How Fear Worms Its Way Into Your Brain
Human beings are fearful creatures. One in six Americans takes prescription medication to help relieve fear and anxiety. I spend a greater part of each day paying close attention to how fearful thoughts rise into awareness and activate threat-detection networks which then trigger increasing levels of stress hormones. 
Then I deploy a range of strategies and physical exercise to help regulate them. It’s a lot of work, let me tell you. What this research from the Salk Institute underscores is that fear is essentially a neural net- work phenomenon – one that can be actively worked with. Anti-anxiety meds are one way, but brain plasticity and the potential for organic change invites us to experiment with other ways as well. For example, the Authoritative Communities mentioned in the “Hardwired to Connect” piece that follows. All of us can be calmer together than any one of us alone.
Some interesting experiments with what it’s like to not have to worry about and be stressed around the making and spending of money. When I think about participating, I can already feel my adrenals activating my threat-detection circuitry! For this concept to work, I think it really needs to begin early with kids raised in a “Hardwired to Connect” Community ( <– This short talk by Amy Banks, that includes Interpersonal Neurobiology, is worth listening to).
It’s interesting that, back in the day, a famous Apple Computer TV ad announced, “You’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.” Well, 2018 is more like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four than 1984 was, and Apple computer and phone screens ironically are playing a major role in that social deterioration. This piece, by University of Michigan history professor, Henry Cowles, details how our screens themselves have turned into a kind of Ministry of Truth where alternative facts rule not only the day, but many of our lives without us ever being aware of it.
It’s long been clear to me that our brains can be trained to handle crisis situations. 
That we can engage in practices that allow us to deliberately and conscious- ly manage the Hypothalmic-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) axis which is primarily responsible for when and how the fear response shows up in our body and brain. In this detailed account of an artist’s response to the Trader Joe’s hostage standoff in L.A. last month, we see how a heart fully operational in kindness and empathy can manage an otherwise completely unmanageable situation. Breathtaking in its beauty.
This is a compelling Google Talk by Isaac Lidsky, who suffered a progressive blindness disease which ended up teaching him how fear / stress hormones compromise neural functioning and distort reality in ways that few of us even begin to realize. From the assumptions we make daily, to the things we turn toward and away from, fear circumscribes and constricts our lives in ways large and small. I think of Isaac as a true Adrenal Ninja with a red and white folding cane.
David Eagleman and Walter Mischel teach us about “Odysseus Contracts” and when we should just “eat the damn marshmallow” (or the ice cream cone). I think their research would find a lot of people who could benefit in our nation’s capital.
Since general anesthesia is essentially a medically-induced “freeze response,” I can’t help but wonder how the adverse effects might be mitigated if a post-operative protocol for “discharging the freeze response” might be enacted. It’s what the body does naturally when it goes into “shock” and begins spontaneously trembling in response to overwhelming, hyper-stimulating experiences.
The brain and body have evolved to protect me in unsafe circumstances. They do that first by activating my 
High levels of unabating stress hormones flooding the brain and body become increasingly toxic and threaten to damage our neural network by severing the adherence proteins that keep neurons properly connected to each other. Rather than have that happen en masse, the brain takes evasive action: it deploys inhibitory neurons to circuit-break transmissions. What that often feels like is going numb, or we simply faint.
It’s rarely a lot of money, since I don’t have a lot of discretionary income to give away. But even a little, distributed in fun, creative ways, can activate feel-good chemistry. For example, I’ve filled a water bottle with coins and left it half buried at the Half Moon Bay beach. Imagine the surprise and delight of a kid (or an adult with a delightable inner child) who stumbled upon it.
Now, of course, brain science explains how wordless, implicit memories get triggered and flood our brains and bodies with stress hormones, requiring immediate action to help address them – fight or flight. Interestingly, once I understood the neurophysiology underlying them, I have not had a single panic attack since.
Such scary differences can show up as skin color, socio-economic status, culture, specific training, age, gender – you name it – things we’re unfamiliar with put our threat sensors on guard. And while we can’t help the initial reactivity, we can train and learn to regulate such adverse reactive responses. This study shows one more example of how unconscious conditioning operates in our relationships and profoundly influences us, mostly without our ever being conscious of it.
Then a difficult puppy birth process had to be aborted, and our Berner mom had to be taken in for an emergency C-Section. Ten puppies in various stages of birth trauma made it back home with us, but over the next several days one after another after another ended up dying. Four died in all. Needless to say, April has been filled with an extremely painful 30 days. Making and burying little ten inch wooden coffins is not my favorite Spring activity.
