It seems that fear helps you learn and anxiety makes things worse. Like, the author is saying that fear is an adaptive learning mechanism. It helps you learn to survive. And anxiety is maladaptive. How is it maladaptive? Idk, it seems like anxiety doesn’t get better cuz when you’re lacking info the brain spins out of control. When does anxiety happen here? How does anxiety make things worse here? I wish things were explained philosophically. That’d make it easier to understand.
I’m going to read sentence by sentence:
Fear is an adaptive learning mechanism that helps us survive.
It seems that the goal of fear is to survive. Like, that’s what it helps with. The author I think said that fear helps you learn to avoid danger. That helps you survive.
Can there be downsides to fear? Like, what if you don’t know if something actually is danger or not? Like, you see too many things as danger? Idk how that could happen.
Anxiety, on the other hand, is maladaptive; our thinking and planning brain spins out of control when it doesn’t have enough information.
Saying “on the other hand” contrasts two things. Anxiety is different than fear. Fear is adaptive and anxiety is maladaptive. What does maladaptive mean? This is what Merriam Webster says:
:marked by poor or inadequate adaptation
That would make sense. That’s like failing at the goal. If you adapt an idea then it’s good enough for a goal. If an idea doesn’t adapt then it fails. Why does it sound like anxiety makes things worse tho? Like, the author says that your brain spins out of control. What does “spins out of control” mean?
Paragraph from the book, “Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind” by Judson Brewer:
You can get a sense of this simply by looking at how quickly a fear response happens. If you step into a busy street and a car bears down on you, you reflexively jump back onto the sidewalk. In this situation you don’t have time to think. Processing all of that information (car, speed, trajectory, etc.) in your PFC takes much too long, and making a decision
about what to do (“should I step back or will the car swerve around me?”) takes even longer. We can break it down into three very different time scales that differentiate reflexes from learning from anxiety:
Immediate (milliseconds)
Acute (seconds to minutes)
Chronic (months to years)
The first sentence:
You can get a sense of this simply by looking at how quickly a fear response happens.
I have to check what “this” means but it seems like a larger idea. It’s a pattern. If you look at how fast something happens you’ll get a sense. Where is a fear response from? I think that’s from how we learn thru fear.
“this” could be about how fear is adaptive and anxiety is maladaptive. Or how anxiety is maladaptive. Or how our brain spins out of control without much information.
What does “simply” mean? Like, obvious? Or by doing something simple? Or not requiring much? Like, a simple request.
Yeah, I don’t think you have much time. I think you react subconsciously. Like, one time I was playing Bloodborne and it was difficult to recognize a boss’ attack. I thought I could just walk backwards away from it, but it was a leap attack. After postmorteming about why I didn’t dodge or move out of the way, I was able to reflexively avoid the attack the next fight. Like, I reacted without thinking much about it. It felt very similar to avoiding dangerous traffic. Like, I was in danger so moving out of the way is what I chose to do. I don’t think I ever really got in the way of traffic like in the author’s example but went through similar things.
When the author says “think” does that mean consciously think? Is there subconscious thinking? Cuz how else would you know what to do. It’s ideas you’re dealing with that you think about. Either you know what to do or you don’t. Like, you could probably not know what to do and you just sit there immobile.
Also, the quoted sentence is looking at how fast a fear response happens. I think you’re afraid of getting hit so you jump out of the way. That happens really quickly. This can give you a sense about something. I think that’s about fear being adaptive and anxiety being maladaptive. Idk. I think I need to learn more about anxiety and fear to understand.
Does it really happen that you take time to process info in your prefrontal cortex? I think I agree that it would take too long to process and make a decision. If you take the time to process does the all that happen in a different part of the brain? Do quick decisions happen in other parts of the brain? That would kind of make sense cuz there’s so much to the brain. Like, it has so many parts to it. What is each part for?
So I think I kind of get what happens. Fear seems to take place in quick decisions. When you have time to think that’s when your anxiety can do its work. Like, you’re literally thinking about things and making decisions. That’s where you can get inaccurate info about things and make inaccurate predictions and decisions. Can that happen in a fast accident too? When you don’t have much time to think?
How long does it take to process things in the prefrontal cortex? And how long does it take to make a decision? Is it helpful to deal with anxiety by looking at the parts of the brain? Is anxiety an idea you can reason with?
The information could be about the car’s speed, its trajectory, or that the car is even there. The information could also be about what kind of vehicle? Is it a truck or car? Concerning the speed, you could process the information about how fast it’s going. Is it going 20 mph? 30 mph? 50 mph? That’s a process you have intuition about but it could take longer figure out. Sometimes I have to look at a speeding car a second time to see if it’s actually going a speed I guessed at first.
What is some other information to process in the car bearing down you scenario? There’s processes involved so you could think about where to move based on how the car is moving. You could calculate where to move so you don’t get hurt so much. Is this different from processing information?
I think processing information has to do with taking in info about the situation. Like, you could process how many speeding cars there are in each lane. You could find out about how many lanes you already crossed. There’s information about what time of day it is but I think you probably already processed that. There’s information about the gender of the driver. I don’t think that would matter too much in a dangerous scenario. It would probably be good to identify the driver for later.
It seems there’s a lot of info to get when there’s a car bearing down on you. I think that makes it complicated to think of it all in time. Like, that stuff would have to happen automatically. It makes me think about figuring a problem out with time constraints. Like, sometimes you don’t have a lot of time to think so you carry forward with the information you do have. That’s like being in danger of getting hit in an accident.
Sometimes you don’t have so much time to commit to solve a problem thoroughly. I’d be nice to learn about that more. Like, I think you could still make the best decision even if you don’t have a lot of time. A familiar example is having a job. You don’t have all day to learn CF like you would unemployed. You also have less energy for it. That’s a problem to solve under a time constraint I think…Idk tho cuz you could set aside a few minutes to solve the problem. That’s different than having less time to do the actual activity. Not too sure
So it takes some time to process information and it takes longer to make a decision. I think you would process the information to make a decision. I think that decision would come from having more detail. I think if you were to move out of the way reflexively that still counts as a decision tho.
I think I see what the author is saying cuz how would you know if driver will hit you where you stand or move around? Should you decide to stay still or step back? Those kinds of decisions take longer?
When im in a quick acting scenario like a car coming on to you, I feel the time pressure. It gives you less time to think. You gotta kind of know what to do cuz otherwise you might not act in time. Idk how long it takes exactly for people to process info and decide an action. I for sure think tho you don’t have time to ponder what exactly you’re dealing with. You could do that before or after the situation.
Something’s being broken down. “it” is what’s being broken down. What is that? The time it takes to react and what kind of thinking you’re using? Like fear response vs. anxiety? I still dont think I know what anxiety is.
There’s going to be three different time scales. The author describes them as “very different”. Why? I think probably cuz the differences are clear or maybe there’s not much overlap. Maybe it’ll show how different anxiety and fear are but clearly.
Also, i dont know what a time scale is. Is that like milliseconds vs. seconds vs. minutes? Is that an example of three different time scales? Here’s the definition from cambridge dictionary:
Thats the definition of timescale; it’s one word. A time scale from the book would describe a fear response happening over a period of time. It could happen over a few secs probably. I know it’s fast.
One more thing from the book’s quote above is that what’s being differentiated is reflexes from learning and anxiety. You could have a reflex cuz you learned from fear I think, and you could have anxiety. I think the anxiety looks the same as fear but you’ll be able to tell the fear apart from the anxiety. It’ll be good to know the difference between the two.
Those time scales make sense. They’re like a pain scale of 1-10. 0 is nothing and 10 could mean severe.
Immediate is a time scale? The amount of time that happens with something that’s immediate is milliseconds. For acute, it takes seconds to minutes. And for chronic it takes months to years.
If you had chronic pain according to the time scales above, you would have had it for months to years. You could have it for 5 months or 5 years. It’s like what counts is > 1 month. What happens if pain only takes a few weeks? What time scale does that fall in?
There for sure is a difference between acute and immediate. Immediate happens so fast. If something happens in milliseconds it would be harder to notice than something happening in seconds. Like, if a light flashes for a few milliseconds you might have to double take or rethink what you saw in the corner of your eye. That’s compared to the light happening over a few seconds.
Also do reflexes from learning happen in the acute range or in the immeduate range? Is that how we differentiate the fear response from anxiety? Anxiety could happen for seconds to minutes or months to years. Idk but I heard the term chronic anxiety before. That sounds like a problem one can have and has to figure out.
Paragraph from the book, “Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind” by Judson Brewer:
That immediate reaction happens at the survival level. We aren’t learning anything in this situation; we’re simply getting out of harm’s way. This has to happen really quickly and instinctually. Jumping back onto the sidewalk is something that happens so quickly that you realize what just happened only after the fact. That’s a reaction that starts in your older brain’s autonomic nervous system, which acts quickly and outside of your conscious control to regulate all sorts of things, like how much blood your heart pumps or whether your muscles get more blood than your digestive tract. It is lifesaving because when there is an immediate threat, you don’t have time to think—thinking is a much slower process. In other words, this fight/flight/freeze reaction keeps you alive long enough to get to the next phase and actually learn from it.
First sentence:
That immediate reaction happens at the survival level.
I forget what that immediate reaction is. That for sure sounds like having a reflex and moving out of harm’s way. Are you learning anything there? Or is it after you get out of the way? Fear is a learning mechanism right? Where does the learning happen? It would make sense that it happens after cuz you have time to think.
“at the survival” means like the primitive part of your brain doing it’s work. I forget what that was called. I remember that fear is something that’s very old and is shared by many generations of animals. Like, the most basic animals have it i think. It would kind of make sense cuz fear has evolutionary use. It can help keep an organism alive. Then it can survive to reproduce. Not too sure but yea.