Fear Less

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. The singer Carly Simon has suffered for most of her life from stage fright. Although she enjoys performing in front of an audience, she never knows when a surge of panic will bring her to her knees. In 1981, she set out to conquer her fear by arranging a string of concert dates at big concert halls. Midway through the tour, during the first of 2 shows in Pittsburgh, She felt her heart begin to race. Carly Simon told the audience what was happening. Go with it, they called to her. We'll be with you. She invited some fans to join her on the stage for support. They huddled around her, rubbing her arms and legs and telling her that they loved her. She was able to finish that show. But right before the next show, with 10,000 people waiting to see her perform, she collapsed. Oh my God. She canceled the rest of the tour and stopped performing in public. This week on Hidden Brain, how our fears get the better of us and how we can learn to get the better of them. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Southern New Hampshire University. The brain isn't fixed. It's flexible. That means we're always capable of transformation. A master's degree from SNHU can help you build the skills to become whoever you want, a leader, career changer, dream chaser. With no set class times and low online tuition, SNHU makes grad school possible because it's never too late to learn something new. Get started at snhu.edu/brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Planet Visionaries. Professional climber and environmental advocate Alex Honnold hosts Planet Visionaries, a podcast spotlighting the people tackling climate challenges with real hopeful solutions. Throughout season 6, Alex brings together extraordinary changemakers for powerful conversations about grit, determination, and the power of hope to fuel our fight for a better future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, This is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. Fear is a normal and healthy response to things that threaten to do us harm. But fear can also hold us back from doing the things we want to do. At Wayne State University, psychiatrist and neuroscientist Arash Javanbakht studies the psychology of fear how it helps us, how it hurts us, and what we can do to harness it. Arash Chavanbakhsh, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Thanks for having me on, Shankar.

Arash, I understand that you yourself have long suffered from a particular fear involving heights. What is your earliest memory of feeling afraid of heights?

I remember actually one of my first encounters with serious fear. It's this experience. I was a child, I think around 10 years old, and I got up this ladder to a balcony with my mom. My mom was basically overseeing building a house, and it was going from one level to another level. There was no stairs, so we used this ladder to go up there. It wasn't much of a height. It was like about 2, 3 meters, but going up was much easier because I wasn't looking down. I was just looking up forward. So I didn't even register that it's scary. I just went up easily. And cheerfully, and then trying to come down—it was tough. And we went up there and did what we were about to do. And then, as we come down, she comes down first because she wanted to be able to watch me from below. So she comes down, and then I get on the edge of the balcony. I look down, and I'm terrified. And it took a while for me to overcome that shaking my knees and the feeling of. Terror inside my heart. And of course, my mom's kind and encouraging face helped me. But yeah, that was my first encounter with this fear and realizing that I'm afraid of heights.

I mean, I remember when I was a small kid, I mean, there is a terror in actually getting the first leg off the ledge, you know, because it's sort of, you're swinging it out into the air before you can catch the first rung of the ladder. And it is, I mean, it is scary.

Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, you're right. And that is the, Toughest part. The anticipation is the toughest part.

So I understand that this fear did not necessarily dissipate as you became an adult. How did this stay with you as you grew older, Arash?

I remember if, let's say, we went for hiking, I would really avoid any edge that could expose me to being able to see below if the decline was not gradual. Or when I came to America and I bought my house, of course, there are attics here. We didn't have attics in my house in Iran, but here, I couldn't go up the ladder to go to the attic, or trying to replace a light bulb was a big challenge for me. And so it stayed with me. I remember probably about 10 years ago, I was with a friend, we were jogging in Ann Arbor, and we are alongside a river, and then she basically wanted to show me this little tiny island in the river where there was a tree log connecting the mainland to that tiny island, probably like—

10 feet.

10 feet long. She just ran on it like a gazelle and she was on the island. And again, it was a reminder to me that I am afraid of heights. And the water below me was probably again 8 to 10 feet below, but I needed a lot of encouragement to get to the other side.

Did you have to sort of hold your arms out and walk very carefully? How did you manage to get across the log?

Embarrassingly, I was basically on my forelimbs. I was crawling on this log to get to the other side.

So your experience on the tree trunk may have been embarrassing, but ultimately, it was fairly minor. Fear can also hold people back in far more serious situations. One tragic example unfolded in Parkland, Florida in February 2018, When we experienced a school shooting, can you set the scene for me and paint me a picture of what happened, Arash?

So the school shooting was happening, and the sound of a gun going off was coming out. And one of the security officers there who was at the school, he was very slow and kind of paralyzed in responding to the threat, was outside the building, and ended up not taking action in a timely manner.

He was armed, but he took shelter in an alcove outside the building and waited for help to arrive, even as the shooting was taking place inside the building. So he didn't go in and confront the shooter.

Yeah, that's correct. And of course, I was not in the head of this person, but I could just imagine, if I go in, what's going to happen to me? What's going to happen to the kids? Will I, by mistake, shoot someone else? Do I know what I should be doing? Will I be judged and criticized afterwards? And of course, all the bodily reactions which are there at the site And it goes back to the biology and psychology of fear. This is a very, very strong force and energy within us. It's one of our deepest and most primitive emotions, which functions at many different levels, from very basic primitive animal fear brain, which is, okay, now gunshot, loud noise, danger, to the highest level of human processing. And there's a lot of thoughts that we have about fear. Plus the biology at play at the moment.

So, Arash, you're a psychiatrist specializing in the treatment of stress, trauma, and anxiety, which means that you help people who are afflicted with very severe anxieties and fears. Some of your patients have seen their lives become very constricted as a result of their fears. For one patient, I understand his descent into fear began When he got laid off from his job. Can you tell me his story?

Yeah, so right after college, this bright kid immediately gets a job. He enjoys the job. He has a circle of friends, mostly work-related. They hang out together. And then he's laid off. So then he searches for work a little bit, and he finds a job that he can do from home and remotely. And gradually, he starts losing some of his social skills. He loses that circle of friends. He doesn't have other people outside. And then he loses So he loses his job also and starts a full period of self-doubt. And then panic attacks start. And panic, the way it works is just totally out of the blue, there is a full storm of fear. It's the most extreme form of fear someone can experience in their mind and in their body. Heart pounding, breathing is difficult. So it's very terrifying to people, especially if they don't know what's happening. And this happened to coincide with driving. So then his brain associated driving with danger, slowed down on driving, and at some point stopped driving. Then he started to have panic attacks in social situations, started avoiding going to places, first places which were more crowded, and then more and more basically generalized to situations even like a grocery store. And let's say another time had a panic attack while showering, and now brain associated being in the shower with the panic attack, so started basically—

Avoiding.

Increased the intervals of his showers, and then now hygiene is not great. So that was another layer of lowering self-esteem and not going out. So by the time I met this person, in his mid-40s, he was basically housebound, dysfunctional, spending all his day on the couch.

Sometimes our fears can feel bigger and stronger than we are. They hold us back from doing what we want to do, what we know we ought to do. When we come back, how understanding the psychology of fear can teach us when to listen to it and how to control it. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Quince. We all have those pieces in our closet that we can count on: the versatile jacket, the perfect t-shirt. These are the pieces that make getting dressed easy, and that's what Quince does best. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials in designs that are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. And when the temperatures start to drop, Quince makes it easy to build on these everyday staples with versatile layers designed to keep you warm and comfortable all season long. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. If you peer down the long corridors of evolution, you will see that there are many aspects of the brain that have changed over time. But researchers find that the neural pathways that govern fear are highly preserved across species. You can find them in rodents, in antelopes, and in humans. There is a simple reason for this. Creatures who lack the capacity for fear did reckless things and were quickly removed from the gene pool. The survivors were the ones who had a healthy capacity for fear, and they passed their genes to us. But what this means is that we all have fear circuits in our brains that were sculpted in the Stone Age. What worked for our ancestors may not always work for us. Psychiatrist Arash Javanbakht has studied what fear does to us. He believes that understanding the mechanisms of fear can help us form a wiser relationship with this ancient emotion. Arash, I understand that a number of years ago, you were sitting in your parked car when something very dramatic happened to you. Tell me what happened.

So this happened early in medical school. We were near the university hospital with a few of my classmates. We were getting ready to go to funeral of one of our classmates' mother. And all of a sudden, this motorcycle riding very fast just plows through the driver's side door.

Wow.

And I'm so happy nobody was injured, luckily and miraculously. But basically the 2 doors on the left were just totally damaged. But what I remember was it's as if I'm seeing a slow motion movie. And right now, 20-some years later, you and I are talking, I see the image right in front of me. And I see how slowly that bike is coming towards me, basically slow motion with full attention. And then I saw, even I remember the guy's face as the bike was getting closer and then hit the door on my side.

Hmm. So you clearly had a chance to look up and see him coming toward you. I'm assuming you didn't have enough time at this point to actually get out of the way or start the car or move the car. I mean, what you're describing happening in slow motion, of course, probably happened in a couple of seconds or even a fraction of a second.

Absolutely. I couldn't do anything. The car wasn't even on. And I just saw a scared face and then boom. That was all I saw, but in a very slow motion. And being aware of all the, even the colors of what's going on around, what time of the day was it. Basically, my brain registered all the context.

And accused that murder. So why does this happen, Arash? When we have these very dramatic things happen to us, I think many of us have these moments that almost feel cinematic, where everything seems to slow down and we can see things in great clarity, but there's nothing that we can do about it. Why do you think this is happening? What is happening inside our brains?

So fear has a very long story with us, and we have to understand the context within which it evolved. And the context within which fear evolved was a context of physical threats. We had to worry about a predator, another human attacking us, or a falling rock or natural disaster. So the system is designed to react very fast to the dangers that are around us. And when the system is activated, the brain regions involved in fear processing, including the amygdala and the sympathetic nervous system, basically it was not that the environment slowed down, I sped up. So my processing speeds up, my attention becomes hyperfocused, and the memory becomes stronger. So we register such experiences even more crisp and more strongly. And that by itself has an evolutionary purpose, because if something is dangerous, if something is a threat, I should register and learn it so well that the next time, if this is about to happen, let's say Instead of the motorcycle approaching me very fast, it was a grizzly bear. And I was attacked by a bear as a tribal human 50,000 years ago. It would be very dumb for me for the second time to go try to pet the next grizzly bear that I met. So it registers in my brain so well that this is dangerous. You got to be careful and also learn whatever skill you need to avoid it the next time.

Aurash, when you described the motorcycle approach in slow motion, it sounded like you were frozen in place. You couldn't do anything but watch the crash unfold. Why does the sense of paralysis sometimes strike us when we feel very afraid?

And that's another amazing aspect of fear. So we have the fight response, flight response, and the freeze response. Freeze response has been seen mostly in animals which are prey. For example, a rabbit, Spots a hawk, and the rabbit freezes because it doesn't want to be seen. So basically, the brain paralyzes the system, so the motion is minimal. For humans, we are more of the predatory animal, and that's why freeze response is less often observed. But when there is no other option, you try to basically minimize the risks and minimize the resources and minimize the chances of more harm. by freezing, and we see this reaction in a lot of horrible situations where humans are stuck, like rape and assault and torture, that they cannot do anything else, so the best option is to not do anything to at least, let's say, going back to the evolutionary context, reduce the amount of bleeding.

So you've given me some very dramatic examples where freezing happens. You know, a predator is attacking its prey, or a human being is being attacked by another person, very dramatic situations. Can freezing also happen in less dramatic situations, situations involving psychological peril?

Absolutely. We talked about how this system has evolved to react to very physical situations of danger. But what you are coming to now is that in the modern life, majority of the threats that we are perceiving are so abstract. A few years ago, we were talking about this virus, which is spreading from China to Europe and gradually coming to America. It's a virus. We don't even see it. We just hear the news, and we have to make decisions based on that. So system gets confused a lot of times, but also there are situations that you pause to be able to process more. You pause because you cannot do anything else, or it's a better self-preservation to not make a move when you do not know what is the move to make.

In your work with many veterans, first responders, and refugees, you say that sometimes what happens is that not only are we afraid of the thing that originally caused our fear, we start to generalize across similar things that might also be a trigger for our fear. And you say that many of these first responders and veterans often have frightening experiences when it comes to one holiday in the United States. What is that holiday, Arash?

4th of July. So this generalization of fear is, again, an evolutionary advantage. As you said, a grizzly bear attacks me or one of my tribemates. Now I avoid not only grizzly bears, but also black bears. Or a wolf attacks me, and now I avoid all different kinds of wolves. And for people who have been in war or near explosions or gun violence or shootings, the loud noise is associated with something horrific and dangerous. And now any unpredictable loud noise can create the same response, and the brain overgeneralizes the fear response to any loud noise, whether it's a slamming door, Or the fireworks, and that's why a lot of veterans and survivors of gun violence—they are terrified of Fourth of July—and they try to wear headphones, go to the basement because they logically know they are safe. This is not the war environment, or this is not the shooting context. The problem is that we are talking about the illogical part of the brain, which basically learns fear through association. And I've had even veterans that during the Fourth of July, when the firework goes off. to just drop on the floor.

One of the things that you mentioned about the patient you had who was very successful coming out of college, but gradually started to withdraw into himself, is that fear tends to cause us to avoid the things that made us fearful. Can you tell me the story of one of your patients who was robbed at a gas station and the effect this later on had on the patient's life?

Yeah. So when something dangerous happens, these highly dangerous, painful situations are very strongly registered. So for this person, when the robbing happened, they were in the gas station. They were just about to get in their car. Somebody comes pointing a gun at them and then takes their money. This was very terrifying. And now this brain wants to prevent this from happening again, right? The same story as the grizzly I don't want to be attacked by a grizzly bear again and lose another limb to them. So now the brain tries to collect not only data about the bear, but also about the context. In what context did this happen? That corner of the woods, there are bears there. I shouldn't go there anymore. Same applies here. It was a gas station. It was at this time of the day. So the associations becomes the gas stations here for this person. Avoiding gas stations, finding it very difficult going there. And it's automatic. Logically, they know. That the guy with the gun is not at this gas station. Now, there may even be cops nearby, but they find it difficult. Gradually, they can expand to convenience stores or that time of the day. For a lot of people, it's the time of the day or the time of the year that this happened that the anxiety increases, because amazingly, the context is not just the physical context, but also social context, but also temporal context.

From an evolutionary perspective, let's say you encounter a bear in one neck of the woods. You now give that area a wide berth. The more often you avoid that area, the better off you're going to be. But that same adaptation in the modern context can mean that people quickly cut themselves off from everyday sources of meaning and connection.

So if we avoid a grizzly bear in the woods, every time we avoid it, it's a benefit. But the challenge is a lot of these fears that we have learned are context dependent. A loud noise just in the war zone or in a shooting environment is a dangerous thing, right? For on the 4th of July, it's a fun experience. The problem is that sometimes this thing that we are avoiding, for instance, now In this example, new other gas stations. It's not dangerous. But the way it works is that I see it, I freak out because the brain says, this is dangerous, you shouldn't go there. You don't go there, nothing bad happens. The brain says, you see, you avoid it, nothing bad happens. So, you should keep avoiding. So, now it will become harder and harder and harder, and it keeps expanding and generalizing and consolidating the fear and becomes stronger. And I've seen it. And other examples of patients, how like a plague, it expands through their life and generalizes to other more and more and more and more conditions.

I understand for one of your patients, you know, even a cheerful, bustling restaurant has become a place of danger. Tell me what the world looks like for this person.

So I see this actually a lot in first responders. I work a lot with cops and firefighters and emergency personnel. I didn't know how tough their lives are until I started working with them. There's a ton of stress. There's a lot of unpredictable dangers happening in their lives. And, right, if you're a police officer, you go to deal with a shooting that has happened, or there's been domestic violence abuse. You're a firefighter, you go to where there's been a car crash. You have to pull people out of burning cars. And the difference they have, let's say, with veterans is that a veteran goes to a war zone and then they come back to the safe civilian environment. For first responders, the same environment where they live is the same environment they are exposed to the worst of what humans do to each other and to themselves. So their brain automatically goes to the state of fight and flight, constantly screening for danger. And they could have arrested or done a CPR on someone in the same restaurant. Now they want to go with their family. So when they go to the place, a lot of them Go at a time that there aren't many people there. And if they go, they will sit somewhere with their back to the wall where they can watch everything and watch the exits. And so it basically becomes an automatic safety behavior.

Fear works by distorting the thing that is fearful, by magnifying it. Again, this worked well in a context where survival was a challenge and avoiding threats was a far more important priority than seeking out opportunities. But many of our fears today are not connected with matters of survival. Messing up a speech, burning a casserole, or being rejected by a date are not in the same league as being confronted by a hungry tiger. When we treat trivial dangers the same as life-threatening dangers, this can skew everything in our lives.

So a lot of times, fear, as you said, distorts our attention. So when I'm scared, let me just bring an example. I go to a class that I'm teaching, and I already am terrified that I may not be a good speaker, I may not be a good professor, or I already have some fear of public speaking. And I have actually had this in a lot of my patients. So I go into this class, and I already feel less confident. My heart is pounding, my breathing is difficult, I might be a little bit sweaty, my attention is a little bit distracted and distorted. And then the amazing thing about it is that my brain is in fight or flight mode and threat detection. So my attention is focused on any signal and cue from the environment that might suggest that things are not going well. Let's say if one of my students is on their phone, I will think that they are texting another student about how bad of a teacher I am. If another one is on the computer, even, even though if they're taking notes from my speech, I may think that they're bored. If someone is sitting with their arms crossed, I think they are now guarded. So that makes me become less confident in myself, and my reaction to them may become awkward. And they, they start thinking, what's wrong with this guy? Why is he acting awkwardly? And gradually, this basically creates a self-fulfilling prophecy cycle because we already set the expectation that this world and this environment is dangerous. And these other people— and we see this actually, the example I brought up, a lot of times in people with social anxiety, for example. They go out thinking everyone out there is trying to judge them. And anytime they see any sign that other people appreciate them, the brain basically screens this out as noise. But any sign that can be interpreted, even neutral signs, as there's something dangerous, or some people are judging me, or they don't like me, or I did something dumb and they didn't like it, That will affect basically my perception of other people and my perception of myself and my own behavior.

When we come back, strategies for overcoming unwarranted fears that can allow us to move toward goals and activities that are important to us. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram Teen Accounts' automatic protections limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into Teen Accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about Teen Accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts. Working as a dedicated Fidelity advisor, I always ask, what's important to you? I'll look at those priorities and goals alongside your full financial picture to build a comprehensive plan designed to help grow and protect your wealth. With proactive portfolio insights and an eye on taxes, I'm here to help you make the most of your money. I'm Laura Maxwell, And I'm a dedicated Fidelity advisor. Learn more at fidelity.com/wealth. Investment minimums apply. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC, member NYSE SIPC. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Air France. Air France Business Cabin offers comfort throughout the journey with priority check-in, boarding, and lounge access. Onboard, enjoy menus from renowned French chefs, wines and champagne selected by a sommelier, and free high-speed Wi-Fi. When it's time to rest, settle into a fully adjustable lie-flat bed with added mattress comfort. The art of travel elevated, because Air France business cabin goes further in every detail to make your journey exceptional. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. I told you earlier about how the singer Carly Simon suffered a very dramatic experience of stage fright while performing live in 1981. Her fear kept her from singing in front of an audience for many years afterwards. In 1987, however, she ventured onstage again. In a carefully planned event, she performed before a small, local crowd in the seaside community that had been her home for many years. The concert was a triumph. Psychiatrist Aurash Javanbakht has helped many people keep fear from destroying their lives. He's the author of Afraid: Understanding the Purpose of Fear and Harnessing the Power of Anxiety. Arash, you've said that the path to becoming brave is not to eliminate fear, but to work with it. What do you mean by this idea?

So bravery and courage are defined in situations which are difficult and challenging for the person, but the person is able to overcome that primitive animal reaction and take the right action. Sometimes it's basically a self-sacrifice, which could be logical. The case I remember is, uh, there was a firefighter who was stuck with his partner, with his colleagues inside a building, and this person decides that the other 2 should go first and pushes them out and helps them out of the building, and he dies. So this is a brave action, but then there are a lot of actions that might sound brave from outside, but could just be an impulsive action, right?

I mean, it's interesting that I think we use the words courage and fearlessness synonymously, but in some ways, courage is not merely the absence of fear, is it?

No, it's not. Actually, to be fearless, basically one needs to not have amygdala. Basically, brain damage leads to inability to experience fear. Otherwise, all of us normal humans do experience fear the same way we experience pain. Well, of course, there are things that help us be stronger, be more prepared. So accurate threat perception, right? I see a snake, I freak out. Someone, a zoologist, sees that snake and they're like, well, we are in Michigan. In Michigan, the prevalence of poisonous venomous snakes is very low. And then of course, I'm looking at this snake and I know this snake is not venomous. So they look very brave to me, but What is happening here is that they just have knowledge, or someone has training, someone has a sense of control or a sense of purpose. So there's so many different aspects that come into a brave action.

Can we just spend a moment on this idea that you just brought up, which is one major way of cultivating bravery and courage to shore up our feelings of safety is to have a sense of control over what's happening. And in some ways, maybe a sense of control is what allowed Carly Simon to return to the stage on that day in 1987. Can you just talk about this idea that in some ways what fear steals from us is our sense of control over what is happening? And if we regain a sense of control, in some ways we get a sense of control over the fear itself.

This is one of the most important aspects of dealing with fear. In normal, usual scary situations, yes, that is a sense of control. That allows me to feel I can do something about it. Let's say when the pandemic started, we didn't know anything about how we can protect ourselves. Then some came and said, okay, there's a mask here, there's a vaccine here that reduces the chance of getting sick. And we started feeling a lot more confident because now we had some control. We could do things that could help us protect ourselves against the danger. And the one way of gaining this sense of control is gaining the knowledge. to prepare, educate, learn ways we can deal with the situations we are afraid of.

Learning does more than simply provide us with knowledge. When we are learning, our mindset changes. Our emotional storms quiet down. Aurash brought this insight to bear as he helped one patient deal with a fear of sharks.

So this person loved swimming and surfing, and they would They love to go to California and go on the beach and do surfing and swimming, but they were so terrified of sharks. And interestingly, this fear started when they were younger and they watched the movie Jaws. And of course, these fears are not logical. The person even comes to my office and says, I know it's stupid, but I'm afraid of this or that. To which I answer, it's not stupid, it's illogical. We have a logical way of processing and we have the illogical or associative way. So how about we start learning about sharks? How about we learn about which ones are dangerous? Because not all sharks are dangerous. Dangerous to humans, which ones are dangerous, which ones are not, where are those dangerous sharks, what are the chances on the beach here that I go there are more and less of them. So not only learning about that environment allowed him to be more comfortable— okay, the kind of shark that is dangerous is never spotted on this beach, so I can probably go here— but also it became a kind of a curious interest which helped him every time Engage and incorporate basically the cognitive brain to— and every time we bring the cognitive logical brain, whether it's through paying attention to things around us or doing something mindful or learning something or even labeling the emotions, the intensity of the emotions declines.

So sometimes learning more about the thing that we fear can quell our feelings of panic, but sometimes the fear itself is unreasonable and needs to be Reevaluated, like, for example, when we are talking about public speaking instead of sharks. Talk about this idea that sometimes our response to fear needs to be to reevaluate the fear itself.

Yeah, and this happens a lot in anxious people with more abstract forms of fear experiences. For instance, how scary is failing an exam or not grading well on an exam or failing a job evaluation or failing an interview I'm doing? Right? For a lot of people who are anxious, you ask them how, which part was the most scary? They say the anticipation. So a lot of times I say, look back in the past and see the past on average, what percent you overshoot the danger? And then I say, cognitively, try to bring it down. That's one way, basically knowing myself and knowing how scared I usually am compared to the reality. Let's look at the statistics. And utilizing all of these cognitive resources and tools allows us basically control and leash that animal fear response.

Arash, psychologists have a name for this kind of reevaluation. They call it cognitive reappraisal. I understand that you were once prompted to engage in cognitive reappraisal by your boxing coach.

So boxing started in my life when a friend of mine, probably about 10 years ago, dragged me to this fitness center. Fitness boxing gym. I first thought it's such a stupid thing, just stand there and hit a bag. But I just fell in love. First of all, it was fitness boxing. Just hitting the bag, I found it a very good discharge of a lot of tension, being focused, and of course, good workout. And basically, I have a trainer, Reggie. He's a boxer himself. And we have started basically sparring training, but we don't hit each other hard. So after so many years, 10 years of fitness boxing, I knew all the moves. I— and I'm not bad. I glove up and I'm standing in front of him. All of a sudden, it's just like I time traveled to when I was in school standing in front of a bully. As a kid, I was never fit. I was never athletic. I was smaller. So I was bullied a few times. So I see myself right in front of this bully. And I was like, wow, Reggie, I'm just experiencing the whole— my whole body experienced that fear. And he said, imagine if that child you were once was here today, how proud of you he would be. He basically made a beautiful connection. I time traveled there, and he made a bridge between there and now.

Yeah, it's almost like you were time traveling to your past, and he was helping your past to time travel to you.

Absolutely. Such a beautiful way of saying it. And a lot of times we do this with patients in treatment that they're stuck in the past. Part of our animal brain doesn't understand time, doesn't understand the distinction between what happened there and then and what happens here and now, right? A person with, let's say, post-traumatic stress disorder, they have a flashback of the memory and now they have a panic attack. And one of the things we do in treatment is to put those memories in their context. That's in the past. Now we are here. What did I learn? And now I'm a different person than that other person. I'm making basically these connections. You said it very beautifully.

So when fear takes hold of us, we often get caught up in spirals of fearful thoughts and ruminations. Arash, you say that grounding ourselves in our bodies can help in moments like this. What do you mean?

Interestingly, this, I have started over the past few days doing this ice plunge. Basically, I got one of these buckets and there's ice in it. I mean, I was too lazy, I put it outside on the back porch. In Michigan, it's already very cold, so I don't recommend the 25 degrees, but I have been able to sit in it for 30 seconds. During that time, I'm just here and now in my body. I'm not anywhere else. And the idea is that when I do mindfulness practices with my patient, I ask them, basically, at the moment, listen very carefully and tell me how many sounds are in your environment. Then I ask them to look around and tell me how many colors they're seeing around them, all shades of color. Right now, there's in front of me in my office, there's a picture that I took in Alaska, which has a mountain and beautiful water and trees, and there's so many colors in this. Then I ask them to feel their shoes, feel every inch of the shoe, where there's more pressure, less pressure, where the foot is touching the ground, where the foot is not even touching the shoe. And then this very tiny practice, after we're done, I ask them, how much did you think about the past or the future? The answer is no. The reality is that we as humans are capable of reflecting on the past and planning for the future, which is an amazing human capability that has made us very capable. But it has also plagued our lives because majority of the times we are not here, we are in the past or in the future. And mindfulness is a practice of bringing us to here and now because the reality is The only true moment in our lives is this very moment, which most of the times is the safest moment. So you can use practicing mindfulness to bring us to the here and now and ground us in here. And a lot of times that could be our body. I use the example of this cold plunge because at that moment, really, I cannot think of anything else. And actually, that's one way fear helps For me, with my fear of heights, if I stand on the edge of, like, a rock in Grand Canyon, even though I'm safe, I cannot at that moment think about anything else.

So one of the best-established clinical techniques to reduce unwarranted fear is known as exposure therapy. Can you tell me how that works, Arash?

So we talked earlier about how my brain associates something to danger, and every time I avoid it, I reconsolidate the fear and the idea and the belief that that thing is dangerous. So exposure therapy is the opposite of that, that we gradually, slowly introduce the feared situation to the person. Let's say I'm afraid of dogs. So we can sit here in my office and forever talk about how and why dogs are safe. It's not going to work. It's not going to teach the animal brain. Animal brain learns through experience. So we gradually introduce the feared situation, whether it's a dog, whether it's height, whether it's public speaking, whether is being around other people. I go in, I get terrified, nothing bad happens. I go in, I get terrified, nothing bad happens. Gradually, gradually, I develop a new learning that in this environment, it's got this context, I'm safe, which is paired with the sense of control, because it's not forced upon the person, right? We don't throw a person with a dog in the room and close the door on them. It was their own agency. They took charge and did it. And of course, I, as a social safety cue, I'm there with them. And they gradually, this brain develops this new learning along with the sense of control, I could do it. And we say you should keep doing it until it becomes boring or just annoying. And that's it.

So you've done some work using virtual technologies to help people extinguish their fears. How does this work? What do you do?

So I'm very excited about this technology we have created. So virtual reality, you wear these goggles, you're in a different world. But augmented reality, you wear these goggles, let's imagine you're wearing a pair of sunglasses, you see what is exactly around you, and then on your desk you see a spider. So we combine the real and unreal, and that makes it more real and immersive. So we started this for exposure therapy. Let's say I have people with fear of spiders, We put tiny spiders in the environment and gradually the spiders become bigger and more spiders, more colors of spiders, so we can generalize. And of course, it's not as easy. In the beginning, it's just one tiny spider in the very far corner and they're terrified. What's amazing is that we have found the subjective responses and brain autonomic responses to these virtual spiders are the same as a real spider. So then we gradually advanced this to dogs and snakes and now for or people with post-traumatic stress disorder, they find it difficult to be around other people. Now I have someone in my office wearing the goggles, a virtual door opens on the wall, humans of different race, sex, body type, behavior walk in the room, start interacting with the patient, and then the patient practices exposure. So we have been using this technology and it works so well.

You had a patient who was extremely afraid of spiders and you brought her into your lab and you basically had these virtual reality goggles placed on her, and you started running these spiders around the room that she could essentially interact with. And you even recorded the session of you talking her through this session. I want to play you a little clip.

See if you can touch it. Why not?

Why not?

Why not? I touch it, you can touch it also.

I'm just going to feel a board.

Ooh, I'm under it. I swear it felt warmer under there. That's good. That's very good. See if you can hold it like longer time. Because what we are— what are we doing? We are training your brain that this is safe. This is safe. This is safe.

Arash, what was happening in the session there?

This is actually the part that she was trying to slide her hand under this spider. How amazingly our brains perceive this, that she started to even feel it. She was like, oh, it's warmer. It feels warmer here while she was sliding her hand under this thing. It's one thing to be okay with some virtual augmented spiders, but we want this to have real-life implications. So after that, we have a live tarantula. My lab is Stress, Trauma, and Anxiety Research Clinic, STARC with a C, and this tarantula's name is Tony Stark. So they will see how close they can get after the treatment to Tony Stark. And actually, this patient was able to go ultimately have Tony in her hand, which is a large rose-haired tarantula. And interestingly, we have published this clinical trial In our clinical trial, everybody we treated for— with this technology for fear of spiders, in less than 1 hour, 1 session treatment, was able to touch Tony Stark or the tank containing Tony. And these are people who were like standing 15 meters away from Tony before treatment.

So you say that we might all want to practice a kind of exposure therapy as we go about our daily lives. How would this work, Arash?

I always say the only way Beyond fear is through fear. At the end of the day, exposure matters. We gotta throw ourselves in it. Of course, we want to do it the way that we succeed. So gradually, one step at a time, and I recommend people go to the minimum level I can do. Let's say I am afraid of grocery shopping because of my anxieties. Just go to a grocery store which is smaller, which you're most comfortable. At the time that there may be even 2 people at the store. Just go there, stay there. What matters most is stay with that scary situation, whether it's the date, whether it's the grocery store. Stay with that little tiny bit. Keep repeating and repeating, repeating until I master that stage. Now I have a sense of autonomy. I've learned my own limits. I've learned how my brain and my body responds to this. Then go to the next level, then go to the next level, then go to the next level. And I've seen a lot of good responses from people who do this.

I understand that you once got the opportunity to unlearn a fear during a visit to the Grand Canyon. Tell me what happened, Arash.

Yeah. So this happened— I still laugh every time I think about it. Many years ago, I was doing my residency, and I had a week of vacation I had to use in December. One of my friends who was very adventurous tells me that, hey, go to Grand Canyon. There's this mule ride down bottom of the canyon. It's beautiful. And I was so naive, I didn't think for a second that I'm afraid of heights. So I signed up for this thing. I go there, 6 AM in the morning in December, very cold. Everybody's wearing several layers, sitting on these huge mules. And that was the first time I saw what Grand Canyon is. You look down and you see the bottom. It was terrifying. And we were told, listen, if you're afraid, you can leave now, but you have to leave now. When we start moving, you cannot back off. And I'm like thinking, should I stop? Should I not? Should— looking around, seeing all these kids and older people are there comfortable, having fun. I was embarrassed. I'm like, okay, we'll do it. And these mules, they tend to walk on the edge of the canyon, and it was icy and slippery. Sometimes they slipped. And when they make you— and the trails are narrow— and when they make a U-turn, you just see the bottom of the canyon. Your mule's head is off the canyon, basically. So it was very terrifying for me. But knowing that what are the principles of this exposure, I tried to basically do as much as I could, looking at others, getting so seeing other people are having fun, remembering the fact they told us that they are running this business for 100 years and nobody has been injured or died. No mule has been killed. So basically utilizing all my cognitive and non-cognitive resources.

Uh-huh.

We went down to the canyon and the next day we come back up. And that basically, not that I recommend this as a way of overcoming your fears, But that was it for me, and I overcame my fear of heights. Actually, a couple of weeks ago, I was back in Grand Canyon. I stood on the edge of that cliff, of course in a safe way. I felt the tingling in my knees, but I could do it. And another amazing experience that came out of this, besides the overcoming my fear of heights, was for the next few days, I realized I'm not experiencing my usual anxieties daily life. And I started thinking about what is the source. I mean, one theory I came up with was that maybe we need some occasional experiences of real fear to exercise the fear system in a normal way, the same way we exercise our bodies to be healthy because our lives are so sedentary these days. The other thing I realized was that when we experience such real fears, because at that moment I'm standing on the edge of that cliff on that mule, What is my fear? My fear is if I fall, I'm dead. So now I'm facing a real fear. Now, compared to this fear, how much does it matter the things that are going on at work, or the paper that got rejected, or this disagreement that I have with this other person? Basically, these kind of fears put other anxieties in context.

Yeah, because the other fears start to look trivial at this point compared to actually plunging to your death. 2,000 feet in the Grand Canyon.

Absolutely, and that's why a lot of people, I mean, we did talk a lot about the trauma in, let's say, first responders, police, firefighters, veterans, but the other side of it is that people who have seen the real dangerous situations, who have experienced what really matters, a lot of them have grown to the point that they find other anxieties that bother the rest of us meaningless.

We've talked about different ways to get our fears under control, but it's also possible for us to change, in some ways, what's on the other side of the equation. When we're afraid of something, instead of reducing our fear, we can increase how much we care about the thing that our fears are holding us back from. In some cases, that bigger thing might be a sense of duty or patriotism. So when Western countries offered to airlift Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to safety after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, he said, I need ammunition, not a ride. Can you talk about this idea, Arash, that the things we care about deeply can be a bulwark against our fears?

And that's one amazing thing about us humans, that we are capable of overcoming a lot of terrifying situations that we even did not know we were capable of. What I've found in my career is that the meaning we create for our experiences transcends a lot of our fears and can help us basically protect us against fear.

So sometimes the thing that is bigger than our fear is our love for another person. When you were training as a doctor, you once helped a family who had been brought into the emergency room. Paint me a picture of what happened, Arash.

So I was in the emergency room and there was a car accident. There's a mom on a stretcher with a very pale face, and there's a dad and a couple of kids, probably 5, 6 years old. And I remember this woman's son was next to this stretcher, terrified, crying, worried about his mom. And mom was basically so calmly, Such a soothing way, saying, "It's okay. I'm all right. Nothing bad has happened. It's okay." And then we unwrap her arm, which was wrapped in a in a sheet or towel. I don't exactly remember. And I saw the worst injury crushed bones on her arm. I was just amazed by this is crushing pain, and she knows she has a high chance of losing this arm. But for her, the priority. is to make sure her child is okay and not terrified and not hurting. And this was one of the most amazing examples of selflessness and bravery I've seen.

Arash Javanbakht is the director of the Stress, Trauma, and Anxiety Research Clinic At Wayne State University School of Medicine. He's the author of Afraid: Understanding the Purpose of Fear and Harnessing the Power of Anxiety. Arash, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Thanks for having me on, Shankar.

Do you have questions for Arash Javanbakht? What kind of fears have you faced in your own life? If you'd be willing to share a personal story and the strategies you've used to combat your fears with the Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone and send it to us at ideas@hiddenbrain.org. 60 seconds is plenty. That email address again is ideas@hiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line Fear. Hidden Brain Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querelle, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our unsung hero this week is Hidden Brain listener Joy Smith. Not long ago, Joy noticed that multiple episodes of our show had been marked as explicit In Apple Podcasts. We realize that this error might make some listeners reluctant to play those episodes. Everything is marked correctly now. Thank you, Joy, for spotting the problem and sending us a note about it. If you liked today's show, please share it with one or two people in your life. Word-of-mouth recommendations are the best way to help us connect more listeners to the ideas we explore on Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

Thank you.

Having lots of choices sounds like it would be great. Who doesn't want more flavors of ice cream? It turns out the answer is us. Too many choices can make us anxious, overwhelmed. I'm Shankar Vedantam, host of the Hidden Brain podcast and YouTube channel. Each week, Hidden Brain brings you fascinating, science-backed insights about human behavior. So the next time you have to choose, choose Hidden Brain on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or hiddenbrain.org.

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