Issue 6. Afraid New World? Good fear, bad fear and how to use them.

Enter… if you dare… into the latest Six Things Impossible newsletter! The theme is fear.?

MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!?

But don’t be scared: fear is something we all experience, and can overcome. Considering every human being suffers from fear at least occasionally, we don’t talk about it nearly enough.?

Why??

…Because we’re embarrassed??

…Because it's a sign of weakness??

Phobophobia is?the fear of fear. The prospect of fear and our reaction to it can be more terrifying than the feeling itself. When was the last time you admitted to another person that you felt afraid? It’s certainly no easy admission.?

Human beings sometimes scare themselves on purpose, with fairground rides and horror films. Because as well as hating it, humans also love fear. It’s evolutionary. Those moments of uncertainty and the rumbling threat of the unknown. Fear is a reminder of being alive. The staccato pricks at the back of your neck; pulse racing; sweaty palms, weak knees, heavy breathing, the surge of pure adrenaline into every last corner of your body.

Generally, the only times we love to be scared are in those very specific moments when our brain knows we’re safe. According to clinical psychologist Dr John Mayer, apparently when we feel the good kind of fear,?horror-film-fear, our appetite also increases. Says he:

"The increased allostatic load leads to an increase in consuming fats … thus, we tend to crave and eat more popcorn."?

Who knew! So buy yourself an extra large bag when you go to see the long-awaited Candyman remake in cinemas. Salty, not sugar. And definitely none of this sweet and salty mix, which was surely invented by Satan’s in-house chef.?

The love/hate relationship we have with fear is a fascinating space. Fear is a terrible thing, but what if fear was a wonderful thing? Fear Hack by Hillary Gallo is a book I recommend at every opportunity. He talks about how we can reframe those feelings; of the pulse racing and the heart pounding and imagine, instead of terror at the prospect of a life change or hard task or a difficult conversation, we feel excited. It’s the same symptoms, after all.?

So let’s crack on with six impossible things about fear. I’m excited. Are you? You should be.

1. Fear makes us faster, less creative?

I remember when I was a youth, hanging out in the parks and pubs of Essex, some of my friends smoked cannabis. I’ll be honest, I hate the stuff. Not because of judgement, but because weed makes me paranoid, hungry and tired: my three least favourite things to feel.?

But I always remember my friend Dave saying, any time he drove us home from the park all buzzed, that being stoned made him a better driver. Why? Because he became worried about being a better driver, which made him more focused. DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME, KIDS. But there’s something about mild fear that makes us more alert, and potentially more productive.?

In Afraid New World, a meaty research project from the problem-solving community &us, fear can be a good thing at work. Sometimes. They wanted to establish the relationship between fear and innovation, and so carried out a huge quant survey across the UK, conducted interviews with innovation practitioners and ran some pretty nifty social experiments to see how fear affected the way people work.?

The results are pretty scary. Over a third of British workers feel fear at work every single day. And it’s not irrational: a lot of workers who experience fear at work have been burned before. The research found that the more institutional change people experience, the more jaded they become, highlighting a process called ‘transformation trauma’.?

45% of fearful individuals had experienced significant business transformation in the past, compared to 30% that felt no fear. There’s a lesson here: that restructure you just forced your employees to go through has probably given them emotional baggage for life.?

But it’s the social experiments that reveal the super juicy stuff. &us started with three hypotheses and a sample size of 60 people:?

Hypothesis 1:?Fear makes you slower to complete simple tasks. They used a maths test of easy(ish) quick-fire questions designed to measure speed and accuracy.

Hypothesis 2:?Fear makes you less creative. They used the Remote Associates test, which has been validated as a great measure of creativity. Participants are shown 3 words and asked to find a 4th associated word. It’s tricky.

Hypothesis 3:?Fear makes you less likely to collaborate. They turned to Game Theory’s Prisoner’s Dilemma and framed it to present the quandary of choosing to collaborate with or work against a colleague based on the temptation of various financial incentives

Here’s the unfortunate reality… fear can make you more efficient. Ugh. 8 out of the top 10 performers in the maths test experiment feel persistent fear, and they not only got more questions correct, but were faster. And fear can make you more collaborative. WTF! A third of people in the social experiment who felt regular fear were more likely to collaborate on the Prisoner’s Dilemma, versus only 10% of people who felt none.

BUT! Before you start wearing a Scream mask on Zoom calls and telling colleagues the office is haunted, fear also makes you less creative. In fact, it can make you up to 25% less creative. And if you weren’t particularly creative anyway… wowsers. That’s bad. Kinda explains all those terrible brainstorms, huh? There’s also a number of caveats it’s important to add to this: for example, people with psychopathic tendencies don’t generally feel fear, nor do they particularly enjoy collaborating.?They also have a lovely knack of inspiring fear in those around them.

Do you think the results are surprising? Ever since the industrial revolution many businesses have operated very successfully with a culture of fear. It works. But what do you want? If you want happy, creative employees who enjoy going to work everyday; teams that embrace innovation rather than run to the finish line as fast as possible, well… you know what to do. The full research can be found here https://fear.andus.co/introduction?

And for further reading, I recently dissected the culture of fear at Brewdog for my regular column, following the recent release of an open letter from former employees. Shocking stuff.

2. Where’s your inner honey badger??

We’d probably all like to feel fearless from time to time, and less daunted by the world around us. To help you out, I’ve landed on two possible ways to extrapolate your fearless self:?

1. Spend thousands of pounds on self-help books and Tony Robbins retreats?
2. Channel your inner honey badger?

The honey badger is widely believed to be the most fearless, ridiculous animal to roam our planet. Nothing?- not lion nor hippo nor ancient megalodon - is as ferocious as the honey badger. The honey badger will bite your arm off, and then steal your wallet. The honey badger will eat you alive and then call up your girlfriend to ask her out on a date. And she’ll say yes.?

The honey badger won’t just kill you, they’ll shame you. According to the best source of honey badger insights on the internet, honeybadger.com:?

“Honey badgers are reputed to go for the scrotum when attacking large animals. The first published record of this behaviour was a circumstantial account by Stevenson- Hamilton (1947) where a badger reportedly castrated an adult Buffalo. Other animals alleged to have been emasculated by honey badgers include wildebeest, waterbuck, kudu, zebra… and man.”?

They’re only around 80 centimetres long, by the way. I’m obsessed. So next time you’re facing an everyday fearful situation, think: what would a honey badger do? The honey badger would let loose. They’d jump into the situation with teeth snarled and confidence radiating from their tiny fur.?CHANNEL YOUR INNER HONEY BADGER.?Seriously.

If you need some inspiration, check out this video of the honey badger fighting every single dangerous animal on the planet and giving precisely zero fucks. (It’s especially funny if you imagine the honey badger has a voice like an angry cockney.)?

3. Fear, beauty and the sublime?

I’m writing this newsletter from the lovely - slightly odd - British seaside town of Margate, where I’m on Woliday. You know what a Woliday is, right? Oh, you didn’t know. A Woliday is a working holiday, and it’s the future. I work for a few hours a day, have a couple of meetings, and then run to the beach to read books and write poems. I appreciate this sounds a little twee, but Woliday is the very best summer solution for a low-responsibility childfree woman.?

The seaside town of Margate boasts The Turner Contemporary gallery named after JMW Turner: English Romantic painter and lover of Margate sunsets. There is nothing quite like a Margate sunset… orange bleeding into red bleeding into purple and smeared across the sky in inebriated celebration every single night. Sunsets are good for the soul; an often-needed prompt that nature is the most beautiful thing we will ever see.

JMW Turner was fascinated by the Sublime: the intimidating power of nature that inspires within us a unique combination of awe and terror. A number of Turner’s works focused on the sea and?haphazard thrashes of waves that could swallow us in a second, demonstrating that humanity is far weaker than any natural force. Joseph Addison, who conquered The Alps in 1699 stated that its natural beauty: “fills the mind with an agreeable kind of horror”. Every year between 90 and 110 people die on the Alps, as a result of avalanches.

But philosophically speaking, Sublimity is a wider concept referring to a greatness with both light and dark impact. An intensity that isn’t pleasant per se but exhilarating and memorable. It can apply to how we feel about nature, yes, but also to people, and even technology… we can be impressed by a computer’s capability whilst ultimately terrified by its potential.?

In this polarised, left or right basic world we’re steamrolling into, an appreciation of the complex and Sublime nature of the world around us is fundamental to remaining human. I’ve been watching Loki on Disney+ and loved a quote from the second episode. It reminded me of the Sublime, and is important to remember, I think:

“No one bad is ever truly bad and no one good is ever truly good.”

4. When everything but the screams are virtual...

The first time I tried virtual reality was at an event ten years ago. I was asked to give my expert creative view on a Game of Thrones VR experience in which you got pushed to the edge of an icy cliff; the entire landscape aflame. I screamed, my legs wobbled and I’d never felt anything like it. I talked about it for weeks, months, years afterwards and I’m still talking about it now.?

A few years later I was at an innovation exhibition in Taipei, Taiwan (long story) and offered myself up to try a Jungle Book VR experience in front of a small crowd of visitors. The resolution was sharper and lag shorter than my original GoT taster, but in the final few moments that wretched snake Kaa appeared and launched himself in my direction, no matter where I stood or turned. Once again, I screamed, but even louder this time. No one wants a snake flying at their face! I was on my own, because I was on a work trip, and screaming with a helmet on in front of a bunch of strangers is unsurprisingly embarrassing… I wouldn’t recommend it.?

But whilst VR is excellent at frightening the living daylights out of you, it can also be excellent at fighting fears. I’ve long-admired the use of mixed reality to deal with important psychological conditions like body dysmorphia - a subject close to my heart - but now the technology is being used alongside counselling to deal with significant phobias.?

Check out this video featuring a man with a fear not just of heights but of irrationally jumping from them, being guided through a highly realistic VR experience. Another exciting development of note is the simulacrum, a form of hyperreality which in theory enables you to overlay a VR experience (via headset) onto any real life location, in real time, thus making your treatment even more realistic.

5. What is ‘fear appeal theory’ and why does it hurt women??

HE WON’T LOVE YOU IF YOU GET FAT!?

PEOPLE WILL JUDGE YOU IF YOUR HOUSE ISN’T CLEAN!?

PEOPLE WON’T LIKE YOU IF YOU GET SPOTS!?

And so on, and so forth. Just because something’s effective, doesn’t make it right, and ‘fear appeal’ (i.e. communicating to consumers via their fears to make your product seem like a saviour) is in the business of implying that bad things will happen to you if you don’t buy the product advertised.?

According to decades’ worth of research on the effectiveness of this approach, there’s actually very few examples of it being ineffective. Sending the fear of God into your target audience is a solid strategy!

When it’s for public health purposes, i.e. don’t smoke, don’t drink and drive, use a condom, it’s a sensible way to communicate, but according to a comprehensive review of over 50 years of research on the topic, published by the American Psychological Association, it’s more likely to work on women.?Oh, for crying out loud.

I for one am SHOCKED. The book Brandsplaining by Philippa Roberts and Jane Cunningham is an excellent account of the history of scaring women into adopting a ‘Good Girl’ ideal, as a result of brands telling them they won’t be desirable, popular or womanly without certain products (especially in the beauty space).

But if you were hoping to use fear appeal in your next ad campaign, carefully consider the context and how you do it.?

“(The research) found fear appeals to be effective, especially when they contained recommendations for one-time only (versus repeated) behaviors and if the targeted audience included a larger percentage of women. They also confirmed prior findings that fear appeals are effective when they describe how to avoid the threat (e.g., get the vaccine).”?

If you're gonna shout about a problem, don't just scaremonger: be specific with your solution. Offer it without prejudice, and whilst hurting no one else in the process. Oh, and just be prepared for your brand to be aligned with doom forever. No big deal.?

6. Are you scared of public speaking??

If so, you’re not alone. According to a study conducted by the Ripley’s Believe it or Not Museum, 2000 women were asked to prioritise a list of 88 phobias, and public speaking was NUMBER THREE, behind only losing a loved one and being buried alive.?

Being buried alive is not nice, but should you ever find yourself in this situation (perhaps the result of an arch nemesis with a twisted vendetta?) this is how you get yourself out. This newsletter is not only enlightening, it’ll save your goddamn life.?

But back to public speaking! It’s little surprise that women are so deeply paranoid about their public speaking performance. Many moons ago in cave-person times if all eyes were on us it meant we were about to be attacked, and so the panic still sets in. It’s a form of self-preservation.?

But when it comes to women specifically, there’s other reasons that I can relate to. There’s a wealth of research suggesting women are judged far harsher in professional settings… for what they wear, how they interview, how they lead, their hair (especially Black women) and how emotional they get. Such corporate grooming has inevitable impact on our self-preservation, too.?

Often these judgments come from colleagues, and sometimes they’re almost impossible to shrug off. I remember in an agency pitch for a beer brand my global MD asked me to “speak less rigid. More like a man.” This was after I’d been told by the new business team what kind of dress I should be wearing on pitch day; what shoe heel was the right height and what kind of blow dry to have (likely for 25% less annual pay). I’ll present like a man as soon as you treat me like one, guys!?

I’m joking. Kind of. But how women should present themselves has dogged us since forever, so in partnership with the magazine New Digital Age I’ve created a course called Practice Makes UnPerfect that helps women finesse their public voices including writing, presenting, being on a panel and even being a podcast guest, so they can practice not being a man, but being themselves. And enjoying it.?

It’s a six-week course, two hours a week, and it’s the perfect way to say BOLLOCKS to our stage fright and unnecessary judgement.?We also do in-house versions, too. It costs money, but if you want to discuss the kind of training that's been described by many alumni already as "transformative" (!) then get it touch. Get your employer to pay for it. And if you're an employer? Pay for it! The next course starts at the end of July.

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That's all for now, folks. What did you think? I’m off to hide under the duvet and whimper uncontrollably until you tell me.?I always love feedback so leave a comment, email me at [email protected], drop me a LinkedIn DM or say my name three times when you next look in the mirror....