Failure, Fear and the Panic Button
On this page 5 headings
Start here You have a class in 30 minutes. It’s raining hard. You park your car and see the back lights won’t switch off. The battery will drain! Your heart races. What do you do? The answer depends on whether you panic or pause.
Denial wastes time
Lecture example — the promotion that didn’t come A young professor was sure he’d be promoted. Everyone thought so. One of the interviewers was even his old friend. But he wasn’t promoted. He went into denial: “How can they pick others and not me?” He spoke badly of the people who were promoted, and even of his friend. A whole year passed with nothing done. He was promoted the next time, but that year was lost.
What should he have done? Accept it, find out what was missing, and prepare better.
Know what’s in your control:
- You control your preparation and effort.
- You don’t control the result once it’s out of your hands.
- If you’ve done your best, accept the result and learn from it.
Thomas Edison was asked about his many failed experiments for the light bulb. His idea: each one wasn’t a failure, it taught him one more material that didn’t work. Every failure brought success closer.
Fear of failure
We worry: “What if I fail the exam? What if I don’t get promoted?” Too much worry stops us from trying and steals our joy.
Everyday example: fear of water can stop you learning to swim. Face it, and you gain a skill that could save your life one day.
- Take calculated risks, ones you can manage.
- Don’t let one failure stay in your head. A cricket captain who keeps worrying about the last loss may lose the next match too.
The panic button: amygdala hijack
When we panic, a small part of the brain called the amygdala takes over. The thinking part of the brain (the neocortex) switches off. We get only three choices:
| F | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| Fight | Argue, shout, attack |
| Flight | Run away from the problem |
| Freeze | Get stuck, do nothing |
This is called an amygdala hijack. Decisions made in panic are often poor ones.
Three ways to keep the panic button far away
| Tool | What you do | Example |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Dry run | Practise the event before it happens, to catch problems early | Rehearsing a big event (did we keep water for the guest?); solving mock papers before an exam |
| 2. Pause | Stop for a moment. Let your heartbeat slow down and let the thinking brain return. | Works for panic, anxiety and anger |
| 3. Chess move | Like in chess, think about the next few moves: who might object, what could go wrong. Also ask: has this been done before? | His old director always asked these two questions |
Lecture example — how the car story ended The teacher paused. With 15 minutes left, he thought: the lights need the battery. So he drove the car home, removed one battery wire, and took his scooter to class, on time. The battery was saved and the mechanic could fix it later.
In one line: Accept results you can’t control and learn from them, don’t let fear stop you, and beat panic with a dry run, a pause, or a chess move. Exam words: denial, control vs no control, Edison’s experiments, fear of failure, calculated risk, amygdala hijack, fight-flight-freeze, neocortex, dry run, pause, chess move, precedent.