Category: Extreme Fear

No one alive has done more hair-raising crazy stunts than Travis Pastrana. The first person to ever pull a double-backflip on a motorcycle, he has also jumped out of an airplane without a parachute (video here) and back-flipped a child’s Big Wheel off a huge jump called a megaramp (video here). But contrary to common belief, Pastrana is not immune to fear — in fact, almost every night he wakes up in the grip of night terrors. So how does he keep cool when his life is on the line? Here are some tips.

Be Prepared. “The scariest thing for me is when I go into something unprepared. When I jumped a Big Wheel on the megaramp, that was scary. I didn’t know if it was going to blow up on the takeoff. It’s not made to be going 55 mph and withstanding four g’s.”

Use Your Fear. “When I’m not nervous, I’m not 100 percent focused on something. When I jumped out of the plane without a parachute, the part that scared me the most was that I wasn’t scared enough. I had to deliberately re-set my mind: ‘Okay, Travis, you have the rest of your life to find those other jumpers and make this work.’”

Trust Your Crew. “The hardest part about putting the jump together was finding people that were a) good enough and b) willing to risk being involved with a stunt like this. But once I found a good crew, we all trusted each other. The guys that I was jumping with had 10,000 jumps apiece.”

Commit Yourself. “Before I did the double backflip, I was scared all day. I didn’t know if I would decide to do it or not. And then the second I was on the jump, and I knew that I was going to do it, the fear just went away. It was like, ‘Well, okay, it’s inevitably going to happen — let’s try to make it work.’”

Pastrana shared these tips with me as I was interviewing him for an article in Red Bulletin, which you can check out here.

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In Slate today, writer Alan Siegal poses the burning question:  “Is Kobe Bryant really the best clutch player in the NBA?” That is to say, does Bryant possess that ineffable quality, so highly prized among athletes, of being able to respond to the highest degree of pressure by pulling out the stops and performing at an even higher level of performance than usual? Which, as Siegel acknowledges, raises a corollary question: does such a quality even exist? A growing consensus among sports statisticians is that the answer is no, as attempts to identify clutch players based on their average performance under certain high-stress conditions (the last shot of a game, say) have so far come to naught. Writes Siegal,

The topic of “clutch” is a contentious one in sports. In baseball, the debate over clutch hitting has raged for decades, with sabermetricians arguing there’s no evidence it’s an actual skill and wizened baseball men claiming they’ve seen it with their own two eyes. In basketball, a sport that’s been slower to embrace modern statistics, the fight over clutchness is in its relative infancy. Perhaps Kobe Bryant, then, will become the NBA’s Derek Jeter: a player whom the media and the fans perceive as clutch despite a lack of statistical evidence to prove the case.

The piece goes on to describe various attempts to identify various statistical grapplings with the data before coming to the conclusion that, no, Bryant is not a masterful performer in the clutch, if indeed anyone is. But as the saying goes, an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. So allow me to address the topic from a different perspective: is clutch performance biologically plausible? That is, could the human brain could be capable of responding to intense pressure by performing outstandingly? Continue reading The Science of Sports: Is There Such a Thing as a Clutch Performer?

Since I’ve started blogging, I’ve been amazed not just by how it lets me reach out to all sorts of people all over the world, but even more so by the ability of these readers to reach back and share their experiences. Their real-life stories not only make for gripping reading, but offer vivid insight into the mechanisms of fear.

A few days ago I got an email from Tom Bittner of Ellsworth, MN, who wrote about how he found himself acting to save himself before he even consciously realized he was in danger.

A few years ago I was at an old folks meeting hall, looking in the furnace room for stuff that might be sold at their auction that day,  when the wooden floor collapsed. There was no noise, no sense of danger, no indication that anything was about to happen — it just went. Instantly I threw out my arms and did an iron cross pose catching my self from falling down an old indoor well. Hanging there,  it was then that “Oh, s**t”  kicked in and I was able to figure out how to maneuver to remove myself from the situation. The two things I find most intriguing are, first, the throwing of arms to stop the immediate drop without any thought — where does that come from? And second, while hanging there my thoughts went to the fact I could not hear the falling wood hit the bottom of the well. Continue reading Readers Write: How Fear Saved My Life

On Saturday, I wrote a post about how the Swedish explorer S.A. Andree carefully observed his own fear reaction as he made his first ascent in a balloon. Intellectually he felt no trepidation about what he was about to do, yet as the craft began to rise he found himself desperately holding on despite himself. I described feeling similarly overwhelmed by fear myself, on several occasions. But I had no word for the phenomenon.

Well, now I have one. It’s called “The Grip.” Continue reading How the Bravest Are Different

I am in the middle of reading Alec Wilkinson’s fascinating New Yorker story about Swedish explorer S.A. Andree, who tried to be the first man to reach the North Pole by floating there in a helium balloon. Turned out to be a bad idea.

As part of his self-education into aeronautics, Andree took his first balloon ride at the age of 38. The year was 1892. In an age when traveling by air was still a novel and rather far-fetched idea, it must have been far more terrifying than we can imagine today. As he prepared to board the contraption, Andree must have wondered whether he would feel fear or not. Ever the man of science, he decided to pay careful attention to his body’s reaction.

Andree wrote that he was preoccupied with observing himself to determine whether he was afraid. He was surprised to find himself, as the balloon left the ground, holding tight to the ropes encircling the basket. “I discovered  that I was not conscious of any feeling of fear, but that I probably was influenced by it unconsciously,” he wrote. Continue reading Fear-watching

If only you could somehow run an fMRI scan on someone while they were doing a backflip on a Big Wheel…

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Cary Tennis, an advice columnist at Salon, is currently on leave while he undergoes treatment for cancer. In the meantime, he’s blogging about his experiences in a very personal way. Recently, he wrote about how the experience of coming so close to death has erased many of his old fears:

I realized a few weeks ago how much fear had dominated so many aspects of my life. It wasn’t big enormous fear. It was little fears. Like little fears of being uncomfortable about stuff. And now, after all I’ve been through, after what I’ve faced, I just kind of don’t have that. I don’t have that complex of behaviors to avert little pains and such. So this is fascinating, and maybe the biggest single change I’ve undergone in years. Not sure I’m describing it right, but it’s a good thing and good things will come of it.

We spend so much of our lives worrying that the worst might happen, yet when it does, so often it winds up deepening our lives and giving us an appreciation of life that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. Continue reading When Fears Come True, And Disappear

Fear is our brain’s way of preparing us for danger in the world around us. But, though we may think of fear and danger as being closely linked, they can actually be wildly out of sync with one another. As David Ropeik has been discussing on his blog at Psychology Today, we often feel a great deal of fear when there is little actual risk  (such as flying commercial), and little fear when there is actually substantial risk (such as smoking or driving on the highway).

In my book, I describe a particularly compelling example of this disjuncture between fear and danger, one that occurred during the Blitz in World War II, when the German Luftwaffe tried to bomb Britain into submission.

Londoners who were subjected to German bombings regularly during the Blitz eventually grew blase. They grew used to the wail of the air-raid sirens, the ritual tramping down into the bomb shelter, the rumbling thuds of distant explosions. The terror of aerial devastation, which prewar theorists had predicted would quickly cow a populace into submission, instead became a commonplace, a part of daily life.  Britons who lived in the suburbs, by contract, became progressively more terrified of German raids.

The difference, I argued (with a nod to Stanley Rachman), is that people living with daily exposure to the terrors of bombing eventually grew used to it through a process called habituation, which requires frequent and regular exposure to a stimulus. Conversely, infrequent or irregular exposure to fear may not lead to habituation at all, but to its opposite: sensitization. Instead of grow smaller, the response to a stimulus grows more intense.

Recently, however, I came across another explanation for this disparity, one which requires neither habituation nor sensitization and in fact can happen almost instantaneously. Continue reading Closer to Danger, and Less Frightened

People who have suffered panic attacks — and I’m one — know that fear can be so intense that you feel like you’re going to die. Your pulse races, your heart pounds, you find it hard to breathe. You might even pass out. But you can fear become so intense that it actually kills you?

This past Friday Danielle Goldberg, a 26-year-old Staten Island woman, was riding in her building’s elevator up to her sixth floor apartment just before noon when her neighborhood suffered a blackout. For half an hour, she was trapped inside the small space, in the darkness, alone. In an effort to stifle a growing panic attack she used her cell phone to call her mother, but it was no use. By the time rescue workers freed her half an hour later, she was unconscious. She died in the hospital a short time later. At first glance,  the cause of her death seems clear: pure fright.

But the truth is a bit more complicated. Continue reading How a New York Woman Died of Fear

Worrying sucks.  Not only is it unpleasant, but also often quite useless, as your brain finds itself hijacked by ruminations about some future event that you may not be able to do anything about anyway. (Here it is, a beautiful day in early spring, and instead of paying attention to the blossoms on the cherry tree I’m stewing in thoughts about neuroscience…)

As I’ve written about earlier, however, worry isn’t all bad. Last year a team of researchers in England recently found that depressed people who suffer from anxiety as well actually have a longer life expectancy from those who are depressed but not anxious. Mused team leader Dr Robert Stewart,  “a little anxiety may be good for you” because it leads sufferers to reach out and seek help when they need it.

Now a new study provides more ammo to the worry-is-good camp and suggests another mechanism for its benefits. Fretting, it seems, can help counteract that activation patterns that depression tends to elicit. Continue reading I’m Worried That You’re Not Worrying Enough