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"\n\n You know the feeling. It's a physiological certainty you do. Something that's scared you for as long as you can remember scares you again, no matter how much you tell yourself it shouldn't. I've seen otherwise brave friends faint at the sight of a needle. Justin Timberlake is said to be terrified of spiders. And John Madden, the football broadcaster whose career demanded constant travel, is so afraid of flying that he spent thousands of hours crisscrossing America by bus.\n\n For \"Eric,\" a fiftysomething professional in New York City, the experience was especially potent. It began the same way each time, with a little vibrato in his stomach that escalated to hairs standing at attention, waving around in the brisk wind of his breath. His pulse quickened, he could feel the pounding of his heart, and in some of the worst cases, Eric began to sweat. You'd think he was an undercover cop, or one of those rangers assigned to tranquilize rogue lions in the Nairobi suburbs. But no. He was just a guy who had to pick up the telephone and make a cold call.\n\n These cases\u2014from JT to Eric\u2014may sound extreme, but every man has experienced similar irrational responses to situations that hardly warrant them, whether that's walking into your superior's office to tell him you disagree with his decision or asking a cute girl at a bar for her number. And the fact that Eric, the owner of a project-management firm with twenty-one years of experience, can be reduced to a quivering mess by making a call to solicit new business (or even thinking about making one) reminds us that being afraid isn't just uncomfortable. It's detrimental. Fear, as much or more than any factor we self-destructive humans deal with on a regular basis, is holding us back\u2014from bigger paychecks, better partners, and new experiences. In its chronic form, phobias, it can be nearly crippling.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n Anxiety cures do not include Costanza-like desk hiding.\n\n So what's going on here? Why are we slaves to our fears? According to those who study the subject, it's not some neurological hiccup. Fear is a deeply ingrained by-product of evolution. And in our current context, that adaptation has gone haywire.\n\n What We're Afraid Of and Why\n\n Of the six so-called basic emotions\u2014the others are anger, sadness, surprise, disgust, and joy\u2014fear is unique and arguably the most powerful, because our survival literally depends upon it. Or at least it used to. \"We evolved the ability to feel fear and anxiety,\" explains Michael Fanselow, who studies the nature and function of fear at UCLA's Brain Research Institute. \"If you are an animal that will get preyed upon, you have to develop something to deal with that threat.\" That something is fear.\n\n All mammals share this powerful and very specific early-warning system. Any fearful person\u2014or monkey, or rabbit, or rat\u2014will exhibit a similar autonomic response: an increase in heart rate and blood pressure, raised hairs, rapid breathing, and an instinct to freeze in place. These aren't just warnings. They combine to create a heightened sense of awareness and, by pumping blood, oxygen, and stress hormones more quickly throughout the body, prepare us to either fight back or evade the danger. This is the famous \"fight or flight\" response.\n\n Over the thousands of years of evolution from Cro-Magnon to modern man, these responses have proven as uncontrollable as hunger. And yet over time\u2014especially in the extremely brief period since the onset of modernity and its comforts\u2014this hairtrigger system has become less and less necessary, to the degree that there's now a massive disconnect between the software we're born with and the cushy environment we inhabit. When Eric feels panicky over a phone call, he's experiencing similar sensations to those his far-distant ancestors felt when being stalked by sabertoothed tigers. This might very occasionally come in handy if you happen to walk into the wrong dark alley, but for the overwhelming majority of your life it causes far more problems than it solves.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n So where do specific fears come from? Only a very few seem to be innate. One is a fear of heights, and the source of that one seems pretty obvious. (Falling = bad!) Another is a fear of loud noises. (Giant boulder! Angry bear!) Most fears, then, are learned\u2014quickly and powerfully\u2014and the resulting memories are very hard to shake. It can take only a single traumatic memory to cement a fear, according to Fanselow. \"You have one aversive experience and you immediately label that whole thing as dangerous,\" he explains. A toddler bitten by a dog probably won't remember the traumatic event, but there's a very good chance his adult self will be afraid of dogs because of it. A young man who draws his father's wrath is likely to cower rather than confront his dad in the future. And a soldier who survives a harrowing firefight can emerge with post-traumatic stress disorder, an extreme form of anxiety that causes him to fear certain sights or noises.\n\n Fanselow explains that we can view many of these fears through the prism of evolution, even the ones that don't seem obvious, including the kinds of things we encounter at the oce: asking for raises, making cold calls, or challenging superiors. To understand, he says, we need only look to our fellow primates, which abide by dominance hierarchies. \"Knowing your position in that hierarchy and keeping to it is very safe,\" he says, and since safety equates with survival, that's a powerful instinct. \"To do things that come out of that hierarchy are very threatening.\" Asking your boss for a raise is exactly that. \"You're going to the dominant animal and trying to get something from him. In evolutionary history, those are the peers that beat us up.\"\n\n This same logic works for public speaking (often cited as the most commonly held fear in the modernized Western world), where you're subjecting yourself to a large group of people who will be judging you, providing immediate feedback if you've hit or missed. Here, Fanselow says, the likely antecedent is a departure from the familiar, wherein an animal leaves an environment that feels comfortable and enters another full of strangers. In this situation, too, the interloper could end up attacked.\n\n \"I think instinctively we are born afraid to face a lot of people, because evolutionwise, that means we were being hunted,\" says Jeansok Kim, who runs the fear lab at the University of Washington. \"Those kind of fears are ingrained in your brain and are really hard to overcome.\"\n\n Scientists call fears without obvious antecedents \"illogical fears,\" which can result in what psychologists refer to as phobias. And these, of course, extend far beyond the office. My wife hates flying but has never been in a crash. (And flying is statistically safer than driving.) I get anxious about dancing but have never been beaten (or even heckled) for doing it poorly. And plenty of people seize up in the presence of snakes and spiders, even if they've never been bitten (or chased, or hissed at).\n\n Mona Lisa Schulz, a Ph.D. in behavioral neuroscience, explains the phenomenon of illogical fear as a \"corrupted file that you downloaded by accident that keeps coming up.\" And that file, scientists say, is nearly impossible to erase. Schulz notes that fear is so powerful, so deeply ingrained, that it is resistant to pharmaceutical treatment. While there are numerous drugs that can effectively treat depression for years, nothing really works on fear for any extended period; benzodiazepines like Valium and Xanax provide more of a total body/mind numbing rather than targeting just the anxiety, and they decrease in efficacy over time, making them highly addictive. And beta blockers have proven helpful in relieving symptoms of anxiety, but they too lose their efficacy. You're hiding the symptoms, not treating the cause.\n\n But this doesn't mean that the situation is hopeless. There is a way to treat your fear: by hacking your own mental hard drive.\n\n A Cure for Common Fear\n\n 1. Think Fearless Thoughts:\n\n Schulz specializes in eradicating fears among the alpha dogs of business, the socalled C-level ecutives (CEOs, CFOs, etc.) who, despite being rich and powerful and married to beautiful women half their age, have the same problems as the rest of us.\n\n She starts by helping them recognize when the body's fear response kicks in, and then teaches them to short-circuit the process by importing a new file to override or at least compete with the corrupted one that's tickling the fear instinct. The effect is to \"dilute the message,\" she says. So when you hear, for instance, a little voice saying, \"I'm afraid to ask for a raise because I might be rejected and humiliated, and then it's only a matter of time until I'm fired for being undeservedly brazen, at which time I'll have to give up my apartment, take a job at Cracker Barrel, and move home to my parents' garage, where I'll raise beer money by selling bottle-cap necklaces on Etsy,\" you've trained another voice to pipe up and drown it out. This voice should be the more rational one, reminding you of why you're going to go through with the thing that you're afraid to do in the first place. It might say something that directly contradicts the fear thought. In this case, Schulz recommends an old standby: Make a list of the value you've added\u2014noting, say, that you won new accounts totaling $500,000.\n\n Every neuroscientist and therapist I spoke with talked about working around fear and fear memories by introducing conflicting thoughts. \"You specifically have to teach the brain a new memory, that this situation is not one that should provoke fear,\" Fanselow said. \"It's an interfering memory that says, 'No, it's actually safe.'\n\n 2. Avoid Avoidance:\n\n In the case of Eric the project manager, curing his fear was a matter of stripping down the situation\u2014with the help of his therapist, Jonathan Alpert, co-author of Be Fearless: Change Your Life in 28 Days\u2014to recognize how trivial his root fear was. \"It was a fear of rejection,\" Eric says. \"The key is to see it.\"\n\n Clearly there's nothing actually dangerous about rejection. No one has ever been mortally wounded by a rude businessman on the phone or a dismissive woman at the bar, but for certain people the biological reaction to the possibility of rejection feels as if that's the case. And what's worse is that there's an easy solution: You avoid the situation. Avoiding it feels good. It lessens stress. And in turn it intensifies the fear. \"The more you avoid something you're afraid of, the stronger that fear is,\" Alpert says.\n\n You might know the spooky voodoo of avoidance from your own adult relationships. Imagine that little ripple of tension you've got with your wife or brother or father. The longer it lies dormant, the worse it gets. Confronting the matter is stressful enough, but over time the act of avoiding it becomes so powerful that it eventually magnifies the underlying problem until it is impossible to face.\n\n Once Eric knew it was rejection he feared, he could confront the threat. \"It's okay to be rejected,\" he says now. \"Not everybody is going to like you. And once you see it in front of you, you can say, 'Well, that's kinda dumb.' \" Until he was able to do that, however, \"it was this bogeyman, this unnamed thing.\" His therapist, Alpert, helped by pointing out that the worst possible outcome wasn't really bad at all. Eric might not get the business, but he would at least have introduced his name. \"You're there because you're supposed to be there,\" Eric says he came to realize. \"It's not like you're breaking into somebody's house.\"\n\n 3. Act Fast:\n\n One thing that is nearly always true is that \"it's never as bad as we fear,\" says Randy Gage, a professional speaker who travels widely, lecturing to crowds of up to 10,000 about prosperity and success. One cure, obviously, is what Eric did. Another, Gage says, is to avoid overthinking. \"If you have to break up with someone or fire someone, the best way to do it is as quickly as possible.\"\n\n The more time you have to think about something, the more you will think about it, and your mind is your own worst enemy when it comes to fear. Gage says that \"most people's default setting is negative\"\u2014this so-called negativity bias is something therapists often talk about\u2014and that you need to work around it. If you're single and afraid of approaching a woman in a bar, chances are it's because you've already imagined her response: that you're too old or short or bald. \"You've totally invented that,\" Gage says. \"It has no basis in fact.\" Instead, he says, \"choose to create an empowering script.\"\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n Remember: Your boss is not really going to beat you to prove dominance.\n\n Alpert likes to tell his clients to prepare for stressful situations the way an athlete would. \"If every time Michael Phelps got on the starting blocks he thought, 'I'm not good at this,' he'd never win a race.\" If you're about to give a speech and you approach the podium worrying that you'll stumble over your words, you probably will. Instead, prepare enough that you're feeling confident and then remind yourself that you know the material, that you're giving this presentation for a reason. As Gage points out, \"No one wants you to fail less than the audience. They want you to be good.\"\n\n Making Friends with Fear\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n Once you tame fear, you realize something else: It doesn't have to be your enemy. That's one secret of many high achievers, who tend to have increased anxiety thresholds. They not only tolerate fear on a day-to-day basis; they actually use it to their advantage, experiencing that nervy buzz as energy instead of stress. If you spend time around many film producers, tech entrepreneurs, or hedge-fund guys, you'll notice that many of them share an interest in dangerous hobbies. They race cars. They fly planes. Regular old skiing often isn't good enough\u2014they need first descents accessed by helicopter. It's not that people like this are fearless; they just interpret fear differently.\n\n Few people on earth have learned to handle fear better than Jeb Corliss, arguably the world's most famous BASE jumper and wing-suit pilot, meaning he voluntarily throws himself from safe perches into harm's way. When I spoke to Corliss, he was in the final stages of recovering from a crash six months before that should have killed him. While proximity flying in South Africa\u2014that is, soaring downhill in close proximity to the terrain, wearing a wing suit\u2014Corliss made what he calls \"a stupid mistake\" and flew directly into the rocks, clad only in nylon, at 120 miles per hour. The least surprising part of this story is that once doctors told the 36-year-old that he wouldn't have his legs amputated\u2014after immediately telling him that he would\u2014 Corliss wanted to jump again.\n\n Corliss is such an extreme case of an intentional risk taker that it's easy to dismiss him as an aberration, but what's driving him is not so unusual. \"When the fearless feel what most of us call 'nerves,' they don't think, 'This is horrible, I'm going to die,' \" says Alpert, who sometimes sees people like this in his practice. \"To the contrary, they accept nerves as a normal part of life and as a healthy physiological response.\" In fact, he points out, fear and excitement are nearly identical, physiologically speaking. In large part, the difference is how the person experiencing those sensations perceives them. Apparently, fearless people, Alpert says, \"recognize that their system is getting revved up and enjoy these sensations. It is what makes them feel alive and gets them out of bed in the morning.\"\n\n \"In a dangerous situation, your body releases chemicals like adrenaline and endorphins,\" Corliss says. \"These make the body operate at a higher speed\" and in turn \"everything else feels like it's slowing down.\" This is what people often say about near-death experiences\u2014that time slows down. But Corliss says it's actually the opposite; it's your mind speeding up so \"you can react better and get shit done. You need that fear to operate at optimal levels.\"\n\n Corliss is very conscious that he's overtly courting fear, chasing it even, and he's spent a lifetime trying to understand how to use the feeling instead of being controlled by it. \"I believe every person has a gift,\" he says. \"My gift has been fear.\" Corliss explains that there are two kinds of fear\u2014anticipation fear, or the fear of what's maybe going to happen in the future (that's anxiety), and a more real fear triggered by actual danger. He's trained himself not to waste time with anticipation fear, which is a clever trick the brain uses to start talking us out of danger before we even encounter it. To overcome it, he says, you need to have an interior dialogue in which you convince yourself there's no point in worrying about a situation that hasn't yet presented itself.\n\n Corliss thinks that what he's learned is applicable to all of us, because he sees fear as the basis of almost all weakness; it's the thing keeping us from ending a spoiled relationship or quitting a job that sucks: \"You can choose to allow fear to cripple you, or you can fight through that fear and just take a risk.\" It's a conversation he has with himself all the time, even in legitimately perilous situations. Because when he's standing on the top of a mountain preparing to proximity fly at 120 miles per hour, much of the fear he's feeling is irrational. \"I have to listen to it and decide, am I really in danger right now? Or am I just scared for the sake of being scared?\" That's some high-stakes hairsplitting, but Corliss's point is that he's so confident in his preparation and so in tune with the environment that he can distinguish between a fear that's real\u2014something about the circumstances feels wrong because it is\u2014and one that's just his body saying, \"Dude, you're nuts! Let's go have a beer instead.\"\n\n \"It just so happens that 99 percent of the time that's it,\" he says. \"It's just scary. You have no reason to be scared.\"\n\nJosh Dean is afraid of adults in Crocs."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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