Here are 3 key things to know about why fear plays such a part in our life and how it affects us.
#1: Fear is generally the default reaction to something our mind-brain-body perceives that we can’t control or understand.
This is because we have a higher chance of surviving if we detect 'false positives' rather than false negatives.
Another way to say this is that when our system automatically puts something unfamiliar in the 'danger' category, if it's correct - great! That just saved our lives.
If it's wrong, 'oh well' - we might miss out on something that could be beneficial, but the cost of our system assuming the worst is worth it because it keeps us alive (technically speaking, from a brain-based statistics perspective).
This means that there is a higher chance that most of us miss out on new experiences because our mind-brain-body system places things we don't understand into the 'threat' category.
Some of the things we miss out on can include:
- meeting people who are very different than us
- listening deeply to try to understand opinions that are different than what we hear all the time
- allowing ourselves to feel feelings that we don’t understand
- having an experience that could change our life, even if it could end up in rejection (like public speaking, auditioning for something)
If we don’t build a track record of experiencing these kinds of things, our system doesn’t have any new ‘data’ to predict the probability of surviving those experiences.
So we end up just ‘sticking to what we know’.
The more we interact only with people and situations we are familiar with (including online), the bigger and more generic the category of ‘danger’ becomes.
The world becomes binary: a small number of familiar people are ‘safe’ and massive amounts of unfamiliar people and experiences are ‘unsafe’.
This makes the world a very stressful place!
# 2: We tend to over-generalize fear
"brains do not react to the world, but instead predict and then test their hypotheses against incoming sensory evidence."
-Feldman Barrett et al., (2016)
Because our mind-brain-body system is an efficiency machine, it also does us the "favor" of grouping things together so we don't have to analyze each and every person and situation.
If we've had one negative experience with something, many neural resources are devoted to making sure we don't repeat whatever that was.
This can happen for things like getting food poisoning from eating oysters and never wanting to eat them again even though each oyster is not necessarily going to give us food poisoning.
This can also happen for things like if we experienced a parent or caregiver as threatening, our brain may pick up on something from a boss, or romantic partner or someone who has features that our brain associates with whatever that is with our past negative experiences.
It then puts us into a defensive mode without us even realizing it.
This can be called a 'schema' (Ledoux, 2019) and can also be referred to as predictive coding, active inference or belief propagation accounts of brain function (see references); and aligns with our understanding of the brain as an energy-regulating predictive processor.
"Fear can even occur when some or all of the subcortically triggered consequences are absent: when the threat alone generates memory-based expectations that mentally simulate the missing elements, thereby pattern-completing your fear schema Ledoux 2015)
(see also Lang's Fear Network model and Emotional Processing theory in this paper from Harvard as well as a set of wonderful papers by the Royal Society on Interoception and mental health: find them in the references section).
And this can happen when we dislike the opinion of one person.
Our brain will try to be efficient by putting that person into a category, so we can just avoid (or attack) that category altogether.
From a brain- perspective, over-generalizing** is much more efficient than actually trying to understand and getting to know every single person we interact with.
**In fact, some of Carol Dweck's original research was on the use of 'generic language': as children, around 40% of the language we get about the world is 'generic', meaning pluralized and categorized, rather than individuated. Example, "cats are ___, adults are ____". This can lead a child to believe certain traits are innate about a group, rather than see them as individuals. (see Navigating the Social World for more on this).
#3 We ‘learn fear’ from other people.
This means we don’t even need to have a direct experience with something to be afraid of it.
We just need to be around someone else who is afraid of it (especially if we trust that person). Their reaction will create biofeedback signals that we then detect and associate with whatever they are afraid of.
(An example of this would be a child being afraid of a bee or spider even though they’ve never been hurt by one, but they have seen a parent get freaked out.)
What do all three points have in common?
They show us that:
Many of us are afraid and defensive more often than we realize.
Here’s one way to train your brain to have more access to its higher order features:
Beware of your 'fastest reaction'.
Your survival mechanisms will always be the first to take over.
Signals coming from our five senses and our internal organs need to travel from our spinal cord, brainstem, limbic system, until they finally reach the areas furthest away from our spinal cord - the prefrontal cortex. This means that signals take longer to reach the more evolved areas of our brain.
Sophisticated, more deliberate responses use more energy than our more primitive reflexes.*
The prefrontal cortex plays a major role in being the ‘control tower’ of the brain. It has a lot of coordinating and processing to do. It is designed for more complex functions and calculations, rather than reflexes.
*see this Geary D. C. (2021) paper on mitochondrial functioning (see references below)
Your 'fastest' reaction will keep you alive when something is an actual threat.
(so we don't want to get rid of this system)
BUT... for ‘non-life-threatening’ situations, such as conversations, online behavior… situations where our life is not actually in danger...
it may be worth honoring the micro-moments it takes for our more thoughtful brain features to catch up.
When you are engaging in an angry/upset text, phone conversation or social media post:
the faster you are typing and replying, the less likely this is coming from your more evolved neural architecture.
The more you are able to slow the pace down, pause, take some breaths, move away and come back again (after you've engaged in other types of conversations, movement, nature, gratitude, silence), the more you are giving your higher order brain a chance to keep up, process, and then come up with something that is more intelligent than what your primitive systems will get you to do.
If we keep having the same types of arguments or interactions-without-new-ways-forward (either in our head, online or in person), it means we are ‘re-acting’*.
*Reacting: to re-act. To act again and again in the same way.
But we must use effort and intention to override our more primitive reflexes.
There is no other option. It won't happen easily and effortlessly.
The beauty is that effort is where the 'juice' is.. things that initially take effort eventually flow with more ease.
Awkwardness and effort are signs that the brain is leveling up. It's shifting its energy to help you do something new.
And that leveling up is where our most empowering, most intelligent state of being exists.
On that note, let me leave you with the words of someone who clearly allowed his prefrontal cortex to come online in the face of fear.
(if you haven't read Long Walk to Freedom, I highly recommend it)
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