Fear is the subjective mental state of anticipating a negative or bad future, usually based upon, (because humans are particularly anxious and neurotic), a highly exaggerated assumption of what will actually happen.
Part 1 Lessons from Rock Climbing
I first learnt about fear when I had finished all my studies, passed my exams and needed something to do with my newly acquired spare time. Realising my predicament, Dad invited me to join him on his most recent adventure into the world of rock climbing. Notwithstanding an adolescents ambivalence to anything their parents suggest, and being a bored, I agreed to tag along.
Being fortunate in possessing an athletic body, I easily managed to do the first few problems. As a cocky young youth, I wasn’t surprised, after all I was the Thanet Pentathlon Champion and had a cup to prove it. There wasn’t anything I couldn‘t do, or so I thought. Next came Bow Shaped Buttress. I tried as hard as I could but this was just too difficult for my strength and novice skill level. I kept on throwing myself at the rock, but all this did was sap my strength as arms and legs flailed around in desperation. I was annoyed, really annoyed. For the first time in my life I had failed, and I didn’t understand why, and that dented my pride. However, It also fired my resolve to come back next week and try again.
And that’s how I became hooked on Rock Climbing, because I couldn’t do it! I came back the next weekend and with fresh arms and a clear head, I managed to cruise up Bow Shaped Buttress, However by the end of the day, I was falling off another climb, this time called Long Layback. From then on I devoted most of my spare time to climbing, slowly improving, but forever failing as I attempted yet harder and more challenging routes that were always just around the corner. I was driven on by an intense curiosity of what I could achieve, the subtle effects of balance, the nature of the rock, its friction, its holds, and the amazing scenery. But most fascinating of all was what went on in my head whilst clinging on, especially when above a large drop with the strong possibility of my own extinction in the next few minutes. And it was these mind games that interested me the most.
At Bowles Rocks, there is a route called sapper, which ascends a fine wall up to a the underside of a large overhang. In order to make the route a similar standard all the way up, in the dim and distant past someone, perhaps a military engineer, had carved a vertical hole through the roof so you can squeeze through and avoid the upside down, sloth like, manoeuvres which would be need to reach the top via the overhang, which is obviously far more difficult and for climbing rock stars only.
After mastering the wall and squeeze through the hole in the roof, one day I reached out tentatively exploring what it felt like to be a sloth. Even though I was attached to a rope, the sensation of suddenly having most of my weight, not on my feet, but on my feeble arms above a thirty foot drop, was very alarming. I swiftly scuttled back to the hole and shot up through the man made hole to the safety of the top and waited for my heart rate to drop..
For about a year, every time we went to Bowes, this little saga repeated itself. Up the wall to the underside of the roof, a reach out to the solid jams, a few moments with my body hanging upside down in space, my mind racing with doubt and fear, followed by a swift retreat. There was no way I could do it and a fall at the lip would mean at least a bone braking drop and swing into the rock face below.
However, one fine still autumn evening after a great, but not challenging, days climbing, I was contented and relaxed and thought I would finish off the day with a swift ascent of sapper before it went dark. I made easy work of the wall and arrived at the roof. Without thinking I leaned out and started jamming with my fists and then also with my feet, so I was doing the sloth like upside down manoeuvres. It all felt natural and easy, so with out thinking I kept going right out to the lip of the roof. Here the crack started to turn into the vertical and widen, I found some good holds and. not thinking about the consequences of falling and slamming onto the wall below, I just hung right out and automatically brought one leg from under the roof up and into the wider crack that was just above my head. With my leg jammed in the crack above me, it was now impossible to fall out and so with a few more pulls, pushes and grunts I arrived at the top immensely satisfied my efforts. . .
After a year of dithering and messing about I’d finally cracked it, my first 5c roof. I don’t believe I had become particularly stronger, so why had I succeeded this time and failed so many times before?. Well what made the difference was I was relaxed and totally lacking in fear. Without the worry of the consequences of failure, I’d cruised the route in fine style. Without emotions, worries, or aggression I’d just got on with the task in front of me, solved the problem efficiently and managed the climb with ease, With no fear, I just climbed and succeeded.
From those early days my rock climbing became a passion and dominated my life. I moved to Sheffield so I could climb in the evenings and meet lots of other like minded climbers for trips away. I loved the beautiful surroundings and the extreme situations you could put yourself in.
When climbing harder routes at the limit of my capabilities I often found myself expecting to take a long fall that would result in seriously bodily damage. However, in these moments mysterious and fascinating things, that to this day I can’t explain. started to happened.. In moments of extreme fear and stress, feelings and thoughts would shut down, I would become calm, emotionally .empty and I would begin to climb at an entirely different level, on instinct without thought, as if guided by something outside of me. “If I’m going to fall, I may as well pull on something” was my attitude and so resigned to my fate, I would arrive at the top and not really knowing what I’d done, how I had remained on the rock face or understanding how I’d got up the route. Thinking and memory had not been involved.
Eventually, I learnt to turn off the stress and fear completely. If these negative subjective feelings only existed in my mind, then I could control my thoughts and eliminate them. And so after years of experience, I learnt to attempt climbs at the extreme limit of my physical strength with out any thought of the consequences of failure. However I wasn’t the strongest climber by a long way and after several very fast trips head first towards the ground, I decided I had reach the pinnacle of my climbing career and it was time to back off before the rope didn’t save me and something life changing happened. Also eliminating fear had made climbing less exciting, and climbing in an emotional void had made it almost boring and less interesting. It was intense but dull. It was time to move on in life.
(I also learnt that you can love the rock, but I doesn’t love you back, only another person can do that, But that is a different story altogether).
Part 2 If fear holds us back, why do we possess it as a basic emotion?
One of the current theories of how the brain works, is that we all have a working model of the world inside our heads based upon past memories and what the senses are detecting. This model is continually being updated as the senses detect errors in the model. The emotions, (which are external expressions of inner subjective feelings that signal our internal mental state to other people), are hard wired into us and together with the lessons we’ve learn from past experiences, the hormones, (that tell the brain about the state of the body), then interact with the working model to make a prediction of the future which guides our choice of action, so we can achieve outcomes beneficial to ourselves and our goals.
For example, you are walking into a town, with your senses detecting all the sights, sounds and smells that fit your previous experiences of a high street. Say that hormones in your bodies send signals to the brains that tell that the body is lacking energy, so we experience a feeling of hunger. However, across the street we see a sign bearing the symbols C, A, F, E, over a door and through past experience you have learnt to associate these symbols with buying fine bacon butties which gives rise to the internal subjective feeling of pleasure which is expressed to others by the signalling emotion of delight. So we cross over, but unfortunately the door is locked as the café is closed on a Tuesday and today is a Tuesday. From this set back we feel of frustration, anxiety and stress, externally expressed as agitation, which reinforces the feeling of hunger, which makes finding a café more of a priority and you decide to pace off down the street in search of food whilst worrying that all the cafes in town are shut on a Tuesday. Such an emotional fear based model of the world is discovered to be unfounded because the café owner down the road knows his main competitor is shut on a Tuesday, and he can have good trade by remaining open all week.
Stress and Fear are a good thing overall for alerting us and others close by to danger (in this case the prospect of no food) so we can deal with hazards (the closed café) in the appropriate way by devising a plan (try further down the street) and survive for another day. But fear that is so great that it paralyses us into inaction, or muddled thinking, (ie giving up on the idea of eating in town because you think all the cafes are closed) becomes a hindrance. So we have to learn where to strike the balance.
We all have fear for the obvious reason that it helps to keep us and others around us alive. If our ancestors hadn’t run from that sabre tooth tiger, or avoided the loose cliff edge or treated those potentially violent strangers with extreme caution, we probably wouldn’t be alive today. Fear gives us a better chance of survival and an evolutionary advantage over those who sense no danger. But so too does excessive fear and natural selection is unable to distinguish between the two. Those with no fear get eaten by the tiger but both the wary and the absolutely petrified, who wouldn’t leave the safety of home, would both survive to pass their genes on to the next generation. Only those with no fear of tigers become tiger lunch. Over reacting to danger gives a survival advantage just as a sensible but cautious reaction does.
We are the most complex product of evolution and natural selection on the planet, (with society, technology, language and art) and this implies that our species has undergone the most evolutionary change driven by our being constantly under pressure to survive ie our species has always been on the edge of extinction.. To have become so complex we must have faced and overcome more environmental challenges than any other species, If we would have faced less challenges we would be less complex as less novel characteristics would have been sufficient to survive. (One day we will probably face one too many challenges and we will go extinct like most of the other species recorded in the fossil record.) However as a by product of all this environmental stress, is it any surprise that we aret the most anxious, fearful, stressed out animal on the planet? Did we survive and thrive on the edge of extinction because we are extremely neurotic as well as intelligent?
When I was growing up every one was scared of a thermonuclear war. If the bombs started dropping it was the end of the world. However, despite a few hairy moments it hasn’t happened and even though the bombs still exist, we learnt that if such a war was to happen, no one wins and we do all love our children what ever political system they grow up in. . Our excessive fears were unfounded and today thermonuclear war is rarely mentioned unless it concerns a new country getting the bomb which upsets the current power balance between nations. (which basically means a nuclear power can no longer invade what was a non nuclear power). So irrational fear kept us alive but at the time it was over the top.
Before my childhood, was not the dominant fear of the Nazi’s? before him the Hun?, before then Napoleon?, before then Catholics?, next then plague?, Vikings?, Anglo Saxons?, Romans etc etc? Was it fear all down the ages?
Today’s fears in the UK have been a lack of Toilet rolls and petrol! These are prime examples of excessive fear causing more problems than they solve, They are hardly life treating issues but fear stoked up in the media with the resultant mass panic leads to a break down in the thought processes as people see what others are doing and with out question do the same. Alternative means of cleaning ones behind and getting from A to B and back to A again (and if it is really necessary to go to B in the first place) never entered the public discussion.
More serious fears are climate change, covid, terrorism, gene editing, China etc These matters all need addressing but do we not over react to all of them? Geologically the earth has been hotter than current predictions, historically covid is a mild disease, that only kills the old, unhealthy or genetically unlucky, terrorism is carried out by very few people, the human genome undergoes many naturally occurring changes and the rise of Chine economically will not lead to world war three, their wealth is too dependent on world trade and capitalism. .
So in summary, my opinion is that to have become as complex as we are, our species must have lived constantly with environmental challenges. A heighten sense of fear of the world would have kept us aware of risks and dangers of the world but this advantage to our survival resulted in us being overly neurotic, anxious and fearful because natural selection has little power to select between performance enhancing caution and extreme risk aversion at all costs. In today’s world we need to recognise and be aware to the dangers but not to let our fears get the better of us.
We need to learn to use our fear to alert us to the dangers but also when it’s time to stop dwelling on the negative modes of thinking and when we should just get on with the job, when its time to just pull on the holds in front of us and reach our goals successfully, so we can continue to survive and thrive..
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As martial arts expert Bruce Lee said "Don't think -do"
