Author: Jeff Wise

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

At first, Gerry and Margarita Licon only saw the benefits of doing business on the US-Mexico border. Co-founders of Licon Engineering, a construction management and engineering services company, the couple expanded their business from two employees to 38 in their first seven years in business, and took their revenues to more than $5 million. It seemed like they had the best of both worlds. From their headquarters in El Paso, Texas, they had access to US government contracts with set-asides for minorities and small businesses. Across the border in Ciudad Juarez, they could tap low labor costs and an ever-growing customer base in the manufacturing sector.

Business was so good that they weren’t particularly concerned when drug-gang warfare sent the murder rate in Juarez skyrocketing. By early 2008, six or seven people a day were being killed. Gunmen riddled a pickup truck with 31 bullets, killing the driver and her 9-year-old girl passenger. A man kidnaped from his front yard in El Paso turned up dismembered in Juarez.  Seventeen patients in a drug rehab center were lined up agains the wall and shot to death. The scale of the slaughter led Time magazine to dub Juarez “The Most Dangerous City in the Americas.”

Like many living and working in the border region, the Licons still didn’t think at this point that the crime wave posed a direct threat to them personally. The killings seemed to be strictly limited to those involved in the drug trade. But as the violence escalated, the criminality expanded. Kidnaping and extortion also became endemic.

And on an afternoon in March 2008, Gerry Licon experienced the dark side of Juarez for himself. Continue reading Murder and Profit in Mexico’s Most Dangerous City

The new issue of The Brain, Discover magazine’s newsstand special, is now out, and with it an excerpt from Extreme Fear in which I discuss Sue Yellowtail’s struggle with a mountain lion in a remote canyon in southwestern Colorado:

At 25, Sue Yellowtail was just a few years out of college, working for the Ute Indian tribe as a water quality specialist. Her job was to travel through remote areas of the reservation, collecting samples from the streams, creeks, and rivers. She spent her days criss-crossing remote backcountry, territory closed to visitors, and rarely traveled even by locals. It’s the kind of place where, if you got in trouble, you were on your own.

On a clear, cold morning in late December Yellowtail pulled her pickup over to the side of the little-traveled dirt double-track, a few yards from a simple truss bridge that spanned the creek. As she collected her gear she heard a high-pitched scream. Probably a coyote killing a rabbit, she thought. She clambered down two steep embankments to the water’s edge. Wading to the far side of the creek, she stooped to stretch her tape measure the width of the flow. Just then she heard a rustling and looked up. At the top of the bank not 30 feet away, stood a mountain lion. Tawny against the brown leaves of the riverbank brush, the animal was almost perfectly camouflaged. It stared down at her, motionless.

She stood stock still.

As I go on to explain, Yellowtail had entered the first instinctual fear-response state, the condition of freezing known as attentive immobility. But her trial had just begun. Within the next 15 minutes, she would pass through the three other distinct forms of panic. Continue reading In an Encounter with a Cougar, Four Different Ways to Panic

According to Google Translate, that’s German for “The book is in German.” By which I mean that I just learned that the German edition of Extreme Fear will be on shelves April 26. Unglaublich!

Interestingly, the Amazon page indicates that book was translated “from the American” by Stefanie Schaeffler. Hopefully the original is intelligible to English-speakers as well.