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
Emotions vs Rationality
This is the holy grail of decision-making, isn't it? Most of us believe that we each have a logical and emotional side. The logical side is analytical and brilliant, while the emotional side is an impulsive, needy mess. We want to develop ourselves so that our rational, logical side is able to suppress our emotions, ensuring that we make the best decisions and live the best lives and all end up as Albert Einsteins or Bill Gates.
Of course, the truth is not so simple.
There are 2 major assumptions with the chain of thought above:
1) is that cognition (or rationality) and emotion are separable - 2 different parts of our brain which can activate independently.
2) More specifically, the cognitive brain is the like an old wise man that can direct and manage the little kid that is the emotional brain. We make better decisions with rationality and cognition, and emotions are not useful.
Let's examine both of these assumptions.
To begin, let us look at the region of our brain responsible for rationality - the pre-frontal cortex(PFC). This is the most newly-evolved, most brilliant, most analytical brain region. And it is true that the PFC is responsible for making sense and regulating our emotions, for delaying gratification, for long-term planning, and for strategy.
But if we look just a little bit closer, we realise that this is not the full story.
In the 1960s, Walle Nauta of MIT provided us with a key insight. He studied neural networks formed involving the frontal cortex. Unsurprisingly, many neural networks led out from the frontal cortex onto other parts of our brains. But these also happened in reverse, many other regions projected onto the frontal cortex. In particular, one network was especially well-connected, very busy, and crucially, bi-directional. This network is between the PFC and the limbic system (the emotional brain). The rational and emotional parts of our brains are always talking, mutually influencing each other, and, as we shall soon see, not necessarily always in contradiction.
This network was so well established Nauta proposed to name the PFC as an honorary member of the limbic system. Ironically, for many years, brain scientists got all emotional in response to such supposed blasphemy.
A second important clue of the interaction between rational and emotional brains come in the structure of the PFC itself. There are 2 important regions in the PFC.
The first is the dorsolateral (this simply means that it is located at the top edges) PFC or dlPFC for short. The dlPFC is the ultimate decider, the most rational, cognitive, unsentimental, and unemotional part of the PFC (and hence our brains). Say you are faced with a classic philosophical question: is it ok to kill one innocent person to save five people? The more the dlPFC activates, the more likely it is for the answer to be "yes". When the dLPFC is silenced (through a magnet) or damaged, we struggle with gratification postponement, persist with strategies that offer an immediate reward, and show poor executive control over their behaviour - we find it harder to control sexual or aggressive urges. Pretty much everything you would expect.
But there is a second important region in the PFC, the ventral region, in particular the ventromedial PFC (vmPFC). What does the vmPFC do? It is the part of the PFC that is specifically dedicated to interface with the limbic system. It assesses the impact of emotions on our decisions, and the impact of decisions on our emotions.
What happens if your vmPFC is impaired or damaged? There are some things that are not affected, analytical intelligence, working memory, making estimates. But when decisions have an emotional or social element, a damaged vmPFC leads to poor or paralysed outcomes. Those with a damaged PFC can advise others what to do in a particular situation, but when they have to decide for themselves in the same situation, they don't know what to do. (interestngly, the amygdala, part of our emotional brain responsible for fear, anger, anxiety, and aggression, also plays a role in assessing the value of changing rewards)
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How does this work?
Another giant of the neuroscience, Antonio Damasio offers an explanation. What the vmPFC does is continually simulate different outcomes, and then ask, "How would I feel if this happens?". Why is this an important question? If we think back on our lives, we'd find that it is emotions that often give the biggest chunk of meaning to what we have done. Consider someone who is completely emotionless. What would climbing Mount Everest, or marrying the girl of his dreams, winning a tournament with a team, or overcoming major adversity really mean?
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People with a damaged vmPFC damage also show poor judgment in choosing friends and partners and are unable to process and learn from negative feedback to improve behaviour - without the work of the vmPFC to interface logic and emotion, the negative feedback doesn't hit us hard enough to force us to change.
The 2 parts of the PFC gives us a hint as to how rationality and emotions work things out in our brain.
Certainly there are times when rationlity and emotions works exactly as our assumptions predict. The PFC examines if our emotions are justified, injects objectivity, and help us come to a better decision. For example, when we stood up to our fears - defined them, and produced a plan to overcome them. When we calmed ourselves down from anger. When we resisted the immediate reward for a bigger one later. When we decided not to conform to what everyone is doing. When we choose to buy a bundle of stocks instead of just from our favourite company.
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Sometimes, your rational brain affirms what your emotional brain is saying. Your emotions are able to express something that isn't logical, but is still accurate. You feel nervous before an examination. You think about it, and it is true - you're nervous because you're not well prepared. There's something that makes you really angry. You think through it and realise the anger occurred there are certain values and beliefs that you hold firm, and an incident had crossed those boundaries. Your emotions helps you define where that boundary lies, and how much it means to you.
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But for the most important and challenging questions in our lives, we find that both emotion and logic provide an important piece to the final answer. Should we leave the company where we established great relationships for another job that offers more money; should we pursue that dream we always hesitated on; who are the people that you can trust when times are down?
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Further, when we examine behaviour to more complex situations on over a longer period of time as opposed to our decision/reactions to one incident or episode, emotions and rationality become even harder to tell apart.
Consider empathising with someone in need, and taking action to help them.
- Empathy is an emotion, primarily triggered in a region called the anterior cingulate cortex. When we lack empathy for someone, or when we are overly rational, the tendency is for us to rationalise not helping - it doesn't seem so bad; he's just exaggerating; someone else will help him; I'm very busy myself. Without the triggering of emotion, we simply find it difficult to help anyone, even when they really need i.
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- But feeling too much causes problems too. Feeling someone's pain literally causes the pain centre in our brain (a region called the periaqueductal grey) to trigger as well. If we feel too strongly, sufficient distress is created in the pain centre, and we are actually less likely to help. Instead, our brains start to automate protecting ourselves - "this is just too painful, I can't be here any more; I can' bear to watch/listen to this, please don't tell me". As pain from empathy increases, our own pain becomes our primary concern.
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- At this point, it falls back onto our prefrontal cortex to regulate pain from empathy, to realise that we are not actually the ones suffering, that the real victim will suffer more if we don't lend a helping hand. It takes our PFC to shift our emphasis from ourselves to some tangible action to help others.
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Thus, without some emotional attachment, we don't help. Too much emotional attachment, we don't help. We need our emotions to help us feel for someone, but we need our PFC to help us not to feel too much.
Another example: Lying
- It might be emotions that create the initial impulse to lie, to protect ourselves or to protect others. Ths impulse comes from emotion, which yells at our PFC, we need to lie to keep ourselves safe! At this point, the rational brain starts regulating - is it really the right thing to do, and will we really be able to get away with lying?
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- Let's assume that your PFC agrees with the amygdala - you decide to lie. While your emotions was the trigger to lie, the PFC is the one that formulates how to best to do so, how to weave layer upon layer of deceit so that you won't get caught lying.
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- But your PFC does more. Once you have decided to lie, not only does your PFC formulate the lie, it starts to formulate reasons to justify lying that you are doing the right thing, that you had no choice, that you thought it through. You lie not only to others, but you also tell a little lie to yourself.
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- Ironically, it is another emotion, guilt, that might persuade you to come clean. You become so uncomfortable with lying that you feel an impulse to come clean (just like the initial impulse to lie)
Emotions act as an exaggerated trigger to direct us to do something or to stop doing something ASAP. Rationality prevents us from doing something rash, but equally can be the one that pulls us deeper and deeper into a hole which we then can't come out of. This happens when our rational brain justifies our decision and builds additional layers on top of the original impulse.
To complete the cycle of complexity, while it might be emotions that first convinced us to go down a hole, it might also be emotions that finally convince our rational brain we don't need to stay down the hole, there's another way out.
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Our final and most important example - change. We often attribute our inability or resistance to change to emotions. It's fear of uncertainty, fear of losing what we are familiar with, fear of failure.
But it should be evident by now that it is not just emotions at work. Fear could be the initial impulse. But more significantly, somewhere along the line, our rational mind justified our fears. Our PFC manufactured reasons why our present beliefs are correct, why we do not need to change, and how we have in fact considered the options thoroughly and are making the smarter choice.
||| It is not just fear that makes us unwilling to change. It is that we believed and legitimised our fears.
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Along the way our logical PFC endorses the emotion. The emotional impulse is developed into a narrative, a story with reasons that we are right. A story that convinces us to continue with our present behaviour.
This applies to other examples. The person who obstinately refuses to change his/her mind? The one who refuses to ever apologise for anything in life? That colleague that is always trying to protect herself at work, even at the cost of others? The person who never tries anything new in life. It is easy to just blame emotions for this. But it only when logic syncs with emotion that we develop a persistence.
This also applies for positive behaviour - when unhappiness with your present circumstances drives you to formulate a new plan for life. When you are so disappointed with what you did to someone you endeavour never to do so again. When you are so angry at a mistake you made that it forces you into a new pattern of thinking. You may also be interested in our fear-setting page - facing our biggest fears requires us not just to make sense of the emotion of fear, but to sharpen the narrative and reasoning that follows.
2 conclusions from this chapter:
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1. We know for certain that there different brain regions each responsible for regulating a different behaviour. It is very natural whenever there is categorisation that we think each category is unique, dichotomous, and disparate, each brain region doing its own work. But we've seen that in reality there is constant interface between different regions. Region A might influence B, but in turn, B also influences A (as well as regions C and D and E).
The brain is less about regions, and more about circuits - the patterns of functional connectivity among these different regions.
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2. Nowhere is this more obvious than rationality and emotions. Osensibly, these 2 regions are direct opposites. More often than not, we believe that if we can stay rational and remove emotions, we will all be Nobel Prize winners and billionaires. With rationality, we avoid mkaing hasty and inaccurate decisions that we come to regret.
But as the examples show, it really isn't so simple. To draw an analogy, baking a cake requires ingredients like flour and eggs. Flour and eggs are distinguishable by themselves. They are so different. But once we mix them together, they can no longer be differentiated in the baked cake, the final product. Rationality and emotions are like the flour and eggs. If we just look at them by themselves, they are so different and distinguishable . But life's challenges often resembles that baked cake - in the end, our decisions and behaviour contain both emotions and logic layered upon one another that are indistinguishable.
Related Links:
- In our sections on changing minds and changing behaviour, we see that pure rationality rarely works, even when it is blatantly obvious. What helps us change our minds and behaviour is often an unexpected mix of both logic and emotions.
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- Check out our chapter on 2 types of intelligence, where we examine Max Planck and Dale Carnegie, 2 drastically different personalities.
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- Read more about major parts of our brain:
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- Examine how our brains are wired for survival, and how fear is our favourite tool to help us survive.
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- Understand the world of pain and perceived pain
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