Fact-Checking Your Fears

I once knew a little boy who had a lot of fears. During the day, he wasn’t scared of much—he’d run around feeling pretty great—but once the sun set, his fears would wake up.

Especially when it was time for bed.

He was so sure a scary bad guy was going to get him, he found it near impossible to relax.

His mama kept on the lights.

His dad checked outside to prove no one was there.

They even hung monster-proof curtains.

But for all the work they did, nothing eased this boy’s fear.

And though there was a part of this boy that wondered if he was being ridiculous, there was this other part of him that wondered, what if he wasn’t.

What if he was going to be that one person this bad guy was gonna get?

This boy needed something to stop his suffering, so he could feel cozy in his mind and get a good night sleep.

But what?

“I know,” I said. “How about we solve this problem together by fact-checking your fear.”

“What does that mean,” he asked.

“Well,” I said. “It means talking about the fear from another perspective. As if you were a scientist. Or a detective. Someone whose goal is to figure out what’s real and what’s not real by gathering a lot of information.”

“Ok.”

So right away, we got to work.

“How long have you had this fear?” I asked.

“Two years.”

“Every night?”

“Just about.”

“Have you found any evidence that someone has actually been trying to get you?”

“No.”

“Do you have any enemies?”

“I don’t think so.”

“So I wonder, what would be the motivation for someone to brave the frigid cold of night just to get you, of all people? Roaming around at night is not a very easy thing to do, you know. It takes a lot of planning and motivation and it’s quite dangerous, not to mention illegal. Besides, aren’t most people too busy at home figuring out how to be happy? Why would they want to venture out in the middle of the night just to be your worst nightmare?”

“Well,” he said. “There’s this bad guy in a show I watched and he never has any trouble lurking around at night. In fact this bad guy lives to destroy people. And he doesn’t even feel badly about it afterwards.”

Suddenly, things began to make a little more sense.

Through fact checking his fear, we discovered what he was afraid of — that some scary guy he saw on a screen might show up in his back yard.

“But that sounds really silly,” he said.

“Yes, I agree. But your fear doesn’t come from the part of your brain that knows it’s silly.

It comes from the part of your brain that only has one skill—to help you survive.

It’s the part of your brain called the amygdala. Grown-ups love talking about it. It’s a very old-fashioned part of the brain that our ancestors used a lot to survive. It’s like our own built-in body guard.

But the thing about the amygdala is, it doesn’t understand what a show is. Or what a video game is. So let’s say you spend all day long killing zombies on Minecraft. Your amygdala thinks you’ve actually been killing zombies all day. Your amygdala actually thinks it’s been working hard all day to keep you alive.

So when the sun sets, it doesn’t get that the screen has turned off and that you’re safe. It’s still on guard, waiting to warn you about the zombie that very well might be right out your window.”

“Wow,” he said.

“It’s on guard 24/7, just like it was in the days of our ancestors. But back then, nighttime was a legitimately scary time. There were no lights, no one had adequate housing — our ancestors had very few resources to protect them from the many varieties of danger they faced, and bc they were pretty much on their own, they had to rely on their amygdala a lot.

So when you’re alone at night in your dark room without anything to distract you, it’s easy to forget you’re safe. That you’ve got electricity. A lock on the door. A 3-digit connection to the police department. And your amygdala comes to the rescue the same way it always has since the beginning of its time.”

“But how do I tell my amygdala I’m safe?”

“Good question.

Because your amygdala doesn’t have skills to fact-check your fears, that’s got to be your job. You have to be the one to do this work.

And once you determine that you’re safe, you have to tell your amygdala the same way you’d tell anyone anything—by communicating.

You simply explain that you have fact-checked your fears and that it’s safe right now.

And that all the stuff on the screen was just made up by grown-ups who get paid a lot of money to share what’s in their imagination.

There are still scary things out there—our amygdalas are on guard for a reason. Like for instance, if we were to cross the street right as a car ran a red light, our amygdala will react much faster than the logical part of our brain. The amygdala shines when it gets to actually save us from real danger.

But as for the rest of the time, while the amygdala is still on guard, it’s our job to fact-check our fears. Even I have to do that.

I might not be afraid of monsters anymore, but I do have to fact-check other fears. Like my fear of flying for instance.

When I’m on a plane, my amygdala is not happy. It doesn’t quite understand 30,000 feet in the air. It interprets that as a serious emergency. It has no appreciation for the wonders of aviation—it prefers to be on the ground.

So if I choose to listen to my amygdala while I’m on a plane, I can get myself in quite a panic, imagining that something is very wrong and that I’m not going to make it out alive.

I have to work very hard to shift my focus from reacting to these fears to using the problem-solving part of my mind to figure out a creative way to reframe my situation. So I say, “Dear amygdala, Look over there. See that woman and that man? They’re flight attendants. They do this job every day, multiple times a day, and they’re not scared because they understand how planes work and they know the statistics of how safe they are. In fact while we’re over here fearing our life is going to be over, they’re putting crackers in baskets.

My amygdala gets this. Because when I can laugh, it senses I’m not in danger and it relaxes with me.

It takes practice to be in charge of your reactions, to use the creative problem-solving parts of our brains to reframe our fears to decide if something is dangerous or not.

And sometimes, while you’re practicing, those old fears will come back again and again. And you’ll have to create more and more ways to reframe what you’re scared of so your amygdala can relax.

Sometimes you might find you’ll have to do what my father-in-law used to do when he wanted to swim at Howard Beach in Queens, New York. Back then, the beach was gross and sometimes there’d be these little chunks of poo floating around. But because he wanted to swim, he had to figure out a new stroke to knock the poo out of his way. So when the same fears keep getting in your way, you might find it useful to imagine they’re nothing but little chunks of poo at Howard Beach, knock ‘em away, and keep going.”

I’d like to end this conversation with a meditation.

Because when all else fails, you can always count on your breath to help you find comfort wherever you happen to be. You can rely on breath because it’s always right here, breathing, till your dying day.

So let’s try a meditation I like to call ‘threading our awareness through the fabric of our moments’. I’ll guide you through a few breaths:

On the in-breath, I want you to imagine that your breath is a needle and thread, and as you breathe in, I want you to imagine that your breath is threading one stitch through the moment, and on the out breath I want you to imagine your breath is the needle going back through the moment. The longer your breath, the longer your thread. And as you keep breathing, in and out, what you’re creating with the awareness of your breathing is a through-line through the fabric of time.

Breathing in, your breath is threading one stitch through the moment, and breathing out, your breath is the needle going back through the moment. Your awareness is the thread. Stay with your breaths, making the stitches through the fabric of your moments.

—JLK