Training Your Brain to ROAR!

(Exerpt from ROAR! Courage - From Fear to Fearless now available on Amazon).

Last Friday I went surfing with a shark. No, not intentionally. Thankfully I wasn’t close enough to see its teeth, but by the size of its dorsal fin, my guess it was a biggie. A fellow surfer spotted its dorsal fin, while a small group of us were sitting on our surfboards in the line-up, about 437 yards (400 metres) offshore, behind the breakers.

A shark’s dorsal fin is triangular with a straighter trailing edge, it’s distinctly different to the curved dolphin’s fin. I have surfed with lots of dolphins and very few sharks (that I know of), I know how to tell the difference—unless they are coming straight at you.

While our clique of surfers all knew that a shark was only fifty or so metres from us, surprisingly not one of us got out of the water. I thought I would be scared, I really did, but I wasn’t. I had to ask myself—was my reaction courage or stupidity? While many would say its stupidity, part of me cannot disagree—though another part of me knows we are scared of too much in this world and it is time to stop this fear pandemic.

The next day I went surfing again, but this time alone. After paddling the first hundred yards from shore, I noticed a strange shadow in the water. It startled me, but it was nothing. That morning there were many nothings. I saw dark shadows everywhere! The water where I usually surf is a clear sapphire colour and no matter where I looked, I kept seeing dark shadows and immediately felt a sense of paranoia. These are the tricks that are generated from a fearful mind, we can be fearful of our own flatulance and startled by our shadows.

Have we become scared of our own shadows?

We can train our brain to be brave, or fearful. So how does fear contaminate our thinking? The physiology of fear such as a shock response to shark writes code in our neurology. Fear forms patterns in our psyche that we follow. They become behaviours that are initiated via a stimulus and cause a chain reaction. The result is a release of chemicals that cause our heart to race, we breathe faster and shallower, our muscles tighten and our voices shrill at high frequency, immediately broadcasting a warning to everyone within earshot and all of this is formed in our neurology as a memory. Memories is how we store fear. Once we learn a fear, we have memorized the sensory triggers that fire off our unconscious mechanisms that have us jumping like a cat on a hot tin roof. If you have seen the movie Jaws then you will know the music used to trigger that the shark is coming. That music engages a powerful set of neural fear triggers. Still today, the movie Jaws is responsible for people’s irrational fear of sharks. Even in Michigan, beach populations plummeted in the years after Jaws. The State attempted to educate people on the fact that sharks cannot live in inland lakes, but they were not buying it. To this day, beach populations in Michigan have still not reached the levels that they were before the 1975 horror film. Over thirty-two years later, many are still affected by the scenes that they saw in Jaws. Whenever a shark attacks, or is even spotted, a dip in beach populations will be evident.

Universal Pictures, the company that brought us Jaws, conducted a survey that asked how many people would not go into the ocean to swim. It then asked: “What was the number one reason why people would not swim in the ocean.” The answer: "Because I saw Jaws,” had over 80% of the vote. The second reason was because the survey taker could not swim.

The music from Jaws has become one of the most recognized pieces of music in the world. The base line from that music can still send shivers up swimmers’ backs after over three decades.1

Fear triggers simply initiate a fear response. Music can do it; being grabbed quickly from behind will certainly do it; as will a gunshot or the sound of helicopter rotors can have a Vietnam veteren break out in a cold sweat. A fist waved at your face or someone screaming at you can become a fear trigger. Being made to perform in front an auditorium full of people will do it for most. The sudden thud of a branch landing upon your roof late at night can cause us to fear to sleeping in our own beds! So should we experience the trigger again, we will immediately respond by feeling fearful all over again. Even if we logically deduce that we are perfectly safe at that moment. Hence, fear is not logical, it is learned.

Every unresolved traumatic experience is like a ‘jack-in-box’ spring loaded into our neurological library in a part of the brain called the ‘amygdala.’ The amygdala seems to be the boss of our emotions and how our mind works when it comes to fear is simple.

First, we experience something (like my latest shark experience) and we react immediately to the potential danger and do everything humanly possible to make it back to safety. Once the fear trigger jump-starts the fear response, within a split second physiological changes take charge of our entire body.

The amygdala is the ‘boss of our emotions’

Following a traumatic event, our brain stores that experience within a part of our mind called ‘the unconscious,’ its lightening-speed processing, speeds up our reaction times. Just in-case the event occurs again. Should we sense anything resembling the threat again, the fear trigger is fired and we immediately fight, flight or freeze our way to safety.

Fear is rarely rational, yet it is actually a perfectly healthy and normal response. Leaping over your family to escape a spider on the wall is not always helpful, but it is healthy and just needs to be normalised. I will share some strategies with you later in the book, so that you can graduate from fear to fearless.

Psychology will often call irrational fear, ‘Post Traumatic Stress Disorder’ or ‘PTSD.’ I prefer to frame it as Dr Doreen Virtue does as; ‘Post Traumatic Stress Response’ or ‘PTSR’ as I don’t believe it is a ‘disorder’ either. Disorder suggests there is something seriously wrong with someone when it’s just a normal response. So here is how PTSR works.

Fear is normal

First, our sensory organs—our eyes, ears, tongue, nose and skin pick up cues from our surroundings and feed them back to our brain’s threat centre, the amygdala. If the amygdala identifies the data as a possible threat, it sounds the siren, immediately activating our fight, flight or freeze response, hyper-activating our senses. The response is what most calm individuals would describe as an ‘over-reaction,’ yet fear is a natural response to a perceived threat.

A normal heart-rate is between 60 and 100 beats per minute, depending on your physical activity, age and overall health. During a panic attack, it may beat from 8 to 20 more beats per minute. A faster heart increases our breathing rate and alters the depth of breathing. In fear, our breathing shifts to fast shallow breaths, up high in our chest. Our speech rate and volume equally increases and we sweat profusely to cool our bodies, and our muscles tighten to intensify our power should we need to defend ourselves or make a quick getaway. If you consciously tried to emulate each of these responses now, you would likely feel yourself becoming fearful or stressed. A part of the peripheral nervous system called the ‘autonomic nervous system,’is responsible for these biological changes and it regulates automatic changes to the body's vital functions. Thoughts are like galeforce wind; you can’t see the power of the wind but you can see the effects of it as it snaps a tree like a twig.

Thoughts are like wind; invisible but able to snap a tree in two

The brain is a profoundly complex, yet powerful organ. It has more than 100 billion nerve cells comprising of intricate communication networks that influence what we sense, think and do. Some of these communications lead to conscious thought and action while others produce autonomic responses—what we call ‘unconscious behaviour.’ That is we are not consciously aware of why we just did what we did. A fear response is almost entirely autonomic: we do not consciously trigger it or even know what's going on until it has run its course.

Because cells in the brain are constantly transferring information and triggering responses, there are dozens of areas of the brain at least peripherally involved in fear. But research has discovered that certain parts of the brain play central roles in the fear process:

Amygdala: decodes emotions; determines possible threats and stores fear memories.

Sensory cortex: interprets sensory data. It often tries to make sense of nonsense.

Thalamus: decides where to send incoming sensory data that comes from our eyes, ears, mouth and skin.

Hypothalamus: activates our physiology, such as our ‘fight, flight or freeze’ responses.

Hippocampus: stores and retrieves conscious memories; processes sets of stimuli to establish context, such as ‘when that happens I do this.’

So in summary, that is the neurology of fear—but how does it work psychologically?

When we have a fearful experience, the incident excites and fires off electrical pulses, activating a neural network in our brain’s sensory cortex. This process stores all of our experiences in a way that we can interpret them; encapsulated in sounds, pictures, feelings and self-talk and transforms our analyses of our experiences into a chemical reaction, in specific locations in our brain. So that we can recall our specific experiences, they are most likely stored in the hippocampus. So now we have a neural system of connections that allow us to recall and access the fear easily. So the next time an event that is similar to the previous fearful event occurs, we can react instantly, without having to process our thoughts. This is called unconscious behavior.

That neural network, associated to the fearful event, also has a hair trigger, which is fired-off by anything that reminds us of the initial event. It is like the fearful event unlocks the ‘safety’ of a gun and puts a metaphorical finger on the trigger. The trigger that causes this chain reaction, could be something we see, hear, feel or phrase that someone says (like “RUN!”) or a combination of all four. Every fear has a specific trigger or set of triggers that initiates the fear pattern. In the case of the shark, it could be something we see, like shadows in the water and POW! We are back to feeling and experiencing that initial event. A trigger could be a word said in a certain tone or at a particular volume such as the word ‘shark!’ or ‘look out!’ The trigger fires off the original neural pattern and we immediately feel the fear running its program throughout our body.

We can equally trigger the thought pattern by stimulating the associated feelings in our body again. For example, after the shark experience, the next time I got on my surfboard and got wet, the associated feelings might trigger the memory of the shark from the day before. All my thoughts may move to high alert and become focused on spotting another shark. Should I have seen another shark, my thoughts would have been immediately rewarded. That is how we create fear patterns in our lives. That is why I became sensitive to all the shadows in the water. None of the shadows were sharks, some weren’t even shadows; they came from my vivid and over-productive imagination triggered by trauma from the day before. If we keep on experiencing fear, the associated neural pathways are metaphorically deepened in our memories, to the point they can turn into ingrained, core-based phobias. They are irrational though our senses can rationalise anything—as crazy as this may be. Therefore, fears are learned and while irrational to an outside observer, they are completely rational to the person experiencing it.

So how do we resolve trauma and fear?

“Once you become fearless, life becomes limitless.” - Unknown

So while I was feeling the fear in my body due to the shark sighting from the day before, I initiated ROAR! Courage. This is a conscious process where I made a new decision that I was safe and powerful, and while at first, I didn’t believe it, I just decided that I would over-right my fear, by whipping myself up into a powerful state! I felt that decision quickly shift my state and so my thoughts altered to match my new state. I simply pretended that I was channeling my higher self, who believes that we never die and death is an illusion—so there is no purpose for fear. Now this might sound crazy, but no crazier than a phobia.Another way to get beyond fear is to excite yourself (no, it is not what you think though that would work too). All you have to do is remember or imagine a time you were excited, recall what you saw, remember what you heard, evoke what you felt and recall what you said to yourself at the time. Bring back the memory to the present and you’ll notice your state starting to change. When your state changes, so does your thinking. Your thoughts commence to match your state. The moment you feel that your state has changed, click your fingers or clap your hands in a particular way, do anything to initiate a memorable trigger that immediately is associated with the state. I suggest you do this exercise and run this new pattern about three to five times to deepen the response. In NLP, we call it ‘anchoring.’

So all memories are state-based. If you can stimulate and trigger a specific state, you will have all sorts of memories surface that were placed into your neurology when you were in that state. This knowledge has all sorts of brilliant applications and possibilities including education.

All thoughts and memories are state-based

The lack of understanding in our schools about ‘state-based learning’ is why I’m so passionate about getting this knowledge into the hands of our children. Our educational systems could gain enormous insights from this knowledge alone. For example; we educate our children in a relatively calm environment (hopefully). Therefore all the information that enters a students’ neurology is associated with a calm state. Can you imagine what happens when nervous students enter a tense exam room that has time limitations imposed? You guessed it! Their state is typically a polar opposite to the state associated to classroom learning. It is no wonder many children cannot recall their classroom lessons and get poor marks in exams, and as a result, their self-confidence is compromised. Imagine what would happen if teachers learned this technique? Our children’s ability to learn will improve. I hope you’re a teacher reading this now!

So, we now know that all memory is state-based, just as fear is state-based. Therefore, if we can alter our state, we diminish our fears. That is ROAR! Courage. If you keep shifting your state by using your triggers, such as clapping your hands or another simple action, then you will train your brain to become courageous. It’s as simple as that, however, I will go deeper and take you through this step-by-step in ‘Chapter 20 – How to Create a ROAR! State.’

STRATEGIES TO GET YOU FROM FEAR TO FEARLESS

1. Do something every day that scares you a little and builds your courage muscle a lot.

2. Before you do something, determine the best state to get it done and elicit that state.

3. Create your ROAR! anchor which helps you to immediately shift your state and thoughts.

AN OPPORTUNITY TO PRACTICE ROAR! COURAGE (Paying the second price)

1. Practice shifting your physiology and state. Begin to notice how this one technique seems to make all the difference. When you are about to do something that you normally fear, excite yourself, ROAR! play full out and notice how much more you feel you can achieve. Remember, we don’t do what we think we can do, we do what we feel we can do.

To find out more visit: www.ROARcourage.com or get FREE tickets to the ROAR! Courage Workshop here!