Free Solo and Facing Fear.
A very quick thought.
This weekend I watched Oscar-winning climbing doc Free Solo. In the movie climber Alex Honnold is put into an MRI to examine his brain. The MRI reveals that Honnold’s amygdala (the brain’s threat response and interpretation system) shows virtually no activity at all. While one can argue nature vs nurture, here’s what Honnold himself has previously said about fear:
‘People use “overcoming” or “conquering” fear as a way of managing fear. I view that as: I’m afraid of something but I’m just gonna suck it up and do it anyway even though I’m afraid. And that can get you so far — that can get you to step onto the dance floor. But that won’t get me to free-solo a big wall. I can’t just overcome it. Because the reality is it takes me hours and hours to climb the wall, and you just run out of that overcoming. So I think that the only real way to manage fear is to systematically broaden your comfort zone so that you’re not afraid of it anymore. You just have to basically desensitize yourself until it’s not scary anymore. I think that’s the only real way to deeply manage fear. There are tons of ways to trick yourself to do something even though you’re very afraid. But the sustainable solution is just to no longer be afraid. And that requires a lot of practice, a lot of time, a lot of desensitization.’
Honnold is at the very extreme peak of what we’d associate with risk tolerance, yet even he says he got there through a gradual, conscious process. He wasn’t born scaling vertical cliffs.
For the rest of the population, Fear can paralyse us into inaction; indeed that’s what’s implied by Medusa’s head of snakes. We become ‘petrified’, literally turned to stone, like a deer in the headlights. In the face of paralysis, Honnold’s example suggests that it’s gradual exposure rather than dramatic shock therapy can help us overcome our fears.
First we pay attention, then we become aware of our fears and then we choose to willingly and responsibly walk towards them.
‘Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.’- Mark Twain
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