Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 238

Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear," by Eva Holland.

I know now that I don’t need to make my world smaller—I don’t have to allow fear to shrink the boundaries of the life that I live. But I also know that I don’t have to keep trying, pushing, proving myself. I don’t have to become a rock climber if I don’t enjoy rock climbing, even if it doesn’t scare me as much as it used to. I can choose to seek thrills, to embrace the rush of fear, or I can choose to stay home and read a good book. Maybe I’ll go back to Florence someday; maybe I’ll try to learn to sail again. 

But if I don’t, I’ll know that it’s not because fear stopped me. If I never make it back to the top of the Duomo, it’ll be because there was so much else to do and see in the world. My time is not limitless—something I can now accept, mostly, without fear.


 

Before, Mujica-Parodi (and the military) had been conceptualizing the problem in a certain way: placing people on a spectrum of stress resilience, from more resilient to less resilient. Presumably, they had figured, the best Navy SEAL would be someone who was maximally resilient to fear-inducing and stressful situations—someone as close to fearless as ordinary folks (rather than the Alex Honnolds or the Patient S. M.s of the world) can get. But actually, when she dug in, Mujica-Parodi realized that what mattered most wasn’t the subject’s resilience level at all. Instead, she came to view threat detection, a different function entirely, as the key. 

“The distinction between different types of people doesn’t become evident when you put a gun to someone’s head,” she told me. “If there’s an actual threat, everybody reacts essentially the same way. What distinguishes people is how they respond to a potential threat. That is, an ambiguous threat.” People who are generally more anxious can tend to see threats where they don’t truly exist; conversely, people on the opposite, reckless, end of the anxiety spectrum can sometimes ignore or disregard genuine threats. “And that’s where the kind of stress-resilience way of thinking about things breaks down,” said Mujica-Parodi. “Because the ideal Navy SEAL is not somebody who is fearless. . . . Ideally, you want someone who is very good at identifying threat but doesn’t identify threat where it doesn’t exist.” 

Here’s the ideal, not just for a Navy SEAL, I suppose, but for anyone who wants to successfully navigate their fears: someone who can correctly identify a threat, neither under- or overestimating its risks, and then override their initial fear response—a freezing instinct, say, which can be useful if you’re a mouse trying to evade an owl in a nighttime field, but not if you’re a person on a highway who’s about to be hit by a U-Haul truck—in order to react effectively to mitigate said threat. 

Seems clear enough when you break it down, right? But most of us will spend our lives failing at the task in one way or another, underreacting or overreacting, and hopefully living to try again the next time. That’s one reason why fear memories are so powerful, why they can hang around and hurt and haunt us: They are designed to be potent, to last, to serve as shorthand when the same threat crops up again. Fear memories can enable a rapid response. Their job is too important to be easily short-circuited.