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What Fear Can Teach Us

Our emotions are signals, what we do with them is our choice.

Neuroscience, Aristotle and You

I’ve talked before about the neuroscientific challenges of being mammals hardwired to survive daily life or death struggles. (Yes, there’s a reason you feel a little out of sorts! Managing all those primitive reactions with that big brain of yours, lots of feelings, and all the inputs from our knowledge based, capitalist economy — it’s a lot. If it makes you feel any better, it always was.) What I haven’t talked about is fear — the emotional signal that we detect danger. Fear is a sign that our bodies are experiencing threat and risk.

When we detect a threat, in an instant, we are in “fight, flight or fawn” mode; our prefrontal cortex goes offline. Thinking simply cannot happen in a state of fear. Ironically, a response designed to protect us (this is no time to think) makes us easier to manipulate and more vulnerable in our world where thinking is the most useful reaction to any circumstance that causes fear and is not actually immediately life threatening. (Most of the threats we face are not immediately life or death.) For us, fear becomes the biggest challenge to our best thinking, developing our characters consistent with our own values, and achieving our goals.

Spot the Fear

What can make a difference is “fear spotting.” More on Substack…