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 do you change a first impression?
We know a few things about first impressions:
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we formulate first impressions automatically. Because of the sheer amount of new experience, things, and people we encounter through life, our brains have evolved for efficiency over accuracy, to quickly find a way to categorise any new stimulus
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first impressions can be formulated by very minor observations, a single word, the other person's favourite sports team, the shirt the other person is wearing. These minor observations are then extrapolated to create a story of who this person is.
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first impressions are lasting. Once we have formulated a story about something, it becomes very difficult to change.
In particular, negative impressions have a larger bearing than positive ones. This is because we generally accept that people want to portray a good image of themselves, so good behaviour or attributes gets a discount. In contrast, bad behaviour or bad attributes are taken as a truer reflection of character, the belief being that people wold generally try not to display such attributes. Or put more simply, everyone remembers when you've been an arse.
This also means that even if we went on to demonstrate very positive behaviour after a leaving a bad first impression, these positive actions are still tainted with a negative brush, "oh he's just pretending", "I've seen his true colours", "It's trying to change my impression".
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Good grief, this sounds like a vicious cycle - if it starts bad, it stays bad.
Fortunately, there are some ways to overcome a negative first impression. We have discussed how impressions are formed based on the brain's innate preference to quickly categorise a person based on one or two observations. Correcting a negative impression requires an updating of this categorisation.
In particular, from brain scans, we are able to observe which parts of the brain are most active when updating an initial impression. These are the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the superior temporal sulcus (the names are not important). What do these regions do? Interpreting social signals. Assessing emotional cues. Story perception and story updating. Differentiating noise from information to take note of. And a measure of frequency of occurrence - something that does not happen often is weighed much more heavily.
And 2 of the most effective ways to create this updating are:
1. Abilities and competencies
Even if a person had left a bad impression, finding out about his/her abilities or competencies causes us to reassess our story of him. The more outstanding the ability or competency, the more we use this as the main heuristic to categorise someone.
For example, you might have met an older lady at work who is very conservative and bureaucratic. You hate working with someone like that, rigid and hierarchical. But one day at an office party, this lady comes out and performs the most beautiful piece on the violin. Or perhaps you find out that she's actually a gamer who is very good at the game you are playing. Or perhaps there is a problem that our department is facing, and she provides a convincing solution.
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Abilities and competence force our brains to update our assessment, because they are simple and major heuristics that we cannot ignore.
2. Selflessness
The second way to change a negative impression is a display of altruism or selflessness. When someone does something for someone else that is clearly not in his/her own best interest.
The reason behind this is also easy to understand. Almost everything we do is for ourselves- we spend most of our lives thinking and acting on what we want and don't want. The common and expected behaviour is self-centredness.
Selflessness is the direct opposite of this. It shows that person isn't thinking for himself/herself, but others. We are all capable of selfless behaviour but is much more effortful and hence rarer.
A display of elflessness forces us to reassess our initial categorisation of someone. For example, you might have a very bad impression of someone because he regularly contributes the cheapest food items for the weekly office potluck . Later, you find out that he quietly donates a large part of his monthly paycheck to charity. Or when you were getting blamed for something you didn't do, he always the only one who stood up for you even though it was obvious you didn't like him.
When we see a display of selflessness, our brain starts to ask itself, can he really be that bad? Sure he seemed a bit stingy, but he's also extremely kind even when no one else is looking. Just like we took notice of the original heuristic (stinginess) and used this to categorise someone, the new heuristic (genoristy) cannot be ignored. We recognise that the original categorisation is inaccurate, and we developed a more nuanced and layered view towards a person.
There appears to be a "minimum threshold" for selflessness. You're unlikely to change a bad impression because that person "selflessly" lends you a pen, or congratulates you for work well done when everyone else had also done so. Someone who offers you a spare umbrella, who offers to share an umbrella with you, or who shelters you while themeves getting wet is reviewed differently; all these actions keep you dry in the rain, but the cost to the other person varies widely. Our brains make an assessment of the social value and scarcity of the action.
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