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
Asch experiment
Which of the lines are the same as line X (on the left, in the picture above)? The obvious answer is B. It is unambiguous. No one could have gotten this wrong.
Er, but what if you were in a room and everyone else said A or C? Would you still be convinced that the answer is B?
Would people be able to go against the majority, when they are very sure they are right?
Solomon Asch aimed to find out. In the Asch experiment, each participant is joined by 8 other "participants" - these 8 are actors planted by the experimenter to give the wrong answer. The real participants were of course not aware that the others were actors. Each real participant answered 6th in order, having heard 5 wrong answers before.
The experimenter asked a total of 12 questions, similar to the one above, with obvious, indisputable answers. What results did Asch find?
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50% of people gave the same wrong answer as the others on more than half of the trials.
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76% of participants denied their own logic at least once, following the blatantly false judgement of others on at least one of the 12 trials.
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5% always conformed with the majority incorrect opinion (I presume we all have someone like this in our lives)
Asch interviewed the real participants after the experiment, interested to find out what influenced their decision making. Their answers should sound familiar:
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All of them were anxious and feared disapproval from others. Everyone became more self-conscious
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Most admitted that they had seen a different answer, but eventually thought that so many in the group must be correct.
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Some said they went along with the group to avoid standing out, although they knew the group was wrong.
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A small number of people actually said they saw the lines in the same way as the group.
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We have repeatedly explored how much we are wired for survival. The Asch experiment reveals another deep-rooted mindset that we have evolved to carry - if everyone else is doing something, we tend to quickly come to the conclusion it is the right and safer thing to do. By following what everyone else is doing, we have a sort of insurance policy.
However, while conforming to the majority worked well in human history, and is quite often a useful heuristic in decision-making, the Asch experiment shows that blindly following others does not always work.
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In fact, most major breakthroughs occur because someone didn't follow the majority. And if we are to write our unique life stories, we would necessarily have to decide and act for ourselves.
How can we do this? Read more about the "Growth Mindset and the disconfirming evidence theory"
Further info about the Asch experiment
Solomon Asch, an esteemed psychologist, was influenced by the work of Muzafer Sherif's Robbers-Cave Experiment (super interesting, read more here). The Robbers-Cave experiment found that when people were faced with making a decision on something they not sure of, they used others' judgement as a reference.
Asch wanted to find out, what if people were sure of the answer? Would the judgement of the majority still be used as a reference point? As we have seen, for most of us, at least some of the time, the answer is yes.
The findings of this study were startling and drove other psychologists to experiment further. More findings:
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Asch later found that if the participant only had to write down their answer (while others called theirs out) conformity was reduced to 12.5%.
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Deutsch and Gerard (1955) though gathered conformity rates of 23% even in conditions of high anonymity and high certainty about the answer.
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"Conformers" typically have high levels of anxiety, low status, high need for approval and often authoritarian personalities.
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Cultural differences also matter. People from cultures which view conformity more favourably – typically Eastern societies – are more likely to conform.
Related links
Conformity - sometimes we want to be sheep
How to get someone to agree with you even if you have different views?
We fear what we are not good at
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