Irrational Fear — Our Brain’s Most Dangerous Defect
All of us — every single one of us — have experienced this.
Your boss tells you something and you agonize over it the entire day. Your son or daughter lashes out at you — and your week is thrown off course. Your client sends you an angry email and you are rattled for rest of the day.
It is common for a single negative comment to destroy a blissful day. But isn’t it surprising that the opposite is not true. A single positive comment hardly every pulls us out of an awful day?
It is no accident. Evolution has programmed us to overreact to negative events. We are wired to overestimate the impact of perceived threats.
For our ancestors, fear fueled their survival instincts. When they heard the roar of a lion, fear motivated them to race towards safety. However, survival prospects were poor for those early humans who were not driven by fear. Those that experienced awe at the mighty roar of the lion payed the price by death.
For most of human history, the penalty for under-reacting to negative events was death. So the genes that prioritized negative emotions survived. While the genes that prioritized positive emotions extinguished itself from the gene pool.
What we are left with is an anxious, fearful mind that is always on the lookout for the next incoming danger.
“System 1 (the ancient part of the brain) has been shaped by evolution to provide a continuous assessment of the main problems that an organism must solve to survive: How are things going? Is there a threat or a major opportunity? Is everything normal? Should I approach or avoid?
The questions are perhaps less urgent for a human in a city environment than for a gazelle on the savannah. But we have inherited the neural mechanisms that evolved to provide ongoing assessments of threat level, and they have not been turned off. Situations are constantly evaluated as good or bad, requiring escape or permitting approach.” ~ Thinking Fast and Slow by Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman
The brain treats each threat as a matter of life and death. It is the only way it knows how to operate.
Our brains were not designed to make us happy, it’s singular purpose is to keep us alive at all costs. Even at the cost of our sanity. It prioritizes survival over everything else, even happiness.
Today, we find ourselves in a world where our personal priorities of attaining love, joy and gratitude do not align with the priorities of the ancient brain. This misalignment has created a serious defect in our operating system: We are primed to overreact to all perceived threats.
Most of the time it turns out, they are not even threats at all.
“I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.” ~ Mark Twain
We have all experienced it. Remember that time when you thought a friend did something horrible to you? You became furious and started planning evil plots to avenge him. Only to later discover that you were dead wrong and that the person didn’t deserve all the blame.
BrainOS is outdated. It is running a 2 million year old software. It used to be really good at it’s job. It kept us safe from gazelles, tigers and bears.
However, it has not adapted to the modern world. It is filled with defects.
To live a happy life, we need to recognize the mind’s tendency to overestimate perceived threats. A fearful mind was an evolutionarily favorable trait, however, it is no longer useful. We are not fighting for survival anymore.
Once you recognize that fear and worry are the default state of mind, you can re-orient your relationship with them.
When you find yourself riding the tides of fear, ask yourself, how bad is it really? How will it affect me a week from now? A month? A year? What is the worst that could happen?
We can disrupt the chain reaction of rumination if we recognize fear for what it is: A fleeting thought that is generated by our defective brain intended to help us survive in the savannah.
“Most of us let our negative emotions persist longer than is necessary. Becoming suddenly angry, we tend to stay angry — and this requires that we actively produce the feeling of anger. We do this by thinking about our reasons for being angry — recalling an insult, rehearsing what we should have said to our malefactor, and so forth — and yet we tend not to notice the mechanics of this process. Without continually resurrecting the feeling of anger (or fear), it is impossible to stay angry for more than a few moments.” ~ Waking Up by Sam Harris
When I decided to quit a job that I loved to travel the world, my brain came up with numerous reasons on why it would ruin my my life.
I simply asked myself, “What is the worst that could happen?”
Instead of letting my ancient brain spin out unrealistic catastrophes, I decided to sit down and objectively analyze my situation using a checklist, created by Tim Ferriss:
- Define your nightmare, the absolute worst that could happen if you did what you are considering.
- What steps could you take to repair the damage or get things back on the upswing, even if temporarily?
- What are the outcomes or benefits, both temporary and permanent, of more probable scenarios?
- If you were fired from your job today, what would you do to get things under financial control?
- What are you putting off out of fear?
- What is it costing you — financially, emotionally, and physically — to postpone action?
- What are you waiting for?
Fear of losing your job, fear of losing your wealth, fear of coming up short, fear of public humiliation.. the list never ends.
Fear is powerful, we all feel it in our bones. Everyone experiences it, but what separates the successful from the rest of us is that they do not let it run their lives. The recognize it as a part of life and refuse to follow its narrative.
“Our eyes are not viewers, they’re also projectors that are running a second story over the picture that we see in front of us all the time.
Fear is writing the script. Now fear is going to be a player in your life, but you get to decide how much.” ~ Jim Carrey
You cannot let the ancient brain write your narrative.
It overestimates the dangers of failure. It pulls us down with every single hiccup or road block. The mechanism that provided an incredible survival advantage for our ancestors has become our worst enemy today.
It has become a bug, a defect that will ruin our lives if left unchecked.
If you want to live a life rich in creativity, joy, love, gratitude, awe, curiosity and appreciation, then you need to overcome the irrational fears of the ancient brain.
Remember, brain’s job is survival. Happiness is your job.
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