Tag: Fight flight freeze

Feel the Fear – Do it anyway.

 

What is the purpose of fear?

What outcome is that e-motion focused on?

Primarily Safety – to keep us safe, is one of the main reasons we become afraid, see fight, flight, freeze.

Let’s look at the SCARF model again

As David says, fundamental drivers of the brain are perceived threat and reward. In his SCARF paper he talks of an underlying principle that the brain operates on, Minimise Threat – Maximise Reward (Avoid  – Approach) with a huge bias toward Minimise Threat (keep us safe).

Collaborating & Influencing using SCARF

So how does fear stop us?  We hold beliefs about ourselves, often learned early in life, about what we can or can’t do, oh and we are right about those beliefs being ‘true’  🙂

Looking at the picture above, familiar  thinking / behaviour has the potential to trigger reward (dopamine) and it does. There is Certainty (one of the SCARF domains) about the familiar – we know what is going to happen. As the slide says even if the familiar thing is ‘bad’ for us we get a reward from the brain, see addiction. 

New thinking / behaviour on the other hand triggers a perceived threat state, we are uncertain, not sure about what may happen, if we think in this new way, believe this new thing, act in this new way, we then trigger an amygdala flood.

How old do you think we are when we first perceive threat and reward?

As a child, we build patterns based on what our brain ‘learns’in terms of avoiding threat. The brain then uses these learned ways of thinking and behaving and they become familiar, laid down as patterns (which take no conscious effort to evoke when required).  When we follow these familiar ways, we don’t get nasty threat feelings.  Of course  we are right when we justify those ways 🙂

What is happening?

One of the things that happens, is that we learn we do not like the effect of the threat response and the feelings it evokes within us.  We then become afraid of feeling that feeling. 🙂 The brain being the brain, learns “ah ok if we don’t go to that threat state then we won’t get that horrible feeling” and we’ll feel ‘safe’! Oh and being the brain I know  I am right about that 🙂

So that’s what we’ll do, we’ll just not go there and that’s a habit formed 🙂

What to do?

We need to go there 🙂 feel the fear and do it anyway. We think it / do it and nobody dies 🙂 We ride through the feelings of sick in the stomach (because blood moves to our muscles to get ready to fight or flight) of the rising heart rate, shallow breathing, dry mouth etc. We ride it out and in so doing our brain learns that actually,  we can do it or think it 🙂 🙂

It may be useful to use the name it, claim it, tame it method here also. E.g. if you are feeling uncertain, just say “there goes my certainty trigger”

As you triumph over the fear / threat response doing the ‘new way’ will become easier and end up as the preferred way.

What about adrenaline junkies?

I’m not one 🙂  It would appear that they relish and look for the rush generated by the Fear/ Stress reaction in the mind and body

  • What will you now feel the fear about and then do anyway?

The Red Mist; what’s that all about?

Quite a lot to take on board in this Post, revisit it, give it some time 🙂

In the post about Points of View,  I said we were invested in our view being right 🙂  It is the ‘Red Mist ’ that descends when we are challenged.

What is happening in our beautiful Brain then?

I have mentioned before, that the Brain is a Meaning-Seeking, Pattern-Making Prediction Organ, created around one fundamental principle:-

Minimise Threat————  Maximise Reward

The huge bias inbuilt towards minimise threat is, to keep us Safe.

See also A way of thinking about the Brain.

In this post, I am introducing  some more distinctions.

The founder of The Neuroleadership Institute,  Dr David Rock,   created a model  SCARF that enables us to talk about what is going on when ‘the red mist descends’ or ‘we lose the plot’.

In my Points of View entry I introduced the concept of the triune brain. The ancient reptilian part of the brain was the first to develop and its job is to keep us from danger. Historically, in the development of our species, this part was really useful.  Its Fight – Flight – Freeze mechanism driven by the Amygdala kept us alive 🙂   A thing to note here, is that this ‘process’, (referred to as the amygdala flood), will fire on a perceived threat as well as a real threat and therein lies an issue for us in today’s world.

Back to David’s Model

As you can see in the model, we perceive threat and reward in the five domains, Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness

How can we use this model then to help us?  Well it is David’s view that we scan the SCARF domains five times per second , so we have about a fifth of a second (enough) to catch what triggered. 🙂

SCARF PRE Model

In my experience, the above is very helpful, Name it, Claim it, Tame it

An example:-  I am driving down the M40 towards London and wish to join the M25. There is a queue!

I have a couple of options and I do both 🙂 :- join the end of the queue or go further along and ‘cut in’.

If I join the end of the queue and somebody else ‘cuts in’ guess what? Yep ‘Red Mist’, my wife Gill can testify to this 🙂

(Do you think this is a real or perceived threat by the way? )

Anyway, using Name it, Claim it, Tame it, I have my 1/5th of a second to name what just triggered me. Status/ Fairness, in this scenario.

Internally then, I say to myself, “There goes my Status trigger” and do you know, its like my brain says “Ah, you know about this, its not a threat then” 🙂 It works. Again, Gill notices 🙂 🙂

The really hard bit, is remembering to do it, see Gill again 🙂

If you ever wondered about ‘Road Rage’, this is what is at the beginnings of that.

Back to the slide above,  SCARF PRE Model.  We can use this to practice, to learn how to ‘catch the triggers’

Before a meeting / an interaction you know might be tricky in ‘Red Mist’ terms, think about which of the domains might trigger e.g. Autonomy, Status and Fairness.

  1. Predictive:- Before the interaction, think through in your ‘mind’s eye’, how you may respond rather than react to those stimuli.
  2. Regulatory:- During the actual interaction, notice which stimuli are triggering and as above Name it, Claim it, Tame it.
  3. Explanatory:- After the event, replay it in your mind’s eye and explain what what happened in terms of the stimuli, what they triggered in you, and whether you reacted or responded

Remember, Who makes you angry?

You make yourself angry, stuff happens then you make yourself angry 🙂

What triggers that, is what this post has been about 🙂

  • What order would you put the SCARF triggers in, for you in general?  (They will vary by context)
  • What triggered you most today?
  • What triggers your partner the most?
  • If you have children, what triggered them today?
  • What triggers your Boss?

 

A point of view is just a view from a point!

Points of view are interesting, in that we defend them sometimes as if our life was depending on that point of view being the absolute ‘truth’.

What’s going on?

Well in the picture above, Black Beret on the left has a belief  and remember the definition of a belief as (a lens through which we perceive reality) that there are Four, that’s what he believes, backed up by what he sees, the ‘evidence’. Oh and of course he has the common belief we all have, ‘I am right’. Now look at the perspective (point of view) that No Beret (his brother 🙂 ) holds. His belief, his lens, tells him there are Three and  he has the ‘evidence’ to back it up and of course he has the belief ‘I am right’ also. Oh dear!

It would actually all be fine if our brains did not care about disagreement and just played “yeah whatever” and sometimes it does.

It just does not care!

And sometimes it does!

What is making the difference?

Caring.. If I am invested in the point of view and by that I mean, it is important for me, it means something to me.

There is something else however:-

When you disagree with me,  my brain perceives that as an attack, a threat.

Then, what happens? I will cover this in much more detail in a future post, for now though, just be aware of how the brain developed. I will use the concept of the Triune Brain  proposed by Neurologist Dr Paul Maclean, for simplicity here (you will find, not all Neurologists hold the same point of view as Paul 🙂 ) However it is useful to talk briefly about what is going on when there is disagreement.

At a simple level, the reptilian brain ‘perceives’ the disagreement as an attack, (and by the way in any situation, this part of the brain gets control first, to keep us safe).  The amygdala then,  get control and put the brain in fight / flight/ freeze mode. This releases Adrenalin (to prepare us for the ‘fight’) the rational brain (pre-frontal Cortex) is also shut down, so we do not have access to superior executive powers of thinking.  All that is ‘running’ in the Brain is “my life is in danger – I must win this fight!!”  And  by the way we also cease to listen to what the others are saying, we are just listening for a gap to get our point of view articulated more!  Sometimes we  don’t even wait for the gap, we just talk and nobody’s listening !!  That I’m sure, you have seen many times with points of view, in politics for example 🙂

Let me finish here with two points of view on a mountain, Ben Nevis in Scotland. Both are talking about the same mountain.

“Come on, let’s amble up this wee hill”

“No way, that’s an enormous challenge”

  • How might you work with points of view differently now?
  • How might you respond rather than defend or attack or both?
  • Would holding differing points of view perhaps be a good time to practice the Pause?