What is fear and why is it important?
“More love. Less fear.” This is what we advocate and work for at A Human Workplace.
Those four words offer vast canyons of possibilities to explore with numerous question trails to follow. To go on that journey together in pursuit of understanding what more love and less fear at work really mean, we need a shared understanding of some basics about love and fear. These next several posts will give us that common view of this landscape so we can traverse this territory together.
When fear comes up, we naturally ask several core questions that these posts will answer:
What fear is? How does it function in us, what are its costs, and why is fear important?
Aren’t there good types of fear? Isn’t fear helpful?
What are the bad types of fear and when is fear harmful?
Fantastic questions. Let’s dive into the first set.
What is fear and how does it function in us?
Before we go after eliminating fear, let’s understand what fear is and the purpose it serves. This will help us to be clear in our next posts about the kinds of fears we want to go about eliminating and the kinds of fears we actually value and embrace.
Fear is an ancient, instinctive response to a physical or psychological threat of harm. This important and useful mechanism evolved to help us align our internal condition and our actions with the realities of the world around us. Fear helps us respond to the external environment in a way that aids our survival. And that’s a good thing. The world is full of threats to our safety and a fear response helps us to protect ourselves from harm. Fear is our friend!
The fear response generally works like this:
1. We experience a threat stimulus. Something happens and we perceive that it might jeopardize our well-being. This perception often happens quicker than our cognition. Our sensing mechanisms are on alert, looking for threats and ready to respond often before our minds even register the threat. Some of these stimuli have been part of our human experience for millennia and our response is deeply embedded in our neuroprocessing. Other threats are newer but match up with our ancient instincts for self-protection. Being followed down a dark street. Discovering that our online accounts were hacked and our online identity was stolen. A car runs a red light. Someone breaks into your home while you’re away. You’re excluded from a critical team meeting without explanation. Your boss yells at you. Each of these threats are triggering.
2. In response to the threat, the body releases chemicals like adrenaline and cortisol into the bloodstream. This happens FAST, often well before we have a chance to think about the situation and logically identify it as a threat. We “know” there is a threat through other channels.
3. Those chemicals tell the body’s systems to adjust and prepare – suppressing non-essential functions like digestion while activating functions related to protection like vision, hearing, and the muscular system. We experience these shifts as physical manifestations like increased sweat and elevated heart rate.
4. Those chemicals also signal the amygdala to focus on the danger and store the situation in our memory while at the same time rational thought processing is short-circuited.
5. Those reactions culminate in what we know as either fight or flight, and secondarily perhaps freeze or appease, or tend and befriend. These are all options meant to increase our chances of survival.
We know the terrible costs of chronic fear.
Living under the chronic fear of a threat takes a terrible toll on us. Physical and psychological impacts can include diabetes, inflammation, cardiovascular disease, anxiety, weakened immune system, insomnia, difficulty regulating emotions and making rational decisions, ulcers, irritable bowel syndrome, decreased fertility, and cancer. Participants in my research interviews reported these same kinds of impacts from the workplace threats and fear they endured. We will look more closely at this in future posts in this series.
The pandemic has given us all an unwelcome and visceral master class in chronic threat and fear. If we weren’t aware before, we now understand better what it means to be thrust into a sudden, ongoing, life-threatening situation with unknown parameters. We know what it means to have normalcy yanked away and to be isolated from other people. We know what it means to lose loved ones and to lose our way of life. Certainly, some of us experienced this more intensely than others; the pandemic fell harder on communities of color and on those who were socially and economically disadvantaged.
And, no matter the depth of that impact, what is true for all of us is that everything has changed. Everything. And all that change is threatening. The threats brought on by all that change trigger our instinctive fear responses as we try to learn how to be safe in a circumstance that won’t let us figure that out. So we struggle and suffer as our neuro-systems continue to release adrenalin and cortisol, and we continue to have fight, flight, freeze, and appease responses, and try to find ways to tend and befriend instead. And so we know all too well what it is to experience anxiety, depression, sleeplessness, difficulty focusing, emotional outbursts, and illnesses in response to threats and fear.
Can any good come from this? Yes! We can learn and remember the impacts fear has on us as people. We can understand that these impacts are the same whether we are experiencing a physical threat, like COVID or being chased by a dog, or a psychological threat, like being humiliated by a supervisor or ostracized by our colleagues at work. Our neurophysical response is the same. The impacts on our ability to function are the same. The impacts on our health and well-being are the same.
Hold on to that knowledge because we urgently need to apply these insights to our workplaces. We will discuss this in future posts. After all, this is the crux of our work at A Human Workplace. And if you are ready to talk to someone NOW because the situation at work is so urgent, contact us here for a conversation.
Why is fear important?
Still, it is important to remember that the fear response itself is a normal and even desirable protective response. Consider what would happen if we didn’t respond to danger with fear. Imagine having no fear response when encountering an aggressive dog, or crossing paths with a stranger holding a weapon in a dark alley, or when the brakes fail on your car. In each situation we could suffer harm if we don’t sense danger, feel fear, and respond. Such oblivion would be abnormal. In fact, Urbach–Wiethe disease and Williams Syndrome are two examples of a lack of normal fear response.
So perhaps technically we don’t really want to eliminate fear itself. Fear is an important and helpful mechanism. Instead, technically we seek to eliminate the threat that drives us to fear response.
Less fear at work is the shorthand way of saying we need to decrease the threatening experiences people have at work that trigger a healthy, normal fear response that harms performance, human experience, and well-being.
What has the pandemic taught you about threats and fear? How have you applied those insights to your work?
