I have these strange irrational fears. When I’m riding my bike down a hill, for example, I occasionally imagine the brakes heating up my rims so much that my tire pops. I actually pulled over on a long descent once and hailed a ride from a passing pickup truck. Another one: when I’m trying to open a new jar of pickles, I’m afraid I’ll squeeze the glass so hard that it will shatter in my hand. I know, I’m taking a pretty optimistic view of my own strength. But still...
There’s this thing we do with fear. We give it this privileged place in our mind, and then we let it grow. And let it tell stories to us about the way things are going to be. Going to be. Fear thrives on uncertainty about the future.
And that is simultaneously fear’s greatest weapon and weakness: it hasn’t actually happened yet. It seems so inevitable -- we know it’s going to happen. We can picture it happening. Go ahead -- think of something you’re worried about right now. Even if you don’t fancy yourself the most creative person in the world, I bet you’re really good at imagining all the ways your fear might manifest.
Of course, it’s not just pickles. If fear thrives on uncertainty, it’s having a heyday right now. Because so much of the predictability of our lives has been lost, we’re more vulnerable to that uncertainty. So fear rubs its hands together, licks its chops, and moves into our imagination.
We can’t get rid of fear. And we don’t actually want to. It serves the important evolutionary purpose of alerting us to danger. It speeds up our heart rate, preparing us to flee. It makes us sweat, so we’re harder to grasp. It may make us empty our bowels, so we’re lighter and can move faster.
The problem is that our fear response adapted to a completely different set of stressors than we face today. Instead of warring tribes and sabre-toothed tigers, we face fear of failure or fear of missing out. Our students may struggle with social anxiety, or feel like they don’t belong -- chronic stressors that don’t allow us to recover. Our body simply isn’t equipped to sustain the fear response over a long period of time. So our immune system starts to break down, or our cholesterol goes up, or we find ourselves getting angry or irritated more often.
But remember, it hasn’t happened yet. We can’t actually be afraid of something that’s already happened. So the trick is to get inside that fear response, to slow it down, to let our prefrontal cortex -- the human part of our brain -- respond to the amygdala -- the paleolithic fight or flight center of our brain. To recognize that it’s a story we’re telling ourselves. That we are not our thoughts.
How do we do that? With breathing, for one. Steady breathing and deep breathing calm down the amygdala. And over time, with a steady mindfulness practice, we can become more aware of the thought processes that kick in when fear takes over. We can, as Viktor Frankl says, create a space between stimulus and response.
It starts with thought awareness, with slowing down the automatic processes that animate our
brain and becoming an observer to those processes. Once we do that, we can soften the fear, we can feel it in a way that allows us to respond with peace rather than panic.
You can start stepping outside the instinctual flow of your mind with this thought awareness practice.
But one confession: no matter how much I do this, I still prefer climbing up a mountain to racing down one.
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