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:
TRAIN> The more afraid you are, the less the higher-reasoning portions of your brain function. Don’t expect to be able to figure out those inflatable-raft instructions while your sailboat is sinking. On the other hand, fear can actually help improveyour performance at tasks you’ve learned well. Green Beret Rob Smithee (for his privacy, his name has been changed) recalls an incident during his service in Mogadishu when he saw, out of the corner of his eye, a Somali approaching him with a hatchet. Before he was consciously aware he was being attacked, he unholstered his pistol and shot the attacker. “That was after I’d fired literally thousands of rounds on a firing range and thousands more in high-stress training,” he says.
DRESS FOR THE CONDITIONS> The physical stress of cold or heat adds to the psychological burden of fear. In a study of scuba divers who had panic attacks, William Morgan, former director of the University of Wisconsin–Madison Sport Psychology Laboratory, found that not wearing a wetsuit in cold water increased the likelihood of panicking.
BE PREPARED> Recognize that each time you step into a hazardous situation, this could be the time things go south. Being aware of the danger will help keep you from getting overwhelmed. Earl Wooden was trying for a speed record on the Bonneville Salt Flats when his tire blew at over 300 miles per hour, sending his car sailing nearly 400 feet through the air. Primed for such a catastrophe, Wooden hit the parachute switch in a fraction of a second. “The parachute saved my life,” he says. “If it hadn’t come out, I would have tumbled for another mile.”
TAKE CHARGE> Concentrating on productive activity helps calm fear. When Art Davidson and his buddies were trapped by a storm in an ice cave atop Mount McKinley, days went by as they suffered through hypothermia and starvation. They kept themselves going by making plans about the only thing they could control: their meager rations. When the food ran out, they found another problem to worry about: finding a cache nearby. By stringing a series of small hopes together, they survived.
DO IT AGAIN> Repeatedly exposing yourself to fear can raise your threshold for panic. Rob Smithee’s fear of heights led him to take up climbing and parachuting. “I’m still scared every time I climb,” he says. “Courage is one of those things that builds up one step at a time.” And it feels great. According to Lilianne R. Mujica-Parodi, director of the Laboratory for the Study of Emotion and Cognition at Stony Brook University School of Medicine, “People enjoy taking risks not because they like the excitatory feeling”— the adrenaline rush—“but because they love the feeling afterward,” when the body’s system for calming itself swings into overdrive.
Nolan Koller’s fear circuitry helped save his life, and his son’s. The neuromodulators epinephrine and norepinephrine energized his muscles to fight, while a cognitive response called “attention narrowing” blocked out all distractions. Crucially, Koller was able to keep from panicking, even as the bear barreled straight at him.
An arrow isn’t like a round of buckshot; it has virtually no stopping power on its own. Koller had to place the arrow in exactly the right place, which is no easy feat when the target is moving fast through thick foliage and trees. But Koller waited for his shot, and then took it. The arrowhead sliced through one of the sow’s ears, burrowed through her thick hide, and severed her spinal cord. While the half-paralyzed bear pawed at the ground, Koller checked his son’s condition, then dis- patched the animal with another arrow.
Jason was badly hurt. The bear had mangled his legs, cutting them all the way down to the femoral artery. Medevacked out of the forest, he spent three days in the hospital and made a full recovery.
“I’ve hunted over 30 years with a bow,” Koller says. “I’ve taken a lot of shots in high-pressure situations. But I’ve never made a shot like that before. We had to have someone watching us that day.”
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