How Afraid is Afraid Enough?

How much fear do we need to keep us safe?

This depends on how well each of our amygdala's are functioning and what we mean by safe.

The amygdala is the fear center of our brain. It is wired into our nervous system for the purpose of recognizing and evaluating threats to our safety, security, and survival.

It would seem the greatest barrier to understanding where to place our fear during this once-in-a-century pandemic is that what’s being asked of us is not likely to make our amygdalas catch fire. Therefore we cannot rely only on our body’s fear-response system to do all of the work for us.

We are not all going to die from this novel coronavirus. Nor will even a majority of us die from it. The question is how many of us will die and how many of those deaths will truly have been preventable.

The amygdala behaves like the gatekeeper to higher brain functioning that some say define us as humans - reason, compassion, empathy, imagination. Everything we encounter must get past the amygdala first, before we are granted access to these species-defining capacities. It’s like a safety override for the brain. When danger is perceived, all essential life functions operate, perhaps even go into overdrive, but access to the frontal cortex is essentially closed. And for good reason. We don’t need our creative brains searching through the most appropriately beautiful or ruthlessly philosophical treatise on the nature of life when response time is critical.

Social distancing is rather straight forward epidemiologically - keep your distance so you don’t get sick or get others sick. But that’s not the sum total of what’s being asked of us. Once we learn that everyone is not going to die, even that most of us are not in mortal danger, most amygdalas reopen the gates to the rest of our brain. At this point, we have the choice to activate other brain functions or to walk away and renew our subscription to “don’t tread on me.” Some not only continue to refuse to distance from one another, but are now actively gathering to protest...their right to gather. For others, once their automatic responses have turned off (at least theoretically) they are left with more complex decisions to make.

The social implications of this pandemic require an inclination towards complexity that is lost on those overly or insufficiently frightened. Too much fear than we collapse into worry, suspicion, even paranoia believing the world is even more dangerous than we already assumed. This produces hoarding and induces protecting ourselves at all cost. When we are in too much fear, everyone and everything that is not me or mine is my enemy.

If we are insufficiently frightened with too little fear, it is easy to operate out of selfishness and arrogance seeing this whole debacle as nothing more than an inconvenience blown out of proportion by people who think they are smarter than us and enjoy telling us what to do. A commonplace narrative today that also functions as the hallmark of particular political movements.

To reiterate briefly the basics of epidemiology we are all being asked to learn right now: the more contact between people increases the rate of infection which means statistically more deaths. This is particularly tricky because many people are carrying the virus but are currently asymptomatic, showing no signs of being sick. The more cases of infection we have, means more resources will be needed. When too many infections occur too quickly, resources are strained and some sick people won’t get the resources they need, because the supply isn’t large enough to meet a rapid increase in demand, or at least it wasn’t initially. This means more deaths are prevented when there are enough resources and there are fewer cases of infection and this only happens when there is less public, social, and personal contact between people.

We are being asked to continue suspending our usual activities and to stay at home because we want our health care systems to not have people dying in the hallways because there are not enough resources to attend to those who need life-saving care. This type of complexity doesn’t trigger most amygdalas. Which is fine as long as this news gets past those amygdalas and triggers a reasoned or compassionate response instead.

For as straight forward as the above scenario may seem to some, in order to follow its logic, we have to be willing to trust either math and/or experts in subjects we know very little about. However, if you are living in too much fear, then your math brain doesn’t work. And if your fear isn’t activated at all, you’ll see no point in doing math at all. Which also is fine, as long as you believe other people knowing more than you is not a threat and you’re willing to listen to them when they say, “your behavior will make a difference.” However, it seems a larger than helpful portion of the population is not inclined toward math and currently is predisposed to feeling like they should not be told what to do, and experts aren’t to be trusted. This seems to include people who currently hold incredible amounts of power.

Determining the line of diminishing returns for fear in our current pandemic induced socially-distanced state is crucial to how we get to the other side. Too little fear and nothing is activated, we do nothing differently and our complacency puts ourselves and others at risk because nothing ever engaged our compassion or reason. Too much fear and then everything is on high alert, we have no access to our capacities for compassion or reason, both of which we need right now, so we spin our wheels preparing for an apocalypse that does not resemble our current crisis.

It seems like enough of us are doing the math or listening to medical experts to already have weathered much of the storm. We will pray that mathematically, it is enough to get us all the way through. May we remember that compassion is always needed, perhaps particularly for those who currently refuse to distance, because neither fear nor reason have worked thus far.