02 Jan Letting Go of Fear: A way to bring in the New Year/Decade
Okay. I’m here in the airport thinking of you and how I can support you in the coming year. Here’s the beginning of a series of posts on fear and how we can learn to dance more elegantly with it.
There’s something about turning the calendar that brings up fear for people. I decided to learn what I can about fear, it’s neurobiological mechanism, and how to train our minds to gain some freedom from fear. This post is the first in what I hope to be few installments as I learn more.
Gloria is a client of mine. We’ve been working together for many years. She longed for relationship, for sexual contact, yet was terrified of it at the same time. We both acknowledge she’s come a long way from the days when she would run out of a room if a man showed interest in her. Running out of the room only entrenched the fear that men aren’t safe — but even worse, filled her with utter shame that she couldn’t control this horrible behavior.
Getting some awareness of the neurobiological mechanism was one way we helped intervene in this cycle.
When Gloria was in the presence of a man she was confounded with both the longing for connection and the fear that she would be hurt. What we know from the research is that her amygdala (the part of the brain that signals danger) would get activated, quickly spreading to her cortex (the part of the brain that can organize disruptive experiences.
When the amygdala disrupts life like this, operating at such a pre-conscious level, we feel out of control, swept away by the rip tides of life. The problem for many is that this unconscious mechanism can dominate life.
To shift this we need to understand both our unconscious fears better and also how to learn to train our minds to slow down, to become aware of our internal processes, and find ways to respond to these fear mechanisms in ways that enhance our lives instead of overwhelming them.
Researchers have found that if a person is presented with an image of a fearful face for more than 10 milliseconds but less than 30 milliseconds we’ll activate the fear circuits but won’t be able to use the frontal cortex to mediate that process.
Studies have shown that when our brains register something fearful electrons start flowing through fear circuits. It takes at least 10 milliseconds (think how fast that is) of exposure to fearful stimuli to start feeling the effects in our bodies.
During that 10-30 millisecond exposure to fear the brain starts trying to process what’s happening, taking in the body cues, the nervous sytem signals.
After that initial load to the system, our brain scrambles to slow down. That’s when the conscious part of the brain (the cortex) begins to initiate. It’s like the Road Runner scrambling quickly trying to engage the brain to slow down! That only happens after about 400 milliseconds after the initial fear input. That’s how rapid this fear system is.
Paul Whalen, PhD, a researcher at Harvard, studied people with anxiety (but without other mental disturbances) by placing them in an MRI. They were shown images of a fearful face quickly and then a neutral face for a few milliseconds longer (167 milliseconds.)
The MRI showed blood flood increased to the amygdala when the fearful face was shown. Consciously they “saw” the neutral face and yet had no conscious recollection of the fearful face.
All is this okay if our nervous system is steady, balanced, and can handle the load of stimuli streaming through our circuits. Too much activation and our system shuts down.
Okay. It’s a lot, right? I don’t tell you this to overwhelm you but to remind you that as we train our minds to go where we want to go, as we learn more about our unconscious processes, as we explore the “parallel lives” that we live we can begin to make some in-roads.
Instead of being ruled by our nervous system, catapulted into fear and distress, we can sit with what comes up inside ourselves, steady, balanced, finding the eye in the internal storm and begin to befriend our fears.
What better way to bring in the New Year?