FEARVANA: The Revolutionary Science of How to Turn Fear into Health, Wealth and Happiness
232
FEARVANA: The Revolutionary Science of How to Turn Fear into Health, Wealth and Happiness
232Paperback
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Overview
Weaving together inspiring stories, in-depth research in neuroscience, psychology and spirituality, practical insight, and actionable strategies, Fearvana teaches the science of how to transform all your seemingly negative emotions into health, wealth and happiness.
Fearvana’s revolutionary approach shatters conventional wisdom, giving you the tools to leverage your fear, stress and anxiety to accomplish anything you set your mind to.
By laying out clear, proven and actionable steps to find bliss through suffering, Fearvana will help you develop an unstoppable mind. This is the essential guide for you to overcome any barrier standing between you are now and where you want to be
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781630476052 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Morgan James Publishing |
| Publication date: | 10/10/2017 |
| Pages: | 232 |
| Sales rank: | 507,207 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Dissatisfied with outside treatment, he healed himself and has since pushed his limits in the most hostile, and awe-inspiring environments on the planet, from climbing mountains in the Himalayas to scuba diving into underwater caves to dragging a 190 pound sled 350 miles across the second largest icecap in the world in temperatures as low as -40 degrees. After quitting a corporate job, he then built a global business helping people live limitless lifestyles. His work helps fund his nonprofit, the Fearvana Foundation. Akshay and his work have been featured in places like CNN, Fast Company, Entrepreneur.com, Forbes, INC, Runners World, Fox, ABC, NBC, CBS, The Washington Post, Military Times and many other media outlets around the world.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Making Fear Your Friend
* * *
"What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do."
— Tim Ferriss
Perched behind an M240 machine gun, the gunner opened fire, showering nine hundred and fifty rounds a minute at the speeding vehicle in a desperate attempt to save his brothers.
Two men in a pitch-black sedan raced toward the squad of Marines, doing everything they could to avoid the hail of gunfire raining down on them. They swerved across the road. They crouched beneath the windshield. Yet, they did not slow down.
BOOM!
They collided with one of the Humvees. The force of the impact launched three Marines thirty feet away from the havoc. Those were the lucky ones.
Two vehicles, now entangled in a fiery wreckage, spun around in circles, spraying fuel in every direction, a merry-go-round of mayhem. Flames engulfed everything: the messengers of death, the mangled metal frame of the Humvee, and the two Marines still inside it.
From less than a hundred yards away, the gunner witnessed the entire collision, but could do nothing to prevent it. In one single, life-altering moment when, as he said, "Life lost all its innocence," Lance Corporal Dale stood powerless against the dark hands of destiny. Despite the inevitability of the disaster, he now had a choice to make.
He chose to act. Dale leapt from his turret and moved cautiously toward the burning wreck, expecting a second explosion from a possible bomb on board the black sedan. Two charred corpses entombed in the fiery destruction sent a clear signal to Dale. They were no longer a threat.
Dale moved on to the Humvee. By the time he arrived, the other Marines had pulled the passenger out of the vehicle. Only the driver remained. Dale and his buddy Peter knew what needed to be done. They ran into the fire. With every effort, they were beaten back by the venomous smoke poisoning their lungs, piping hot metal burning their hands, and blazing heat scorching their bodies.
The heat then ignited the live ammunition in the vehicle. The rounds exploded with ferocity, bouncing onto every surface obstructing their path. They still kept fighting. After what felt like hours, Dale and Peter managed to pry open the door and get the driver out.
Through the blood and smoke stains on the driver's face, Dale recognized his twenty-three-year-old friend Greg. He remembered speaking to him just a few hours earlier. But this was no time for emotion to cloud action. Dale began the ABCs on Greg. He checked the Airway. It was filled with blood. He looked for signs of Breathing. He saw none. He searched for a pulse to determine blood Circulation. He found nothing.
While the other Marines called in a medical evacuation, Dale initiated CPR on Greg. There was still hope. Spitting Greg's blood out of his own mouth, Dale continued mouth-to-mouth resuscitation while Peter followed his lead with chest compressions.
Life started flowing through Greg again. His skin color indicated oxygen was entering his body. A faint pulse returned. He even attempted to breathe. Determined to keep Greg alive, Dale persevered in his efforts until the UH-64 helicopter arrived at the landing zone. Along with a handful of Marines, Dale grabbed the stretcher and ran toward "the bird."
Instinctively, they leaned over Greg to protect him from the dust and debris whipped up by the helicopter blades. Within minutes, they got him and the other wounded Marines on board. The loud roar echoed into the Iraqi desert as the chopper flew to what they all hoped would be salvation.
Dale's body and mind finally settled. "I was lost in shock. There was no sound. Everything was muffled, like I was underwater. I knelt down in the middle of it all, and my body started trembling," he wrote in his memoir The Green Marine: An Irishman's War in Iraq. "I tried to focus on praying and looked off into the desert because it was only there, where there was nothing, that I could find any solace."
As the rest of the Marines cleared the scene, a report came over the radio, announcing Greg was still alive. They clung to a glimmer of hope. With a sense of calm restored to his environment, Dale washed the blood off his face. It had soaked into his skin and crusted behind his fingernails.
Half an hour later, another report came in over the radio. Greg did not make it.
Fear: The Foundation from Which Life Springs Forth
"Survival prospects are poor for an animal that is not suspicious of novelty."
— Dr. Daniel Kahneman
Evolution has blessed you with not one but two brains that work together to shape your experience of life: the animal brain and the human brain. At the base of the animal brain is your brainstem. Like you, all animals have the ability to address basic survival needs, such as eating, drinking, reproducing, regulating the essential functions of the body, and defending themselves from external threats. The brainstem's sole purpose is to keep us alive and thriving as a species. The needs it addresses are instinctual and require no conscious processing.
The brainstem is the doorway between you and the rest of the world. It receives input in the form of electrical signals from your all your senses and sends that information to the rest of the animal brain, otherwise known as the limbic system. This part of your brain is responsible for your emotions and the habitual patterns that run your life. The animal brain uses everything it has learned from your past to act on its own without your awareness. It wouldn't make much sense for us to have to stop and consciously process the act of walking or brushing our teeth every morning, would it?
To optimize functionality, your animal brain has a gate that acts like a guard against external stimuli. This guard stands on duty 24/7 and filters out irrelevant stimuli from entering your brain so you can focus on what matters at any given moment, like the words on this page instead of the sensation of your toes. Unless you choose to activate it, this bodyguard operates from outside your conscious chain of command.
Conscious thought gives you the power to seize control of the guard and, in turn, sculpt your entire animal brain. Consciousness is the ability to process our experience of life, which means we can step outside of ourselves to think about the act of thinking. This enhanced intelligence lives in the human brain, otherwise known as the prefrontal cortex. Based on your survival needs, the guard decides what stimuli to allow into your human brain. If something is perceived as a threat, this bodyguard sends you into "fight-or-flight" mode. If not, it is allowed to move into your higher consciousness for further processing.
As Dr. Joseph LeDoux, from the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety at NYU, says, "Fear is the most primitive and basic emotion. It occurs when we encounter danger. An animal can put off the good stuff — eating, drinking, sex — for days. But responding to danger must be immediate, or there will be no more eating, drinking, or sex."
Survival takes the top spot on our brain's priority list. Fear is the fuel that allows our brain to execute its most important function and rapidly respond to threats. To build a positive relationship with fear, we must first accept it is a natural, human response to the unknown that occurs beyond our conscious control.
Whenever you take a risk or experience anything new, your brain asks itself, is this dangerous? It has no previous reference to compare the new experience to, so it doesn't know if this is something that will kill you. "Is this good or is this bad? This is the most basic question the limbic area addresses," says Dr. Daniel Siegel, a psychiatry professor at UCLA. Based on the answer, your body and mind react.
Dale's brain knew everything happening around him warranted fear, so it sent him into "fight-or-flight" mode. "First thing you recognize is that this situation is dangerous. A normal person should flee. Flight takes over. But in a nanosecond, you realize that this is a silly thing to do," Dale said of his experience.
Let's see how this played out inside his brain. His thalamus, the receiver of all external stimuli, deemed the situation to be life threatening. This kicked the rest of his brain into survival mode, shutting down certain parts of his rational, human brain that were no longer needed to keep him alive in that moment.
With clarity on where to devote its energy, his brain sent the information coming in from his senses to his amygdala, the fear center of the brain, which stores fear memories and determines threats, along with the hypothalamus, which activates the "fight-or-flight" response. They started pumping out an invaluable chemical cocktail of adrenaline, endorphins, testosterone, dopamine, oxytocin, and cortisol. This narrowed his attention, giving him the ability to filter everything else out and focus on the task at hand. The cocktail also ensured his metabolism went into high alert so he could handle the danger in front of him. As a result, Dale leapt from the turret before he was even consciously aware of it.
The presence of fear created the necessary conditions that allowed him to face it. Fear became his ally. Without it, rationality would have kept him imprisoned in inaction. As UCLA neurobiologist Michael Fanselow says, fear is "far, far more powerful than reason. It evolved as a mechanism to protect us from life-threatening situations, and from an evolutionary standpoint there's nothing more important than that."
Since our brain always chooses fear — ahead of reason — to keep us alive, evolutionarily speaking, it would only make sense that the brain finds a way to harness that fear. Otherwise, why would it show up in the first place? I have always wondered how fear could possibly be considered evil when it clearly is our best friend. It prevents us from dying!
Such an important job requires an outstanding skill set. Our brain is more than up to the task. It can thrive in the presence of fear and transform us into unstoppable warriors who never retreat from a fight. We just have to condition it for battle. Fear gave Dale courage, but during that same incident, it paralyzed another man from taking action. Fear can help us or hinder us, depending on how we perceive it, how we train in it, and who we choose to be outside of it.
Dale was a Marine at heart. The generations that came before him served in the military. He grew up with the desire to fight for something greater than himself. His self-identity was forged by the spirit of a warrior, so when fear found him, fight took over. Dale had training as a Marine and an EMT. This gave his animal brain references to recognize patterns in his environment and respond to them accordingly. Through practice and an unwavering belief in himself, he trained his brain to subconsciously choose to fight in the face of fear.
But fight was not the only force at play here. I put "fight-or-flight" in quotes, because it is a common misconception that those are the only two responses to fear or stress. In reality, we have the power to choose from a variety of options.
When the Humvee exploded, the emotional connection that bonded Dale with his fellow Marine released "the love hormone," oxytocin, into his brain. He recognized there was something more important than his own survival. His animal brain heard this message and directed him to run into the burning vehicle.
Along with fight, Dale's actions included what is known as the tend-and-befriend response. This triggers a desire to protect and care for the people we love. Depending on the scenario, we can choose how we want fear or stress to help us. Our weapons of choice include options like fight, flight, freeze, tend-and-befriend, or learn-and-grow, which is when we find the lessons in our experience to build a new and improved self. Initially, choosing a response requires conscious activation, but in time, these responses can become automatic, as they did for Dale.
By inoculating his brain to the experience of heightened fear, he was able to feel it, experience it, and act in the face of it. The problem is that when it comes to fear, our brain is designed for the kind of life-or-death situation Dale encountered in Iraq, not for the developed world where survival is no longer a daily concern. "Our brains were simply not shaped by life in the world as we know it now," writes Daniel Gardner in The Science of Fear. "They are the creation of the Old Stone Age. And since our brains really make us what we are, the conclusion to be drawn from this is unavoidable and a little unsettling. We are cavemen. Or cave-persons."
The experience of Fearvana reconnects us to this archaic world of survival our brain is designed for, but no longer living in. Today our lives have become extremely complicated, with more distractions and choices than ever before. Our brains are just not ready for such a complex world. "This ancient fear system is not perfectly adapted to modern life," echoes LeDoux. "It's being co-opted by all the non-life-threatening stresses we have in our lives, and there are a lot of them."
Without the simplicity of having to worry only about death, we now have the luxury, and burden, of many other things to worry about. Our cave-person-like brains don't know how to handle these daily concerns, so it does what it knows to do and reacts to non-life-threatening situations as if they were a saber-toothed tiger. As a result, fear lurks behind anything and everything, causing us mental anguish.
When we get jealous of someone flirting with our spouse, deep down we are afraid we will lose her. When we get angry at a child for staying out late, we are afraid something will happen to him. When we feel guilt for doing something wrong, we are either afraid we will get caught or afraid of how the action will affect our sense of self-identity. When we feel stress before a test or job interview, we are afraid we will do poorly.
At the root of every emotion holding us back, we will often find a hidden fear. It is no surprise, then, that the number one reason why people say they are not living the life they want is fear. When fear shows up inside us, it then produces an associated stress response as well. Fears often present themselves as stress, or even anxiety. Essentially the same neurological pattern occurs for all three emotions.
The trigger which activates each of them creates the subtle distinctions between the three, but they are closely related. Shifting our mindset on one of these so-called negative emotions will allow us to do the same for the others. Moving forward, whenever you read the words fear, stress, or anxiety, choose the one you feel most applies to your situation and apply the lessons accordingly. Either way, though, regardless of what we call the emotion, it is not the problem. It's our response to that emotion that causes the worst mental ailment of all: second dart syndrome.
The Myth of Free Will
"Almost the entirety of what happens in your mental life is not under your conscious control."
— Dr. David Eagleman
Think of someone you hate or disagree with. What if you were born from that person's parents with those exact genes? And what if you had the same experiences of life? Would you be any different? Did he or she even have a choice to become that person? Did you have a choice to become who you are today?
Take a more routine example to illustrate the nature of free will: think about what it's like driving to work. Do you have to consciously process the route, or does the journey seem to go by on autopilot? This kind of automatic processing shows up everywhere because, like it or not, you can't control most of what happens in your brain. Almost all your thoughts and emotions are simply the result of conditioning and habit. As neuroscientist Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz says, "You really can't decide or determine what will initially grab your attention — your brain does." Our animal brain makes the decision without our conscious approval.
How does it decide? It chooses our reaction to events based on past patterns, implicit memory, genes, and pretty much everything that has brought you to where you are today. Dr. Benjamin Libet demonstrated our lack of free will by using EEG to prove activity could be detected in the brain's motor cortex close to three hundred milliseconds before a person consciously made the decision to move.
In another experiment, researchers found two separate areas of the brain held information on their participants' decision to hit a button a whopping seven to ten seconds before that decision was made consciously. Another group of researchers was able to predict their participants' movements seven hundred milliseconds before it occurred with up to 80 percent accuracy by tracking the activity in the brain.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Fearvana"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Akshay Nanavati.
Excerpted by permission of Morgan James Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword His Holiness the Dalai Lama xiii
Introduction: From the Brink of Suicide to the Science of Fearvana xiv
Section 1 Awareness and Acceptance 1
Chapter 1 Making Fear Your Friend 3
Chapter 2 Why We Do the Things We Do 23
Chapter 3 Our Only Real Freedom 34
Chapter 4 Becoming Superhuman 49
Chapter 5 Time Traveling to Change Your Past 66
Section 2 Action 79
Chapter 6 The Birth of Fearvana 81
Chapter 7 The Mindset of Fearvana 91
Chapter 8 The Experience of Fearvana 108
Chapter 9 The Path of Fearvana 125
Section 3 Awakening 141
Chapter 10 The Gift of Suffering 143
Chapter 11 The Most Important Habit of All 163
Chapter 12 Love, Faith, and Fear 184
Acknowledgments 197
About the Author 200