it?
Just as your brain did with that exercise, it does the same with nearly everything else in your life. Your likes, your judgements, & your fears. It fills in the blanks with acquired information that it deems useful.
Fear conditioning
Where does this information come from? That’s the fun part.
We have two ways of reasoning: objective and subjective. Let’s define objective reasoning as conclusions, based in fact, drawn time & again through direct empirical experience. If I touch a candle flame, I burn myself. If it rains, I get wet. Subjective reasoning are conclusions drawn from an inferred flow of information: opinion, assumptions, predictions & judgements: that girl looks like she’s mean, that food isn’t going to taste good, today’s going to be a bad day, mom said that’s not a good choice for me. It’s easy to confuse subjective & objective reasoning, because the brain accepts them both to be true….unless we consciously tell it not to.
In order to help you through the day easier, the brain stores all of that information to be immediately accessed. We would be very inefficient beings if every day we had to re-decide everything. So our “conclusions database” contains both direct & indirect information. If you had an unpleasant time in a new restaurant, your brain archives that as a “bad experience” (regardless of the number of variables that could potentially have drawn a different conclusion). So when that restaurant comes to mind as an option, your instinct is “mmmh, bad choice.”
Here’s where things get tricky – remember I spoke about associations yesterday? If you see a completely different restaurant that in some way, shape, sense or form re-minds you of the original restaurant, your brain can suggest that you won’t like the new one either, even though you haven’t tried it.
Let’s take this one step further. Imagine you live in a community where everyone – whether they’ve eaten there or not – tells you that restaurant is bad. You’re going to believe them right? I mean why would they lie to you? So your brain deposits that as a conclusion as well.
Remember Maslow’s Hierarchy? The third rung is belonging, being accepted by a community. Anthropologically speaking, survival in numbers is easier than alone. Our fear instinct – of being kicked out of the tribe – will encourage us to follow the status quo without question. In modern times there is more active choice in the tribe, but the brain mechanism is the same. Even in “alternative” tribes there are accepted rules, behaviors, beliefs, and costumes.
This combination of beliefs, direct, indirect, inherited & associated, are what forms the basis for what you consider to be“safe” and what you consider to be “in danger”. Your archive of memories adds a trigger mechanism for your reptilian brain. The reptilian brain goes into effect in front of the threat. The memory helps it get there a few seconds before the threat happens. This is what we talk about when we say you’ve been “triggered”. You flip the switch to fire.
We create stronger memories for situations that have greater emotional salience for us. So if you stub your toe and it kind of hurts, your brain isn’t affected enough to save that as Class A offence. But that time you had to speak in the auditorium & something made the kids laugh? (Rejection from the tribe) That’s going to leave a serious impression.
You will – selectively – remember pieces of that memory & make a bunch of associated conclusions on what needs to be avoided in the future so that situation never repeats itself again. School is bad. I’m not smart. Public speaking is bad. People will laugh at me. They were laughing at my clothes because they’re cheap. I wont’ be poor in the future. These are what we call conditioned fear responses. You see how quickly they spiral out of control into very unnecessary and dramatic defence mechanisms?
Fear is usually in response to one of the steps on Maslow’s hierarchy. So you may feel threatened at a level of
-basic survival – food, air, water
-security – work, money, house, finances
-belonging – acceptance into a group, friends, family
-esteem – personal respect, appreciation
-self-actualization – the ability to achieve your dreams
If you pay attention to the nightly news, they use fear conditioning to keep you hanging on through the commercials. You know those bumpers that say “When we come back, see if the baby food your using may actually be harming your baby.” A sentence like this will light up almost all of your fear elements.
They do this because it’s the most effective way to keep you hooked. Pay attention to the advertising around you as well & see how actively every thing in your life is trying to scare you all day. Dealing with our own family & personal fear conditioning is hard enough, when all of society is trying to keep us on an emotional roller coaster, the problem becomes enormous…& harmful.
Organisms that stay in a heightened state of fear become paranoid, anxious, begin to color the present & the past negatively, & tend towards impaired ethical decisions…all in the name of self-preservation. This fear is then shared with everyone in that person’s ecosystem. It’s fundamental that we get a handle on this.
How to get a handle on it.
How to recognize when you’re scared? We’ve talked about our instincts & how they translate into fight/flight/freeze behavior. When you are not in an actual life threatening situation, if you find yourself being aggressive (fight), avoidant (flight), or immobile (freeze)….there is a fear at the root.
Remember our brain has been running the show since we were born, & for most of us, without a boss. It’s kind of like giving the keys to an intern to run Apple. So the first thing we want to do is let our brain know that it has a boss. What this means is that you start to observe its work. (I talked about this in my piece about What you focus on).
Notice when you get aggressive, avoidant or immobile. When you see it, pay attention immediately & ask yourself/your brain…Why? Why are you attacking that person? Why won’t you go to the dinner? Begin to be present in the situation. The simple act of consistently disassociating from the ingrained behavior mechanism creates a different dynamic. Try & drill down deeper than just the reaction to what’s actually behind it. Keep asking why, your brain will provide the answer.
You want to actually talk to your fear. Speak to your fear as if you were speaking to a helpless child (because that’s what it is). The first thing you do is thank it. Thank your fear for looking out for you, for its best intentions, for trying to help…..but you’ve got this now.
Then look around you & call out a number of things that can confirm to your brain that you are safe. We’re sitting in our office chair, there is no one attacking us, we’re going to see some friends later. You need to talk it down from its ledge & what it wants is to know is that it’s going to survive.
You then want to engage your prefrontal cortex by giving yourself a question to solve. What should I make for dinner tonight? How do planes stay in the air? What do nuns wear at the beach? What’s 625×125? Give it anything else to think about.
Once you’re out of your fear state, look at the situation that provoked it again. Try & think of alternative responses, meanings, conclusions to the same situation. Are we sure they said what we thought they said? Is it possible we could have fun at the dinner? Even if we did fail would it be fun to try? Flip the situation from an attack into an opportunity.
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Greatness awaits!
