FEARLESSNESS
We all face stressful and dangerous situations. We all feel fear
and anxiety.
When we are faced with a frightening or terrifying situation, our
bodies respond in a powerful but primitive way. The brain kickstarts
this reaction causing your heart to beat harder and faster, our
breathing gets deeper, our pupils dilate and our digestive systems
effectively shuts down.
This is followed by an immediate release of hormones from your
adrenal glands which enter through your blood stream supporting
and prolonging the response - your sense of fear. In effect, we
are preparing ourselves for fight or flight.
Your fear response is designed to help you survive a threat but
it can also work against you - have you ever failed an exam or an
interview because of nerves? That's why taking control of our body
and minds is crucial to being successful.
So can you control your fear? When the chips are down can you hold
your nerve?
The Test
Our contestants really didn't know what they had to do - a bungee
jump.
They were all taken to a foundry in the North of England and kept
in a small dark room.
Wearing heartbeat monitors, in pairs they had to climb up to a
gantry 150 feet above the ground. Each contestant starts with a
same number of heartbeats - 500. This figure drops by one with every
heart beat they have.
This test introduces four strong stimuli to create fear and anxiety
in our contestants:
1. Height is a good fear stimulus to design the test around as
it is universal - if somebody says they are not scared of heights
they are lying.
2. Jumping from height is not something that the human mind is prepared
for so it is bound to cause anxiety. The penalty for failure is
sudden and frightening.
3. As well as height there is the anxiety of being in competition,
this is why they are jumping in pairs.
4. There is also the anxiety of competing on camera for the first
time.
So it is highly unlikely that our contestants will not feel a strong
sense of fear.
Once on the platform facing the drop below, our contestants have
to fight their fear to control their heartbeat. Whoever uses up
their 500 heartbeats first plunges towards the ground in a bungee
jump.
The Experts
Dr . Hugh
Montgomery - Cardiovascular Geneticist
UCL
Why Is It Superhuman To Be Fearless?
To have emotions is to be human. To be able to control
your emotions is a superhuman ability.
Fear or anxiety is actually a good thing for most people: it increases
the speed of your emotional, physical and mental responses. It makes
you think faster. But if you feel no fear at all it's not so good
as you will fail to increase your alertness in moments of real danger.
But if you have too much fear your alertness is raised to such
an extent that you are unable to think clearly and your body is
so pumped up that your limbs shake. You are less able to concentrate
on the task in hand or make informed decisions. Because of this
it's important to be able to control your anxiety - your fear -
so that you do not allow your body to handicap you in an emergency
situation.
Being able to manage your fear, to face highly stressful and unexpected
situations and deal with them successfully marks someone out as
being Superhuman. In fact a mark of excellence in successful people
is that they are prepared to make themselves do things that they
would really rather not do. However, we are not solely at the mercy
of our genes. You can learn tricks and techniques that can help
you to manage your fear and persist doing something that you really
don't want to do.
How Much Fear Do You Feel?
In our test, how much fear you feel will affect the speed of your
heart rate on the platform. The less frightened you are the lower
your heart rate will be. However, how much fear you feel can depend
on your previous experience - a climber like Rachel may feel less
fear because she is used to heights; on the other hand she may feel
more fear as she is more aware of the consequences of falling from
height.
But how you respond is not just about 'real' danger. Fear response
is also linked to imagination. The more imaginative you are, the
more you may be able to envisage the consequences of falling and
things going wrong. On the other hand, if you are an unimaginative
person you are unlikely to think about these things and feel safer.
So less imaginative people will have a head start in this test.
With practice, imagination and visualisation can be used positively.
For example, athletes can train themselves to 'visualise' winning.
If any of our contestants are well practised in these techniques
they may be able to visualise their heart beating slowly, and their
opponent dropping from the platform.
How well do you control your emotions?
So although the test is the same for all our contestants, with
visualisation, certain people should be able to make it less scary
inside their heads. Some may take this to extremes, and be able
to divorce themselves from the 'fear stimulus' completely.
Successful people are often very good at disengaging themselves
from unwanted fears and other distractions - they are able to lock
off internally and concentrate on one thing. It's the classic example
of 'lying back and thinking of England'.
At its greatest extreme, such disengagement and 'visualisation'
can be combined in 'self-hypnosis' - for example you 'put yourself
on a sunny beach'. Such visualisation techniques are used in cognitive
psychotherapy for people with phobias.
How much emotional engagement do you
have?
Being able to emotionally disengage yourself from what's going
on can help you cope with fear. Psychopaths are sometimes good at
this sort of 'emotional disengagement'. They are successful in some
environments due to the lack of emotional investment they make.
They can get what they want without worrying about it. They would
also be good at controlling their emotional response to other things,
such as cheating at a lie detector test.
How well you control do your response?
Even with the same 'fear hit', it is possible to use your body
as well as your mind to control your heart. The most easy way to
do this is to control your breathing pattern - a technique used
by snipers, where the wobble of a hand from a heart beat can throw
a shot off target.
What about Phobias?
Height phobia, for example, will certainly screw up the chances
of somebody on our test - they simply won't do it!
In reality though, it's very unlikely that any of our contestants
will be a true height phobic. To be a true height phobic the level
of fear associated with the stimulus has to be completely disproportionate
and irrational. Even if somebody says they are scared of heights
it doesn't mean they are phobic.
Scoring
We calculated using our heartbeat monitors how long it took before
each contestant used up their allotted 500 heartbeats.
Our Superhuman was the contestant who was better able to concentrate
on getting one thing done while the rest of the world is falling
down around them. In our test, they were the contestant who was
able to control their fear the best by controlling their heart rate
and so being the last person to use up their 500 heartbeats (i.e.
take the longest time) before they completed their bungee jump.
Click here to see the
final results >
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