Fear and Bad Behavior

Seth Godin, on fear:

Bad behavior and irrational decisions are almost always caused by fear. If you want to change the behavior, address the fear.

And yet we don’t.

Instead, we impose an embargo or throw someone in prison. We put a letter in the permanent file or put the employee on a performance improvement plan. We walk away from a prospect or blame a lack of sales on our advertising.

“What are you afraid of?” is not just a great line for a movie trailer. It’s a shortcut in understanding what motivates.

NY Times: Taking Anxiety to a New Level

The New York Times has a posting in their Fashion and Style section on anxiety. Who knew that my psychological disorder was either stylish, fashionable, or both?

The author experiences some knee-knocking while looking over a cliff at Big Sur and notices that as she gets older, she’s much less inclined to engage in activities that involve elevation. She claims to never have been afraid of heights before, but now, at 47, altitude causes her anxiousness.

From a clinical perspective, as one gets older, we lose some of our mobility, and our confidence in being able to handle some of the physical demands as well as we did in our youth can wane. But is that anxiety?

From the article:

There is a difference between a fear and a phobia, of course. The people at the Anxiety Disorders Association of America will tell you that we all have things that scare us, after all. It’s when fears start limiting our behavior that they become the kind of full-fledged anxiety-producing phobias that afflict more than 19 million people nationwide. That’s more than 8 percent of the adult population, and the only reason I agreed to hike on the headlands trail in the first place was to keep myself from joining them.

So she takes to nature so she doesn’t have to join our ever-growing group of anxiety sufferers? Really?

I think there’s a big difference between fear and anxiety. Standing on the edge of a craggy cliff that juts out over the ocean is the kind of thing humans learned to stay away from, because experience reminded us of the time when Urg the caveman did that and plunged to his death. Our self-survival mechanisms kicked in, and over time it became ingrained in us to avoid doing silly things like that. It reminds me of a cat that sits on a hot stove. He never sits on a hot stove again – but he never sits on a cold one, either.

I’m guessing that the writer was trying to be cute and draw comparisons between loafing at Big Sur and having a panic attack for no discernible reason, but I’m not buying it. We don’t have the choice to avoid our everyday lives like she can avoid Big Sur, or an expensive dinner at a rotating restaurant at the top of some tall building.

Please don’t use anxiety for alliteration purposes, especially if you don’t understand what it is. A couple of quotes tossed in from authoritative anxiety sources doesn’t help explain how crippling anxiety disorders can be, and equating them to being afraid of falling into the ocean do nothing to educate the general public about a very real, very serious illness.

Image via Wikimedia Commons – Dysepsion

Using Weather to Teach a Child About Fear

My eight year old son – we’ll call him Sam – has inherited his Dad’s fascination with weather.

From his earliest days, when he could barely hold his head aloft, he would swivel in the direction of the magical TV box whenever the weather radar would come on the screen, or if he heard the computer-generated voice that gave the NOAA forecast superimposed over the map on our local weather channel.

Living in central Ohio, severe weather in the form of terrible thunderstorms and tornado watches is common. The combination of flat, open spaces and cold fronts often churns up the atmosphere, which means the local weathermeisters frequently interrupt regularly scheduled programming to jam their Super Nexrad Doppleganger Accu-Panic 4000 in our faces as they chart the speed and direction of the forthcoming swath of probable doom.

For Sam, there’s really only two things he knows about a tornado. First, they destroy homes and kill people, as evidenced by the video played and replayed ad nauseum on said TV box. Secondly, they are talking about tornado watches or warnings where he lives. Fear and panic set in, and Sam believes a tornado is heading through our subdivision, as the sky is dark and the wind is blowing where he is.

It’s senseless to explain to a pre-teen that the odds of dying in a tornado are roughly 1-60,000, or that he stands a much better chance of death by falling down (1-246) or via an air travel accident (1-20,000). That’s the thinking brain approach, and he’s not responding intellectually. His reaction is an emotional one, generated by the feeling brain. And he’s not alone. The vast majority of adults have exactly the same reaction. Even though the odds of dying of heart disease are 1-5, we still eat butter, cheeseburgers, and chips. There’s little trepidation about hopping in the car even though statistics tell us there’s a 1-100 chance of dying in a crash.

We watch news reports of horrific storms and stare at video of the carnage, and listen to sobbing testimonials from families surveying their destroyed homes, or townsfolk eulogizing the lost.  That personalizes the event in our minds and keeps it in the forefront of our memory. It’s difficult for us to recall the hundreds of tornado events each year that don’t cause death or serious injury, but our mind can quickly flash on examples of video and still photos taken from news reports and print media that document the worst scenarios. So when “tornado” hits our conscious mind, viola! Terrible event, death and destruction, risk alarm clangs loudly, fight or flight kicks in.

Between 1976 and 2000, the mean number of yearly tornado fatalities was 54. From 1912 to 1936, the mean number was 260, almost 5 times as many. So the risk has decreased substantially. But you wouldn’t know that because modern communications keeps the 54 foremost in our minds.

So how do you teach a child to not be afraid of a tornado?

I do it by telling him that in my 48 years on this planet, I have never seen a tornado, smelled a tornado, or lived anywhere that a tornado hit. He can connect with that – and there’s trust and credibility built in that no amount of statistical information can approximate. We also talk about what to do if one does happen to head our way. We know exactly where in the house we’re going to go and what we’re going to do, so he feels empowered in his situation. It’s no longer abstract – more than 17,000 days have passed without Dad experiencing a tornado, so it must be pretty darned unusual.

Then we eat healthy foods (mostly), always wear our seat belts, and change the batteries in our smoke detectors. Because I don’t want Sam to be fearful like me. I want him to live his life by paying attention to the important things while being somewhat resistant to the fear culture that’s developed.

Who knows. He might even grow up to be a storm chaser.

Fear: So Easy, Cavemen Did It

Unless you’re a former member of the Kansas Dept. of Education, the concept of natural selection seems entirely logical.

Throughout our evolution, the weaker of the herd didn’t survive to procreate and spread their genetic flaws. If you couldn’t outrun a tiger, you were dinner. If you could outrun a tiger, then your offspring would probably have those marvelously strong legs and a runner’s endurance.

Over time, we learned what to fear. If we were too stupid, or headstrong, or suffered a deficit of common sense, we became some other creature’s appetizer. I mean, look at humans compared to wild animals around the world. We didn’t have a lot going for us outside of our brains, which we used to compensate for our physical limitations. Again, the pea-brained among us, the less intelligent, would walk into quicksand, or bend down by the river to get a drink and get bitten by a croc, or stop paying attention to where we were going and fall into a ravine where we would lay until our bones were picked clean.

So we developed this hard-wiring over time – little schematics engraved on our gray matter – that didn’t require us to think about things quite so much. Some call it instinct, or intuition, and you see examples of it today. There are certain things that just don’t feel right, and we react without needing a lot of coaxing or intellectualizing.

Have you ever been face-to-face with a grizzly bear? I haven’t – but I’m pretty sure if one popped his head into my office, my reaction would be a combination of fear and panic. I’ve never had a bad experience with a grizzly. I’ve never met anybody who had had a run-in with one. WikiAnswers tells me there are less than 30 bear attacks a year – and as of November 2008, there were 6,734,923,433 people in the world. It’s completely irrational for me to be afraid of a bear attack, given those stats, but I guarantee you I am afraid of bears. Thanks for that, Stephen Colbert.

There’s something in my DNA that makes me afraid of bears, because my ancestors probably had bears visit them in their caves on occasion in search of warmth, food, and hibernation. Again, if the caveman ignored the bear threat, there’s a chance they would be a last supper before the big winter nap.

So we have all of these strands of information etched into our very being, which came in handy 100,000 years ago, but most of that stuff isn’t applicable today. It’s still there, though, sending us warning signals, raising red flags, popping off flares, all out of self-preservation.

Perhaps that’s the reason why we seem to be so afraid these days. We’re living longer than ever, fewer of us are dying of cancer and similar conditions, and we generally have things much better than our ancestors of even a few hundred years ago. There’s really no reason for us to be so skittish.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll share some of my ideas on why we’re so afraid. Feel free to chip in with your own thoughts.

The Thing I Fear Most Is Fear

In 1580, French essayist Michel de Montaigne penned this sentence in “Of Fear,” The Essays (Les Essais). Others have used variations of this theme since (FDR is his inaugural address, for one) and there’s a lightning bolt of truth in this phrase for those with panic and anxiety disorders.

Once I started having panic attacks in my late 20s, fear and trepidation concerning the next episode began to intrude on everyday life. Knowing how unpleasant panic attacks were for me, I began to fret about attacks before they happened as I postulated and predicted the next one.

Would I be on an airplane? That would be terrible, for there is no escape from the pressurized metal tube in the sky. How about stuck in traffic on a tall bridge? Feeling the sway of the span would cause my heart to race in anticipation, completely ignoring the fact that engineers build flexibility and elasticity into the structure to ensure fault tolerance and to prevent catastrophic failure.

A crowded meeting room? A party filled with my friends? A job interview?

Once I began to anticipate the (inevitable) next attack, I was all but ensuring its occurrence. I became a walking, talking self-ensuring prophecy of anxiety.

Fear is scary, and physical / emotional response to perceived risks is part of our survival instinct. But it seems like we’re a lot more afraid than we used to be. I’m not sure if it’s because we see and hear hyped-up threats constantly in our 24 hour news cycle, or if we’ve lost our sense of ratio and proportion.

Driving is one of the more dangerous modes of transportation. If you ask around, people would generally acknowledge this statement as true. But in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when everyone was afraid to fly, more people took to driving to get to their destinations, even though the risk of driving far outweighs the risk of being in a plane that’s commandeered and flown into a skyscraper.

It’s projected that an additional 1,595 people died in traffic fatalities in the year after the World Trade Center attacks, the deaths directly attributable to the increase in people driving. Statistically, we stand a 1-6,000 chance of dying in a car crash. Since only 3000 people have died due to planes crashing in tall buildings at the hands of terrorists in the history of the world, and of those, only a couple of hundred were inside the planes themselves, it stands to reason that we tossed aside rational thought and elementary school arithmetic out of fear. And rather than making us safer, fear increased the number of deaths and injuries we faced, directly opposite the result we were seeking.

It’s important for us to be able to step back, take a deep breath, and evaluate whether the measures we take out of fear are helping or hurting our cause. It’s not an easy exercise, but it is a necessary one. Otherwise, we’re constantly reacting.

More people die of malaria in a month than have died from swine flu in recorded history, but people wore ineffective surgical masks in public and began to stock up on Tamiflu rather than sending mosquito nets to Africa.

Fear makes us do idiotic things.

What Makes Us Happy?

Joshua Wolf Shenk, writing in the Atlantic, takes a very deep look into 72 years of Harvard research to see if there’s some obvious formula to happiness.

The Harvard study followed 268 men who entered college in the 1930s throughout their education, careers, marriages, family-rearing, and into old age. The collected data gives some keen insight into our perception of happiness and how we tend to form our own particular flavor of happy.

There are several powerful nuggets to be gleaned from Shenk’s essay, and it’s highly entertaining and educational to navigate your way through the mind of psychiatrist George Vaillant, who acted as a sort of curator of these stories for 42 years.

Happiness can be as difficult to define as it is elusive to locate. Some see it as a state of contentment or joy. Others equate being happy with pleasure or satisfaction with the quality and direction of their life. In his book The Art of Happiness, the Dalai Lama noted, “I believe that the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness. That is clear. Whether one believes in religion or not, whether one believes in this religion or that religion, we all are seeking something better in life. So, I think, the very motion of our life is towards happiness.”

Interestingly, the co-author of the Dalai Lama’s book, psychiatrist Howard C. Cutler, MD, noted that in his many years of treating patients for a variety of mental health issues, not once did he or his patients articulate “being happy” as a goal of their therapy or treatment. Cutler’s colleagues similarly had never used happiness as an outcome, focusing rather on correcting troubling behaviors or helping patients develop coping mechanisms to allow them to function better in society. But achieve happiness? Never!

I’ve struggled with allowing myself to feel happiness and joy, my anxiety and fear always sitting on my shoulder, ready to whisper that nothing ever lasts, so if I give in and glee it up, there will be an inevitable hard landing when happiness ends.

But does it end? Ten years ago, my answer would have been yes, of course. My journey has shown me differently, however, especially as I took measure of the role anxiety was playing in both how I defined happiness and what a happiness lifecycle was supposed to be. As usual, anxiety distorted my view significantly because to be happy really is to take things as they are and to cede control, two major obstacles for me, because of the inherent vulnerability that accompanies such emotions and actions.

As Shenk describes in his essay: …positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs—protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections—but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.

Who knew that the marketing departments of various state lottery commissions had the answer with their “You’ve gotta play to win!” campaigns?

What Makes Us Happy?

Pig Flu: The Odds Are With You

As the media continue to flog the pig flu story for all it’s worth, and I watch scores of people walking around wearing powder-blue surgical masks – you know, the kind with holes large enough for most bacteria to get through, including H1N1 influenza – it reminded me of how easily we’re moved into fear and panic mode by the remote possibility that something could kill us dead.

We’re all going to die of something, and none of us gets to choose the manner or location of our demise, unless we happen to take matters into our own hands. In the absence of having any real influence over the beginning of our end, one would think that we would concentrate on the next best thing – run the numbers and then attempt to learn from them in order to do as much as possible to live as long as we can.

If you take the actuarial route, you’d find that you’ll most likely die of heart disease – a one in five chance. I don’t see anyone wearing masks that keep cheeseburgers and fries from making their way into the body, or a warning system that sounds if the cold radiating from ice cream is detected close to your lips.

The odds are roughly 1 – 300,000 that we’ll perish in an asteroid strike. Where is the call to spin up a real-life team of crackpots to destroy renegade celestial bodies like that portrayed in Armageddon?

Based on the latest available information, the odds of contracting swine flu are 1 in 29,000, and the chance you’ll die from it are 1 in 736,000. You are eighty times more likely to get hit by a drunk driver right now than you are to get pig flu.

It almost seems that it’s the control, or lack of it, that’s feeding people’s fears. If we only knew what to do, what precautions to take, then we could take them. Even if they were probably ineffective (remember duct tape to keep our anthrax and biological agents?), there’s something empowering about staying out of airplances, washing your hands like Adrian Monk, and trotting around wearing a little gauze mask like Dr. Zorro.

Once again, the best advice appears to be similar to what mothers have been telling us for years – cover your nose and mouth when you sneeze, wash your hands, and stay home to rest if you don’t feel well. The Pork Council would also like to know if it would be too much trouble for you to eat something, after they’ve worked so hard to raise those piggies. Would it kill you to have some carnitas or a ham & swiss?

Beating the Fears

Zen Habits, always the helpful source of noble truths, has posted a handy guide to beating the fears that tend to hold us back.

Leo Babauta posits that most fears have their genesis in yet another fear – the fear of not being good enough. Babauta explains that in his life, the fear of not being good enough was sufficient to keep him from even trying.

That’s a bit of a head-scratcher to me. I grasp the idea that a lot of folks have issues relating to self-confidence or self-image that make it difficult for them to take risks because of the threat of repeated disappointments, and being constantly beaten down certainly makes it harder to rise up.

But the concept that the other fears Babauta lists – rejection, intimacy, success, going broke – are somehow inescapably entwined with the fear of not being good enough seems improbable.

They may all follow a common thread, and it’s possible the if you have repeated failures, rejections, or break-ups, that you may decide to stop trying, I’m not certain the linkage remains solely around not being good enough. That’s painting lack of success with a mighty broad brush.

Again, the lesson I take from this article is one of compassion for oneself. No one is perfect – even the best ball players only hit .300. So don’t be surprised by failure, and most certainly don’t be afraid of it, as it happens statistically more frequently than success.

We have nothing to fear but fear itself. And bears.

A Guide to Beating the Fears That Are Holding You Back

Rumors of my layoff are greatly exaggerated

What a difference a year makes.

My wife sat down on the opposite edge of the sofa the other night and earnestly confessed that she had something important to tell me, but she didn’t want me to freak out. Easier said than done, but ok.

A bit of background – we both work for the same Fortune 50 company and for a brief time held roles in the same group, so we know a lot of the same people. In fact, my wife’s current manager is the same person who hired me into the firm.

What she wanted to tell me was two things. The first thing she wanted to tell me was that she had been trying to think of a way to tell me the second thing in a way that didn’t put me into fear and anxiety mode. She knew she couldn’t not tell me – that would breach one of our foundational agreements – but she was understandably upset and worried to the point that she reached out to a couple of her friends for support.

I’m glad she has friends like that.

What she wanted to tell me was that her boss had called her to see how we were doing since he had heard that I got laid-off, furloughed, riffed – call it what you will. That was news to her (and to me), and my wife assured him that I was still around. There was some conversation between them about how ridiculous it would be for the firm to can me, given my performance, and some chatter about how a whole bunch of people would be happy to have me in their organization if I did happen to come on the market. That was pretty comforting.

I listened to her tell the tale as she watched me intently for signs of a pending freak-out, but none was forthcoming. I was smiling and calm, remarkably at peace. What the heck?

It’s not like I couldn’t lose my job. There’s plenty of that going on in our firm, and I’m certainly no more mission-critical than countless others. They could pull the plug on me tomorrow, too – just because I’m not gone yet doesn’t mean I survive indefinitely.

What’s surprising is that I’m really not filled with dread or worry. That same condition would not have existed two years ago, and twelve months ago it would have been a struggle for me to cope so well. So what’s changed?

I’m begun to embrace impermanence as my new reality, fully realizing that things have always been changing, and any control that I thought I had asserted over past events was merely an illusion.

Instead, I’m open to the idea that things will change – today, tomorrow, next month. Anxiety and suffering come from trying to maintain the status quo when the universe is constantly in motion. Understanding and accepting the world as it is – floating on the currents as they ebb and flow – uses much less energy and allows me to focus on the journey rather than the struggle.

I’m feeling pretty good about that. I’ve worked long and hard to be able to let go. In fact, for the longest time, I had a sign on the wall beside my phone to remind me of my task.

Ride the horse in the direction it’s going.

Economy Causing Record Anxiety?

It’s impossible to turn on the television or radio without hearing more dire news about the current state of our economy. Upswings in unemployment, the FDIC taking over failing banks, and viola! We have ourselves a nifty recession to deal with.

Downstream of that are even more things being written and read about how this tempest is affecting the population at large, which  seems like a pretty stupid question. It reminds me of when television reporters show up at the scene of some tragedy, shove their microphones in the faces of people who have suffered an enormous loss, and ask, “So how are you feeling about losing your house and all of your possessions?”

It comes as no surprise then to learn that groups like the Mental Health Foundation are sharing the results of studies that show roughly 37% of respondents feel more frightened than they used to. Two-thirds claim to be experiencing fear and anxiety as a result of the current financial maelstrom.

Ya think?

I’m not sure how you can pin the anxiety label on that. Anxiety is generally recognized as a mood state characterized by no identifiable triggering stimulus. Saying that a lot of people are fearful in this environment seems rational, but there’s a Gatling-gun of stimulus firing at us daily, which would seem to render any anxiety labeling inaccurate.

Of course, the 24-hour news cycle is being saddled with most of the blame for this rise in “anxiety”, so I suppose if you keep getting whacked on the head with a stick around the clock, there are bound to be some side effects. But we have the power to flip that switch to the off position, and we can also realize that watching a news report of a plane crash is bad, but watching it fifty times doesn’t make the crash any better or worse. It is what it is.

What do you think? Are you feeling more anxiety as a result of current events, or simply fear in different areas?

Record levels of anxiety in a “culture of fear”