| Overcoming Fear |
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Page 1 of 2 In a deadly crisis, fear can hijack your mind. Here's how to fight back. 
Photo by Mark Hooper
Koller, 50, and his 29-year-old son were on a three-week hunting trip to Caribou Targhee National Forest, in southeastern Idaho. Hours earlier, the two had sat down in the brush a quarter-mile apart. It was 8 A.M., and it had been a quiet day so far. The radio crackled again: Another cub had emerged from the undergrowth. And then the cubs’ mother appeared. By now there was an urgency in the younger man’s voice: “Dad, she’s seen me! She’s on me!” Koller sprinted toward his son’s screams, stopping 15 yards from Jason’s hiding place. A 200-pound black bear had his son backed against a stand of trees and was clawing and biting him. Jason’s clothes were shredded, and blood covered his face. Koller raised his bow, but the bear was in line with his son: no shot. The young man screamed again. “Get her off, Dad!” “I started hollering. I couldn’t think of anything else to do,” Koller says. The bear wheeled, saw him, and charged. Koller drew back the bow, looking for a shot. “I’ve never experienced anything like that,” says Koller. “Every bit of energy I had was focused on placing that shot. It was like, I’ve got to kill that bear.” Anyone who leads an active outdoor life has brushed up against it at one time or another—the rising fear that takes hold of us when we face the prospect of imminent death. At its worst, extreme fear can become a sort of mental coup d’état in which irrational terror overwhelms our self-control: the scuba diver who panics at 60 feet and bolts for the sur- face; the climber who finds himself frozen on a difficult pitch; the skier who gets sketched at the top of a steep couloir. In each case, an ancient but powerful fear circuitry has kicked into action, producing a fight-or-flight response to help us survive danger. But in moments of crisis it can hijack your brain and put you at even greater risk. “Under high levels of stress, you resort to preprogrammed things like freezing or running away,” says Yale University psychiatry professor Charles A. Morgan. “That’s OK if you’re being chased by a lion, but not if you’re driving a car or hanging off a rock ledge.” You can refine and develop the ways you respond to fear, which could one day save your life. Some advice for keeping your rebel brain under control: |
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