The Science of Fear and How to Overcome It

Don’t watch the movie Halloween when you are seven years old. It was a bad idea then and it’s a bad idea now.

That mask is why I started sleeping with my bedroom door closed. Some twenty-odd years later, I still see that lumpy-white face when I look out into a dark hallway. Fear is a very strong emotion but I am sure I don’t need to tell you that.

I wanted to understand exactly how fear was processed in the brain and what makes it so different from other emotions we can more easily control. What I found out will hopefully give you some better insight for how you can overcome and control your own fears.

Fear 101

Fear is not anxiety. Fear is an emotional state that exists in the presence of danger and ends once that danger has passed. Anxiety exists when we anticipate a danger or threat, regardless if one is present or not.

“Human anxiety is greatly amplified by our ability to imagine the future, and our place in it, even a future that is physically impossible.”—Joseph LeDoux

Our understanding of fear comes from classical fear conditioning experiments, which look like this:

Say you are walking through your house, minding your own beeswax when out of your left eye you see something on the wall. The brain does two things simultaneously:

Takes the Low Road—innate and unconscious (takes a fraction of a second)

• The sensory thalamus receives some sort of a sensory input, like seeing something on the wall.
• Passes that information to the amygdala. (Your brain isn’t even sure what exactly it’s seeing here. It could be a spider, it could be a random mark on the wall.)
• The amygdala recognizes that the input is a threat and prepares your body to respond.

Takes the High Road—takes a few seconds, is both conscious & rational.

• Your sensory thalamus also sends information to your cortex (which gives you context to understand what you are seeing).
• Cortex says, “Yes, that is a spider, it has eight legs and is full of nope...”
• This information is sent back to the amygdala, where your fear response takes over—heart rate increases, pupils dilate, and perspiration occurs.

Your brain is set up to allow fear to take control. As evidence of this, there are a good number of pathways from the amygdala to the neocortex. There are far fewer pathways from the neocortex to the amygdala. Your brain doesn’t want your conscious awareness to override your fear responses

You might think that your fears are unique, but we there are certain fears that are pretty common. Fear of heights, fear of public speaking, fear of failure—to name a few. Can we ever truly get rid of our fears? Neuroscientists are trying to find out.

What happens when you retrieve a fear memory?

A process known as reconsolidation occurs.This is your brain rebuilding the connections to that specific fearful memory and this happens each time you recall that memory.

During this time the brain can add more information to that specific memory. This can increase the power of that memory (this can make you more fearful). There is a 10 minute window from the time at which a memory is recalled when neural connections are most open to change.

Professor LeDoux figured that if you could block the protein needed to rebuild the connections of fear based memories you could block the reformation of that memory. He was right. LeDoux tested his theory on rats, but as we aren’t allowed to inject humans with protein blockers, scientists had to find another way. That’s where neuroscientist Daniela Schiller comes in.

First she had to create a fear memory, which she did by subjecting 65 individuals to fear conditioning.

She (and her colleagues) showed test participants two colors, blue and yellow. One of the colors was some times paired with an electrical shock. This color would become the fear stimulus and soon just seeing it caused the participants to sweat.

The researchers then split the group up and manipulated their fear based memory during reconsolidation. The first group received no memory manipulation, the second received it after 10 minutes, and the third—after 360 minutes.

Here’s how it the experiment worked:

The first ten minutes of reconsolidation is when memory is most unstable and open to change. It was during this time that researchers updated the memory with new non-fearful information—showing the visual object with no shock present.

This completely eradicated the fear response. A year later the results of the test still held up—the fear memory appeared to be erased.

While you were sleeping…

Sleep is a restful time for us but not so much for our brain. Our brain is doing a lot of work and some of that work is to consolidate memories. So, it’s a logical place to look for preventing/stopping fearful memories.

A small study done in 2013 showed a group of 15 people photos from a mock lineup, each photo was paired with an odor. Two of the photos were also paired with a light electrical charge. Then everybody took a little nap.

The researchers exposed some of the napping participants to the same odors they smelled when looking at the photos. They cycled the odors over two hours. After everyone woke up, they were shown the images again. Those who had been exposed to the odors while sleeping were less afraid of the faces that had been paired with the electric shock. The exposure to the odor dampened the fear response—enabling new, non-fearful memories to form.

Most of us don’t have access to labs, or electrical charges to help us get over our fears. Thankfully, we can still do something to help diminish and/or alleviate our fears.

Stop fear from ruining all the things

A brief disclaimer: Dealing with a fear that you find to be completely overtaking your life is truly better left to professionals! I can, however, offer some modest advice for how to overcome our everyday fears, like public speaking, or talking on the phone (surely I'm not the only one).

Question

Our fear response is largely unconscious, so the first thing you need to do is bring awareness to what the hell is happening. You have to question the basis for your fear.

• What am I afraid of?
• What triggered this fear?
• What is the worst that can happen?

You may think these questions seem silly or obvious, but it’s not about the complexity of the question, it’s about unravelling the fear. It’s about untangling it from our minds so that we can get control of it. The thing about fear is that it often makes us believe things that just aren’t true.

For instance: “I quit that job, therefore I am a quitter.” 

What am I actually afraid of? I’m afraid of not being good enough. I’m afraid of letting people down and not living up to my potential. Now that I understand this, I can use evidence to contradict my fear. It’s also extremely beneficial to talk to others about your fears. Research indicates that just admitting what fears you have can help you get over them faster.

Dispute and reframe your fear into something that isn’t a scary abstract beast. Break it apart into pieces that you can control by questioning and understanding it.

Face It

Say you experienced some particularly horrific turbulence on an airplane and now you can’t fly. In fact, any time you see a plane, you freeze up. That’s just your brain doing what it thinks it should do. Instead, it’s actually just debilitating. What do you do?

You see an airplane up in the sky and instead of ignoring it, you look at it. Oh, that wasn’t so bad, right?

"When you hear an airplane rumbling overhead, you can freeze, or you can take a step. And with every step you reroute the path of fear through the amygdala.”—Joseph LeDoux

Okay, it’s one thing to look up at a plane in the sky, but what if you are afraid of something like an earthquake? It’s not like you can actively seek one out. So what do you do in situations where you may not want to (or cannot) expose yourself to the actual fear?

Learn everything you can about it. This advice comes from Melanie Pinoa over at Lifehacker. We tend to fear things we do not understand or are not familiar with. When you take charge of learning about your fear you are asserting power of it. That alone can make you feel better, but this process can also help teach you where your fear stemmed from in the first place.

Workout

Whenever I am really nervous about something, my first inclination is to workout. I mean I’ve worked out before interviews, before getting on a plane, I thought this was due to some personal defect, but apparently it serves a purpose.

Working out gives fear an outlet. Your heart has a reason to pump, your breath has a reason to become ragged. That helps your mind say “Hey, I’m not dying, I’m just working out!”

Which research has found, is actually quite powerful. If you workout for 20-30 minutes prior to engaging in something you know you are afraid of, you can use up some adrenaline. Exercise also helps to get control over your stress hormones, which reduces anxiety too. It releases endorphins and reduces tension in your body. What's not to like?

These elements work together to help counteract what your body would normally do in a fear based situation, helping you to regain control over your internal systems.

When I see that white mask staring back at me in the hallway for no good reason, I say, “Andrea…look in the hallway there is nothing there.” I look, even though I don’t want to.

By doing this, I override my fear response. It may not happen over night, but every time you consciously override that response, that fear will have less control over you. Does it take work? Yes. Can it be done? Yes.

Fear serves an incredibly important evolutionary role but some of us find that fear disrupts our lives. When this happens, our fear response has gone too far and it has to be reigned in. It’s not easy to overcome our fears, but it can be done. You just have to be willing to take that first step.

From:Crew