May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears

May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears – Nelson Mandela

Fear is one of the strongest emotions—in both humans and animals. One of the greatest motivating factors for the decisions that we make is fear. Fear of the future, fear of the unknown, fear of being rejected by society, fear of losing out in the race, fear of losing your loved ones.

And then there is the fear triggered by an immediate danger, which is so overwhelming that your body secretes alarm pheromones in the sweat. Animals, of course, have long been known to have the ability to ‘smell fear’. From a purely scientific standpoint, though, what they smell are the ‘fear’ pheromones.

For a long time, it was a matter of speculation whether humans can smell fear, but a team of researchers at Stony Brook University in New York showed through experiments that people cannot just smell the pheromones secreted during fear, in fact the emotion can be ‘contagious’. The team taped absorbent pads to the armpits of 20 novice skydivers - 11 men and nine women - on their first tandem jump. The pads soaked up sweat before they leapt from the plane and as they fell. This sweat was transferred to nebulisers and volunteers for the brain scanner (who were not told about the experiment) were asked to inhale it. The results, as published in New Scientist magazine, showed that the volunteers' amygdala and hypothalamus - brain regions associated with fear - were more active in people who breathed in the "fear" sweat. 

The research was, in fact, funded by the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency - the Pentagon's military research wing—which fuelled speculation that they were trying to isolate the fear pheromone for use in warfare; to induce terror in enemy troops. 

Even without the research, it’s not difficult to see that fear is indeed contagious. Rumours of impending doom are known to travel like wild fire: a case in point was the widespread fear of the year 2012 because the Mayan Calendar ended right there. It takes very little to spread panic— even without pheromone-tactics.

In fact, the difference between animal and human brains can make fear a potentially deadly emotion for us. Because of the greater complexity of our brains, the fight-or-flight response initiated under threat can cause the brain to misfire—causing us to be in perennial defense mode. That is, we would be imagining threats and dangers all around us, forever feeling insecure, which becomes extreme in mental disorders such as schizophrenia.  But even ‘normal’ people have a tendency to fret too much about potential threats and situations that may or may not arise.

Perhaps that’s what Mandela meant when he exhorted us to base our decisions on hope, not fear. It isn’t that we must give up being rational or prudent, or not evaluate the risks of our decisions. It doesn’t mean you skip that seatbelt because you hope you’d never be in an accident. Simply put, it means envisioning the things we’d like to see transformed to reality, and consciously taking initiative towards them. It means filling our minds with positivity for the future. That way, we wouldn’t be falling prey to the constant tendency to imagine the worst. We also wouldn’t be losing out on opportunities that we missed due to fear of a bad outcome.  Coming from a man who led an entire nation towards their hopes, you have good reason to apply it.