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.

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.

Worry is Emotional Avoidance

Robert Leahy, Ph.D., writing in Anxiety Files, suggests that worry is all about language rather than images. We prefer thinking over feeling. We do that to avoid emotion.

Now, I’m a visual person. That doesn’t mean you can see me – although you can. It means that my primary way of gathering information is to see it. I do best by reading, watching – my eyes are sponges.

I had a class long, long ago where we learned the three primary ways people learn and communicate – visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. Do you know someone who argues a lot for no apparent reason? They are probably auditory, and need to keep data coming into through their ears in order to get the information they need. Or perhaps they’re just being difficult. Who am I to judge?

Anyway, for someone like me who gets the majority of his information through his eyeballs, it would stand to reason that it should be a rather easy formula for me to follow – if I don’t see it, it’s probably not there. Right?

So why do I spend so much time worrying about bad things that could happen? It’s almost like I can diagram it out on a flowchart. I can take a bad scenario, think about all of the ways it could happen, and then spend my time figuring out how I can avoid each of those problems. Ahhh!

When I’m doing this plotting and planning, I’m thinking, not feeling.

Leahy writes:

When you are engaged in the endless “what ifs” of worry, you are dredging up predictions and thoughts about how bad things can happen and then you come up with other thoughts about how to solve problems that don’t exist. You are temporarily suppressing your emotions. When you run out of worries-by exhausting yourself or by finally deciding, “I’ve covered all I can for now”— you find that your emotional arousal bounces back as free-floating anxiety. This is the tension that you feel in your body, the sweating, the rapid heart-beat, and the insomnia. Your emotions incubate as you worry and these emotions bounce back later. And then you will worry about your emotions: “What’s wrong with me?” or “Am I sick?”

One of the reminder tools that I used when I first started struggling with this concept was a polished little stone with the word “feel” engraved on it. I kept it in my pocket, and when I pulled out some change to buy a soda, or reached in for my keys, I had a gentle reminder that it was ok to let myself feel.

It was part of a broader exercise that involved embracing feeling instead of pushing it away, letting it wash over me and through me, sometimes speaking the name of the feeling out loud to make it real and present. When I was able to do that, it soon became apparent that feelings, like most things, are impermanent. They come, and they go. Rather than taking the long way ’round the barn to avoid them, it was actually faster and easier to just let them pass through.

Sure, reality can be a pretty frightening thing, and feeling the emotions that often accompany events can be draining and unpleasant. But other than a couple of times in my life – when my daughter died, or when my parents passed away – the awful situations I worked up in my head were never more painful or hard to deal with than the actual events that I eventually needed to face. And no amount of advance planning prepares you for the horrific agony of losing your child.

So you feel.

It doesn’t make any sense at the time, and it’s terrible. But then you realize that feeling badly is exactly what you are supposed to do. Bad things sometimes happen.

Learn to let yourself feel things. If you keep avoiding emotion, you’ll miss feeling all the good things, too. And there are a long more good things than bad.

How to use your emotions rather than worry about them