Fear Management
It's the Ultimate F Word.
Fear.
That dirty, four-letter word. It'll try to hold you back from the things you desire and stop you from fully appreciating all that life can teach you.
Guys are often controlled by fear: their beliefs, their behaviors, their thoughts. Fear is why they don't approach the hotty at the car wash, don't go for the make-out, don't head to the club alone, don't call the chick on the phone. So what exactly is fear, and more importantly, how can we take charge of it?
The 3 Fs
In the beginning – and I mean the very beginning – animals on earth were controlled by their limbic brains. If they saw something that could kill them, they responded without thought. Primitive animals didn't yet have the higher level of problem-solving that man possesses. They weren't capable of analyzing the entire scenario so as to elucidate the best course of action. The little dudes simply reacted instinctively, and as a result, they escaped harm.
The limbic brain is there to keep us humans alive as well. If there is a danger in your proximity, over-analysis could lead to death and injury. So you react to perceived dangers very swiftly. If you hear a gun go off near your head, you're gonna startle and move away from the sound without thought.
Fear is handled by the limbic brain using three responses:
1. Freeze. The first strategy you'll usually use if faced with danger is to freeze. Since movement attracts the attention of predators, freezing makes us invisible to them. It also gives our higher brain time to come up with a strategy.
If I tell a guy with approach anxiety to go talk to the three-set of 9s, the guy will initially freeze up. His breath will get shallow, he'll avoid eye contact when he does approach, and if he sits down he'll lock his feet together under his seat. In effect, he is making himself smaller, less noticeable and ideally invisible, all indicators of the freeze response. Even evasive eye contact is his way of “hiding” in full view.
If one person in the tribe suddenly freezes when he sees a lion, the others will mimic his behavior. This mimicry is in place to help survival of the group; hence, fear is contagious. Going out and trying to be sociable with anxious wings will make you more anxious. A better strategy is to hang out with guys who aren't as nervous as you.
DR. MARLOWE SPEAKS ABOUT FEAR. LISTEN HERE.
2. Flight. When freezing won't assure survival, we flee. In the wild, we would run from a lion that was pursuing us. In the modern world, we can't literally run from everything that scares us, but we can evade in other ways, called distancing and blocking. The goal: to create space between us and the danger.
Distancing is seen when we turn away from people who are annoying us, lean away from someone confrontational, point our foot away while legs crossed from someone offensive.
Examples of blocking include briefly covering your face with your hand when somebody says something you don't like, closing your eyes almost as if to make the world momentarily go away, and holding a drink or cell phone up in front of you when a sexy mama walks by.
3. Fight. When freezing and fleeing don't cut it, we fight. In the wild, we turned fear into rage and fought our predators. In the modern world, we can't fight physically so we tone it down, and instead we argue. Insults, sarcasm and other verbally aggressive tactics are manifestations of our desire to physically fight. When we feel the urge to fight, our subcommunications tell the story: an aggressive stance, clenched fists, gnashed teeth, hard eye contact, getting up in the other dude's grill.
Pacifying Behaviors
Your subcoms will vary depending on whether you're comfortable or uncomfortable. Comfortable people give off a sense of high confidence, well-being and contentment. Those who are uncomfortable appear to have low confidence and seem stressed and possibly afraid.
To assuage ourselves of this discomfort, we employ pacifying behaviors. In kids, these maneuvers are easily apparent, such as thumb-sucking. But as we grow out of these babyisms, the pacifying becomes less recognizable: chewing gum, biting fingernails, munching a pencil. While the child tries to hide from a stranger behind mom's leg, we as adults use our beer bottle to hide behind. When we don't have a beer bottle, we touch briefly at our nose or throat. Different behaviors, same drive: to alleviate our discomfort.
The full version of Fear Management, including a dozen ways to handle fear, is available to Man School students.
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