Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: It's the youe Life Lived well podcast with Dr. Kevin Payne. A better way of seeing the life that you want to live.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: Fear.
It's one of those things we all think we understand. It's simple, right? You feel afraid, your heart pounds, your stomach tightens, and you get that creeping sense of panic. Fear is fear. We all know it when we feel it. But what if I told you that's not actually fear?
What if everything you've been taught about fear, what it is, what it does, how to handle it, misses something fundamental?
See, we tend to treat fear as if it's some kind of enemy, Something to conquer, to silence, to push away. We act like the goal is to live without fear, to be fearless.
That's nonsense. Fear isn't the problem. In fact, fear is trying to help.
It's just kind of bad at it.
Fear is ancient. Fear is primal. Fear is so deeply wired into us that it predates us. We share it with every vertebrate on the planet. And like an overeager bodyguard who doesn't quite understand the assignment, it treats everything like a life or death emergency. That email you haven't answered, that weird pain in your side, that difficult conversation you've been avoiding, it throws the same response at all of them. And that's a problem, because most of what we deal with in modern life isn't an immediate existential threat. It's not a saber toothed tiger charging at you. But your body doesn't know that. It only has one way to respond.
So it hijacks your system, sprints through the same cascade of reactions, whether the threat is real or just something your mind perceives as dangerous.
And if you're living with a chronic illness, caregiving for someone you love, or just dealing with the relentless uncertainties of life, that fear response can end up running in an endless loop.
And that, that's where fear stops helping and starts hurting.
So today we're going to break it down. What fear actually is, what it's doing inside of us, and how we can work with it instead of being controlled by it. Because if we can shift how we understand fear, if we can step back, catch that one beautiful brief instant of pause, and see what's really happening, then we can start making different choices.
Alright, so let's get into it right after a quick break to practice those pauses.
[00:03:00] Speaker C: I'm Dr. Kevin Payne. Just jump with me into your life lived well.
Half of us now live with chronic illness.
Mine is multiple sclerosis.
It's your life, live it well. A chronic diagnosis doesn't mean goodbye to the good life you wanted. You don't have to feel overwhelmed or hopeless. I'll show you how to save yourself. Take your first step at justjump Life.
[00:03:33] Speaker A: It's the youe Life Lived well podcast.
Don't forget to, like, share and subscribe.
[00:03:45] Speaker C: We really don't have a good understanding of what fear actually is and what it's doing and how to handle it. Fear is this overwhelming primal response to a perceived threat. But it's not helpful for chronic illness. The thing that scares me most lives inside my body, with me. My Ms. Is the scariest thing in the world to me because it's taken a lot from me and it has the power to take a lot more. For those of you who are listening who live with a chronic illness, you've had your terrifying moments as well. You've had terrifying moments as caregivers to your loved ones when they deal with their health challenges. And those induce fear. And we think of fear as our bodily reaction. There are certain feelings that we get in our body and we interpret them. Oh, that's fear. Our breathing becomes fast and shallow. Our heart beats faster and our blood pressure rises. Our blood vessels dilate in our muscles, but they constrict elsewhere. We get pale or flush. Our pupils dilate. We produce fewer tears and saliva, but we sweat more. Our blood sugar rises, Our insulin level falls. Our digestion slows and stops. Sphincter muscles clench and our bladder releases. When we get really scared, our immune system gets repressed. Our tissues get inflamed. We shake. Our spinal reflexes are disinhibited. Our bodies get flooded with hormones, cortisol, catecholamines, like norepinephrine and epinephrine. Our emotions get heightened and extreme, called an amygdala hijacking. Lovely term. But we have difficult with emotional regulation and reactivity. So our emotions are all over the place. We feel almost raw and fragile and exposed due to that constant emotional arousal. Our higher level cognition gets short circuited and we can only think about here and now. And we're focused overwhelmingly on the negative. When we're fearful, it's called automatic vigilance. And we have a strong, overwhelming urge to do something now, anything. And we know what that fear experience is like. The only problem is, everything I just described to you isn't fear. That's not actually fear. That's our body gearing up for an immediate challenge. The kind of challenge that our distant ancestors would have faced for thousands and thousands of years. Where you have an immediate existential threat right in front of you that you have to deal with. You have to get distance between you and that saber toothed tiger immediately. And you're going to do it in a number of ways. And we'll get into that here in a bit. But that's not fear, that's a challenge response and it's amping us up so that we're prepared. Now, the only problem is 99% of the challenges that we face in this modern world we've created are not those kinds of challenges. And they aren't the kind of challenges that can be handled in that way. But that's the only tool we've got.
We've got one tool, we've got that challenge response, that threat response tool, and we're trying to make it do all sorts of things. And the other issue here, chronic illness, is lasting and repeated trauma. And every time that happens, this response gets kicked on. But it's for acute challenges, small, discrete little challenges right here and right now. It's not for time after time after time after time, ongoing challenges.
[00:07:58] Speaker B: We've all got this really strong preconception, based on our experience, about what fear is. And then perversely, our culture does everything it can to deny fear's existence.
[00:08:11] Speaker C: That's just silly. Fear is a real thing. Fear is trying to be helpful. The only problem is fear is primal. Fear is ancient.
[00:08:20] Speaker B: Fear is kind of stupid because it's shutting down your prefrontal cortex, right?
[00:08:25] Speaker C: You've got that amygdala hijacking going on. So it's not real clever, but it's really well meaning and it's very, very, very insistent. So we have to acknowledge fear in order to deal with it. And we have to understand that every time we're faced with, with a stressful or potentially traumatic experience or just something we think might be fearless, people get dead. I jump out of an airplane all the time. And I can tell you that fear is my friend, fear focuses me. Fear is important, but fear is limited. You know why we have fear? It's one of our earliest, earliest brain systems, long before we were ever human. We share this with all other mammals. One system even more ancient than fear is pain. So pain, that is the original nociceptive pain. Okay, so nociceptive pain is pain when nerves in your peripheral nervous system are being damaged. So crushing, tearing, cutting, rending, burning, that sort of thing is happening to you. And you're getting an immediate signal, wow, this hurts. And, and it's an immediate, urgent, insistent signal for you to Back off. Now, what fear does is it gives you a tiny little bit of warning so that you don't get to the pain part. That's what fear is about. Fear is about, whoa, that looks really dangerous. It looks like something that has been painful or could be painful, and you need to be careful and you need to get away from that. And so we have the fear response. We have that challenge response, the stress response. It's called the acute stress response. Walter Cannon identified it way back in 1915. This ramps up our sympathetic nervous system. We share it with all of the vertebrates, not just mammals, all of the vertebrates. And it's the first stage of Hans Selye's general adaptation syndrome. Colloquially, we know it as the fight or flight response. And its whole reason for existence is to help us avoid pain. So it's a really primal, powerful, insistent signal. This acute stress response is the root of fear, anxiety, grief, rage, frustration, trauma. But it is also the root of joy and challenge and exhilaration and learning. We call it the fight or flight response, but that really oversimplifies what's going on here, because it's not really the.
[00:11:13] Speaker B: Fight or flight response. There's a lot more going on here, and it gets ignored. I call it the eff it cascade. It's really freeze. Front flight, fight, fawn, flock, frame, fault, flaw, flop, fright, faint. Eff it.
I know that's a lot. So let's slow down for just a moment to appreciate all of what's happening. Freeze. Front flight, fight, fawn, flock, frame, fault, flop, fright, feint, eff it.
[00:11:53] Speaker C: Every single one of these is about getting distance between you and a potential stressor or getting apparent distance. So let's unpack these real quick. Freeze. This is the first thing that happens when we get this response. There's a pause. And you know this. I see this almost every morning when I take my dog out for a walk because there's a nest of bunnies in the yard under a wood pile. And when we come out early in the morning, mama bunny is usually out in the yard, and Sanmo comes out and sees her and she freezes. What is this freeze response? We're pausing. We suddenly get what's called hypervigilant. Our senses are opening up just in our immediate vicinity. We lose track of whatever we were thinking of at the moment because we're trying to take in enough information to figure out is this really a threat? And by the way, this is the root of humor as well, triggering that freeze response where you decide whether it's, oh, it's a surprise. I gotta pay attention. Oh, it's funny. Okay, now I can laugh. What's the next thing that we try to do? We think, oh, this really is a threat. I'm gonna front, I'm gonna get big, I'm gonna puff myself up. Display behaviors because you're hoping that the threat is going to say, don't want to mess with that and walk away. Notice you're not ready to fight yet. You're just making out like you're all that in a bag of chips. Our next option is flight. We're going to puff up and then run away. Bravely run away because the potential cost of running away is less than the potential cost of fighting. Now we think, oh, this is really serious. I'm not going to be able to get away. Now we're ready to fight.
[00:13:43] Speaker B: Oh no.
[00:13:44] Speaker C: Now we think it's a fight we can't win. So instead of trying to puff ourselves up and make ourselves big, or instead of really being aggressive, we're going to fawn, we're going to get really low and really small and maybe we'll be so insignificant that the threat will pass us by.
[00:14:00] Speaker B: Flock is a social response. Being alone is scary. There's strength in numbers. So our flock response can actually work two ways. The first is to seek safety with your own people, whoever they happen to be at the moment. The second is the if you can't beat them, join them tactic, where we seek to join the oppressors and aggressors.
The so called tend and befriend response has also been argued as a social option we sometimes see, especially in women.
Frame is a cognitive response.
We're considering the problem and trying to make it make sense differently, either to see a new way out or just to assuage our fear by convincing ourselves that it really isn't a threat after all. Remember I said these responses are about getting distance or the appearance of distance. And the further we go down this list further, the more likely the option is going to be dysfunctional, even harmful.
Fault is another cognitive response. By this time you're either trying to figure out why this terrifying predicament really isn't your fault, or you are working through the mental gymnastics to blame someone else for why it's gone horribly wrong. Why do this? By shifting the blame, you're now preparing yourself to take some maybe awful actions you wouldn't normally entertain. This process includes what are called techniques of neutralization.
Next is flop, a behavioral and emotional collapse. We're not Quite immobilized, but we're pretty deep into desperation. We're out of things to do. We're a quivering puddle. We're relying on some mixture of dumb luck and pathos to maybe see us through.
[00:15:56] Speaker C: And if that doesn't work now we're to the fright stage. And the fright stage looks like hyper vigilance. Okay, looks like freeze on the outside because you've literally frozen up. You are frozen with fear. But this is called tonic immobility, not hyper vigilance, this fright phase. You are overwhelmed and you're doing nothing because at this point you are so fearful and so overwhelmed that all you can think of is please, please, please pass me by. And that's all you have. And it's faint. The feelings are so overwhelming that you pass out. This is where addiction lies. Addiction numbs us or substitutes something else for the negativity of the world that we feel like we have no way of overcoming ourselves.
[00:16:49] Speaker B: The very last stop is eff it. You know what that means?
We can call this the blaze of glory effect. You know you're going to fail. You've lost all hope. You're going to make some noise, do some damage and take some of them with you as you go. This is the desperate terminal point of the fear driven cascade. Most of us never get close to this one, but too many of us tragically do.
You don't want to ride to the end of this line.
The important point to all of this is that your primal brain has judged that you are facing a challenging circumstance and you might fail or lose. The corollary is that your primal brain has no subtlety. Everything is life or death in its world. So every single one of these options is about getting distance or apparent distance between you and that threat. Depending on the threat, you've got behavioral, social, cognitive, and then increasingly maladaptive options.
You've got a lot of potential tools, but crucially, your smarty pants prefrontal cortex, your most modern, logical, evidence based reasoning brain, has been locked out of the engine car. The train is pulling out of the station. You're being pushed with an overwhelming demand to do something. And the only solutions your fast moving primal brain can entertain are those it has directly available down in its preconscious home. That effort cascade, habits, reflexes, instincts, rituals and dominant responses, all tools that might not make the best sense to a modern mind for a modern problem.
[00:18:41] Speaker C: Our fear response is this layer of interpretation that we're putting on that physiological signal. We sense a potential threat instead of interpreting it as A challenge. We interpret it as a threat. And now this system kicks in and we're trying to make sense of it and construct a response that will get us out of it. This is the fear part. The fear is what you do with all that physiological signal. And notice all of these are about manipulating distance or apparent distance between you and the threat. This is great again, if you have an acute emergent existential threat. But if you've got a chronic threat, you can see how our innate go to tools are just sort of wrong. Fear is such a powerful, overwhelming physiological and cognitive and emotional response that we can't just ignore it. This is one of the reasons why I went back to skydiving. I'd had just enough experience with it that I knew that it was a really cool experience.
But it's also a mental sport because you have to learn to function well in the face of this fear response. That's high stakes. You don't function well, you splat on the ground. That's why I always think to myself before I jump, 82 seconds. My life expectancy is 82 seconds. Now I have to do something very right. And it is a joyful experience. And that's because the opposite of fear is not joy. They're not opposites, they're right next to one another. The opposite of fear is apathy. And if you deny that acute stress response in your life, yeah, you're not going to ever have to deal with fear again. If you wrap yourself in bubble wrap and sit in a closet all the time, but you're not going to have any joy either. So when we experience fear, or joy for that matter, these are short term responses. And fear is a short term response to an immediate problem. But what if it's a long term problem? If you are constantly ruminating on the fear that is an entirely natural and understandable consequence of life with a chronic illness, then you're going to keep triggering that sympathetic nervous system. You're going to keep going through these wild cycles. This is detrimental to our system long term. When you always live in distress, this is really harmful. It harms our cardiovascular system, our neural system, it harms our endocrine system. Everything gets out of whack and everything gets worse. And all of the things that you experience as direct symptoms from your condition get worse. Triggering that sympathetic nervous system is the first step of that general adaptation syndrome. Then you've got to rest and digest. You've got to get your parasympathetic nervous system triggered again. And you've got to Calm down and relax. But if you're always up, you're like that saber toothed squirrel in the Ice Age movies and you will certainly explode someday. You don't want to end up that way. So if this is a long term problem, if it is a problem that is inside of you and you can't get away from, your fear response in those circumstances is by definition harmful. Because you can't deal with building a good life in the face of chronic illness from the standpoint of fear. Notice I'm not saying that you should just ignore it. You can't. You have to understand it and acknowledge it and distinguish between that sympathetic nervous system response and the interpretation of it as fear. Two different things. Because I know you know this. You've had experiences where you felt all of those physiological responses and you've interpreted it as joy, as elation, as excitement. Because your body, your brain, your system is amping itself up for a challenge. And when you are faced with a challenge and you can perform at your best and succeed, that's some of the best experiences that you will ever have as a human. You know that same physiological response. You're just interpreting it differently. This issue is, is the crux of many of our non medical problems with chronic illness. Because chronic illness is inherently stressful. And when we interpret it into distress, fear, then we have all those negative consequences that follow from it. And time after time, after time after time, every time our symptoms flare, every time we face our limitations, every time we face all those collateral challenges to our conditions, we can trip this response. That first step in that shorthand fight or flight response is freeze. What you have to do is make the most of that part of the response. That's the important thing. Our bodies and our primal brains, they think this is a good solution. I guarantee you your basal brain thinks that the fear response it's triggering in you is a dynamite solution. Yeah, this is going to really work. It's going to save us. But they can only see this much of the world.
[00:24:28] Speaker B: It's really tiny.
[00:24:29] Speaker C: They're focused right here, right now on surface things and usually on negative things. It's only a good solution because this limited perspective is happening the same things that happen to our senses when we get feared. If you ever notice, you get really fearful, you get tunnel vision. You also get auditory suppression. You'll get a lot of noises that are cleared out in your environment as you're trying to focus in on only the noises that matter for this threat. It happens cognitively as well. We can only think about things that are right here, right now, very concrete. We don't have access to that abstract thought, to the big picture, to the long term. If you are allowing yourself to stay in that fear mode all the time, you're tying one lobe of your brain behind your back. You can't deliver as much to the problem as modern problems demand. So this really loud voice in our head is saying, oh, this is really good idea. It's a really good idea. But we are prone to misattribution errors. We're prone to coming up with really quick, easy explanations for why this is happening that tend to be really negative. We tend to interpret the actions of the people around us in the most negative way. We also tend to see patterns where they don't exist. It's called apophenia. So we become more susceptible to conspiracy theories and other sorts of wrong thinking. There are a whole lot of things when we're in the grip of fear that seem like a really good idea, but they're not. And you can't really bust on your primal brain for thinking that way because A, it won't understand, and B, it's really trying to do its best to save you. You have to be much more gentle with it and you have to acknowledge the fear, and then you have to get some distance. So the first thing we have to understand is that this is the process. This is what happens when we sense challenge. One of the things that mother nature likes to do is reuse the same systems or readapt the same systems for other things when they come along. We use this acute stress response anytime we sense that we're challenged. Physical challenge, cognitive challenge, emotional challenge, practical challenge, environmental challenge, social challenge, all of those. Anytime we feel challenged. The only problem is the body systems that it triggers and the kind of response it gears us up for is not appropriate for all those kinds of challenges. You walk up on stage, if you're somebody who has stage fright, happens all the time. You get up there now, you are petrified. It is so difficult for you to say something. And you know that the best way to get through it is just to say something so you can get off stage. And yet all of the systems that are geared up are geared up for you to face a saber toothed tiger who is not going to succumb to your rhetorical flourishes. So those parts of your brain are not engaged at this point. Same fear response, wrong kind of circumstances. Once you recognize it, the first thing you have to do, label it as a challenge response. This is not fear. Fear may be what you decide to do with it later on down the road, but this is the challenge response. And this challenge response is going to amp you up for certain kinds of activities. So I had like three days of jumping in a row there last week. One of the things I wanted to do coming back was get really comfortable with fear. I wanted fear to be my buddy, my friend, because I have to live with the thing that I fear most in this life. Now, I'm not suggesting that you jump out of a plane hundreds of times just to deal better with your chronic illness and the emotions that happen. I mean, you could, it's worked for me. But what I am suggesting is that you have to learn to recognize it and you have to learn to frame it and you have to understand this is a challenge response. Now we can use that pause, that freeze. We want to extend that. Why do we want to do that? Because our primal brains think faster than our modern cognition. Our neocortex, our smarty pants frontal lobes are slower to the draw than the raw visceral, somatic emotional responses of our deep brain. We've got to use that freeze to give our forebrains time to catch up and say, oh, there might be a little bit of threat here, but it's only this or here's something that I can actually do about it. Because fear isn't rational, it's pre rational. I don't even like saying it's irrational. It's pre rational. It came about before there was rationality. Fear thinks it's saving us, but its perspective is small. So you've got to train yourself to use that pause to say, oh, is this fear or a threat or a challenge? Because we've only got this one response and we can't ignore it. It's going to happen. It's going to happen. We have got to use this one inappropriate response for modern life to get the best out of it that we can. When we're faced with threats that are non life threatening, speaking, having difficult conversations, looking foolish, skydiving, really, the threat of death during a skydive is seven micromorts. Seven in a million chance. It's like driving 50 miles on a motorcycle on the highway.
[00:30:29] Speaker B: We've got to put it in place.
[00:30:31] Speaker C: And we've also got to realize that we've got this one response even for things that we cannot control. So there can be things that are real threats, like our chronic illnesses, but we can't do a darn thing about it. But what we can do is something about how we live through it. Those are the two decisions that you're using your pause to make. Is it really a threat? What kind of threat is it? And then is it something you can do something about? So now what are you going to do? You're recognizing that no matter how loud and insistent and convincing the fear is, and because it's so primal it is all those things, you have to know that it is wrong for your circumstances and you don't want to beat it up and you don't want to be mean to it. Don't be mean to your fear. Really seriously, your fear is doing the best it can to help you out. It's just got a limited set of tools. Be kind to your fear. If you try to clamp down on your fear, it will only get worse. You can't ignore it. You can't dismiss it. You've got to work with it. You've got to work through it. You've got to show it through your experience that it doesn't need to be quite so fearful in that circumstance. You can train it. You gotta treat it like your little cave child, because that's what it is. So we've got this one response. We can't get around it. We can't ignore it. It's gonna be there. Just like every time I stand in the open door of an airplane, I think, 82 seconds. To some people, that seems really grim. I have 82 seconds left to live. But the cool thing is I have 82 seconds left to live unless I do something really right. And I've got this. And when you're facing your fear, you've got this too. Because the thing you have to understand is on the other side of your fear, there is indescribable joy. Acknowledge your fear. Work with your fear. Direct it so that you understand it's a challenge.
[00:32:34] Speaker B: That's a lot. Mull it over and we'll be back after one last quick break to say a few words about how you can put these insights into action and improve your own relation with fear.
[00:32:47] Speaker C: We all have challenges.
Mine is multiple sclerosis. We each have this one life and we didn't choose to be saddled with chronic illness. But there's a better.
So I choose to just jump.
And you can too. It's your life. Live it well.
Justjump life.
[00:33:19] Speaker A: It's the youe Life Lived well podcast.
Don't forget to, like, share and subscribe.
[00:33:30] Speaker B: Welcome back. Alright, so let's bring this all together. Fear feels like the enemy. It's loud. It's insistent. And it hijacks our whole system whether we want it to or not. But as we've unpacked today, fear isn't actually the problem. It's just a tool. And like any tool, whether it helps or harms depends entirely on how we use it. Fear is not some mysterious force. It's physiological arousal. And we layer it with all sorts of meanings. It's just your body reacting to challenge, perceived or real, by flipping on an ancient survival switch. The problem is that system was built for a world of immediate existential threats. It was adapted to get you away from something trying to eat you right now, not to help you navigate long term stress, chronic illness, caregiving, or the slow burn uncertainty of modern life. And yet, this is the only system we have. So we have two choices. One, let fear run the show. Let it keep reacting on autopilot, pulling us into hypervigilance, avoidance, reactivity, exhaustion, and that increasingly disastrous effort cascade.
Or two, recognize it for what it is, catch it in the moment, step back and reclaim our precious influence over how we respond. And all that starts with the pause, that freeze response, the moment when everything stops can be a profound gift. If we use it, if we learn to use it, if we accept that this learning takes time and patience and humility and a willingness to work through repeated failures, that pause is our opportunity to insert the right questions. Is this really a threat? Or is it just a challenge? And what's the best way to respond?
Because the second we name it, when we say, oh, this is my body amping me up for a challenge, we create a little bit of space. And that space opens a world of options. It keeps us from defaulting to fear's usual tricks. Catastrophizing, shutting down, running away, lashing out, or any of the other well intentioned messes our primal brain might uncork.
Now, let's be clear. This is not about eliminating fear. You can't and you shouldn't. Fear is part of the deal.
It's wired into us and it serves a purpose. But if we train ourselves to work with it, to see it as a signal, not a tyrant holding us at his whim, then we can harness it. Because just like fear primes us for distress, it also primes us for challenge, focus, and even joy.
That's why fear and exhilaration live right next to each other in our brains. And that's why the same physiological response can feel terrifying in one moment and euphoric in another. The difference, the story we tell ourselves about it. This really Is that simple and that hard.
And if you're living with a chronic illness, if you're in a body that challenges you every single day, this matters even more. Because fear is going to show up again and again and again.
Not because you're weak, not because you're failing, but because your body is trying to help in the only way it knows how.
So don't fight it. Don't ignore it. Work with it. Teach it. Reframe it.
Pause. When fear kicks in, let your thinking brain catch up.
Name what's happening. Label it as a challenge response, not just fear. Decide how you want to respond.
Is this an actual threat, or is my brain overreacting? And most importantly, don't let fear make your world smaller. Because fear wants to keep you safe. But safety and living well are not the same thing.
You can spend your whole life avoiding everything that scares you. And sure, that might keep you comfortable, but it won't bring you joy. It won't make your life bigger. It won't help you grow. Fear doesn't mean stop. Fear means pay attention. So the next time it shows up, take that. Pause, breathe, and remind yourself you've got this. Because on the other side of fear, that's where all the best things in life are waiting.
The one truth you must understand is that your fear response believes it has the answer. And it has a literal death grip on your psyche. It cannot understand the more sophisticated solution you want to substitute for its command. For you to succeed, you must disengage this control. And there is only one way to do that. Make it feel safe in ways it understands.
So learn to become aware of that. Pause. Stretch it just a little so the rest of you can catch up. Then step into the challenge. Because fear is not the enemy. It's an ancient signal that you're at the edge of something that matters.
All right, that's it for today. There's a lot more about fear. It's a big topic, but I hope this gives you a little bit different way to process fear, your own fear. So thanks for being here. Thanks for thinking through this with me. If this episode resonated, please share it with someone who needs to hear it.
I'll see you next time for an episode on mindfulness and meditation. But for now, go forth, be well, do well, and do good.
[00:40:10] Speaker A: If you've enjoyed today's topic and want to join the conversation with Dr. Kevin Payne, find your life lived well on all of your favorite social media sites, Patreon and Of course, yourlifelivedwell.co.
