Is Fear Saving Your Life or Limiting it?

When I was 7, I apparently threw an enormous temper tantrum over wanting a dog. A year later we got our first labrador. Unlike my love of Marc Bolan, my love of labradors continued to grow over the years. They have the biggest hearts and a humungous capacity for joy - both experiencing and spreading it. What the world needs now is more labradors!

 Recently we had two labradors, Seymour and Cooper. While they were both happy, affectionate and playful, they had very different personalities.

Seymour was a handful. He crashed into people, things and life in general. He ate everything. Socks, plants, an entire outdoor set over a year, and, we suspected, Grandma's false teeth. In his lust for life he ended up with two metal knees and his guts on a slab more than once to remove something he'd swallowed. He was strong, fearless and at times totally deranged. When things didn't go his way, he didn't seem to learn from it, he'd just go bounding back in, big grin, tail wagging, always supremely confident.

 Cooper was the younger dog. Confident with the natural world, including massive bulls and horses. He was brave and socially aware - quick to protect more vulnerable dogs from attack by aggressive ones, but nervous of many things in the man-made world, especially if they were shiny. And just like Seymour, he doubled-down on his behaviour. If something had scared him, even for no reason, it would always scare him, for no reason.

 Seymour was unstoppable, but he was, frankly, thick. Cooper was undoubtedly the smarter dog. He was quick to train. He noticed every detail and assessed whether he should be afraid of it or not. When in doubt he happily submitted, even if it meant being humped by all the dogs in the park before playing with them. No ego there!

After Seymour died at 15, Cooper became more nervous. It was impossible to get him to cross marble floors, any bridges or walk past alleyways without him pulling you into the road to avoid the monsters hiding there. Certain parts of the kitchen became no-go areas even if you tempted him with cheese. At one point he couldn't cross the deck to get back into the house. 

 Fear, or an absence of it, drove both their lives. And as it is the most primal emotion, it drives ours too, especially in the face of our uncertain COVID-19 future.

FEAR: THE STRONGEST EMOTION

Emotions are often misunderstood as fluffy things that accompany our experience of life. In fact they are physiological. They drive hormone release which is intended to drive behaviour. Emotions are drivers of action but they may, on reflection, not be appropriate to a situation. That's why need to monitor them.

Fear is the strongest and most primitive of all emotions. It protects our survival. Not dying is pretty important in evolution, so fear is essential. As an example, Seymour, who appeared not to have any, would have died many times over had we not been able to rush him to the vet.

Paul D Maclean, a Neuroscientist first proposed the theory of the triune brain (brain of three brains). These brains developed along with our evolution from reptiles through mammals to humans. The Reptilian Brain gave us the ability to reproduce, avoid danger (or counter it), find food etc. Fear was essential to this. Fear triggered the responses of Fight, Flight or Freeze which got us out of danger. 

The Mammalian Brain/Limbic System gave us other emotions and empathy. The Neocortex which developed as we became human gave us reasoning, language, abstract thought and art etc. 

However, it also gave us the ability to post-rationalise fear as 'being sensible' and therefore always a good thing. But post-rationalising can justify and therefore reinforce unhelpful or even dangerous behaviour.

And when a limiting emotion becomes a habit, the potential damage is greater.

FEAR IS DRIVING OUR LIVES TODAY

Fear is crucial to life and survival. Right now, it is, according to Lewers Research the principal emotion society is feeling - by a long way. 62% of us name it as our primary emotion, followed by sadness at 32%.

This isn't surprising of course. Not only are we threatened with the mortality and suffering of family friends and ourselves, we are trying to cope with uncertainty.  

The virus is invisible. Like in a horror movie, we don't know if we are sitting next to it or not. We don't even know if we ourselves have it and might be passing it on to the very people we want most to protect.

Today is bad, but combining the effects of health/illness with economic crisis, we have never experienced such an uncertain future. We can't plan travel in the short term, but we feel like we can't plan long term either.  

We're stuck in limbo, stuck in a moment in time, with little control over present or future. 

It's like watching a movie of our lives. So yes, it's scary alright!

ARE WE DEVELOPING A LIMITING HABIT OF FEARFULNESS?

Observing my dogs' behaviour, it was clear that emotions were habitual for them. Seymour always confident that nothing would go wrong, even when it just had. Cooper afraid today of what he was afraid of yesterday even though nothing dangerous happened yesterday. 

Their emotions became states of mind. Ours can too. Confidence can become pervasive, not related to the specific circumstances. Fear is the same - the more we fear, the more fearful we become in general. We become less able to distinguish between what merits our fear and what doesn't.

THE HABIT OF FEARFULNESS IS A SIGNIFICANT THREAT TO US TODAY

Living our best lives requires some risk taking - stepping carefully into the unknown. Not crazy risk-taking like Seymour swallowing corn cobs, nor Cooper's anxiety about all things shiny, but judicious risk-taking like stepping up to a new position, fulfilling a dream you've always had.

Our reptilian brain is still the strongest, especially when it mascarades as 'good sense'. But it's worth remembering that it doesn't want us to live our best life, it just wants to ensure our survival. The quality of our life is irrelevant to it.

If it had its way we'd always be in lock-down.

But while that may be fine for reptiles, it's not for humans. And that desire to live our best lives is what makes being human so fantastic.

Fear, evoked by the Reptilian Brain, drives us towards our safest lives, not our best lives.

  Is that the life you want?

Top Tips for Resisting the Habit of Fearfulness

1) Identify an Element of Your Best Life that you Can Work towards: The temptation is to go into hibernation during COVID-19, to shut down all but the essentials as everything else is too hard. So how about thinking of something that would be fun to do but would stretch you a little and work on that. Is there something creative you can do? 

2) Flex Your Risk Muscle: Get yourself into the habit of taking little risks (not regarding your health of course). Put your hand up for a presentation/a high profile project for example. Think about doing something small but regular to turn habitual fear into underlying confidence in the face of the unknown.

3) Assess the real risk to judge the appropriate fear level: Think through honestly what the worst is that could happen if you took that risk. Think through how you would deal with that. If it didn't work, would it really be that bad? is there any real reason to fear it?

 So do keep your best lives alive - don't resort to reptilian fearfulness where you don't have to.

Stay safe, Be Kind, Find Fun!