As a business coach I am normally asked to focus on an agenda around business results. Nevertheless working with people often brings up surprising differences in how people deal (or otherwise) with personal challenges. We see the lesson time and time again that it is not really the situation that poses the challenge but it is the person's response to it.
Some years ago, I took part in a long distance mountain walk to raise money for charity. Basically we were just a bunch of guys facing up to enjoying a lot of Scottish rain and a significant number of blisters. We stayed in a variety of basic hostel accommodation as we travelled the country which invariably meant that we were all sleeping on pads in the same room.
It was then I first learned the horror of sleep deprivation. One of our number, George (a robust and well known local entrepreneur), had an ability to get to sleep within seconds and then keep the rest of us awake all night with thunderous snoring.
After a couple of nights of this, one of our party, Russell, a manager at our local bank, could stand it no more and dragged his sleep pad outside just so that he could get to sleep. When we told George about Russell having to move out, he could only laugh and hinted at a pretty keen emotional memory. “Well that’s justice anyway – I’ve lost many a night’s sleep because of that f****** bank manager!”
However it shows up in our lives, emotions such as fear have a very powerful effect. Some authors refer to fear as an acronym standing for “Fantasised Experience Appearing Real” and we all probably recognise this as being pretty accurate.
Although we all have different code words for fear and it’s maybe not always “cool” to acknowledge it, we certainly all have a deep knowledge of its effects. In some societies openly acknowledging fear is not something we are supposed to do. I was brought up in a society in which “Big boys don’t cry” and people keep a “Stiff upper lip”.
In order to feel fear, the fact is we are probably choosing to believe something which is not true. We are choosing to form a mental picture that is nothing to do with current reality but everything to do with an imagined future scenario.
I was watching a documentary about Mohamed Ali recently which pointed out that despite his disability through Parkinson’s disease, he chose to believe that his God would never give him a test that he couldn’t cope with. His mental picture of his disability as an opponent gave him the power to face his situation from a position of strength and challenge rather than weakness.
I’m a great fan of Sir Ranulph Fiennes who is one of the most remarkable human beings I’ve ever met and certainly the world’s greatest living explorer. Ranulph didn’t succeed in his bid to trek solo and unsupported from Canada to the North Pole.
He came back with a badly frostbitten hand that was still intensely painful five months after his return. I’m sure that this isn’t a comment on his belief in the UK’s National Health Service, but he eventually resorted to putting his five frostbitten fingers into a workbench vice one by one and removing the blackened ends with a fretsaw.
“If the finger bled or hurt, I just moved the saw up a little,” he said.
Fiennes was happy that his handy-work had knocked thousands off the eventual surgery bill. Whatever you or I might think, he saw (no pun intended) an opportunity where most of us would just see a crisis.
Scientists have now been able to determine how the brain shapes memories about significant emotional events. This process is called the formation of emotional memory. Many human mental disorders - including anxiety, phobia, post-traumatic stress disorder and panic attacks – are the result of problems in the brain’s ability to control fear. Although we are not so interested in these clinical issues today, the research that is going on can give us a better understanding of how fear surfaces within you and I and what the effects are.
Classical conditioning
Most of what we know about the links between memory and emotion come from work in the field of classical fear conditioning. In this type of research a subject, often a rat, hears a noise or sees a flashing light that is paired with a brief (and mild) electric shock. After a few brief experiences the rat quickly learns to associate the noise or light to the shock and responds accordingly. Most importantly the rat learns to respond in the same way even when the shock is no longer given. In other words, behaviour has been learned.
In the language of science the noise or light is a “stimulus” and the resulting behaviour of the rat is a “conditioned response”. The delivery of the electric shock is termed an “unconditioned stimulus”. Now conditioning of this type happens very quickly in rats – and in humans too. Just a single experience of pairing a shock to a stimulus brings on the conditioned response.
Significantly, once this fearful reaction is established it becomes relatively permanent! If the light or noise is then delivered many times without the shock, the rat’s response eventually diminishes in a process termed extinction.
Research evidence suggests though that the emotional memory formed through such conditioning is not actually erased.
What happens is that the brain somehow learns to control the fear response rather than actually erasing the memory. The memory may still lurk there waiting to be recalled once again. The fear response is lying dormant and may pop up again some time under even unrelated conditions.
Fear conditioning appears in just about every animal group that has been studied; it’s present in fruit flies and it’s present in people even though there may be some differences in the details of how it works.
Our response to fear
One of the popular scenarios used to describe the stress response – which is basically our fear response – goes like this.
A hiker comes across a snake on a mountain path. The instant the snake is seen, visual stimuli are quickly routed to a part of the brain known as the thalamus which acts as a rapid switching station that passes information to the amygdala which we introduced in Chapter Four. The amygdala has long been recognised as an important brain region with respect to the processing of emotion and especially in moderating the storage and strength of emotional memories.
The thalamus seems to act only on fairly primitive information; perhaps by comparing a “threat” pattern stored in the brain with the incoming visual stimuli. This quick information relayed to the amygdala allows the brain to trigger a response in the body by powering up the heart and the musculoskeletal system to respond to the threat.
Meanwhile the visual cortex also receives information from the thalamus and this, given a bit more time, actually seeks to determine the nature and extent of the threat. It’s a more considered response. The hiker is now “aware” not just that there is a potential threat, but that there is a snake on the path. If through this process the hiker determined however that the snake was actually harmless and there was no real threat, the cortex could signal the amygdala to quell the fear response.
This makes sense because failing to respond to danger is potentially more costly than responding inappropriately to a benign situation. When your life is at risk, you don’t really need to know straight away whether the snake is a python or a cobra or whether it is red or blue. Once you are at a safe distance you can consider that question safely.
What we can see here is that we have both a fast response and a slower response within our physiology. The fast response through the thalamus is based on very basic recognition of a possible threat. Sensory input from the eyes, ears and so on is compared with a “database of threats” – the previously stored emotional memory.
The slightly slower and more reasoned response through the cortex and the hippocampus (responsible for learning of facts about entities such as people, places, events and things) has a chance to moderate our state. If reason shows “no real threat”, then the fear response is quelled.
Early life conditioning
Science suspects that traumatic early life events may be significant in shaping our fear responses later in life. You see, we seem unable to remember traumatic early life events because the hippocampus has not yet matured enough to consciously form accessible memories. The emotional memory system develops earlier in life and clearly forms and stores primitive patterns of these same events. These patterns are then not part of our accessible memory but they ARE part of our emotional memory. For this reason, the traumas we suffered in our early life may affect mental and behavioural functions in later life through processes that remain inaccessible to our consciousness.
Can you see that a stimulus may find a match in the amygdala, stored decades ago and perhaps even by our genetic ancestors, that triggers a fast response because that stimulus is still recognised as a threat? The information that should allow the response to be moderated through the cortex is not available. That moderating information was never stored.
The creation of emotional memory has been linked to a process called long-term potentiation or LTP in which the neurotransmitter glutamate and its receptors bring about strengthened neural transmission. Once LTP is established, the same neural signals produce larger responses. Emotional memories may involve LTP in the amygdala where fear conditioning seems to take place.
The fact seems to be that we are emotion driven and our response to the environment that we face each day is “programmed” deep within us.
Let’s summarise this bit of science.
From when we are babies in arms we develop and store primitive emotional programmes that are basically about ensuring our survival. The brain is learning to recognise “patterns” that represent threats to our survival. When we are out and about in the world the part of the brain known as the amygdala matches our current situation with the stored patterns of threats. If a “threat” is detected, a response is initiated and it is instantaneous.
The amygdala sends a signal to our physiological systems to power up our fight or flight mechanism and it literally disconnects us from our higher consciousness – in other words it stops us thinking! Every cell in the body responds to the stimulus. When someone cuts you up in traffic and you respond with what later seems like “irrational” behaviour – it’s this process at work.
Our autonomic nervous system becomes out of balance as the so-called sympathetic pathway speeds up the body for high effort. A million years ago, the effort of running away or fighting the threat would have burned off the adrenaline which floods into our system to allow this effort. Today, there might not be such an opportunity and when repeated often, this adrenaline overload leads to increased risk of obesity, diabetes, hypertension, cancer, heart disease, stroke and the many other consequences of imbalance.
The job of the so called parasympathetic pathway of the autonomic nervous system is to slow down the body systems and release hormones that naturally neutralise the adrenaline. Relaxation and meditation can bring this about but only slowly and anyway we may not be able to relax when it is most needed. It’s not just the autonomic nervous system at work – it’s the molecules of emotion we discussed earlier. The hormonal system is slower acting but is extremely powerful and needs to be in balance too.
We probably don’t yet know all of the hormones that flow to regulate our balance. Two of the best known are DHEA which is associated with positive emotions, feelings of well-being and success, and cortisol which is associated with negative emotions, feelings of submission and despair. It is no good taking DHEA pills (although they exist) because what we need is balance – both in the fast response autonomic nervous system and in the slower response of the hormonal system.
What the Institute of HeartMath in California verified scientifically is that the body has a built-in way of creating coherence and balance from chaos.
It seems that the heart is a powerful source of electromagnetic energy – much more powerful than the brain (1000 to 5000 times more powerful) and it can be used to send a signal back to the brain that quickly defuses the stress induced imbalance.
As the heart beats it generates electromagnetic energy in a rhythmic way that can be seen as the familiar ECG waveform. The heart rate is a measure of how many heartbeats or cycles there are in a minute. We now know that a healthy heart has a rhythm that varies smoothly. Even when we are at rest, the heart rate speeds up for a few cycles and then slows down for a few cycles. When we are ill or stressed this heart rate variability becomes chaotic or very uneven.
The act of putting attention to the heart in particular, and if you can manage this, generating and holding positive feelings there, causes the heart rhythm to change. The heart rate starts to vary in a smooth fashion. This biological rhythm is communicated to every cell in the body and literally entrains every cell and organ system to fall into step.
As this smooth signal from the heart is communicated to the brain, the amygdala no longer seems to inhibit thinking. Once again, we can regain access to the higher consciousness and intuitive, creative abilities of the brain. This action of putting attention to the heart activates the slower pathway we noted earlier that allows us to access the cerebral cortex. We actually see things in a broader perspective and miraculously this is a useful key to defusing stress, improving creativity and even personal communications.
Going into the amputee rehabilitation centre today I saw a number of people – minus various limbs - sitting around outside in wheelchairs smoking. 
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