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TEDx Talks
Published: 2017-08-21
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yRuydSpFGY
I would like everyone to take a moment close your eyes and think about the thing that you are most afraid of is it done dancing spiders I get a better one I myself am I played a lot of things some of the real and some of them totally made up in my head so start with a story that includes it was two thousand four that sounds
like a really long time ago and still doesn't boy in the summer I was doing my master's research in the very northern corner of California and my field site was about an eight hour drive from where I lived so I had to do a lot of that field research by myself and one day I was out in my beautiful sagebrush scrub flipside and I had this
pop pop pop of course my fear instincts are gonna kick in and I hope the doctor they hide under the nearest bush and I've been trying to get along highway that I realize that I'm destined all gray in a field full of sagebrush which is also great and it's hunting season yeah maybe not the best life choices but is all too late at that point I
turned my head away from the bush I'm snuggled into I noticed just maybe a couple feet away from me there's a giant fire ant hill so at this point I need to decide which I'm more afraid of the very real threat just feet away from me from the fire ants or may perceive that but the unknown hunters were they shooting at me because the didn't see
any what they should do at me because they did I don't know so I needed to make a decision whether to stay or whether to go when we think about fear it is extraordinary complex situation in a body of dozens of hormones many different parts of the brain are working together and when we have something spiking our fear response spider getting shot at something is going
to be a threat and I am body perceives that bat is going to do two things simultaneously you're gonna have a fast path peer response and you can have a slow path your response the fast path if fast but it's not very good at taking in information this is going to be where our instincts are going to kick in and the slower path is slower but
it could be better at taking in all of the information and making a better assessment at what an appropriate responses to keep it alive so to illustrate let's go back to my story in the one I mountains there was I mean I'm small but like about snuggled underneath the State Bank trying to decide what to do my fastpass is the reason why wasn't about bush in
the first place and after a few beats my slow past I to think about a lifetime full of horror films and newsreels and all of the things that you hear you shouldn't do like be a well meaning go out in the woods by yourself my mom was right and it's at this point that after taking in all of that information I decided to stay I decided
to choose my perceived fear being more fighting and more terrifying then the very real threat in front of me from the fire ants fear is very real fear keeps us alive and it's not going anywhere anytime soon but you can also keep us trapped in the cage of our own creation yeah just talk I really struggle to try to put myself my story into it because
as a classically trained scientist that's just not what we do as a biology lecture hello I just wanted to come up here in these facts and figures in science but if we have learned anything from our post truth anti expects situation that we have to find ourselves in is that just doesn't work and it doesn't work because it doesn't connect us to the story and everything
is about story so when you talk about being a scientist today I wanted to rewrite my story about what a scientist could say and what a scientist could be because personally I'm from a family of secret keepers and we were really great and just ignoring the motions specially fear I which is probably why I got into science in the first place because science so good we're
taught that emotions are my ability and as a scientist you are trained to remove yourself remove your humanity from the research in order to get the good data so science was a perfect place for me and if you're like me you probably also never learned in school how to deal with your emotions warrior deal with fear unless it after we get into illness and that's really
a shame because one eight children are affected by anxiety disorders one in eight and personally I didn't even think about fear hope that like actually scared but I didn't think about fear to study until I was in my early thirties and when I became fascinated by it through my research I would constantly feed these mantras being repeated and I'm sure you've heard these have fight the
fear and conquer your fears and of course my favorite we live whatever but I just I just thought was the most ridiculous thing ever because unless you have severe damage to him until that's literally impossible you can't be fearless but Sicily that's like telling someone which I always wait to just being a hunger less okay thinks that's unbelievable so we go through life pretty just unprepared
to deal with the fear saturated culture that we find ourselves in now today I'm not talking about the fear is that fire an immediate threat to your survival must not talking about the fears that come from phobias world from mental health challenges that many of the space in our society I am talking about the fears that many of us share and that may be of some
really good people in reality but most likely look at a future that may never exist so what would you there was very little chance fear response so how do we adapt that fear response for I modern lines well first we need to get curious where these guys coming down then we need to get creative about how we re write and re frame those stories and finally
get committed to practicing that reframing on a global basis so it just becomes part of what we do so we get serious about fears we find that not all of them come from us they come from the media they come from our leaders they come for my friends and family and this is in part to think about because fear is not the root of many of
the world's problems fair scarcity leads to over consumption of resources fear of failure does it allow us to take risks and create innovative solutions and fear can create political instability and violence so what we do about these things it's saturated with our culture fear is a powerful persuasive tool fear can care attention and motivate us to think or act in a different way and of course
get us to buy when you look in marketing literature you're gonna find something called fear appeal that is found in lots and lots of papers and the repeal a little example so we designed with an evolutionary adaptation for survival to want to belong to a tribe because the food the very recent ability to just pay someone for food shelter and water if we were rejected for
my tribe we would most likely die so we have a deep seated fear of rejection from our tribe from the society how does that work with marketing well you take a product with say a beer and beat the handbag and you frame it in a way that people think that if you purchase that you'll be better accepted into the tribe or maybe increase your social standing
in the tribe and deeply psychologically that means a good thing to us because that is to mean survival until now fear is also a powerful motivator we look at our political leaders society is more quick to react if there's an immediate threat and especially if that bank can be rolled into a story with a clear hero and an evil villain yeah the stories that we get
from our media and our leaders and our friends and family they're not the strongest stories we have the stronger stories come from Los and the ones that we've been telling ourselves over over again for many years to our entire lives so like I said I'm fella family of secret keepers where we don't talk about emotions we didn't learn how to deal with emotions just not what
we did until a few years ago when I found myself standing in an emergency room talking to a doctor I had just met is it a fair that plagues remind two years I believe primary and really the only caretaker for my mom and was I felt inflamed by the level of care that she needed that my life and my time have been sacrificed in order to
be her caretaker and I walked into the emergency room it was the first time point dozens of that point I figured this is just yet another inconvenience on my time but I was wrong minutes past midnight standing there with a magazine doctor that I just might I was being asked to make a decision no one should have to make whether to let my mom live on
life support or let her die a natural death at this point fear swept over me through my head in my heart down through my toes here about everything fear about Los fear about death at this point I never even been around anyone that had died so I had no idea what to do because we never talked about it because you know family secrets sidenote Jackson wanted
and I'm standing there petrified not knowing what to do something finally clicks and my science training takes then because in science if we have an insurmountable problem we're going to look at it in a different way really has a different lands to try and see how we can solve it and in that moment I me frame the question do you want your mother to die to
what would you want if it was you and of course I know could it was me I would want an end to suffering I would want to go home to die in my own bed in my own pajamas surrounded by love that's what we did but like many things in the world life that that happens it does movies some better when I'm home a natural death
or her took about a week and during that week I got to wrestle with all of the same fears and as I was holding her hands for her last breath I mean about not about Amiga prouder do right by the family name but I vowed to not live in fear but she had her entire life and instead to be curious about fear and see fear of
the opportunity not an obstacle so I want to take a moment go back to that fear that you're thinking of are there how did that feel make you feel so for me when I get there and I got a Christmas shoulders that like shortness of breath like you can get queasy stomach I would have a little bit different reaction and when you're in fear what do
you do other one of these four things for me it unavoidable roof I will avoid it and pretend like it doesn't exist until the last possible moment but I have no choice but to face it but the problem is that just because I know it doesn't mean it goes away how we think about here matters because when I blame is focused on fear it's only concentrate
on the threat they can't do anything else to make a successful so all of us in this room want to be successful so playing around with those fears and rewriting those fears stories and re framing them is going to help get us there I will go ahead and play around this today this rewriting of of your story a lot of people are free to strangers right
so what I want you to do both but fear that you thought about that it down to one or two words and go ahead and share that with a neighbor preferably a stranger right now because I'm only I know on the worst just turn around someone you don't know and tell them your biggest deepest darkest fear so with some of my fears maybe some of these
do they share any anything to be honest with each other so I love the fact that this is the top thirteen theories because the Gallup organization that did this list of top thirteen had to have known that there were actual clinical phobia of thirteen the number thirteen so it's just really mean that they made the top thirteen it appears that he we share so many of
these fears and I hope that we can start to come together and see that fear itself is something that should be shared by the community and is not an inevitable destination and lots fighting and struggling against I styles trying to be fearless it's exhausting so instead let's reframe because each one of us is one re right away from changing our lives
