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
Different types of intelligence
How exactly do the forces in the universe work? For example, you are just made up of atoms. Why do you not break apart? But wait a minute, why do some bodies that are also of atoms break apart? And what about light? There are no atoms in light. So is it different from us?
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Understanding and explaining the physical universe is a mindblowing task. And generation after generation of physicists have tried to do so.
Among the most influential, Max Planck. Even if you are not familiar with physics, Planck doesn't really need that much of an introduction. This was the man who is widely considered the father of quantum theory - how atoms and sub-atomic particles interact and work.
Planck was also the man who immediately recognised Einstein paper on Special Relativity, and in fact, improved upon it. Without Planck, Einstein might never have gotten the influence need to push through his other ideas. Einstein himself had this to say: “Planck's work is the basis of all 20th-century research in physics and has almost entirely conditioned its development ever since.”
One last thing about Planck. He was a true scientist. He believed in facts and rejected speculation. But when new research proved him wrong, he would change his mind and support it fully, no matter how revolutionary the idea was. Fellow Nobel Prize Winner Max Born said this about Planck: "he was, by nature, a conservative mind; he had nothing of the revolutionary and was thoroughly skeptical about speculations. Yet his belief in the compelling force of logical reasoning from facts was so strong that he did not flinch from announcing the most revolutionary idea which ever has shaken physics."
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There was however one big problem that confounded this brilliant but open-minded scientist. Not all of his colleagues were the same. In fact, Planck observed, what is now known as Planck's Principle, that:
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"Science progresses one funeral at a time.
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents
and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents
eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it"
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While Planck could wrap his head around the most challenging problems known to man, and he himself was open-minded to accept new scientific findings even when these contradicted his own views, he could not persuade others to do the same. He solved some of the hardest problems, but could not solve the problem of how to convince others to accept new facts.
We now introduce our second character, Dale Carnegie.
Carnegie was born to a farming family, but what he was really good at, was understanding how to communicate with people. From a young age, he also developed an interest in debate and public speaking.
His first real job out of the farm was in sales, and he was very successful. He had that knack of convincing others to buy his products. But what he wanted to do was public speaking, which he eventually went back into, starting at the YMCA. Again, he was a popular public speaker.
Where he really found tremendous success was as an author. In particular, his book, "How to win Friends and Influence People", despite being written 84 years ago, is one most-read books of all time, selling over 30 million copies.
I confess that I had resisted reading the book for a long time. I thought it resembled the sort of overly-positive, scientifically blasphemous, over-simplified, and manipulative book that everyone bought because everyone else had bought it.
But having finally read it, it matches what neuroscientists have known, or as Carnegie puts it:
"When dealing with people, remember you are not
dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotions".
The essence of the book is very simple. Don't just think of what you want and don't want in a negotiation or a relationship, because everyone else is innately inclined to do the same. Instead, if we can just manage to be interested in the other party, think from their perspective, and appeal to the innate biases and emotions of people, this would lead to far better outcomes.
Dale Carnegie had an intuitive sense that to convince people, it is not about how accurate our facts are, but people's reactions to it.
Our favourite little rider on the big wild elephant analogy comes in useful here: the little rider is our conscious reasoning, and the big wild elephant is all our unconscious intuition and emotions. The mistake we make is that we often think the little rider is the one in charge and we try to engage, when really what we should be doing is to first appeal to the big wild elephant.
So here we have 2 giants who demonstrated tremendous intelligence in 2 different areas.
Max Planck was able to pull humanity forward in the realm of theoretical physics, a very difficult area of work.
Dale Carnegie on the other hand, showed us a way to tackle another very difficult area - how to convince people.
Related links:
Why it is so difficult to convince others?
How can we convince others if facts don't work?
People still wouldn't believe us even when we physically demonstrated it.
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