Fear and love are two of the most influential forces upon the human psyche, and although they are opposing forces, there is often just a hairbreadth of distance between them. Both emotions have the ability to drive their host to engage in irrational thoughts, behaviors and actions - yet the reactive, often compulsive choices that arise from fear are more commonly connected to careening down harmful and destructive paths of action that will negatively affect our lives on a multitude of levels. Fear is intentionally used in politics, religion, media, cinema, marketing, economics and relationships of all types to shape desired outcomes, and for good reason: it works – most of the time.

The neuroscience of why this is so is simple: There’s an actual physical area of your brain called the amygdala which responds fearfully in the fraction of the time it takes to blink an eye – 12 milliseconds to be more precise. The amygdala is a deeply rooted aspect of the human brain in terms of evolution since our species’ “caveman” days, and is located in the anterior portions of the temporal lobes in the brains of primates. When it is fired up, your pulse rate and blood pressure accelerate, sweat can practically gush from your pores, muscles tense, eyes widen and nostrils flare out as a series of stress hormones flood your entire body in what has been commonly referred to as the “fight or flight” response. In-the-moment survival is pushed to the forefront of your awareness, which may be in the form of aggression - or freezing in terror. Simply hearing news on the radio about a murderer on the loose in your neighborhood, encountering a vicious dog, receiving a threatening call from a bill collector or seeing the blue lights of a police car flashing behind your vehicle can trigger a fearful reaction so quickly that it may seem impossible to override it.

The good news is you can mindfully pattern your brain to remain calm when it would have otherwise reflexively dived right into full-throttle panic mode. Neuroscientist Kevin Ochsner, PhD, director of the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at Colombia University, has developed a system he calls “cognitive reappraisal” – deliberately training the brain to reassess a scenario that in the past would lead to a instantaneous negative mind/body response to fear-inducing stimuli. “Emotions are malleable,” Dr. Ochsner explained in a July 2008 interview for a The Wall Street Journal article on fear and the stock market, “but people often don’t realize how much [of what you feel] is under your own control.”

Dr. Ochsner suggests a three-part approach to training our brains to respond to fear-inducing situations in a manner that is intended to help prevent us from engaging in impulsive, often harmful ways toward ourselves and others: change the situation, get perspective, and reappraise or reinterpret.1 I will elaborate upon each point below with my own comments and additions.

1. Change the situation. Ochsner recommends avoiding people and situations that you already know will trigger a negative emotional response, be it fear or otherwise. This suggestion is simple, although not always practical, yet echoes the understanding that energy is contagious, regardless of its nature. Humans are rather empathetic beings thanks to the mirror neurons present in our brain, and some of us are more sensitive than others in terms of what we pick up from people. If this sort of encounter is unavoidable, Ochsner suggests the next step:

2. Get perspective. Step away mentally if you can’t do so physically to create some space in which to place a distance barrier in your awareness. Ochsner suggests turning the situation into a “movie” you are simply observing, which is akin to vipassana, or insight meditation, and allows us to see the relative impermanence of the in-the-moment scenario in relation to the greater expanse of our lives, and to gain a clearer grasp of reality, sans self-created traumatic projections and reactions that will throw us off balance. Ochsner states that creating a sense of psychological distance “has been shown to lessen depression, anxiety and negative emotion more generally – both in the moment and when people recollect bad experiences that happened in the past.”

I suggest adding to this a non-reactive observation of your breathing patterns at the time of heightened stress or fear, simply noticing the intensity of the breath without forcing it to change, just allowing it to be what it is. This will assist in a natural calming internal shift to occur that will quell the intensity of the fear, as well as lessen the hormonal chemical reactivity in the body. I strongly recommend practicing (neutral) outward observation along with this breathing technique on a regular basis, even when you are in a non-stressful and quite pleasant environment, as it is imperative to employ repetition in order to sculpt new neural pathways purposefully and mindfully into the brain. Therefore, when you do encounter a highly-charged situation you have already trained the brain to access more productive, in-control responses to fear than out-of-control primal survival ones. Re-minding ourselves in this manner will produce more rational reactions to all daily events and situations in addition to fearful ones; once you train your mind to not fall into your usual routine patterns of behavior you won’t be as easily tossed about by a rash of fear-based, volatile emotions and hormones charging around within you, and will become increasingly more in control in how you instantaneously respond to random events, regardless of the type. In other words, you will become much more proficient in managing to remain acutely alert yet simultaneously relaxed and grounded in your power throughout the day - automatically.

Ochsner suggests combining gaining perspective with the third, and perhaps the most valuable step in re-minding our brains to how to respond to fear-inducing situations:

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