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
How to accomplish your most ambitious goals
"I am still that C- student. I'm still that kid who can't settle down and focus for more than 5 or 10 minutes at a time. And I remain a guy who possesses no special gift of talent or skill. All I do is take really big, ambitious projects that people seem to marvel at, break them down to their simplest form, and then just make marginal improvements along the way to improve my odds of achieving them."
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As a student, Stephen Duneier found himself struggling, unable to concentrate and focus on school work. He began to wonder if life ahead would be a difficult one.
Yet, he would emerge with top academic honours, became a very successful trader, and just a few examples of a ridiculously long list ... picked up auto-racing, helicopter flying, rock-climbing, skydiving, aerobatic plane flying, learning German, hiking, losing weight, uni-cycling, parkour, performing at comedy clubs, drumming, ballroom dancing. Oh, and also knitting... which eventually led to the Yarnbomber movement and a Guinness Book of Record for the world's largest crocheted Granny Square.
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How did he manage to achieve all these in one lifetime? And how did he pick so many skills while working full-time and being a father 2 children?
Well, through the realisation that learning and accomplishing anything does not come from one piece of major action; instead, it comes from breaking the goal down into small slices and consistently making correct micro-decisions to complete each slice.
Here's an example of how he broke down the task of losing 25 pounds:
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He chose not to sign up for a gym membership or swear off foods he loved, because he knew he couldn't do those.
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Instead, he thought about the habits and passions he already had - a habit of walking daily for about an hour and a passion for the outdoors
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He endeavoured to combine his habit (walking) and passion(outdoors) - to hike all 33 trails in the front country of Santa Barbara Mountains where he lived. He had never hiked before in his life.
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Then he further broke this endeavour into smaller pieces.
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He didn't think of the task as finishing all the 33 trails. He didn't even think about the task at the level of finishing 1 trail. He broke it down even further.
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He started with the most basic and smallest unit of action: when he was lying on the couch at the end of the day watching TV, or scrolling through his Facebook, that was the first unit of action that he needed to make the right micro-decision on:
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​Stop whatever he was doing and put on his hiking clothes
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And then to follow- up with the making the right micro-decisions for each subsequent slice of action:
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​Walk out of and shutting the front door
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Walk to the car and drive to the trail-head
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Get out of the car and take 1 step
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And then a second, and a third step and a fourth step.. until he completes the hike
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Every single action is a micro-decision that needs to be made correctly. If one decision is not made correctly, then nothing happens. But it helps that each decision is small and achievable.
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By the end of the year, he hiked all 33 trails at least twice.
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He lost the 25 pounds
Duneier didn't focus on the big goal. He might not have been able to achieve his goal if he didn't break it down into mini-steps. Instead of trying to tackle the big goal - he focussed on making every one of those tiny decisions right.
This was the very same strategy that Duneier used to learn and accomplish all his other goals in life, in so many different fields. You can find out more about what he did in his Ted Talk above.
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This idea of breaking tasks into small actionable steps is wisdom in many cultures.
In Dao De Jing, Lao Tze wrote that "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. However big the things you are doing, see the small. If you draw a line with a brush and scrutinise it, you will see the line is made of up countless tiny dots. Missing any of these dots makes the line incomplete."
The Japanese advocate the method of Kaizen: no matter what is the task, to just work at it for 1 minute.
We also see ultra-endurance athletes completing seemingly insurmountable distances to tiny micro-chunks - and to just make it the next chunk, and the next and so on.
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The impact of micro-achievements
The impact of micro achievements are easily underestimated. But these 3 examples show otherwise:
Are the small changes really enough to make a big difference?
Adapted from Stephen Duneier's TedX Tuscon talk: "How to Achieve your most ambitious goals"
Novak Djokovic went from being ranked 650th in 2004 to world number 1 in 2011. During this time, he went from winning about half his matches to 90% of his matches.
It would have seemed like such an intimidating challenge to go from 650th to world number 1, and to win almost every time he played.
But if you notice, as World Number 1 with a 90% winning record, he won "just" 6% more points than when he was ranked 650th.
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Of course, this "just" 6% is not easily accomplished - but it shows that the difference between the very best and everyone else is not quite as large as we would imagine it to be.
Adapted from Jamesclear.com
This graph, showing the power of compounding, is often used in the world of financial investments. But the power of compounding can be applied to our daily lives. Of course, there is an element of sophistry in this graph - but it highlights how just small improvements or small regressions can accumulate into huge margins.
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“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”
Bill Gates
How Great Britain completely reversed their fortunes in cycling by focusing on the smallest changes. Read more here.