For example? Here are some perceived dangers that get blown out of proportion:

Cell phone radiation. Uncertainty is a powerful trigger of anxiety. When new technologies reach a broad public, they can seem uncomfortably mysterious, and hence ready targets for health-scare furors. Remember Alar, silicone breast implants, electromagnetic fields from power lines? In the case of cell phones, the word “radiation” adds additional emotional baggage. The fact is, numerous studies have failed to turn up any conclusive evidence that cell phone emissions pose health risks, and the physics suggests it’s most likely impossible.

Vaccinations. We tend to be less afraid of things that provide an immediate, palpable benefit. The problem with vaccinations is that we never really know if they’ve helped us or not. What’s more, we’re intuitively suspicious of things we perceive as artificial rather than natural. These biases have helped stoke widespread panic about childhood vaccinations, which in turn expose kids to very real risk.

Terrorism. Specific, reliable information is a powerful defense against fear, while vague or untrustworthy information increases anxiety. Though the government has provided no evidence that organized Muslim terrorists are operating within the US, air travelers are still told that the threat level is “orange”—whatever that means.

Conversely, some kinds of threats consistently fail to trigger our inner alarm system, so we’re apt to endanger ourselves by overlooking them. Some of the more pressing:

Driving. A sense of being in control suppresses fear, so most of us feel invincible when we’re behind the wheel. In reality, we’re at risk of other drivers and other hazards. Last year, 82 Americans died every day on our roads.

Obesity. Because we don’t directly perceive the link between taking that extra bite and the catastrophic lethality of a heart attack or stroke, we find it hard to generate an emotional reaction to the dangers of obesity. Worse, because of a psychological phenomenon called “optimism bias,” we tend to overestimate our ability to change our eating habits. That’s unfortunate, because obesity is one of the worst and fastest-growing health problems facing this country.

Nuclear war. For decades, Americans worried that they might be wiped out in a nuclear attack. After the fall of Communism, that danger seemed to melt away. But thousands of nukes remain on standby. Many experts in the field of global risk assessment rank the danger of nuclear war as one of the few threats that could credibly end civilization in the near future. But since hardly anyone talks about it anymore, we can’t easily imagine an Armageddon scenario, fear it, or push for something to be done about it.

In his book How Risky Is It, Really?, risk management expert (and fellow PT blogger) David Ropeik dubs the difference between fear and actual risk “the Perception Gap.” This discrepancy can not only lead us to engage in dangerous behavior, he says, but can foment health-damaging stress. The first step to responding more intelligently is to recognize how instinct steers us wrong. “Just as we use a seat belt to protect ourselves in a dangerous environment,” Ropeik says, “we can use knowledge of the cognitive biases to help protect us from dangerous misjudgment.”

That’s what he believes, at any rate—it could just be the optimism bias talking.

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Thanks to the cockpit voice recorder, we have a pretty good idea of what the pilots heard, and the instrument data gives us a pretty good idea of what they saw. But what about the passengers in the back? Their perspective was very different, so I’d like to offer a few speculations about what the final moments of the flight might have been like for them.

The plane had taken off from Rio de Janeiro at 7.30 in the evening, local time, and had been flying for about four hours when it first encountered the weather system that would precipitate the final crisis. It was nearly midnight, then, by the internal clocks of most of the passengers; a few were probably reading, or watching a video, while the majority were probably sleeping, or lightly dozing. The captain himself had just left the cockpit to go take a nap.

As the flight neared the line of massive thunderstorms straddling the Inter Tropical Convergence, any passenger who happened to be awake would probably have felt some light turbulence. Those looking out window would have watched the plane fly into a bank of clouds, then out into clear sky, and then back into clouds. At six minutes past midnight, one of the co-pilots made a call back to the head flight attendant, alerting her that the plane would shortly be entering an area of turbulence. He made no such announcement to the passengers, however.

The turbulence grew worse. In the cabin, the flight attendants would have been strapping into their seats.

As a frequent traveler, I’ve experience similar moments many times before: the sudden, unanticipated jolt, followed at irregular intervals by more lurches of varying magnitude. I invariably remind myself that turbulence alone has never caused a modern airliner to crash, but it does little to soothe my nerves. Fears are, after all, irrational, and there is something primally disturbing about being tossed around without any clues as to why, or when the next bump will take place. I imagine some passengers might have been roused from half-slumber; others might have tightened their seatbelt, or tossed back the half-finished drink to keep it from spilling.

The main drama began at 10 minutes past midnight, when the speed sensors became iced over, the autopilot disengaged, and the pilot flying the plane pulled back on the controls, sending into a steep climb. The passengers would have had no explanation for the sudden lurch, nor would it have been easy for them to know in the minutes that followed if they were climbing or descending. One of the most difficult things about piloting a plane in darkness or clouds is the body’s inability to accurately determine its orientation or whether it’s going up or down; this spatial disorientation was the main factor behind JFK Jr’s death. Once an aircraft is in a steady descent or ascent, it feels just the same as flying level, just as an ascending elevator feels the same as one at rest. Few of the passengers could have guessed that after the plane reached its maximum altitude it began a very rapid descent. Indeed, even the co-pilots themselves, with their panels full of instruments and indicators, seemed uncertain as to what exactly was happening, several times discussing whether they were actually going up or down. Until the moment AF447 hit the water, none of the passengers could have known what was in store.

It’s also worth pointing out that, though the plane several times achieved an angle of attack exceeding 40 degrees, this does not mean that the passengers would have experienced themselves as tilting steeply backward, like roller-coaster riders climbing the first hill. The angle of attack is the angle between the wing and the air through which it’s moving; the reason that the value was so high during AF447′s final minutes was that the aircraft was practically dropping like a brick. Its orientation, however, was only about ten degrees up. It probably didn’t seem that remarkable, or even noticeable given what else was going on at the same time.

What the passengers would certainly have felt, and been alarmed by, were intense buffeting and turbulence. Remember, the flight was passing through the top of a major thunderstorm. Making matters worse was the fact that when an aircraft wing is on the edge of an aerodynamic stall, it naturally experiences a kind of buffeting, or trembling. Add to this the fact that a plane is very difficult to control at stall speeds, so the pilot flying the plane was making big side-to-side movements of the flight controls, causing large-scale lurches to the left and right.

It’s a testament to the integrity of the Airbus that it withstood the forces it was subjected to; in his book Erreurs de Pilotage (Volume 5) Jean-Pierre Otelli makes the case that a lesser airliner would probably have been ripped to shreds. But it can’t have been an easy ride for the passengers. I know from experience that in heavy turbulence a moment comes when a particularly violent lurch seems to release the anxiety of the cabin en masse; a gasp seems to erupt from everywhere at once, and a contagion of fear takes over. People begin to cry, to pray, to quietly sob. All at once, everyone has entered a new emotional domain.

One reader commented, shortly after my Pop Mech piece went up, that she hoped that the passengers hadn’t suffered. I think it’s true in a sense, that they didn’t know that the plane was doomed, and that the force of impact was so great that most or all were killed instantly. Psychologically, though, it must have been a terrifying ordeal — though for none quite as much as for the pilots, who alone knew what was about to happen to them.

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How, in the age of satellite navigation and instantaneous global communication, could a state-of-the art airliner simply vanish? It was a mystery that lasted for two years. Not until earlier this year, when autonomous submersibles located the airliner’s black boxes under more than two miles of water, were the last pieces of the puzzle put together. What doomed the 228 men, women and children aboard Air France 447 was neither weather nor technological failure, but simple human error. Under pressure, human beings can lose their ability to think clearly and to properly execute their training—a well-known failing that has proven all too difficult to eliminate.

Over at Popular Mechanics I’ve got a long piece offering a detailed blow-by-blow account of how one of the co-pilots of the Air France jetliner managed, in the course of just five minutes, to take a perfectly operational airplane from an altitude of nearly seven miles down to impact with the ocean. Here, I’d like to offer a nutshell summary of what happened, and what our understanding implies for the future of air safety.

Air France 447 was operating with three pilots: a captain, who was the most senior crewmember, and two co-pilots. At any given time, two of them were required to be in the cockpit, seated at the pair of seats equipped with controls. Four hours into the flight, the captain went to take a nap, leaving the flying of the plane to the more junior of the co-pilots, Pierre-Cédric Bonin. Sitting beside him was the other co-pilot, David Robert.

The crisis began mere minutes later, when the plane flew into clouds roiling up from a large tropical thunderstorm, and the moisture condensed and froze on the plane’s external air-speed sensors. In response, the autopilot disengaged. For a few minutes, the pilots had no way of knowing how fast they were going, and had to fly the plane by hand—something, crucially, that Bonin had no experience doing at cruise altitude.

The proper thing for Bonin to have done would have been to keep the plane flying level, and to have Robert refer to a relevant checklist to sort out their airspeed problems. Instead, neither man consulted a checklist, and Bonin pulled back on the controls, causing the airplane to climb and lose airspeed. Soon, he had put the plane into an aerodynamic stall, which means that the wings had lost their ability to generate lift. Even with engines at full power, the Airbus began to plummet toward the ocean.

As the severity of their predicament became more and more apparent, the pilots were unable to reason through the cause of their situation. Despite numerous boldfaced clues to the nature of their problem—including a stall-warning alarm that blared 75 times–they were simply baffled. As Robert put it, after the captain had hurried back to the cockpit, “We’ve totally lost control of the plane. We don’t understand at all… We’ve tried everything.”

Psychologists who study performance under pressure are well aware of the phenomenon of “brain freeze,” the inability of the human mind to engage in complex reasoning in the grip of intense fear. It appears that arousal of the amygdala causes a partial shutdown of the frontal cortex, so that it becomes possible to engage only in instinctive or well-learned behaviour.

In the case of Air France 447, it appears that Bonin, in his panic, completely forgot one of the most basic tenets of flight training: when at risk of a stall, never pull back on the controls. Instead, he held back the controls, in a kind of panicked death-grip, all the way down to the ocean. Ironically, if he had simply taken his hands away, the plane would have regained speed and started flying again.

Compounding the problem was a peculiar feature of the Airbus’s cockpit layout. Unlike a Boeing jet, in which one pilot’s movement of the control yoke moves the other pilot’s yoke as well, an Airbus features “asynchronous” controls, meaning that moving one control doesn’t cause the other to move as well. Bonin’s colleagues probably never knew that he had the controls all the way back—perhaps because they never imagined that any certified airline pilot could engage in such a misguided response.

Perhaps the most tragic moment of the entire transcript occurs in the final moments, when Bonin at last tells the others that he has had the controls back the entire time. “No, no, no,” says the captain. But by then it is already too late.

What can we learn from AF447? Above all, the tragedy reinforces an unfortunate truth about air travel that many passengers do not appreciate: that the most dangerous component of a modern commercial jetliner is the brain of the pilot at its controls. The majority of fatal airline accidents (vanishingly rare though they may be) are due to pilot error.

One way that airline manufacturers have tried to work around this problem is to increase the amount of automation, so that planes can largely fly themselves. But this tendency has had an ironic effect: the more pilots rely on automation, the less practiced they are at flying a plane by hand when an emergency requires it.

As a pilot myself, I love taking the controls of an airplane and through it finding a perfect freedom of movement in the sky. I would never want a computer to take that away from me. But the practical reality of moving passengers in perfect safety from point A to point B requires a different perspective. As technology improves, and flight control systems become more sophisticated, the relative inadequacy of we two-legged mammals will only become more apparent. Ultimately, the idea of a relying on a human being in the cockpit may come to seem a sentimentality too expensive to afford.

UPDATE: I’ve added another post, explaining what the flight’s final minutes probably felt like from the passengers’ perspective, here.

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There’s just one problem. There’s no evidence that Ekman’s theory has any basis. “It’s hokum,” says Yale psychologist Charles Morgan III. While something like the microexpressions that Ekman described do exist, truth-tellers exhibit them as well as liars. “There is no clue, no behavior, that always means that someone is lying, and never means something else,” says Bella DePaulo, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara who studies lying. “All of these behaviors are just hints.”

So can science help us unmask deception? Yes. But the key is not just to observe a suspected liar but to ask them the right kind of questions. Making up a story and keeping the details straight require more mental horsepower than just telling the truth. Researchers have found that if interrogators can place an extra “cognitive load” on a liar’s intellect they’ll likely push it to breaking point and cause the story to fall apart.

Dutch psychologist Aldert Vrij has tested several ways to accomplish this. In one experiment, he asked pairs of subjects to either go eat lunch together in a restaurant or to simply lie and say that they had. Vrij found that when it came to the kinds of questions that they probably expected to face—“what did you do in the restaurant?”—the liars were able to come up with such convincing stories that it was impossible to tell the two groups apart. But when he forced them to respond on the fly to unexpected questions, such as queries about spatial layout (“In relation to where you sat, where were the closest diners?’’), the liars gave up the game 80 percent of the time.

So if you want to get the truth, sit your suspected liar down for a chat and lay some cognitive load on them. Here are four proven techniques based on experiments that Vrij and others have conducted:

1) Ask them to tell the story in reverse. Having to relate a sequence of events in backward order is mentally taxing, and even more so when the storyteller can’t just pull the pieces from memory. The extra effort should overload a liar’s cognitive wherewithal.

2) Tell them to look you in the eye as they tell the story. It’s a myth that liars can’t look you in the eye—some may even do so more than usual. But having to continuously direct their gaze into your eyes is a cognitively demanding task that could distract a liar’s focus away from the story that he’s trying to keep straight.

3) Ask them to draw the scene. When someone is lying they generally make up a story with as little detail as possible. If you ask them to draw a picture of the scenario in question, they’ll be forced to come up with additional visual details. Their pictures will be less detailed than a truth-teller’s and may contradict what they’ve already told you.

4) Don’t show what you know. A up-and-coming new technique for police interrogators is called “strategic use of evidence,” or SUE. It involves sprinkling pieces of information that you already know about the disputed circumstance into your line of questioning. By leaving the suspect guessing about how much you know, you’ll force him to lie defensively—and hopefully, to give up facts you didn’t already have.

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I'm still not sure this is a good idea. (Photo by Isabelle Dubois)

You can study the psychology of fear until the cows come home; it’s not going to do much to keep your heebie-jeebies under control when you’re about to jump into a gap in six-foot-thick sea ice.

I shuffle closer to the edge of the five-by-five foot hole that’s been chainsawed into the ice. I have no real reason to be jumping into the frozen-over Hudson Bay. I’ve come up here for a totally different reason—to do a story about igloo building for a men’s magazine. But the trip’s organizers added a couple of extra days onto my itinerary so that I could get a taste for the local Inuit culture—riding on a dogsled, eating raw caribou meat — oh, and going scuba diving under the sea ice. Care to give it a try, Mr. Wise?

I couldn’t say no. Stunts like this are basically what I do for a living. I’m a magazine writer specializing in experiential adventures like skydiving, surfing, and survival training. Along the way, I developed an interest in the psychology of intense pressure and wrote a book on it. So though the idea of scuba diving under ice scares the crap out of me, that’s all the more reason I should do it.

And it does scare the crap out of me. Immersion in 32 degree water sounds bad enough, but to be trapped under six feet of ice as well? There’s a section of my book about how deadly that kind of thing can be. If a diver panics, the instinctive response is to rip away anything that blocks the airway – in this case, the regulator. In an enclosed space far from the surface, there may be no chance to recover from that mistake. Ironically, just knowing that the possibility exists makes it more likely to happen. “Well, let’s see how it goes,” I tell the organizers.

I’m being weasel-y, but with good reason. I’m taking advantage of one of the mind’s most powerful tools against fear: the ability to take action. Having options or a sense of power over our circumstances makes it a lot easier to maintain calm. Back in WWII, psychologists found that fighter pilots experienced less trauma in combat than bomber crews, because they were in control of their planes, while bomber crews had to wait passively for the action to start. The longer I can postpone making a commitment to this ice-diving adventure, the more control I’ll keep.

The day of the dive arrives, and my anxiety level is climbing. Over breakfast I meet with the divemaster, and he asks if I’m excited to go. Not really, I say. Why not, he asks? Because, I say, I’m worried about my fear spiraling into a fatal panic.

He shrugs. “If there’s any question about someone’s willingness to dive, I don’t want them under the ice,” he tells me. He explains that if I freak out and block the hole, I’ll endanger the two other divers who will also be under the ice with me. It sounds like we’re on the same page. Obviously, I shouldn’t go.

But a funny thing happens as we talk. I find myself getting less and less nervous. I’m benefiting from the second most powerful tool against fear: knowledge. The more relevant information we have about a potential threat, the less stressful it is. As the divemaster describes the setting, the gear, and what we’ll be doing, I discover my fear has boundaries. It shrinks.

I get fitted with equipment, then we climb onto snowmobiles and head out out across an endless white expanse. Here and there the wind has scoured away the snow, exposing ice as black as night. The thought of being on the other side of it gives me the willies.

After a few miles, we stop, unload our gear, and suit up with alacrity in the 10 degree air.

Ready? Ready! The two other divers jump in and I follow. To my surprise the water doesn’t feel cold at all, thanks to my dry suit. That’s one big worry out of the way. Now it’s time to descend. I let out air from my buoyancy control device and slide past icy walls. I emerge into a murky cave space about four feet high, with a sandy seabed sloping downward below a whitish-gray flat ceiling of ice.

My heart is pounding. I begin to turn. My feet are floating upwards, my back spiraling down. I flail and stir up sediment until I’m in zero visibility. Turns out I’ve failed to open a valve to release excess air from my suit, and now it’s trying to lift me toward the surface while my heavy metal tank drags me down. Here I am, under the ice, struggling upside down, and all but blind.

The thing is, I don’t mind so much. I’m not totally out of control. With some effort, I can awkwardly twist myself around, let out some air, and settle on my hands and knees on the bottom. Now I have time to really take in the strange world around me. As the sediment clears, I look at the patches of mussels on the seabed and the patterns of light and dark in the ice overhead.

There’s no more fear. That awful sense of mystery is gone. And while I may barely know what I’m doing, I’ve got a tentative feeling of being of control. Armed with the two weapons against fear, my stress level sinks to zero. I’m in a whole new world, and it’s wonderful.

(A version of this essay originally appeared in the October 2011 edition of Red Bulletin magazine).

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Stull at the Sun n' Fun airshow this past April.

Sadly, I’ve received news that Mark Stull, a 59-year-old airplane designer and builder who featured prominently in last month’s Popular Mechanics cover story about do-it-yourself aviation, died on Wednesday, November 16, in a crash near his home in Texas. Stull had just taken off on his first test flight of a new design when the accident occurred. According to a witness, he had climbed to about 50 feet when the aircraft stalled, flipped, and fell to the ground. Stull died instantly.

When I interviewed Stull earlier this year for the article, I was astonished by the risks that he described to me. He was constantly tweaking and modifying his aircraft, and would regularly take them apart and start new designs from scratch. This approach was no doubt fascinating to him intellectually, but it meant that he was constantly flying untested designs whose flying characteristics only became clear once he was in the air.

Stull is not the first aviator I’ve interviewed who has subsequently died in a crash. Last year, I wrote about John Graybill, who died while flying with his wife Dolly in Alaska. I’d profiled Graybill a decade before for National Geographic Adventure. Like Stull, Graybill knew that his passion for flying might someday lead to his death; like Stull, he was fatalistic about his chances.

“I have had many near-death experiences in my life. I am a thrill seeker,” Stull told me earlier this year. “I used to be a white-water kayaker, paddling steep, flooded creeks in Oregon. We used to say, if we don’t almost die, we aren’t having fun. I have no fear of death, but I fear being seriously injured.”

Like Stull and Graybill, I love to fly. Like them, I understand that doing so entails a certain amount of risk, but believe that by staying within certain parameters I can reasonably expect to live a long life. When I hear of an accident like Stull’s or Graybill’s, I have to step back and ask myself: am I really being as safe as I think, or am I deluding myself? Am I taking unnecessary risks? The answer may be no, but I have to ask the question again and again and again.

In cases like this, you often hear people say, “He died doing what he loved.” That may be true, but I can guarantee that in the final seconds, he didn’t love it at all.

UPDATE: Go San Angelo, the website of the San Angelo Standard Times newspaper, has put up a nice piece up about Stull by staff writer Laurel L. Scott.

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At the age of 26 he was a chubby, chain-smoking traveling insurance salesman, 60 pounds overweight, unambitious and comfortable with life. Then one day he saw a photograph of himself taken as he met his hero, golf champion Seve Ballasteros. The sight of the chubby man next to the legendary duffer shocked him. “I said, ‘Mother of…!’” he recalls. “I just felt that I was better than that. I said to myself, ‘I have to do something about this.’” And so he did. Starting with small, easy steps, he began a long journey that ultimately shaved off 30 percent of his body weight and transformed every aspect of his life. From an ordinary schlub, he turned himself by force of will into a man of unparalleled resilience.

Duffy’s story offers a perfect example of a profound but often overlooked truth about human toughness: even the most physically punishing feats of endurance are less about the body than they are about the mind. Sure, Duffy is an incomprehensively fit individual. But it’s how he’s trained his mind that’s allowed him to keep going while his competitors are dropping like flies.

It’s a lesson we all can learn. Though we may not need to run multiple triathlons, we all could benefit by being more determined, more resilient, more resolute in achieving the things that really matter to us. Duffy’s journey serves as an example we all can follow, if to a lesser degree. On his own initiative, he launched himself on a course of self-improvement that bolstered the inner quality that positive psychologist Salvatore Maddi calls “hardiness.”

Underlying hardiness are the three basic attributes that Maddi calls the “Three C’s.” The first “C,” commitment, refers to the tendency to see your task as important enough to merit the full scope of your attention and energy. Commitment means that even when your situation is deteriorating you stay plugged in to your goal. Take Duffy’s example. Completing ten consecutive triathlons is such a brutal undertaking that only the most committed athletes would even think of attempting it; yet even so, 90 percent of those who started the Deca with him dropped out due to injury or fatigue. To cross the finish line, let alone win, requires exceptional devotion to the effort. “I have a phrase that I use a lot,” Duffy says. “’It is when we are at our weakest that we must be at our strongest.’ It’s when you’re most challenged that you have to draw on all the mental powers that you have.”

The second “C,” control, is the feeling that, whatever happens, you’ll keep trying to have an influence on the outcome, rather than becoming passive and give up. “When I was 26, I had a passive existence,” Duffy says. “When I took up running, I was starting to lead an active life, and living actively is so much more rewarding.”

The third “C,” challenge, is an understanding that life doesn’t have to be free of worries to be pleasurable and fulfilling. Stress is natural and that it provides an opportunity to grow and develop. The key to mastering this mindset is to develop a sense of confidence in your abilities. Duffy’s experience offers a case in point. At 26, the only exercise he ever got was an occasional game of golf. He ate too much and was addicted to chocolate bars. Looking back, he sees that he was passive and unambitious. All that changed once he vowed to get himself back in shape. He quit smoking, cut back on his portion sizes, allowed himself only one chocolate bar a week, and started running three times a week. Even more importantly, he started walking an hour after dinner, every single day. “The idea was to walk off whatever food I’d just eaten,” he says, “and to keep me away from the chocolate and that kind of stuff.”

Duffy was no expert in physiology or weight-loss, but his strategy employed sound common sense. He laid out incremental steps for himself that were significant enough to feel worthwhile, but small enough to always feel like they lay within his graps. “The important thing about goal-setting is having a plan,” he explains. “Goals have to be realistic, and they have to be very specific.”

Duffy was able to stick with it. By the time he hit his 30s, he was back to his high-school weight, and ready for more challenges. “Because I got very physically fit, I got mentally fit,” he says. “I felt like I could achieve anything I set my mind to.” Emboldened, he quit a well-paying job, went back to school, and then started his own company.

Six months later, his brother invited him to take part in a triathlon. Duffy accepted the challenge, and took part as a member of a relay team. He only completed the swimming leg, but found himself fascinated at once. “I was immediately gripped by the endorphins,” he remembers. “I said, ‘Wow, life just can’t get any better, what an incredible sense of empowerment I’m feeling.’ I vowed to myself that next year, I’d do the whole lot.” The triathlons paved the way for double-triathlons, the multiple marathons, and so on.

The transformation was so extreme that it eventually carried him beyond what he once would have even been able to conceive. Admits Duffy, “If you had told me even five years ago that I was going to run 10 triathlons in 10 days, I would have said, ‘That’s impossible.’”

Without realizing it, Duffy had taken advantage of some of the major techniques that psychologists have found most effective in allowing people to maximize their hardiness. One is a process that Maddi calls “transformational change.” Instead of panicking in the face of a crisis, the goal is to see the situation from another perspective. Try to understand the larger context and to identify the good things that might come along with the bad. “Life rewards you when you move out of your comfort zone,” Duffy says. “If you can push yourself to go beyond your fears, it’s so empowering.”

Another key tool is social support. In a difficult situation, having a friend by your side can make all the difference. In preparing for his competitions, Duffy had the support of an extensive network of family and friends, but he found that even strangers could provide crucial support in a time of need. During his first double triathlon, Duffy hit a brick wall in the middle of the night after 17 hours of racing. At a rest area he stopped and got off his bike. He still had 80 or 90 more miles to ride, and after that two marathons to run back-to-back. He was exhausted and didn’t see how he could go on. Then a woman from one of the other teams put her arm around him. “Listen, I’ve watched you,” she told him. “You’re one of the strongest guys out there. Just stick with it. The sun is going to come up in three hours’ time, and I guarantee you’re going to get a bit of energy, because I’ve seen the forecast, it’s going to be a wonderful day. Sometime tomorrow afternoon you’re going to achieve your goal, so just hang in there.” She was right. Duffy got back on his bike, and when the sun came up at 5am, he got a boost of energy. “I felt on fire,” he says.

Finally, physical fitness itself can be a powerful component of overall emotional resilience. Lilly Mujica-Parodi, a researcher at Stony Brook University, conducted a study of first-time skydivers and found that those in good shape were better able to control the surge of the stress hormone cortisol that accompanied their terrifying first plunge. “Cortisol affects receptors in your brain, which in turn affects your cognition,” she says. “Individuals with lower body fat produced less cortisol in response to the skydive, and therefore the cortisol didn’t affect the receptors as much, which means that their cognition was not as affected.” Trimmer bodies, in other words, mean clearer thinking under pressure.

Duffy agrees that the toughness he acquired by taking up running now affects every other aspect of his life. “Up until the time I was 27, I was unambitious, unmotivated, I certainly wasn’t achieving anything. It’s only when I started running that my mind was opened into just what I could achieve,” he says. Without running, he says, he never would have had the mental toughness to start his own business, or to overcome a crippling fear of public speaking. Today, he’s a motivational speaker, making a living doing something that was once made him “scared beyond belief.”

But for Duffy, the greatest gift that running has given him is simply the pleasure of running itself. His most intense moments of joy, he says, come not when he crosses the finish line, but the months-long ritual of preparation that precedes each event. “Every morning I go out training,” he says. “That’s what I enjoy the most. I just love it.”

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These two levels of dysfunction – personal and collective – surely must be a coincidence, right? After all, the give-and-take of representative democracy is a completely different process from the infinitely complex tangle of neurons and synapses that underlie individual decision making. But if one addiction researcher’s groundbreaking ideas are correct, then governments’ plans tend to fall apart for the very same reason that our individual attempts at self-control do.

Basically, Congress operates a lot like an addict’s brain.

To understand why, let’s look at an ice cream cone. It’s delicious, creamy, oozing chocolately goodness. How could you ever say no to something like that? Well, the problem is that while ice cream cones are nice, so are other things, like not getting fat. So as we walk down the sidewalk through the mouth-watering aromas wafting out of Ben & Jerry’s, we somehow have to balance these conflicting desires. Some psychologists, notably Roy Baumeister at Florida State University, argue that willpower is a muscle, and that by flexing it we can consciously choose to resist the urge to eat the delicious ice-cream cone in favor of a more long-term goal of staying slim.

George Ainslie, a research psychiatrist and professor of economics, takes a different view. He argues that there is no central governor in the brain that decides to prioritize one goal over another. Instead, he proposes that our heads are teeming with dozens of autonomous agents or “interests,” each of which is constantly struggling to see its choice implemented. The one that wins is the one whose goal seems most compelling at the time. Something that’s very rewarding (like being thin) but far away can lose out to something that’s only mildly rewarding (eating ice cream) but immediately available.

No wonder people tend to eat too much tasty but unhealthy food. But what’s really interesting is why they sometimes don’t. Ainslie suggests that we don’t just compare, say, eating ice cream right now with being thin a year from now. We compare eating ice cream now with the sum total of every day of being thin from now until we die. Seen in that light, the goal of being thin isn’t just big, it’s enormous.

But the key is that at a subconscious level, your brain must trust itself. That is to say, the agents that are competing in our decision-making process right now have to believe that the agents operating tomorrow will also be able to take the long-term view. Your brain has to earnestly believe that it will maintain this self-control agenda essentially forever. If it thinks that tomorrow it will fail, the whole process will break down. You’ll eat the ice cream—not just today, but every day. And you’ll be fat.

And this is where personal self-control relates to the behavior of the American Congress. Just like our subconscious brain, Congress is teeming with autonomous parties all shouting “I want! I want!” (Well, not out loud). The easiest thing to do would be to give in to all those immediate urges: a shiny new Navy base for Maine, a research facility for Texas, a prescription drug bill for the pharmaceutical lobby, and so on. But, like our brains, Congress has long-term goals, as well. Like not bankrupting the country down the road.

Of course, as with individuals, the short term (drug bill!) is much more immediately rewarding than the long-term (balanced budget) goal. And there’s no reason for legislators to deny themselves today if they know that the next session of Congress is likely going to through their prudence out the window and turn on the spending faucet to full blast anyway. Just as within the individual brain, it becomes impossible for Congress to exert willpower if it doesn’t trust its future self.

This problem has been inherent in Congress from the day it was first established, but in the past senators and congressman seem to have had a degree of trust in their colleagues. Lately, not so much. Congress’s ability to commit to long-term solvency has become so lacking that earlier this year the government came very close to defaulting. Like an addict, when the institution has no faith in itself, the exercise of willpower becomes impossible.

What, then, to do? Well, Congress can do just what many people facing a willpower crisis do: make a pre-commitment. This psychological strategy is also called “binding,” after the episode in the Iliad in which Ulysses asks his crew to tie himself to the mast of their ship so that he doesn’t succumb to the otherwise irresistible, fatal lure of the Sirens’ song. He knows he won’t be able to trust his future self, so before temptation presents itself he makes sure that he won’t be able to give in.

More than 2000 years later, precommitment is still an incredibly effective way to avoid all sorts of temptation. For instance, if you worry your spending habits will prevent you from saving any money, you can have your bank set aside a chunk of each paycheck. If you know you’re likely to hit the “snooze” button when your alarm goes off at 6am, you can set up your alarm clock on the far side of the room.

Congress enacted a somewhat convoluted version of binding as a way to extricate itself from the seemingly intractable debt-ceiling negotiations this past July. The Republicans demanded trillions of dollars of budget cuts; the Democrats countered with a lesser amount. Unable to meet halfway, the two sides managed to agree to kick the can down the road. They voted to establish a “super committee” with members from both sides which would have to agree on a workable budget plan by the end of the year. If the super committee fails, then the plan stipulates that horribly painful budget cuts will automatically go into effect, and presumably everyone will feel miserable and chastened.

Will Congress’ clever plan work? Well, the thing about binding strategies is that they only really work if the precommitment is really, actually, binding. If Ulysses can just reach around behind him and untie the ropes holding to the mast, the plan is going to fail.

This is where addicts often run afoul. The urge to consume can be so overwhelming that the desperate user manages to slip out of even the most powerful bonds. No money to buy drugs with?  That’s normally a deal-breaker, but not if you’re willing to turn a trick, rob a liquor store, or sell your parent’s furniture.

In the case of Congress, it turns out that the binding in the super committee plan isn’t as solid as it first seemed. In fact, according to the website Talking Points Memo John McCain has already said that if the super committee can’t reach an agreement, Congress can simply repeal the plan:

“If there’s a failure on the part of the super committee, we will be amongst the first on the floor to nullify that provision,” McCain said. “Congress is not bound by this — it’s something we passed; we can reverse it.”

He’s got a good point. Barring the passage of a constitutional amendment, Congress can do whatever it wants. It’s the supreme law of the land. No one can stop it from doing anything it wants. Binding is all but impossible.

Unfortunately, everyone in Congress is surely well aware of this fact. And whether you’re an addict or a branch of government, once you know how easy it will be to get around your pre-commitment, the game is over.

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