Why Fear is a Tool
What do we know about fear?
Can we reframe how we perceive fear?
Rather than a burden, can it be a tool?
Imagine you are a small mountain rabbit, scavenging the Irish grasslands for fruit to feed your newborns. Suddenly from a distance, you hear a series of high pitched whistling which clouds your attention. You immediately recognize this sound — an eagle. The apex predator circles the empty skyline with the exact same purpose as you — scavenging food for its new-borns. But amid this, you realize a key detail — you have seen the eagle, but the eagle has not seen you. This detail triggers you primal instincts to kick in and you look to find a suitable place to hide to avoid detection.
Seconds pass to which feel like minutes, you carefully make your way to what seems to be a large rock with sufficient cover. You suddenly hear the same whistling again, but this time much closer and louder. You scan the sky once more and what you see strikes you as if lightning has hit your entire organism — you see the eagle, and now the eagle sees you. The eagle folds its monstrous yet elegant wings, and begins its almost mechanical-like descent towards you.
Your entire body paralyzes as one final thought comes to mind — who’s newborns will be eating tonight?
An emotion, a state of consciousness, a survival mechanism. Fear plays many roles in our lives both as a blessing and a curse. But without a doubt, fear has been a crucial component to how humans have risen in the animal food chain and became (for the better or worse) the dominant species on this planet. But why us?
This raises the questions:
- What makes fear unique in the human brain, and how does it function?
- How can we use fear to our advantage?
Space, Time and Fear and the human brain
Dr Dean Mobbs, professor of Neuroscience in the California Institute of Technology has spent the past couple of years studying and gaining deeper insights into the fields of behavioural ecology, social, evolutionary and clinical psychology. In doing so, he gave birth to the “Fear Lab”- a space where “brain imaging techniques (e.g. fMRI) and novel behavioral technique […] examine the neurobiological systems that coordinate fear and anxiety in humans.”
In his studies, “When Fear Is Near: Threat Imminence Elicits Prefrontal-Periaqueductal Gray Shifts in Humans”, and “From Threat to Fear: The Neural Organization of Defensive Fear Systems in Humans”, ****Mobbs paved the way to some fascinating findings by creating a virtual simulation of fearful/threat situations and how human behavior are affected by it, using fMRI brain imaging Mobbs found that different regions of the brain are activated depending on where and when we perceive a threat.
Lets take a closer look at this.
Imminent threat
Now imagine yourself back in the fluffy paws of the mountain rabbit. Disaster has struck. The eagle has spotted you and adjusts its trajectory directly towards you as it descends in incomprehensible speed. In this exact context, Mobbs describes the threat to be imminent. In other words, we can either see, touch, hear or smell it. It is right there and therefore without a doubt, we can feel it.
Mobbs’s studies shows that in this context, fear becomes processed in one of our oldest, most primitive parts of our brain, the midbrain. More specifically, our very own built-in alarm system, the amygdala, which is responsible in activating our fight-or-flight response; now imagine yourself taking the first step onto a road but immediately catch a glimpse of the headlights of a 4x4 truck in the corner of your eye — all alarms and sirens for danger go off and before you know it, a jolt of electrical current forces your body back onto the pavement in hopes of evading instant death. This is our amygdala at work. Our actions and behaviors are solely concerned with survival and therefore driven by our primitive survival instincts as well as the copious stream of stress hormones.
Understandably, we now behave no different to our rabbit friend.
Distal threat
You are in the midst of scavenging for fruit and you spot the eagle circling the empty sky, but it has not spotted you. In this exact context, Mobbs describes the threat to be distal. In other words, we are aware of its existence, but cannot touch, see, hear or smell it in this very moment. But regardless we know it is there, we can almost feel it.
In this instance, because of their cognitive capacity, most mammals exhibit strategic behaviors limited to freezing or hiding to avoid detection from the threat.
This is where it becomes interesting.
Fortunately for us humans, evolution has gifted us a much more advanced, developed and executive way in processing a threat we perceive to be “far away”, in fact Mobbs’s studies show that fear no longer resides in the amygdala and instead becomes processed in an entirely different area in the brain, the prefrontal cortex (PFC) — extra layers of neural tissue on the surface of the forebrain responsible for complex and flexible mammalian behaviors. It is also the most recently evolved part of the brain; for lack of a better name — our latest software update.
In fact, humans share the largest cortex size along with great apes while also comprising of other specialized and denser connections between the rest of the brain.
So, what does this mean in the context of how we process and manage distal fear?
As our higher forebrain become activated, we are able to exhibit much more complicated, rational and critical responses and behaviors in the face of fear, we therefore no longer need to rely on survival instincts, primal behaviors and hormonal influences — we can simply catch ourselves, and think.
Fear is a tool
So how does this all tie in together?
When threat is imminent or “close”, the more rational, critical thinking and developed part of the brain switches off and the brain becomes only concerned whether or not we will come out of this event dead or alive. Evolution has designed us to be most effective when we perceive fear from afar, but why do we still wait for it to see us?
Modern day fears for most of us no longer revolve around physical dangers such as a tiger in the vicinity or an incoming flood that will drown your crops for the year. Modern day fears have become increasingly more abstract.
Whether it is a fear of rejection, a fear of failure or a fear of embarrassment, despite it not being something necessarily physical or tangible (as to an eagle closing in on you), if you truly feel that it is holding you back in some form or part in your life, I guarantee that it one day it will close in on you, and hit you right in the face when you least expect it.
To a certain extent, we must take gratitude in how evolution has provided us the anatomical tools to understand and approach fear strategically and rationally, especially when we have the time and space to see it — when it hasn’t seen us. This obviously doesn’t mean you should just wake up tomorrow and take on your biggest fear headstrong, guns-blazing and expect to have overcome it right there and then.
Instead, it starts with identifying the fear, planning and thus taking the necessary steps to overcome it. The truth is, our brains are designed for it.
By taking these steps, we can begin to build a form of self-confidence or self-assurance so that in the scenario when fear does come knocking on our door, even when we least expect it, we are ready for it.
We must learn to approach fear, before it approaches on us.
