The Fear Frontier: Forestalling our Fears in Favor of our Dreams

Description

The amygdala is the part of our brains that controls response to fearful or threatening stimuli. Sometimes called the lizard brain, it is responsible for our ‘fight or flight’ response. Once our amygdala is triggered, we lose our ability to think creativity, act altruistically, or rationally choose the most effective course of action. Simply put, our amygdala only helps us survive that moment, and may inadvertently lead us to make poor decisions with far-reaching consequence. Staying out of our amygdala, however, typically requires living within our comfort zone. This is equally problematic. As the inevitable terrors and misfortunes of the world encroach upon us, we become anxious about the boundaries of our safety and retreat even further before we are in any real danger. The more we are unwilling to make room for discomfort, the lower our quality of life becomes. In fact, high levels of experience avoidance directly correlate with reduced performance, increased stress, and higher risk of depression and anxiety. The trick, instead, is to train ourselves to live in increased discomfort, such that our amygdala response is triggered later and later and later. In this scenario, we train our pre-frontal cortex (our thinking brain) so that it is stronger and more resilient, more capable of navigating us through life’s chaos.

This curriculum will help you understand the movement from the PFC to the amygdala; learn to expand our ‘comfort with discomfort’; and choose to live according to our values and desires rather than being bound by our fears.