The Bull And The Plank

A bull is a potentially dangerous animal: a plank is a plank. I saw a photo recently that had been shared on Facebook. It showed a sign on a field gate which read, “Do not enter this field unless you can cross it in eight seconds. The bull can cross it in nine!” A bull which feels that its territory is being invaded can be a very aggressive animal indeed. Given the chance, it will seriously injure you, possibly even kill you. So the sensible walker, faced with a field with a bull in it, looks for an alternative route to crossing the field. The Spanish matador (or to give him his correct title, the torero) on the other hand, deliberately goes into the ring, confronts the bull and in the end, kills it. Sometimes it doesn’t quite work like that; the torero isn’t as careful as he needs to be and is gored by the bull, ending up in hospital or occasionally, in the cemetery. A bull, whether you avoid it or confront it, is a dangerous animal, and you must deal with that fact or risk perishing. A plank, however, is simply a plank, an inanimate object. Planks used to be made of wood. Now increasingly they are made from metal. Apart from that, a plank is a plank is a plank. If I place a standard metal plank, the kind used in scaffolding, on the floor of my office and invite you to walk along it, you can do so easily and without undue concern. If I now place it on two bricks so that it stands a few inches off the floor you can still walk along it easily though you may be a tad more careful. Now, instead, I place it on two chairs; you begin to feel nervous. I take you and the plank outside and have it placed at roof height from the corner of the building to the corner of the next building. Neither you nor I would now risk walking along the plank. Why not? It’s still the same plank that presented no problems on the floor of my office. It is not the plank which changes but our response to the invitation to walk along it. So long as we think that everything will be fine, it is. Once we begin to have doubts, it’s not. And yet we’ve all seen photos from the 1920s showing steel erectors nonchalantly sitting on a metal girder several hundred feet in the air, eating their lunch. They know and have fully assimilated the knowledge that it is the same girder that it was when it was still on the ground. The bull is the one who determines what your experience will be; you are the one who determines what your experience with the plank will be. Where is the relevance of all this? If you suffer anxiety and phobia, the objects of your response are planks, not bulls. Change your attitude to the plank, and your behaviour towards it inevitably changes too. Whereas, no matter how well you convince yourself that a bull is a lovely, gentle, much misunderstood creature who just needs to be shown a little affection, the bull will still kill you if you trespass on its territory.

What If.......?

What If…….? The value of fear and imagination working harmoniously together is that we are able to learn from situations and respond appropriately if they occur again in the future. This goes all the way back to our primitive origins as a species. We learned that certain animals, places and people were dangerous and had to be approached cautiously and in the right way; some were simply best avoided completely. If experience has shown us that a hostile tribe lives in the valley over the ridge, then that valley is best avoided. This brings us to what psychologists have identified as two particular types of learning; approach and avoidance. The two are very different and for very good reason. Think of living in a hostile world. Think, too, of the saying that fools rush in where angels fear to tread. If you rush into a new situation, you may not survive it. Better to approach slowly and cautiously. If you are in any doubt, back off and review the situation before venturing further. Little by little you reassure yourself that it is safe to go into the situation. Is there a bear sleeping in the cave? Just in case, do nothing that might awaken it. Evident danger on the other hand demands a rapid response. Get out quickly - and stay out. Looking at that the other way round. If you have encountered something scary the instant response is to avoid it in future. No second or third tries. It’s dangerous; stay away. It takes a long time to learn that in fact your experience was a one off and it is actually OK to return to that place or activity. They say that if you fall off a horse the best thing is to get back on as quickly as possible to recover your confidence. Easier said than done. We have been talking so far of actual situations which arise and how the responses that we have learned have survival value. That is what our brains have evolved to deal with, real, actual, imminent threats to our survival. Unfortunately, it is the only mechanism that we have. If the threat is only hypothetical, we still react as if it were real. This is where the combination of fear and imagination becomes toxic. Our mind and body come to a state of arousal in order to deal with something which is not happening - but which might. The result is anxiety which can be very mild, will the bus be late, for instance, or can be extreme; if I try to fly to somewhere the plane might crash. Or the lift might get stuck between floors and I’ll be trapped. Combine that strong anxiety with avoidance learning and thus are born panics and phobias. An example may be helpful. A person is standing at the bus stop one morning on the way to work when suddenly they feel dizzy and light headed, they are shaky and breathless. Somehow they manage to get onto the bus, go to work and do whatever they have to; the feeling has passed. But that is not the end of it. The following morning as they prepare to leave the house, the thought hits them, “I hope I don’t get that feeling again today.” Immediately they feel a little pang of anxiety, which prompts them to think, “Actually I don’t feel too good now.” On the way to the bus stop the anxiety builds, and by the time the bus arrives they struggle to get on it. The day after is worse, as is the day after that. They have taken the first steps to becoming agoraphobic. What caused the original experience? They ate out with friends the previous evening and unknowingly ate a dodgy prawn which showed itself the following morning at the bus stop. They didn’t eat any more dodgy prawns, but since they hadn’t made that connection, it didn’t matter. The seed was sown, and the rest followed. When there is a real, identifiable threat we focus on that. We either fight and overcome it or we run from it, and that is an end to it. One way or another we deal with it and then our system returns to normal. If we get the feelings, but can’t identify the cause there is nothing to deal with and so the state persists and itself frightens us. Unconsciously, we cast around for a cause and that leads us inevitably into asking a fateful question, “What if……..?” Acute anxiety may be described as having a sense of deep foreboding in certain situations. We fear that in such a situation something awful and overpowering will happen to us. And we build a self-fulfilling prophecy. Fear serves a useful purpose; anxiety never does. Well, I hope I have showed how anxiety develops; it is a learned response. Fortunately, if we can learn to react in a particular way, we can also learn how not to react that way.

The Bastard Offspring Of Fear And Imagination

That is what anxiety is; the child of two important human capacities, the ability to recognise and respond to a dangerous situation, and the ability to create pictures in our mind that allow us to to preview situations and plan accordingly. So if I am crossing a busy road and suddenly hear the sound of squealing tyres as a car comes straight towards me, fear impels me at speed out of its path and to safety. Alternatively, if I am attacked by a mugger, I fight back to overcome him. A mechanism as old as humanity itself, often referred to as the ‘fight or flight’ mechanism. Psychologists refer to all animals being at any moment in one of two states; the state of rest, or the state of arousal. ‘Rest’ doesn’t mean sitting or lying down doing nothing. It means that everything around us is fine, so we can simply get on with the business of living. ‘Arousal” on the other hand, means that we have detected a potential threat or problem and have switched to an alertness which allows us to take whatever action may be necessary. To make that switch the bloodstream is flooded with the hormone adrenalin which increases the heart rate, prompts the lungs to pull in air in greater quantities, andtexses the appropriate muscles. At the same time blood is redirected from the brain and the digestive organs to the major muscles which can then be supplied with a rich supply of the oxygen they need for action. The threat is reacted to, the danger passes, and now another hormone, acetylcholine, flows into the bloodstream to mop up all the adrenalin which is no longer needed, and the organism returns to a state of rest. All of this happens incredibly rapidly (the adrenalin is already on its way before we have even had a chance to make any conscious decisions) because an imminent threat may be the end of us if we don’t respond quickly enough. Imagination allows us to conjure up images which save us having to directly experience whatever it is that we want to review. If I want to decided what to do with the approaching weekend, and the choice is between a long walk in the countryside or a day at the beach, I picture each with my imagination and can imagine how each would feel and which would better suit my mood. I don’t have to go into the countryside to rule it out, nor do I have to go and see how the beach feels in order to choose it. But that is what most animals would have to do. Almost certainly many animals have a limited ability to do something like this - chimpanzees and ravens, for instance can look at a stick or a twig and see that it can be used to reach something otherwise beyond their grasp - but it is very highly developed in humans. It is one of the things that has allowed us to develop to the intellectual level we enjoy. Each of these two characteristics is a valuable and necessary part of our armoury for successfully living in the world. Trouble starts when the two come together and produce a third, anxiety.