ROAR! Courage

1. Training Your Brain to ROAR! Last Friday I went surfing with a shark. No, not intentionally. Thankfully I wasn’t close enough to see its teeth, but by the size of its dorsal fin, my guess it was a biggie. Robyn spotted its dorsal fin. A small group of us were sitting on our surfboards in the line-up, about 437 yards (400 metres) offshore, behind the breakers. A shark’s dorsal fin is triangular with a straighter trailing edge, it’s distinctly different to the curved dolphin’s fin. I have surfed with lots of dolphins and very few sharks (that I know of), I know how to tell the difference—unless they are coming straight at you. While our clique of surfers all knew that a shark was only fifty or so metres from us, surprisingly not one of us got out of the water. I thought I would be scared, I really did, but I wasn’t. I had to ask myself—was my reaction courage or stupidity? While many would say its stupidity, part of me cannot disagree with you—though another part of me knows we are scared of too much in this world and it is time to stop this fear pandemic. I went surfing again the next day, but this time alone. After paddling the first hundred yards or so from shore, I noticed a strange shadow in the water. But it was nothing. That morning there were many nothings. I started seeing dark shadows everywhere! The water where I usually surf is a clear sapphire colour and no matter where I looked, I kept seeing dark shadows and immediately felt a sense of paranoia. These are the tricks that are generated from a fearful mind where we will be fearful of our own flatulance and startled by our shaddow. Have we become scared of our own shaddows? We can train our brain to be brave or fearful. The physiology of fear writes code in our neurology. Fear forms patterns in our psyche that we follow, behaviours that start with a stimulus and like a chain reaction, ends with the release of chemicals that cause our heart to race. We breathe faster and shallower, our muscles tighten and our voices shrill at high frequency, immediately broadcasting a warning to everyone within earshot. Once we learn a fear, we automatically create sensory triggers that fire off our unconscious mechanisms that have us jumping like a cat on a hot tin roof. If you have seen the movie Jaws then you will know the music used in every shark scene. That music engages a powerful neural fear trigger. Still today, Jaws the movie is responsible for people’s fear of sharks. Fear triggers simply initiate a fear response. Music can do it; being grabbed quickly from behind will certainly do it; as will a gunshot or the sound of helicopter rotors can have a Vietnam veteren break out in a cold sweat. A fist waved at your face or someone screaming at you can become a fear trigger. Being made to perform in front an auditorium full of people will do it for most. The sudden thud of a branch landing upon your roof late at night can cause you to fear to sleep in your own bed! So all we need is to experience the trigger again and we immediately respond by feeling fearful all over again. Even if we logically deduce that we are perfectly safe at that moment. Hence, fear is not logical, it is learned. Every unresolved traumatic experience is like a ‘jack-in-box’ spring loaded into our neurological library in a part of the brain called the ‘amygdala.’ The amygdala seems to be the boss of our emotions and how our mind works when it comes to fear is simple. First, we experience something (like my latest shark experience) and we react immediately to the potential danger and do everything humanly possible to make it back to safety. Once the fear trigger jump-starts the fear response, within a split second physiological changes take charge of our entire body. Following a traumatic event, our brain stores that experience within the unconscious to speed up our reaction times. Just in-case the event occurs again. Should we sense anything resembling the trauma again, the fear trigger is fired and we immediately fight, flight or freeze our way to safety. Fear is rarely rational, yet it is actually a perfectly healthy and normal response. Leaping over your family over to escape a spider on the wall is not always helpful, but it is healthy and just needs to be normalised. I will share some strategies with you later in the book, so that you can graduate from fear to fearless. Psychology will often call irrational fear, ‘Post Traumatic Stress Disorder’ or ‘PTSD.’ I prefer to frame it as Dr Doreen Virtue does; ‘Post Traumatic Stress Response’ or ‘PTSR’ as I don’t believe it is a ‘disorder.’ Disorder suggests there is something seriously wrong with someone when it’s just a response. So here is how PTSR works. First, our sensory organs—our eyes, ears, tongue, nose and skin pick up cues from our surroundings and feed them back to our brain’s threat centre, the amygdala. If the amygdala identifies the data as a possible threat, it sounds the siren, immediately activating our fight, flight or freeze response, hyper-activating our senses. The response is what most calm individuals would describe as an ‘over-reaction.’ A normal heart-rate is between 60 and 100 beats per minute, depending on your physical activity, age and overall health. During a panic attack, it may beat from 8 to 20 more beats per minute. A faster heart increases our breathing rate and depth, our breathing shifts to fast shallow breaths, up high in our chest. Our speech rate equally increases as we sweat profusely to cool our bodies and our muscles tighten to intensify our power should we need to defend ourselves or make a quick getaway. If you consciously tried to emulate each of these responses now, you would likely feel yourself becoming fearful or stressed. A part of the peripheral nervous system called the ‘autonomic nervous system,’is responsible for these biological changes and it regulates automatic changes to the body's vital functions. The brain is a profoundly complex organ. It has more than 100 billion nerve cells comprising of intricate communication networks that influence what we sense, think and do. Some of these communications lead to conscious thought and action while others produce autonomic responses—unconscious behaviour. The fear response is almost entirely autonomic: we do not consciously trigger it or even know what's going on until it has run its course. Because cells in the brain are constantly transferring information and triggering responses, there are dozens of areas of the brain at least peripherally involved in fear. But research has discovered that certain parts of the brain play central roles in the fear process: Amygdala: decodes emotions; determines possible threats and stores fear memories. Sensory cortex: interprets sensory data. It often tries to make sense of nonsense. Thalamus: decides where to send incoming sensory data (from eyes, ears, mouth and skin). Hypothalamus: activates the physiology, ‘fight, flight or freeze’ responses. Hippocampus: stores and retrieves conscious memories; processes sets of stimuli to establish context, such as ‘when that happens I do this.’ So in summary, that is the neurology of fear—but how does it work psychologically? When we have a fearful experience, the incident excites and fires off electrical pulses, activating a neural network in our brain’s sensory cortex. This process stores all of our experiences encapsulated in sounds, pictures, feelings and self-talk and transforms them into a chemical reaction, in specific locations in our brain. So that we can recall them, they are most likely stored in the hippocampus. So now we have a neural system of connections that allow us to recall and access the fear, so that next time an event that is similar to the previous fearful event occurs, we can react instantly, without having to process our thoughts.