Fear is one of the most deeply rooted biological mechanisms that has evolved over hundreds of millions of years in the brains and bodies of animals and humans, with one key mission to increase our chance of survival.
Fear is deeply woven into our biology, culture, politics, and day-to-day life.
We sometimes don't even know what we're afraid of.
What we know for sure is that we are afraid too often.
And that's why today's SYSK trending topic is understanding and controlling our fear.
In my conversation with Dr Arash Javanbat, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who studies the biology and psychology of fear.
He'll explain what's happening in your brain when fear takes over, why courage is more trainable than most people realize, and practical ways to become braver in everyday situations.
And we'll get to that right after this.
I think it's safe to say that we live in a fearful culture.
When you watch the news or read something online, it seems like there's a lot of things to be afraid of.
And certainly we have all experienced moments of real fear in life.
When you stop and think about it.
Fear is a good thing, because if we weren't afraid of anything, we'd probably all be dead.
You'll never know how many times your fear protected you, because your fear prevented you from doing something that might have put you in danger.
Fear keeps us alive, but a lot of fear seems irrational or overblown.
So how do we better understand and get a handle on our own fear?
Joining me to help with that is Dr. Arash Javanbacht.
He is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who currently serves as the director of the Stress, Trauma and Anxiety Research Clinic at Wayne State University.
He's also author of a book called Afraid Understanding the Purpose of Fear and Harnessing the Power of Anxiety.
Hi Arash, welcome to Something You Should Know.
Thanks for having me, Mike.
So fear is something humans and, I guess, every other creature has.
We know what fear feels like, but what is it exactly?
Fear is a reaction to an obvious threat.
So if there is a lion attacking me, if a rock is falling over my head, I'm using these examples because these are examples related to the context and environment fear evolved in and the system evolved in.
So in these situations, I have an object or situation right in front of me that is perceived as a threat by myself.
But then we have anxiety.
Anxiety is more wider sense of apprehension and worry about something that might happen to us.
The example I use usually is that if someone is pointing a gun at you, the experience you have is fear.
But if somebody tells you there is a gunman on the loose in your neighborhood, the feeling you have is anxiety.
You don't know exactly what you're afraid of.
The object of fear is not right there.
But there is constant alertness and being on watch and looking for what might happen.
A lot of people who have anxiety or anxiety disorders are dealing with this.
You're not necessarily worried about one specific thing here.
You worry about a lot of things that may go wrong.
So i think everybody gets the idea that fear serves a purpose.
If we didn't have fear, you know we'd all be driving our cars off a cliff or, you know, running in front of a train.
It wouldn't bother us.
So fear keeps us alive.
But so when is it a problem and why is it a problem?
Absolutely excellent point.
If we were not capable of experiencing fear, we would not exist as a species.
We would all have been killed, and by the nature or by other species or by our own competitors.
So we do need fear.
But the challenge is that this system evolved over a very long time to deal with the situations of its environment.
And our fear circuitry has evolved to basically prepare us to the conditions of fight and flight.
Back in the time, 50000 years ago, the threats were natural disasters, falling rocks, predators and other humans who were there to kill us.
But the confusion here is within the modern life environment because basically I say the software has evolved extremely fast and the hardware has not.
So we react to situations of perceived threat in the modern life the way we would react to these situations 50000 years ago.
Let's say I'm giving a public speech and I'm scared and I'm worried I may be judged and my heart is pounding in my throat and I'm short of breath and my hands are sweating and it is not helping me.
It sounds stupid that the system which has evolved to help us and serve us is now working against us.
But if you put it in the evolutionary perspective and context, it's less confusing.
So 50,000 years ago, if I'm among my tribe mates, And they don't like me.
Chances are high in a matter of minutes, one of us are dead or I'm exiled or seriously injured.
So I need that fight and flight system to work.
And that's the feeling we feel inside of our chest and inside of our guts and stomach.
Well, it does seem.
I think anybody who would look back at the things that they have been afraid of or felt fear about or anxiety about in the last six months probably was unnecessary.
Whatever it was never happened.
It wasn't a threat.
It was just a perceived threat in your head.
That's true that fear and anxiety, mostly anticipatory anxiety, is worse than what it really is.
And a lot of us overshoot, especially more anxious people, overshoot for threat detection.
We have a tendency to catastrophize.
Like right before this I was talking to a friend who has a company with like 30 40 employees and he's talking about some of the challenges, some challenges at work, and then he goes.
Well, at worst i can have my own solo practice and work.
Well, that was a big jump from going from 30 employees to oh, i will be able to function as one person after losing all of these.
So we do overshoot and a lot of times i tell people How about you look back and see on average in the past, every time you worried about something, how much you overshot compared to the reality of what you experienced?
Then we can use our cognitive brain to basically readjust that next time we are in a situation that we are worrying about.
The other thing that fear and anxiety do is that, which is amazing about us.
So we as a species are capable of reflecting on the past and planning for the future.
But the problem is that even right now, our listeners are not 100% here.
Part of the brain processing is in what happened earlier and in what's about to happen, in a few minutes or a few hours, or tomorrow, the meeting I have tomorrow, what I'm going to have for dinner when I go home, what challenge I will have.
All of these things are constantly here.
And if we were able to be exactly in here and now, we would be a lot less stressed and a lot less anxious.
And if you wanted, we can at some point have a two-minute practice of just doing that.
Of just being in the here and now.
Yeah, I can guide a one-minute experiment between us and the audience if you want.
Go ahead.
Okay, so I want you all to pay close attention, just with the count of fingers, or just tell me or yourself, how many sounds you're hearing at this very moment.
Two.
Two, how many colors, as many as they are, do you see around you in the room?
Many.
Seven, eight.
Seven, eight.
And you can count and focus more and more as much as possible, because there are different shades even in the same object.
Right.
And then I want you to feel your shoes. feel exactly every inch of the shoe.
There are parts that the foot is touching the shoe.
There are parts that are not touching.
There are parts which are less comfortable.
There are parts which are more comfortable.
Same you can do with your sleeves, like sleeves of the shirt.
People can feel every single inch of it.
So during this time, Could I confidently say you were thinking less about past and the future?
Absolutely.
I was thinking about what you told me to think about.
This is exactly mindfulness.
I mean.
To a lot of people, mindfulness is being with some candle and some weird music in the basement.
But this is mindfulness.
This is one of the ways we use and we can use, which is very against what's happening these days, because these days you're constantly not here.
You're on your phone, you're on Instagram, you're on Facebook.
200 different, contradicting and different subjects in a matter of seconds.
You're just scrolling down and up.
But then, with these experiences, we use our senses to come back to here and now, which is oftentimes the safest moment.
And when we are not in there, and then which is just imaginations life is a lot easier and less scary.
Is that beneficial, though only for the few minutes I'm counting colors and feeling my shoes, or does that have any kind of residual effect?
Excellent question.
So it's a practice.
The same way we build muscles in the arms and in the body with going to the gym, this kind of practice basically gradually teaches us to be here and now.
And the more and the longer we can, we will basically be able to do it longer and more.
First of all, it's a respite if I can and that's a lot of activities we do that recharge our brains.
Right, I go to the gym and I do go to a boxing gym.
I hit the bag, not the people doing that.
One hour then I'm hitting the bag, I'm just right there because I cannot think about something else and it's very refreshing.
So mindfulness, any mindful activity in that sense, could basically be a reset for the mind.
Basically takes us away for a second from all the worries and troubles and problems we are thinking about or we have made for ourselves in our minds.
But then also, when we do more and more and more and more and more of this in the midst of the anxious moments and difficult situations, it's easier for us to come back to here and now.
So it's a practice that we do to basically reset the system and be able to come to here, which is the only real moment in our life.
We're talking about fear and anxiety in everyday life, and we'll be talking about bravery too, in just a few moments.
My guest is Dr. Arash Javanbacht.
He is a psychiatrist and author of the book Afraid Understanding the Purpose of Fear and Harnessing the Power of Anxiety.
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So Arash, I've always been fascinated by this idea, and I understand why, but whenever there's something in the future that you're worried about, It's almost impossible to imagine it turning out well.
It's always in the negative.
It's like, what if this goes wrong?
Nobody ever sits around and thinks, what if this goes right?
I get why and we're wired that way.
But wouldn't it be nice if we could say this is going to be a piece of cake?
This is going to be great.
This is going to be the greatest thing that ever happened.
That would be very good.
That would be even better if we were able to have an objective assessment of the threat.
But think about it.
Why do we worry even about jinxing things, right?
You're like, oh, don't say all those good things about it.
Even if you're not superstitious, you still have some worry in the back of your mind about it.
And there's this other part.
Oh, if I set myself for a lower level of expectations.
So if bad things happen, then I'm not, I'm prepared for them.
It's as if there's somebody in my head who is sitting there as a very harsh judge that if I fail, I should be so prepared to explain to them why I failed.
There's also something about fear, though, that intrigues us.
We like movies that scare us.
We like books that scare us.
We like...
So we almost like go after it.
We almost like pull it in because there's something about it.
Maybe it just feels good when it goes away after.
I don't know.
But what is that?
The same way our body needs to be active, we go to the gym, right?
Because this body was designed not for sitting at the desk all day long.
It was designed for other activities.
We go to the gym and prepare it and we feel a lot better.
Think.
Our fear system also needs some good, healthy exercise.
We need some real fuse, and the first time I thought of this was when I had my own experience of Fear, big fear.
I was afraid of heights and I, not thinking well about it, signed up for a mule ride down the Grand Canyon.
So I'm sitting on the mule next to this flat wall going down so deep and terrified course.
Those few hours of right down to the bottom of the canyon was basically helpful in overcome.
Basically was exposure therapy more for my fear of heights and I ended up being able to even do roles in a fighter jet.
But the cool experience was after that for a few days I did not feel anxious.
I felt so calm, Same.
I was talking to my boxing trainer.
This guy fights Reggie.
And Reggie, I was asking him about his fights and how it feels.
And one of the things he said was fighting feels as if he's alive, which I couldn't understand.
This is another one of those real mindful moments.
But he also felt much less anxious the next few days after that.
I think this when putting fear in real perspective, being exposed to what is really scary allows us to put our false anxieties in perspective.
I've always thought, my theory has always been that it's like safe fear.
You know, when you go see a scary movie, deep down inside you know there's nothing to be afraid of.
And yet, so you get to exercise that feeling in complete safety.
Absolutely, I agree with you.
Somebody chasing you with something looking like a knife in a haunted house is different than that happening on a street, on a dark street.
And that is what matters here is the context.
So contextually, we have a very contextual brain.
Our brain is advanced to process the context and put cues in context.
So that context allows you to know, as you said, you're safe, number one.
Number two, you are in control.
Sense of control is one of the most important things for reducing fear and anxiety.
And there are many ways.
I've talked about how we can basically use that sense of control to reduce anxiety.
I mean, there are even researchers that where the same rats got the same number of shocks, two groups of rats, one group had a false perception that they are in charge of the shocks to get.
They were less stressed.
So absolutely, that feeling of safety.
So you rile up the animal inside, but the human knows we are safe and we are in charge and can enjoy the ride.
So is the antidote to too much fear bravery?
Is the ability to feel that fear and do whatever you do with it and just move ahead anyway?
So bravery is a very complicated concept because it has so many layers, because what is perceived as bravery is an action that we see from outside.
Let's say I'm highly trained at.
I don't know a SWAT team member who is highly trained in self-defense feels much less scared if someone is about to rob them than I am.
Is that person more brave than me or is that person more trained and skilled than me?
Or how we perceive the threat.
An accurate threat perception is important in the sense of bravery.
If let's say I
I don't know about snakes.
I see a snake, I freak out.
Someone else knows this snake is non-venomous.
Because of that knowledge they look brave and they can go grab the snake.
But it could also be stupidity.
Someone may have a very unrealistic perception of threat and they act somehow that looks brave.
But there's a point to what you mentioned.
We say fear and anxiety a lot of times is there.
I mean sometimes we cannot even eradicate it.
I mean, we have a lot of advancements in our treatments and whether it's medications therapies, technologies using some advanced augmented reality technologies for that.
And they help a lot.
But sometimes.
At the end of the day, you cannot totally eradicate fear and anxiety, but you want the person to get to the point that they are able to perform and function ideally in the face of the fear and anxiety.
I mean for a lot of people with anxiety disorders and illnesses.
That's one part to learn through skills and coping skills and other abilities.
But this is some of the fact of a life of people who are highly performing.
I know someone who was a very famous actor, actress or singer who was on the stage or high performing athletes.
They always have to deal with their anxieties and fears and still perform fully, ideally.
And that actually is what determines a better professional from the professional which is less successful.
Very often, people who are perceived as brave said well, i had no choice.
That was the only who was the right thing to do it.
You know, if somebody, if i'm holding my own child and someone tries to grab him at gunpoint, i'm gonna do everything.
I'm gonna do things that people would perceive brave.
I had no choice.
What else was I going to do?
Maybe it was brave, but it wasn't like there was another option.
You do what you have to do, and bravery is something other people say about you, more than what you say.
Oh, I was so brave.
I work with first responders a lot.
What you said just reminded me of a story.
I had a cop who basically, whose partner was shot in front of her.
And it's just the two of them, and the gunman is coming towards them and shooting and she's sitting there putting her hand on her partner's neck that is bleeding, to help him survive.
And that was the question I asked her.
I was like, you didn't worry about your own life at that moment.
She exactly gave me the answer you gave, you just said.
I had no other choice.
I did not think and I could not think of any other action at that time.
Is there something and there may be no answer to this, but is there something like the next time I'm in one of those places where I'm really afraid?
I have fear that I can do in the moment like a first aid thing to turn the volume down on the fear?
Yes.
One thing is to try to bring myself as much as I can to here and now, whether it's like counting colors around me or writing something down, or engaging my cognitive brain or joking about something.
Sense of humor.
Bring me here, because being there in the la-la land of fear and anxiety number one, it makes it worse.
Number two, it's not going to help.
It reduces my ability to deal with the situation.
Even seeking help from others.
Others from outside can give you perspectives that can basically, Both from a biological standpoint and cognitive standpoint, other humans are able to soothe each other.
So we can use these resources.
Yeah, well, I've always believed that, that fear grows exponentially in a vacuum.
But when you get other people involved and talk about your fear with other people, they can help you put a better perspective on it.
I've been speaking with Dr. Arash Javanbacht.
He is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist.
He is author of the book Afraid Understanding the Purpose of Fear and Harnessing the Power of Anxiety.
And there's a link to that book in the show notes.
Thanks, Arash.
This was really interesting.
Appreciate it.
Thank you so much.
It was an engaging conversation.
You asked very thoughtful questions and I really enjoyed it.
And if you enjoyed it, I hope you'll share this episode with your friends.
I'm Mike Carruthers.
Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.
