In the United States, an average 63 people are killed by lawnmowers every year, according to the CDC. Another 37 die from hot tap water.
Over 33,000 Americans died in car crashes in 2013 alone.
But I can’t find hard evidence of someone dying of embarrassment after going in for a kiss, or suffering serious blood loss1 because their presentation was a bust.
Our fear response appears to be backward — at least from a logical standpoint — because far more people are afraid of public speaking than mowing the lawn or taking showers.
So what the hell is going on here? Why are we afraid of safe things, and cheerfully cavalier about things that are actually dangerous?2
Research has provided an answer, and if we use it to our advantage, we can use science to overcome our fear of… well, anything.
We don’t even need to be brave to pull it off.
We Want New — But Not Too New
According to research, animals (and people) “appear to be attracted towards mildly novel stimuli, and to avoid extremely novel stimuli.” What this means is that we don’t like being bored, but we also don’t like things that fall too far outside our comfort zones. In other words, when something is too unfamiliar, we find it scary.
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But repeated exposure to “novel stimuli” removes the novelty — put simply, it becomes old news.
Anything we’re exposed to frequently will eventually lose its power to frighten us. That’s why there are people who juggle chainsaws or casually eat lunch on steel girders forty stories high or voluntarily stuff themselves inside subterranean Petri dishes to be hurled through a hole in the ground at ear-popping speeds.
Is this actually scary, or is it just new?
When I think about talking to a stranger, I feel a surge of fear. Asking someone for a favor, or — worse — trying to introduce myself to someone who I hope will be a new friend, fills me with an abstract kind of terror.
But when I run disaster scenarios in my head, there’s nothing that could really go wrong. Short of freak disasters3 — lightning strikes, embolisms, sudden and catastrophic failures of the building’s load-bearing walls — there’s just not much worth fearing.
Discomfort in a new situation trips an alarm, and I feel afraid — even though there’s nothing that poses a credible threat to my safety. My fear is irrational. I’m just in an unfamiliar setting, and my idiot lizard brain4 is interpreting that as a threat.
Road Rash and Rationale
Upon arriving in Koh Samui, Marisa and I rented a scooter. It was the rainy season, so the roads were wet and we were being pelted by raindrops. About 20 minutes into our first ride — which we were both enjoying — I misjudged a turn, panicked, and crashed the scooter in a parking lot.
A half-dozen Thai kids swarmed out to help, and after a quick run through the survival checklist, Marisa and I climbed back on the bike and headed off again, sporting matching bloody elbows and knees.
Only now, we were terrified.
Given that it was our first time on the bike, this set a bad precedent: as of that moment, 100% of scooter rides resulted in pain and humiliation for us. And that made us both far more reluctant to get back on the scooter again.
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But — out of necessity5 — we got back on the bike. And our familiarity with riding improved. I felt more confident after three or four rides, and had a better idea of how the bike would move underneath me.
And Marisa,6 after a dozen or so rides, slowly ratcheted down from “abject terror” to “mild panic” to “sphincter-clenching” to “anxiety”, ultimately landing at an uneasy truce.7
Is the scooter less dangerous today than it was three weeks ago? Hardly. But are we scared to ride it? Not at all.
Constant exposure to our fear dulled it to the point of meaninglessness.
Make Your Fear Boring
Part of being incredibly adaptable is that humans get bored. Thrill seekers need a bigger risk each time to get the same rush. This holds true everywhere: very few of us can do exactly the same thing every day without feeling under-stimulated.
This can be bad news in some cases — for example, the adrenaline junkie upping the ante until he puts on one of those suicidal squirrel suits and all but guarantees he won’t see thirty — but our tendency to ultimately find everything boring after a while can be used to our advantage.
Our ability to become bored by virtually any stimulus can cure us of our fears. All we have to do is take baby steps toward our fear until we’ve knocked all its teeth out.
Who’s scared of a corpse in their bed?
There’s a director8 who’s famous for making horror movies. When he was a kid, he was terrified of dead bodies. But he didn’t want to be ruled by this fear, so he decided to do something about it.
He hung a photo of a corpse at the foot of his bed.
He had to stare at the photo before he went to sleep, and first thing when he woke up in the morning.
And after a while, it stopped scaring him. The dead guy in the photo was just a part of the scenery. An aspect of the room’s decor. A mere fact among the multitude of facts in his life.
He wasn’t scared anymore, because he spent so much time with the thing he feared that it lost its power to frighten him.
Seeking Fear a Little Bit at a Time
We don’t need to suddenly become brave. There’s no need to face our fear head-on with no warm-up and only our force of will to support us.
To overcome our own fears, we only need to spend more time exposing ourselves to things that scare us a little bit — until they’re not scary anymore. Then we go a little bit further and do it again.9
An example of this that I love is Jason Comely’s Rejection Therapy.
Comely, after realizing he was hamstrung by his fear of rejection, decided to go out and purposefully get rejected at least once a day.
By doing this, he took away his fear’s power. Each rejection — asking a stranger for a ride, requesting a discount at the store — made Comely a little more familiar with rejection, and after a while rejections became emotionally boring.
The idea that someone might turn him down was no longer a source of gut-wrenching panic; rejection was just one possible outcome that would, ultimately, have no long-lasting effects on his life.
We can overcome our own fears in the same way:
Continue reading %How to Overcome All Your Fears Without Being Brave%
by Jason Lengstorf via SitePoint
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