Wasp Nests or Beehives
Fear is a warning, just like pain. Fear goes off like a car alarm when some part of your mind or body senses danger and a number of things occur in response to that alarm. Neurons in different parts of you cascade signals from one lobe and gland to another that make your body respond in a potentially helpful way. How do emotions impact you? By altering your state of mind and your state of body, in order to alter the focus of your thoughts and your behavior in a way that might save your life.
The stress hormones cause your heart to race and your breathing to get shallow and fast. Your circulation moves blood from one system to another, shutting some things down and making other things work harder. Your mind behaves more like a targeting system, hyper focused on the threat, on the lookout for a threat you haven’t recognized yet, and racing through your thoughts for other scary things that frightened you before. Your body gets you ready to fight, to run, to hide, or to pretend to give in, and blood flow matches which one you are being prepped for.
How do you decide which response you have? It’s complicated. A few fears are built into you, which is helpful, like fear of falling for example. Fear of snakes may be inherited as well, which would make sense. But most things that we are afraid of seem to be learned by experience. Whatever fear program that your body runs has an editable list of scary things that you can add to, and it also lets you mark just how scared you should probably feel. There are a few different ways of adding to that list as well; we can experience pain, we can learn about it from observing others experience pain, or we listen to stories told by others. Once something is written on that list, it can be hard to ever erase it, because we are less likely to let ourselves face whatever is written there.
Trauma can scribble all over that list, not only adding things that you never thought to be afraid of but highlighting those things so heavily that we become terrified not just of the thing that hurt us, but of the very memory of it hurting us. We will play all sorts of harmful tricks on ourselves to hide from those fear items and from those memories, even alter our daily lives until they are unrecognizable.
But you want to know something strange and pretty cool? There is another emotion, another alarm, that causes our minds and bodies to respond almost identically to our fear response, but it happens to feel very different. It’s excitement. The adrenaline, the heart rate, the breathing, the blood flow, you name it, they are all very similar. They are essentially twin emotions. So why does it feel different? That has to do with our expectations for surviving and for getting something out of the experience, and this is where you can change some of your fear into excitement, or rewrite what’s on your fear list.
That’s the reason I chose to title this post as “Wasp Nests or Beehives.” Some scary things are best avoided with no questions asked, like wasp nests. Wasps and I are not friends. But some scary things, like beehives, hide a sweet reward and if you stand up to your fears and play your cards right, it’s yours to have.
Maybe it’s the dopamine rush of surviving a rollercoaster, or acing a presentation, or earning that kiss, or getting that applause. Maybe it’s the relief of finishing that assignment or that phone call. Maybe it’s the confidence boost of no longer panicking at the grocery store or no longer turning every disagreement into a relationship-ending argument.
If you can focus on the honey, then your targeting system shifts from looking for danger to looking for the reward, your hope lets you face the situation and ride out the discomfort, and that item on your fear list gets either erased entirely or at the very least downgraded in its power level. This is the power of the various exposure therapies: You learn to find the honey and you learn to trust yourself.
