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
Fear is so wired in us we can literally smell it
It's a terrible cliche used in some of these terrible Hollywood movies. There's a villain hunting down his victims, and he declares:
"I can smell your fear".
​
Wow ok. Cringe.
​
The only thing is... it's somewhat true. You can actually smell fear.
​
In this study, Dr Lilianne Mujica-Parodi et al:
-
Taped absorbent pads to the armpits of 20 first-time skydivers – 11 men and nine women. These pads were placed to soak up the sweat of these new sky-divers before they leapt from the plane and as they fell.
-
The team then taped the same type of absorbent pads on the same individuals, to soak up the sweat as they ran on a treadmill for a similar duration at the same time of day they had made their jump.
​
So one type of sweat, from skydiving, was emotional, namely fear and anxiety.
The second type of sweat, from running, was simply from physical exertion.
The team transferred the two types of sweat to nebulisers and asked volunteers in a brain scanner to breathe it in. The volunteers were, of course, not told about what they were breathing in and whom it came from.
And what were the results?
When volunteers "smelled" the sweat of pure physical exertion, there was no obvious effect in ther brains except for those related to olfaction (or smell).
But when volunteers "smelled" the sweat from fear of skydiving, the brain scanner records activities in the amygdala and hypothalamus. You should know by now that the amygdala is the part of the brain responsible for fear, anger, anxiety, and aggression. And the hypothalamus is the brain centre that gives the command for hormones to be produced, in response to the fear that was sensed.
​
It's crucial to also point out that the volunteers could not consciously distinguish between the 2 types of sweat. They rated both types of sweat as mild and not offensive.
But amazingly, although we can't tell the difference, our brains can. It is able to tell, just from a little bit of sweat, whether someone was fearful or not! And in turn, this sparked our own fear centre, the amygdala, which also triggers the release of more hormones. We become slightly more anxious, edgier, and defensive.
​
And this goes to show just how much of our brain works without us knowing. There are many factors unknown to us, that affects what sort of thoughts we come up with and what reactions we have. But because we can only be aware of what we are aware of, we think it is because of our own conscious processing that we develop that thought or had that reaction. And we then come up with a story to explain why or what we did.
Check out:
-
Our chapter on stories - how we create stories to explain the world
-
Holding a warm cup makes us think that someone has a warmer personality
-
One small window every month, the same person looks better to us, even if we can't explain why
​
Emotional
Sweat collected from first-time skydivers who experience a range of emotions before and during jumping
Physical
Sweat collected from the same people who go through a purely physical experience of running on a treadmill