Fear “Riding on the edge of chaos”

One of the areas that I get asked to work on is overcoming “Fear” in many sports such as skiing, sky diving or motor racing.

Awareness of danger is a critical part of mental preparation and performance.

Thinking through potential risks and danger spots allows athletes to effectively develop effective pre-emptive strategies but not get pulled into only focusing on the negative or what you have to avoid. Instead putting your focus on what you want to achieve….(link full article on blog from this point)

So what is fear and where does it come from? At this point it may be useful to look at the “3 Brain model”.

Evolutionary: The Human brain has developed through 3 stages:

1. Reptilian
2. Mammalian
3. Cortex or thinking brain

Primitive survival responses come from the subconscious drives of sex, food, and survival of the older reptilian brain.

The more emotional responses come from the Mammalian brain emotions such as happiness, sadness, joy etc

The logical and cognitive responses and interpretations come from the more recent frontal cortex.

Internal conflict can occur when we “think” we “should” do some thing or feel a certain way. When we don’t this conflict is often between the inter-relationships between the 3 brains.

The  “amydallya” is housed in the reptilian brain when it gets kicked off our body is flooded with chemicals from the adrenal gland (thus adrenaline) that allows us to react quickly with a greater sense of urgency. This explains the great feats of strengths accomplished by people in extreme circumstances such as mothers managing to lift cars off their trapped children. But in modern life this amydalla response is often sparked off when no life threatening event has occurred, someone cutting you up in the car, bad call at tennis. This is known as the Amdallya highjack.

The 3 common, automatic reactions to danger are:

1. Fight – go into attack mode
2. Flight – get the hell out of here
3. Freeze – paralysed to the spot

Recognise when F.E.A.R. is False. Expectations. Appearing. Real.

Recognise when F.E.A.R. is False. Expectations. Appearing. Real. and when is there actual danger to pay attention to or needs preparation to avoid undue risk.

1. Develop a breath meditation practice to control physical emotion response to stress.
2. Evaluate performance challenges prior to performance and identify possible danger and risks based coherent analysis.
3. Know your own conditioned stress response fight/fight and freeze and identify the signals that tell you that these are being switched on and plan to de-escalate them if appropriate.

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