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
Are emotions bad? Wouldn't it be better if we were completely rational?
In the TV and film series Star Trek, one of the protagonists, Spock, was valued for his ability to make every decision based on pure rationality, without any emotional influence. And this is a view often perpetuated in society. Emotions are seen as a pollutant in proper decision making. It is volatile, it makes us pick the wrong decision, the types we regret. It prevents us from seeing a clear picture.
"If only we could be like Spock."
"If only we could be more rational and less emotional."
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But is this true? Are emotions bad? And would we be better off without emotions?
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Before we answer these questions, 2 quick points:
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1) In reality, it is not possible to separate emotions and rationality. One of the most prominent neural links in our brain is the link between the centre of rationality - the pre-frontal cortex, and the centre of emotions - the amygdala. The 2 centres mutually influence each other, regularly, quickly, and continually. In fact, the pre-frontal cortex has an important part (if you're interested - the ventromedial pre-frontal cortex) dedicated solely to interface with parts of the brain that deals with our emotions. (We are in the process of updating a new chapter on the interaction between the rational and emotional parts of our brain - do check back for updates!)
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2) Before we tackle our questions, we should first understand what emotions are. In general, all emotions carry these characteristics:
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It is triggered by a stimulus
The stimulus could be a thought or an experience. For example, you worked long hard for a project - and it fails. But it doesn't need to actually happen - just thinking and imagining the project failing is sufficient to trigger emotions. -
It happens quickly, automatically and subconsciously
The failure makes us feel sad. We don't need to tell ourselves to feel sad... it just happens. Just like we don't need to tell ourselves, hey, you won the lottery, time to feel happy. -
It has an amplification effect
While the emotion happens subconsciously, when you become conscious of it*, it hits you and has an impact on you. It makes you want to take some action or have some response. -
We cannot control the triggering of emotions (in the short term), we can only control our response to the emotion
We will almost always feel sadness with every failure. We can't change this in the short-term. But we can control the secondary response - failure isn't pleasant but we shouldn't feel too bad; instead, we can focus on the lessons we can learn and improve on.
(*for those who are more familiar with this, especially of the work of scientists like Damasio, you will know that emotions and feelings are different. There is an important technical difference, but this difference does not affect this discussion, and I have chosen not to over-complicate the explanation.)
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"In short, emotions are our quick, natural,
and subconscious reactions to stimuli.
They shout out to us that something is important,
and we should look at it.
We can't change our emotions,
we can only our response."
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Great. Now that we have gotten these out of the way, we can answer the questions:
Are emotions bad?
Wouldn't it be better if we could just be completely rational?
Emotions are not bad for us. They are not only necessary, they are meaningful.
1. At the most basic level, our emotions have kept us alive and allowed humans to still be around
This happens in 2 ways:
First, the oft-repeated sabretooth tiger story. Your ancestors were lying on grasslands about to go to sleep when they catch sight of a blur in the bushes. Suddenly, they bolt upright and prepare to start running. It could be a sabretooth tiger on the prowl. Amazingly, our brains can recognise threats and instil fears even before we are consciously aware of what we saw.
If we were completely rational and without emotions, it would have taken too long for us to assess the threat, by which time we would be dead. It is precisely because we have emotions, and our emotions have the characteristics above - automatic, quick, amplifier - that we survived.
Second, the amplification effect of emotions helps us learn things permanently. Nothing makes us learn that hot stoves are dangerous better than the pain from touching it once. You would probably also have a personal example of a difficult theory or a complex piece of information which you learnt while you were emotionally aroused - when you were particularly excited, or it was tied to a story that touched you. And you always remember it. The theory or information stays with you throughout life. There is a neurobiological reason behind this: emotions trigger a specific neurotransmitter (acetylcholine) that encodes incoming information deeply.
Finally, no amount of cognitive learning can translate the joy of sharing time with a friend, a family member, a spouse, your kids, your pet - a joy that you makes you want to do it again. Which segues nicely into our next point.
2. Emotions make our lives meaningful
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Earlier, we mentioned that even the most rational part of our brain, the pre-frontal cortex, has a region specifically dedicated to interface with our emotions. What happens if this region is silenced (with a magnetic scan) or suffers damage? We see that such folks have no problems advising otherson what the rational thing to do is. But they are unable to do the same for themselves. When faced with
And this is not surprising. Imagine if you have trained for a very difficult personal challenge. Say you wanted to climb Mount Everest. And you put months and months of excruciating training. And finally, you made it to the top of Mt Everest, the top of the world.
Now imagine if you had no emotions. What would that be like? Ok - I worked hard for this, we've ticked the box. The rational thing would be for us to go down quickly before we suffer from altitude sickness.
Or you are on a sports team. And after years and years of trying, your team had never won any competition. Your team was never even close. Rationally, it's pretty shite. But why do you and your teammates turn up week after week to play? And rationally, how do you explain why, even though you guys never won anything, it still meant something. To be on a team with everyone else, who supported and played for one another. This meaning cannot be appreciated without a large dose of emotion.
Or an example we can all try out now. Look back at your life. What are the moments you remember? What are these major moments that flash before your eyes? I am sure that all, if not the vast majority carry strong emotions, good or bad, which makes you remember and treasure these the most. Sure, there might be some achievements which we are proud of which required tremendous rational analysis. But without the coupling of emotion, these moments mean far less.
Life, the living, the value - rests with the emotions we generate.
3. It allows us to bond with and understand others. Just like emotions are coupled with our most meaningful moments, such is also the case for everyone else. And it is the emotions that others exhibit which allows us to understand what is meaningful to them, and in what ways.
It is the presence of one particularly strong emotion - empathy - that allows us to forge a bond with others, even those who at first instance appear very different from us. It is empathy that allows us to connect with others without a more tedious logical sequence. It is empathy that allows us to realise that instead of trying to pay people more money to do work, perhaps we can get them to do it even better through understanding and acknowledgement. It is empathy that paradoxically provides an outlet for the harmful effects of stress. It is empathy that allows us to form some of the best friendships, because there isn't just mutual understanding, but mutual sharing.
And as we shall soon see, it is empathy that allows us to maximise utility beyond what rationality can.
Sometimes it is not emotion that gives us the wrong answer
It must be recongised that emotions do cause us to make bad decisions sometimes. We all have moments when we made an impulsive choice when angry, got impatient and acted hastily, over-spent because we got excited, or escalated a small misunderstanding into a major argument because of our pride and anger.
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How can we deal with the adverse effects of emotions on decision making? We will get to that. But we should also acknowledge that there are reasons beyond emotions that causes flawed decision making.
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Consider some examples.
First, lying. At some point in time, we have all chosen to lie. The reason for lying is very likely to be a combination of emotions and rationality. You might feel fearful that the other party finds out the truth, but there is also usually a rational element where you calculate that you can get away with lying. Moreover, once we have made the decision to lie, it becomes completely the domain of the rational part of our brains to manufacture layer upon layer of convolution to make it harder for the lie to unravel. Which is why a small lie becomes a bigger one, and a bigger one, until when it uncovered, it has become an unforgivable web of lies.
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Second, cognitive biases. We have many such biases which are commonly labelled as "irrational", though, in truth, these biases result from the effects of both the rational and emotional parts of our brain. Take, for example, judging someone or something based on heuristics - say the age-old HR practice of judging interviewees based on criteria like whether they have shined their shoes. This is irrational - shouldn't we be more concerned about the interviewee's actual skills? He could be brilliant, just untidy. And this would be true if there was just one single case. But think about how many decisions we have to make, how many new stimulus we encounter, and how many new people we meet throughout life.
If we rationally assessed every new stimulus, we would simply have no time or energy to do anything else. So is it rational or irrational to introduce quick heuristics to make most decisions fairly accurately?
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Third, there are some decisions where we do want to minimise emotions - whether to invest a large sum of money on a company, deciding which medical insurance plan to buy, or an army general deciding whether to attack or not.
But equally, there are many decisions in real-life that do not have simple answers. Should you work at a place where you will get great financial success and a clear path to the top, or should you pick a lower-paying job which you really enjoy? Should you join a successful sports team with the best players but the worst relationships, or a mediocre one where the teammates are your best friends?
As an aside, as someone who read economies for my bachelor's, I often giggled to myself listening to the lectures. The prevalent economic assumption is that people are rational in maximising their utility. Yet this is obviously not the case in reality, and believing so is completely irrational. So we have a bunch of folks preaching about rationality in an irrational way, an ironic example of how the world really works.
Sometimes, emotions are the key to better decisions
Say you are a restaurant owner. And the customer orders duck for their main course. And as the owner, you give the recommendation above - the duck isn't very good today, but the chicken is better and cheaper.
Now, this is completely irrational. As a restaurant owner, you want to make a profit. And the customer is helping you by willingly ordering something you want to sell as soon as possible. In contrast, imagine if there is a genuinely kind restaurant owner who recommends to the customer a cheaper option, lessening his own profit.
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But have another think about this. What would the customer's impression of this restaurant be after such advice? And will he recommend the restaurant to others?
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On the topic of food, have you ever tried the Chilean Sea Bass? If not, you probably have seen it on menus or in pictures. But have you actually seen the fish itself, and not just the dish? What if I told you that the Chilean Sea Bass is not even a sea bass and was originally called the Patagonian Toothfish? No one wanted to eat a fish with a name like that and which looked like this. Until someone figured out an irrational solution - changing its name. You might also be interested in why Germans accepted potatoes after rejecting them for so long.
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Next, and an even more important example: the trust game.
2 players who will never meet each other.
Player 1 is given $10 and has a choice of either a) keeping it, or b) giving it to Player 2.
If Player 1 gives the money to Player 2, the money quadruples - it now becomes $40.
Player 2 also has 2 options, a) keep the $40, or b) splitting the bounty between the 2 players, each getting $20.
If we play this game by complete rationality, the game will end with Player 1 keeping the $10. This is because rationally, if Player 1 gave the $10 to Player 2, Player will surely keep the $40, because the 2 players will never meet.
Based on complete rationality, the outcome will be that Player 1 walks away with $10 and Player 2 with $0. But because we are not completely rational, and we trust the other player to be decent even though we have not and will never meet, both players usually end up with $20, a better outcome for everyone.
Amazingly, when players go through this game in a brain scanner, Player 2s who share the bounty ($20 each with Player 1) trigger higher dopamine levels than if they had kept the $40 for themselves. In other words, we actually get more satisfaction from sharing the money than from pocketing a larger amount. Again, the rational choice is the sub-optimal one.
So the emotional, irrational approach could, in fact, yield better outcomes for the individual than the rational approach.
But this is also the case at a societal or global level. And it is crucial that it happens this way.
Take voting at political elections for example. Think about this, there is a minuscule chance that your vote actually matters. How many elections do you know was decided by 1 vote? So whether you vote or not makes no difference. Moreover, voting takes up travel time and costs. So the rational thing to do is not to vote, since your vote doesn't matter.
Except if everyone thought this way, democracy will surely fail, because no one will vote.
If everyone sought the rational approach to pick careers with a higher chance of success, we wouldn't have inventors and entrepreneurs.
And a much more important example. If you have no kids, why should you bother with climate change? It's not likely to adversely affect you in this lifetime, especially for those who are now above 60. Hence, rationally, seniors with no kids should seek maximum convenience and cost savings, since they won't be affected. This is especially as going green can be very inconvenient (carrying and washing reusables) and costly (green products tend to be more expensive at this current moment).
Again, it would be disastrous if everyone thought rationally. Because then, the optimal answer based on rationality would be to maximise utility, which likely leads to more pollution.
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We often lament that we cannot be fully rational. Indeed we biologically cannot remove our emotions. But as the examples show, emotions are not completely bad. While they might hinder decision making and analysis, emotions also create meaning, attention, and in certain situation, lead to better deicsion.