The Nerdist Way_ How to Reach the Next Level (In Real Life) - Chris Hardwick [29]
As the selection of my irrational fears grew, I realized that they were like a collection of dipping sauces for my brain—all flavor variants of the same basic stuff. One tangy offering that was late to the game was a fear of high floors. If I was able to somehow get past my fear of elevators, the high hotel floor was a neat but separate little fear package waiting for me at the top. My heart would sink into my legs, which would then “gummify,” and then the sweating and the hyperventilating would join the party.
Cut to: A few years later when I’d gotten over a lot of my anxiety. I hadn’t been high up in a hotel in a while so I had all but forgotten about my fun with acrophobia. Then, I was doing a gig somewhere in the gut of Middle America, which hangs over the Bible Belt of the South while obscuring the penis of Florida, and was given a room somewhere above the thirtieth floor. When I got into the room and looked out the window, it all came rushing back into my nerve endings. Right on the precipice of panic, I caught myself. I remembered that most of this irrational fear stuff didn’t bother me anymore. I fished around in my emotional trunk and confirmed that, no, I didn’t seem to have this fear anymore. That was the moment I realized that every once in a while, I needed to reexamine my fears to affirm or deny their presence.
Life is a shortcutting process. In order to take on new tasks and information, it’s necessary to create shortcuts for our brain. You ever notice how a lot of elderly folks seem quick to make judgments or stereotype . . . maybe even get a little racist as they age? I certainly don’t think that’s awesome but what could contribute to that is that we have a limited economy of energy. They’re shortcutting with stereotypes. Don’t we do this with other things in our life (hopefully not the racist part)? Don’t we make snap judgments based on little to no information? It seems like too much of an undertaking to put every situation under the microscope and judge it on its individual merits, so we create mental structures in our brain such that whenever we’re confronted with similar situations in the future, we can thoughtlessly default to our preestablished idea. I believe fear works similarly, but the fear system takes it one step further because your brain’s intention is to try to help save your life by giving you an automatic flight reaction in a crisis situation, or some shit like that. Something happens at some point in our lives and we form a conditioned emotional response. But here’s the interesting part: The response will continue to occur EVEN IF THE EMOTIONS THAT DESIGNED IT NO LONGER EXIST. I started to think of it like an abandoned building that still had an active security system—if you trespass on the property, the lights flash and the sirens go off, which would normally scare a person off. BUT, if you just continued to walk calmly into the building anyway, nothing would happen.
As we glide through the Matrix, we change. New experiences spawn new feelings. Sometimes we get over things without even realizing it. The trick is to go back and check every once in a while. Think of it as cleaning house with your negative emotions. It may not always work, but if you could instantly jettison excess fear baggage just by thinking it through, wouldn’t it be worth it? SHITYEAHITWOULD.