by Taylor Clark
The most legendary hypochondriac in history, though, was the poet Sara Teasdale, who even employed her own full-time nurse. One day in 1933, a blood vessel burst in Teasdale's hand, which the poet interpreted as a sure sign of an impending stroke; convinced of her grim fate, she decided to skip the formalities and take a massive overdose of sleeping pills. The coroner later reported that she'd been in perfect health.
Often, our stress level depends more on how we perceive a set of cognitive variables than on the specific demands of that situation. (p. 109)
Morgan claims that the way we talk to ourselves about stressors is equally important. How you frame something in your head has a great deal to do with your neurobiological response to it, he told me. Once you start saying to yourself Oh my goodness, this is awful, you begin releasing more cortisol and start this cascade of alarm. But when you say to yourself, I know what to do here, or see things as a challenge, then that turns into a much more positive response. p. 112
...Maddi is adamant that any one of us can instill these resilient attitudes. We know we can train people to increase their hardiness, Maddi said. It involves showing people how to deal with their stressful circumstances through problem solving, coping skills, social support, and effective self-care--rather than just giving up. Hardiness trainees learn to identify their stressors and to challenge their negative beliefs about them, like the idea that they're helpless to change a tough situation or that it's safer to give up on a problem when it grows difficult. They practice setting goals and taking small steps toward accomplishing them, slowly building up thir sense of control over their own destiny. In talk sessions, therapists help them to put their stressors into perspective: they see how turmoil often leads to accomplishments and personal growth and how change is an essential element of life. p 115
After obwerving countless assaults, Wigram began to pick up on a peculiar pattern in each twenty-two man platoon. Whenever a platoon ran into enemy fire, Wigram noted, the troops would react in three very distinct ways. Without fail, a few soldiers would go to pieces and "start making tracks for home." Another handful of men would respond valiantly, opening fire and advancing. And the majority of the troops? Wigram said they would enter a state of bewilderment, unsure of how to act; they became "sheep" and would only do their duty when prodded by a strong, decisive leader. p. 240
This treacherous freezing reaction is startlingly common in crises. In the 1970s, the psychologist Daniel Johnson found that when he asked subjects to perform a chllenging and novel task under high pressure, 45% of them shut down and stopped moving for minimum of thirty seconds. They just quit functioning, he later told the Time reporter Amnda Ripley, they just sat there. Under life threatening stress, complex brain processing plummets and the neural mainframe often maxes out, leaving us with instinctive reactions and deeply worn routines; it's as if such an experience can be too monumentl for the brain to compute. Leach says that even in the most ideal of circumstances, the brain needs at least eight to ten seconds to process an unfamiliar situation, but intense fear and stress make that task even tougher. When our brains search their data banks for the right course of action in extreme danger and come up empty, Leach claims, they shut down. We freeze. We do nothing. p244
In combat you do not rise to the occasion--you sink to the level of your training. None of us cn safely rely upon antasies of our innate heroism when the moment calls for it, Grossman says, because a life-threatening crisis makes our normal experience of reality fall apart. Only the man who prepares for disaster can hope to respond well.
...in the middle of this panic-fueled dash, a miracle happened: Kummerfeldt's training kicked in. This little voice in my head said, hey dummy, go sit down, he recaleld. So I went over to a log and sat down. This is precisely what he advises lost hikers to do today--to get off their feet. Next Kummerfeldt followed his second protocol: he took a drink of water. A drink of water is incredibly clming, he explained...These two things, getting off your feet and hving a drink of water, are two absolutely incredible lifesaving steps. p. 257
It is what we do with that fear reaction that determines our fate, Kummerfeldt says. In his classes today, Kummerfeldt teachers a model called STOP to get through wilderness survival situations: stop what you're soing, sit down, and let the adrenaline subside; think about your options; observe your environment; and plan how best to survive. Then get to work. p258
Bravery isn't being fearless. Bravery is being scared and doing the right thing anyway. p266
By now the overarching point should be clear. How did Cooper really stay cool under life-threatening pressure? The same way everyone else we've met did it: by working with fear instead of needlessly wasting energy fighting it, by focusing on what needs to be done instead of on worries, and by taking action. Cooper wasn't necessarily good at not feeling afraid...what Cooper had become good at was making this fear irrelevant. p271
How to be afraid:
1. Breathe. (square breathing)
2. put your feelings into words. Talking or writing about an emotion like fear helps the brain to prosses it behind the scenes; it allows the mine to sort out thoughts and feelings instead of just churning over them repeatedly...s;eaking compassionately and honestly about emotions, without judgement or sel-blame, helps us come to terms with them....William Faulkner once wrote, I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.
3. Train, practice, prepare. If an upcoming presentation has you anxious, rehearse it under realistic, flexible conditions until delivering it becomes routine.
4. Redirect focus--concentrate on th epresent moment and the task at hand....psychologists say that even pausing a few times a day and being present for a moment with what's going on around you (rather than with the monologue in your head) can help you to better inhabit the current moment.
5. Mindfully disentangle from worries and anxious thoughts--be mindful, watch your worries and let them coast by without getting entangled with them, or postpone worry--write it down and agree that later on you can worry about it for 30 minutes, which frees you up to focus on the moment. Over time, she says, you learn to better manage your anxious thoughts and they no longer run the show.
6. Expose yourself to your fears. If you want to remain locked into a fear indefinitely, then by ll means, avoid the situations tht make you anxious. But if you want to give your amygdala a chance to get over a fear, you must expose yourself to the things and ideas that scare you.
7. Learn to accept uncertainty and lack of control. Suppose you're worried you might be laid off from your job...if you bask in your uncertainty, (that is, expose yourself to your fear about the future), repeating the distressing thought "It's possible I could be laid off" to yourself without resisting your anxious emotional reaction, then you (and your amygdala) will eventually begin habituating to it. With enough exposre, the idea loses its power and becomes almost dull.
8. Reframe teh sitution--stay grounded in reason and remind ourself of the doubtlessly more positive reality of our situation. When you change the wy you ppraise a situation, you chnge your emotional response to it.
9. Joke around--helps us break out of a negtive point of view and see things differently.
10. Build faith in yourself.
11. Keep your eyes on a guiding principle.
12. Open up to fear unconditionally. Instead of battling fear, we just let it happen, and when the fight against it desolves, so does the torment. We slowly learn to live in harmony with fear, anxiety, and stress...
Acceptance and commitment therapy--Steven Hayes
