What is fear and why do we have it

This episode looks at fear and how it affects our lives, where it comes from and some of the things we can do to understand and manage it better.

How to be a good Hu(man)

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Hi, and welcome to the podcast, that accompanies the book called How to be a good human. I'm Andrew Wilson, aka IAMSHOKUNIN  And today I want to talk to you about Fear

According to theorists there are technically speaking, two types of fear. 

We have something called “innate fear” and that's what we have learned from millions of years of evolution and seems to be passed down from generation to generation. Innate fear is part of the human condition. It is part of our genetic makeup, it's been passed down through generations and it reflects our experience as Homo sapiens. So we're born within it. Take our innate fear of snakes for example, we don't know why, but we tend to react with caution when we see them for the first time. Other things like fear of large predators or other dangerous situations like  volcanic eruptions, large earthquakes, storms, thunder, loud noises - All of these things inspire fear within us when we encounter them for the first time. It's very rare though with some of these events that someone coming across them for the first time is not fearful. 

Part of that could be because it's unknown and therefore the unknown is a source of fear to us. But also, it goes a little further than that, in the sense that we know from people who have certain biological predispositions, like Urbach-Wiethe disease a condition affecting the amygdala in the brain that renders them not fearful of things. People affected by this condition teach us that it is not necessarily a rational form of cognition that generates our fears - it can be more biological in nature, and hence innate.

So, we know that it's not just about the unknown, there is possibly something passed down genetically from generation to generation and we see this certainly in other animal species where learned behaviours are passed down and become innate.

The other known typology of fear, of course, is that which is learned, from people or events around us. This sort of fear can be simply experiential or transmitted in an almost a viral manner by others. 

You may have come across a situation in your life where you've been with a group of people or a crowd of people and suddenly been swept up in a feeling of fear and apprehension. The fear of the group is palpable. You can feel it and it instantly instills fear in you, and you have no idea where the source of that fear comes from. You start looking around trying to find the source of that fear along with everyone around you. It is if some invisible energy has passed through the group of people you are with, no one has said anything and you haven’t heard or seen anything to give rise to the feelings you have suddenly felt, but none the less it has happened.

So fear, on some level is almost energetic, and that can be passed from human to human. 

We are also very good at learning from our experiences in life, or things that have harmed us or caused us problems and we teach or pass on those experiences to other people. So, a lot of your fear of things will come from your mother and father for example or your family and friends. 

Quite often the fear of insects or spiders comes from your parents, one or other of your parents may be scared to death of wasps, or spiders and as a baby you have seen that reaction in them and You learn to be fearful of those same objects too. You may never have had a bad experience with any of the things that inspire fear in you, but you have learned to be fearful through others.

We know we learn these fears because on the whole babies, generally are not particularly fearful of spiders or wasps or anything else, - they may become fearful when they get stung by a wasp, but that's another matter, what is important is that these are all learned sources of fear. 

Another major source of fear, which doesn't tend to get covered in traditional literature is that of the unknown and we are naturally fearful of the unknown when we come across it. 

So when we come across a situation where we don't know what we're facing, we become apprehensive and fearful. That's because we have no reference points, we don't have an innate response to the unknown, because we haven't come across it in the past and we haven't got a learned response because we haven't come across it or heard about it before.

So, there is an almost default position whereby anything we don't know about may cause us to be fearful of it. It’s the potential for harm that the unknown represents that causes us to fear it.

In Psychiatry there is a tendency to focus on Fear and anxiety as something that is a function of an event or past event that can be treated. I beg to differ on this subject as I think fear is a basic human condition. I think trauma might be something that the psychiatric industry can help with - when fear becomes pathological as a result of severe events. But that is quite different to the basic acknowledgement that fear is a very basic driver in the human condition.

In one  respect, we can look for sources of fear, and we can categorise those that we can see. But there is also an unknown element and the unknown bit also is a major driver of fear in people. 

Now, this brings me on to a very famous quote by Donald Rumsfeld, who was the Secretary of Defense at a time during the Iraq war in 2003 for the US government, and he quoted something which we know normally as something called the Johari Window. 

Unfortunately, most people hadn't heard of Johari’s window at the time of this quote so when he used it, it seemed ridiculous what he was saying. But in fact it's one of the most remarkable mental models that we possess for helping people better understand their relationship with themselves and others and it goes something along the lines of this:

There are known knowns. So, these are things that we know that we know and there’s no room for doubt  - we implicitly understand everything we need to understand about a certain situation.

These are things we know We don't know. An example off this might be we know that people fish for trout and we know that we know virtually know thing about how to do that. It is clear to us that there is s subject we know of, that we know nothing about.

And there are unknown unknowns, and these are things we don't know We don't know. So in a sense the unknown unknowns are invisible to us. This model explicitly acknowledges the fact that there are things that are unknown to us. There are things that are unknown and we don’t even know what they are, we just know that there is a whole lot of stuff out there which is at some stage going to take us completely by surprise.

All three of these scenarios can be a potential source of fear to us as humans.

Now, One of the things that drives fear in us is our relationship with time.

As humans, our bodies, our physical bodies inhabit a construct called “Now”, in time and space. However, we as individuals rarely live in this timeframe, We instead spend most of our time looking backwards and forwards in time. One of the reasons that we engage in hobbies and games or intense events that take place in the “now” and find them so pleasurable to us as humans, is because we have to focus on the “now” to enjoy them. So we give up our constant referencing to the past and the present. And we just enjoy the moment.

And we can learn something from this. When we ask the question why is it that we enjoy some of these things that forced us into the moment so much.? And it's partially because we spend so much of our lives, not in the current moment, we spend it, thinking about the future, or worrying about the future or trying to find lessons in the past that we can apply to the future, to prevent something happening or make something happen. It's very odd that humans do this. And in fact I at one time we thought that we were the only species on the planet that did it but I rather think that we're now starting to discover that other animals in the world are capable of doing the same sort of thing. Maybe slightly differently, they don't have a reference to time as we do in a linear manner but there seems to be some ability to reference backwards and forwards, and use those past memories to influence decisions about the future. But it's very odd that we seem to do it so much. And the reason why it's odd is because the past doesn't exist in reality, it's gone. The only remnants of the past are memories. And those exists in the present. Whatsmore the future doesn't exist either. The future is undecided and well and doesn’t exist either except as a mental construct based on a given idea of linearity that we have given the idea of time in the world today.

Anyone who has spent time in forecasting or trying to plan the future realises just what a futile exercise it can be. That is not to say that planning the future is futile, the futility is often that we tend to do it in a time bound manner.

It's fair to be able to say that, for example, if I as an individual want to become fitter. I need to do exercise. And if I do exercise at some time in the future, I will be fitter. That is a fair assumption about future. The problem then becomes when we try to apply time to that, because what we cannot predict about the future is what will happen to prevent us from doing that. And there are 1,000 different reasons why we may or may not be successful in doing more exercise and becoming fitter. So, when we apply a timeframe. We are almost trying to manipulate the future. And that doesn't work very well.

We can be a lot more successful about predicting the future if we don't try to force it into a timeframe.

And this is interesting in the sense that we try to time-bind everything. As humans, we say that nature conforms to time. Well, it does and it doesn’t.

Take for example a tree - we can say that trees grows on average at a certain rate per year. Therefore we can predict the rate of growth of that tree over time - but this is a huge generalisation, the tree doesn't know that it has to grow at that rate every year that tree is dependent entirely on the amount of sunlight, rainfall, warmth, cold, nutrients from the soil, fire and storms and Any other events that are occurring. And if you look at the growth circles are very old trees. They certainly don't grow uniformly every year. Some years they hardly ever grow. In fact for long periods they hardly ever grow. Some years they're short of water and resources, and then some years they grow a great deal when the ideal growing factors are in place. So nature doesn't grow according to a linear view of time. Nature is more harmonious in its relationship with time, in the sense that it does what it can when it can. And it doesn't do anything when it can't do something. And that is fundamentally the difference between humans and nature. And it talks really to the fundamental relationship that we have with time. 

You can see that nature responds, or reacts in a coherent manner, with the elements around it. Whereas humans try to force it. I think fundamentally, that is one of the sources of fear and anxiety and stress in the human population at the moment - we haven't learned to recognise and understand our relationship with the environment around us. And certainly, If you look at a lot of modern coaching gurus, and especially coming out of the USA, you would be forgiven for thinking that we have complete mastery over what we do in time and space.

The fact that we fail is down to us because we're just poor at implementing these disciplines. The reality is that is a false vision of how we can live our lives successfully. And I think that that is it's actually quite a dangerous proposition. When people foist these ideas on us that we have to get up at a certain time, we have to complete these tasks within a certain time - we have to do this, we have to do that, we have to do X number of steps a day in our plan. And if we do all of this successfully in precisely X number of months, we will have achieved our goal. I think personally that encouraging people to believe this is irresponsible. It's irresponsible because people can't always do that. And in actual fact the world, the universe the planets, the way we engage, however you want to look at it, does not work that way. Something called life gets in the way something called Nature gets in the way, something called ‘other people” get in the way. So all you really doing by setting expectations like that is setting people up to fail and causing them, misery, in some respects.

We set up a linear relationship with time. In these sorts of examples that I'm talking about. You set up a stressful relationship with the past, the present and the future. So, the moment you depart from the plan. You can't meet the future objective. And the further down the plan you get, the more you look back at your departures from the plan, and they become a source of stress for you because you know that you didn't do the things that you had to do. And, you know that you're not going to achieve your future target. And this is why in so many of these self help situations like diets or health and fitness, you so often hear these things it's these comments these phrases. It's okay to not always get it right. It's okay. Don't beat yourself up. You haven't failed, you just continue with the next step. The very fact that we actually have to tell people that means that there's almost an acknowledgement within the industry that they've done that to us. 

So, you have to ask the question, why would you set up a situation where people are going to fail in the first place. Well, the cynical side of me would say that you set up a situation like that, because you know people are going to fail. And if people are failing. They want help and support in order to help them through that failure. They need that guidance and support that reassurance. So as a guru, you set an impossible task, knowing that the person is going to fail. And then offer your services as an ongoing mentor and coach for a certain fee no doubt every month to help people manage that failure and manage them to success. And when they finally reach success you reward them by giving them lots of praise, and they feel really good about that process because they know that they couldn't have done it without you. Which of course is complete nonsense. Because had you not set unrealistic expectations in the first place, and instead had you explained to people that there is no time limit and all you have to do more of something on a regular basis, and track it. And over time, the results will happen. Now I am not saying the coaching industry has malice at it’s heart, I believe coaches everywhere truly believe they are helping; I just think that they are not always aware that there is a a potential contradiction at the heart of their work. Even when we're trying to do good things. We can set up sources of anxiety and fear within ourselves and others. And that's discounting the fact that some more cynical people in this world are actually planning your failure for you.

It gets worse. Because when we start looking back in time. We generally look back in time to reference times when we were successful and times when we failed, and to use that information to inform us in the present about actions we can take to improve our future. 

That all seems perfectly sensible on the face of it, until you consider that our understanding of our past, our recollection of our past, is fundamentally flawed. That's because our understanding of the present is fundamentally flawed. At any moment in time, we have a very imperfect understanding of what our current situation is, that's partially because our brain works in certain ways and it's partially because our brain only processes 10% or less of the images that our eyes take in. What’s more we never fully understand the context that we live in. We hardly understand the the logic or actions of anyone around us with regard to their actions, who are involved in the situation. In the final analysis after two or three days of something happening our recollection of what really happened, has been embellished by what we thought we would have liked to have happened has been skewed by what others though happened and misled by the limited information we could remember. So, in a sense we also lie to ourselves,- not intentionally, but by not understanding how limited our recall and understanding is and being certain we know what happened we force upon ourselves a form of delusion.

So the reality is that when we look back on past events, we actually have virtually no idea whatsoever what happened, and the best example of that is when you recollect something that happened to you as a child and you talk to your mother and father about it and suddenly realise that neither of them  have any recollection whatsoever of that situation, or if they do they remember it completely differently to the way you remember it. 

So, referencing the past is a very imprecise science. It's not a bad thing to do because we will remember things that have happened to us. And sometimes those recollections that we choose will be helpful to us in the current situation going forward. But we have this natural ability - it’s almost a default position to go back and look at things in the past to remember things in the past, and try and use them, and that's not always a safe assumption to make. When we come to the present.

If we don't understand what's really going on in the present. What's the point in going back and trying to find examples in the past. So, you know, in some respects, we're really kidding ourselves in a major way unless we do an enormous amount of research and real hard thinking about what's really truly going on in the current moment and the situation we face. 

So not only do we not really understand what's going on in the current situation but we have this imprecise database to reference as well. And on top of that when we then start to look forward about what we'd like to happen or what we plan to happen we then introduce an enormous amount of bias into it, based on what we'd like to happen. So we become almost totally unrealistic the moment we start to look into the future. 

It takes an extreme amount of discipline to be able to understand why it is we want something to happen in a certain way in the future. Is it because it's likely to happen or is it because we would desire it to happen. 

If you think about it we are all driven by our sense of desire for favourable outcomes, people don’t generally wish for pain in their lives, so what tends to happen is that we start to interpret passed events in a favourable way, and we tend so seek out information that supports our view - this is called cognitive bias, so you only look for the elements that support your future vision. 

And then you go back even further in time. And this positive reinforcement this selection process, becomes even more biased. So the truth is that we have actually almost no real true understanding or representation of reality whatsoever. We live in, what is in effect a dream. Our dream. Our particular selective dream. 

So through the dream that is driven by our selective memories, and our desires for the future the question then becomes, where does fear come from? because why would we choose fear If we're living in a dream, surely we’d choose a brighter future.

In effect what I am saying is that through a natural process of cognitive bias, poor recollection and imperfect understanding and a desire to have a positive future we set ourselves up with a future which 9 times out of 10 is unrealistic. Not content with that, we then go and inhabit our future on a regular basis and start imagining how great it’s going to be. And as a result of that the moment we've set that up in our minds, we start to fear that we can't achieve it, that things will get in the way. The more unrealistic our vision of the future becomes, then the more things we have to fear that might affect a positive manifestation of that future dream.

So in a sense, the natural, optimistic, self delusional self if you like, is at the heart of driving fear in ourselves, which is why it's ever present. It is an ever present fear of loss about something that you don’t even have yet. How bizarre it that as an idea.

It's why we can never really get rid of fear, because if you desire something in the future, or you desire an outcome. Then, you're automatically going to fear anything that is going to stop that happening. Hence why so many ancient thinking systems, focus so much on giving up desire, giving up that idea, that attachment to something, because they fundamentally understood that if you give up the attachment to an idea you also give up the consequential effect of driving fearful expectation around the non delivery of the idea. So in a sense, when we talk about giving up attachment to things and ideas and concepts and things we or objects were actually very wisely, making ourselves happier because we're not allowing ourselves to be fearful. 

And, you know, a really simple example of this would be if you wanted to have the latest iPhone. And the latest iPhone costs 1000s of dollars. It's an enormous amount of money to spend on a phone. Some might say a computer, portable computer. But what's the first thing we normally do. Well we start of by fearing we can’t afford it then once we have bought it we fear that we're going to drop it. So That's the first thing that we get, we go out and buy is a protective case for the iPhone. And normally have a screen protector, as well. Because we are attached to something expensive, that we value highly. And immediately, we have a fear that we're going to lose it so we probably buy insurance, so it doesn't get stolen, insurance against damage protective cases protective covers for the front screen. All of those things that we've done are driven by fear. A fear of loss. 

So when we go back to this idea of attachment. How do you not become attached to something like an iPhone, the new iPhone. Well, it's very hard not to be attached to that brand new, shiny iPhone because you've paid with it, with hours of your life. You've worked hard. You've saved that money, and you have invested a portion of your life. In an iPhone. So it's very hard not to be attached to it. After all a way of looking at it is that that iPhone represents a part of the you you gave up in time and effort to get the money to buy it.

 So perhaps there are other strategies. Perhaps you buy $100 phone instead, because you haven't made so much of an investment in it, your attachment is going to be lower. And that's why so many people find that buying cheaper things actually are a source of happiness. If they do the things that they're meant to do reasonably well. They can offset the fear and responsibility that they have with an expensive purchase against the perhaps lower functionality of the cheaper object. So that's one way of offsetting attachment. Yeah, well the ultimate way of course is not to have a phone at all, then you have no attachment at all to that object.

I think the thing that I'm getting here is that fear can be manifested out of anything - literally out of thin air.

Fear can be a really useful emotion. But when I look at modern society. I think we are driven by an overwhelming sense of fear. And as we've just described the attachment to “things” is one source of setting up fear within us. And in a consumer society where “things” are the currency of life. You are by definition, setting up fear. So you know when you have a mortgage. If you can't pay it you're fearful of not being able to pay it or if you have a car lease for example and if you can't pay that you fear losing your car. If you have a job you're fearful of losing your job, almost anything. We have a fear of loss, everywhere. And to make matters worse, fear is used as a form of control by governments and businesses. So, if a government can persuade you that you're in imminent danger of being attacked by terrorists, which of course, you're not almost all of the time. They can then persuade you that you need to behave in a certain sort of way and they can take your civil liberties away from you and they can enforce new laws, which they couldn't do before. 

Another example is currently with COVID-19. We have a minor virus, which is not really very deadly. And we have managed to instil an enormous amount of fear across the globe, a disproportionate amount of fear, and as a result we now are constrained, as humans, we can't travel, we are having our civil liberties stripped away from us we are having digital passports put in place, we are having tracking and traceability DNA capture. The list is endless. All because they have generated, fear. And how have they done that? -  well they've done that through the news services and the media. So if we consume any kind of media on a daily basis, we are being programmed to be fearful. And when we're fearful, we generally become compliant and we tend to take instructions, and we tend to give responsibility to other people who profess to have the solutions because we can't predict what's going to happen. So, in COVID for example, What they do is they tell you that cases are rising and everyone's going to die in the future if we don't do something, and they create that fear, and what we don't know - we're not an expert so we rely on scientists or quasi-scientists to tell us what's going to happen in the future. So we become compliant and then the government, then instructs us on what to do and we do it. And it seems like it's a success. And so what we've done is we've been persuaded to be fearful, we've been given a solution, we've been shown that it works. Therefore, we have been manipulated through fear to give up our sovereignty as individuals and trust the government and do whatever we have been told. And what they then do is they then reinforce that fear by having, third, fourth or fifth waves. When in reality the numbers are not as serious as they would like us to think they are. But we abandon our rational minds. In these situations, either because there's too much information or we're not qualified or we don't have the ability to collect that information, or just through sheer panic. 

So one of the major sources of fear in our society, apart from the consumerist society that we exist in is the media. And as we now know with social media bad news travels exponentially further and faster on a network than any good news. Good news just does not seem to travel. And that's part of the human condition as well so when good things happen

we are naturally, but a good thing doesn't threaten anyone. So we're unlikely to share that information whereas a bad thing or risk or something that is potentially dangerous that we hear about we share immediately.

We have this innate desire to share that information with other humans because not only is it important to us but we want to protect others. So social networks, tap into our innate desire to be helpful and share bad news. And that is how we're being manipulated so chronically in modern society, because the media understands this. And the media is there to sell newspapers to sell advertising. And the only way they make money is by people buying their newspapers or, or listening to their adverts or listening to their programmes. So, there is a vested interest in giving out bad news. It's the only way you can make money. Unfortunately, what happens to us psychologically when we consume nothing but bad news is we just live in a perpetual state of fear, a pathological state of fear, and hence why no matter how bad COVID ever gets, it will never come close to the number of deaths, globally, which are accounted to suicide. This huge mental health problem that we have in the world. A lot of it, presumably is driven by fear. And fear drives depression and depression, clinical depression often results in suicidal thoughts. Now, that's a very, very simplistic example, it's overly simplistic I know. And forgive me for making it quite so simple because it's, it is not simple at all. But it is one example of how in our modern society we've set up this driving fear culture. This fear in us as human beings in the world today.

So at the end of all of this, what am I saying. I’m saying that fear is always with us, but we can understand it better and learn to manage it better. We can become less attached to ideas and dreams by not applying time limits to things and allowing things to flow. We can reject the media and the programming which is thrust upon us and we can be more critical of the messages we receive. Fear isn’t always bad and most of the time your fear doesn’t actually lead to a better outcome, it just causes you anxiety until the unknown becomes visible and stops being a threat to you. Once we understand that fear is used as a weapon, both by others as well as unintentionally by ourselves to sabotage and control things, we give ourselves the opportunity to have happier and more fulfilled lives.

I hope you enjoyed todays podcast. As always I love hearing from people and thank you to those who leave comments and rate my podcasts. I really enjoy the process of producing them and I am humbled by the fact that people listen to them. Please share them with friends if you think they would be interesting or beneficial to them, and I look forward to talking to you soon.

Bye for now