Feeling Fear? Look for What's Missing

Delving further into the August theme of The Fear and the Furious, on Sunday Rev. Dr. Larry King shared some brain science with us: True fear – the intensity brought on when we see, feel, or sense something – lasts just a mere 30 seconds in biological terms.

That's how long it took to know whether we had to run from the saber-toothed tiger or if that shadow ahead was food instead.

When we have these intense feelings, clarity – fierce clarity – comes when we ask ourselves, honestly, is it true? And borrowing from Byron Katie's other famous questions: Do you know for sure it's true? Do we have the information we need to know for sure?

Fear feels true. That doesn't make it accurate.

So much of what we feel is based on the stories we tell ourselves rather than life-or-death situations. Rev. Larry said we've evolved to be good at pattern matching, but not necessarily at considered decisions. Our old pattern is see, feel, act. He asked us to consider a couple more steps: see, feel, clarify, analyze, act. This is where our power is.

We can't disparage ourselves, though – it's our wiring. From the time we lived in caves, as the earliest humans, these feelings, this momentary instinct, likely kept us alive. That fear mechanism sits in the amygdala, part of the limbic system, and it still fires first, before anything resembling reason shows up.

However, the part of the brain that reasons, weighs consequences, thinks past the next five minutes, doesn't fully develop until our twenties, and later in boys than in girls. It's why teenagers make some pretty interesting choices, and why car insurance is so expensive for young males. Until that part of the brain comes online, we're mostly operating from our lizard brains, which translates to different types of consequences.

When Rev. Larry talked about 25-year-olds, I had to laugh. Just last week, my nephew Nathan turned 25. He's back in Georgia now, but came to Seattle to work with his uncle, my partner, for five years. He and his beloved (his word for his girlfriend), just returned from a trip. His response to "How was it?" was: "It was great. I'm 25 now so I'm taking this fully developed prefrontal cortex for a spin." He's a funny one, that Nathan. And too dang smart.

30 Seconds: That's All You Need

So, if that chemical rush of fear — the flush, the racing heart, the pit in your stomach — only lasts about thirty seconds, what does that actually mean in real life? If you've ever spent a full day angry, or an entire afternoon dreading a call that never came, that's on you, Rev. Larry said, not your biology. Fear isn't usually the problem. It's what we do with it.

Dani, another young person in my life, is 19 and just finished her first year away at college. Now home for the summer, the power struggle is real. She's been making her own decisions for a year, and while there have been some consequences for the "bad" ones, she's OK with learning the hard way. Now, she's under mom's tight watch again and not happy about it. Mom's afraid to let her make her own mistakes, and I understand why.

I know from experience that a tighter grip often has the opposite impact. And, most of what she's afraid of won't ever happen. As her "big sister" through the Big Brothers Big Sisters program, we get to have conversations she can't have with anyone else. We were matched when she was nine, and while we're no longer part of the official program (aged out), we all need someone at that age, yes?

Fear = Missing Information

A lot of what scares us isn't the thing itself. It's what's unknown. Rev. Larry pointed out that our fears are rarely life-or-death anymore — they're social. Will she reject me? Will I look bad? Am I going to perform poorly? When we don't have enough information, we make things up, and we're programmed to imagine the worst. It takes conscious effort to imagine the best.

So, what if you don't have enough information and your brain imagines the worst, and fear punches you in the gut?

Again, ask: Is it true? What information do you need to know to decide if your fears warrant your reaction? Can you ask a direct question? Or imagine something better?

Where Focus Goes

Rev. Larry issued this reminder: where our mind goes, our life goes. He talked about apartment hunting in Seattle — if you focus on how impossible it is to find something affordable, you'll start proving yourself right. Focus on scarcity, and scarcity is what you'll find evidence for.

I say a version of this to myself regularly — where focus goes, energy flows. I've been spinning for a few days around my job search. So I got out my easel pad and wrote out everything I do have. It's a long list. The two things I don't have right now are a job and income, and while those are real, focusing on what I do have gives the fear around those a lot less weight. It doesn't make the missing pieces less true. It just stops them from being the only thing I see.

A Good Day in Disguise

"What if this is a good day in momentary disguise?", Rev. Larry asked. No denial; instead, just a different way to look at your experience. What if it's something 'hard' but not 'bad'? Not something to be afraid of, but maybe a challenge to get through.

What lurks beneath?

Rev. Larry told a joke (that I actually remembered and was able to repeat!) about a man who paid a therapist hundreds of dollars per session to cure his fear of monsters under his bed – treatment the therapist said would take a couple of years. But, after just a few appointments, the man called to cancel. The doctor was shocked and asked what changed. The man said he'd solved it himself -- he bought a twenty-dollar saw and cut the legs off the bed, so now, there's no place for monsters to hide. How's that for clever?

Most fear lives in our heads, and it tends to shrink as soon as we can laugh at it.

Do We Need to Do Anything at All?

Here's a question: After the pause, after clarifying, is action even required? Rev. Larry said his own best move, more often than he'd expect, is no move at all. Most of what triggers him, he said, has nothing to do with him — it's someone else's story, someone else's bad day, someone else's belief about the world. Once he sees that clearly, there's nothing left to do about it.

Rev. Larry got to practice this when he was diagnosed with cancer. He's talked about it before, and shared more today about how many months it took before fear stopped hijacking an ordinary afternoon. So yes, it may be hard; and even though Rev. Larry's had more practice with these tools than many of us, even he has to use them mindfully.

We can all do this. It just takes practice.

Fear and Faith, Same Wiring

Rev. Larry ended with something Ernest Holmes wrote: that fear and faith run on the same wiring. They're not opposites fighting for territory; they're the same mental muscle, just different. Fierce clarity, maybe, is choosing which of these will better serve us.

Fear gets the first thirty seconds. What happens next is on us.

Did you miss the talk? You can listen here.

With gratitude,

Laura