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
We made it to the moon before wheels had luggage
One of man's greatest achievements is overcoming Earth's gravitational pull, travelling 384,400 km into space, and landing and taking those first steps on the moon.
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It's an incredibly difficult feat.
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And you know what? Somehow, we managed to figure out this tremendous feat of travel - getting to the moon... all the while struggling with another part of our regular travel experience - making luggage bags easier to shift.
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In 1970, Bernard Sadow (ironically a business owner of a luggage company) was at an airport in Puerto Rico, struggling to cope with 2 huge suitcases for his family (hmmm... no details if he was using luggage from his company). Then, he saw a man moving a piece of heavy machinery on a wheeled platform. He exclaimed to his wife, " He had the machinery, and he was just pushing it along without much effort, and I said to my wife, 'That's what we need! We need wheels on luggage.' "
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Sadow got to work. He attached 4 casters under a luggage trunk linked to a strap which the user can pull - the world's first-ever wheeled luggage, similar to the picture above. The luggage became commercial, and Sadow was granted a patent in 1972
While Sadow's model was an improvement from manually carrying heavy suitcases, it remained unwieldy and unreliable. The wheels were fixed in one direction, leading to suitcases toppling over or difficult to navigate except in straight line. Even Mr Bean wasn't a fan - he simply carried his own luggage.
It was almost 20 years later in 1989 that a Northwestern pilot, Bob Plath improved on the design. Luggage began to resemble the ones we use today, with more flexible wheels and a retractable handle.
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The moon landing vs wheeled luggage example reveals some biases in how people think:
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We are much more excited about big problems than small problems, even if we have to live with these small problems on a daily basis. Going to space seems a lot more exciting than re-designing luggage, even though poorly-designed luggage is an annoyance that we have to live with regularly. This applies to organisations as well. Energy levels go up for big projects, while people tend to be less enthusiastic about refining existing processes. We also tend to under-value workers who perform routine tasks which seem small, and it is only their absence that we realise how important they are. Think of your company's IT department, or rubbish collectors for societies, or the logistics group for sports teams.
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If it doesn't reach a certain pain threshold, we just live with it. And habits - doing something over and over again makes us accustomed to certain pains which then no longer notice. For example, think of the hand-soap, shampoo, condiments and other bottled products at home. Most of them dispense at the top, which means when the product is running low, it's very difficult to get it out, and a certain amount is always wasted. Sometimes, it takes a jolt for us to realise the little pains that we've grown numb to. Covid-19 has brought about new awareness on hygiene and how easily diseases can spread. Surfaces that are regularly touched by different people carry a higher risk of transmission of diseases; this includes door handles and faucets. Besides, consider door handles - if you were say carrying 2 cups of beverages, you would realise that the door handle is actually terribly user-unfriendly. What about foot handles or elbow handles instead?
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Once we have found a solution to a problem, it becomes very difficult for us to see past the existing solution, or to use a more hackneyed term, to "think out of the box". Henry Ford's quote comes to mind: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” It's hard for us to picture something else once we have a model in mind.
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Value can be created not just in the product itself, but in user-experience. Think of the luggage again. The basic premise of the product hasn't changed much - a space to put stuff in. Adding wheels and a handle doesn't change the function fo the product itself, but its value increases sharply to the user. Value doesn't have to be something new, it could simply be a new way of seeing something that is existing.