The Vine

Gregory Berns has written a fantastic piece in today’s NYT about the neuroscience of fear and its paralyzing effects on our judgment, decision-making, risk assessment, and willingness to explore new opportunities. In other words, its tendency to promote a bunker mentality and stifle the very traits needed to overcome a crisis.

He writes:

We are caught in a spiral in which we are so scared of losing our jobs, or our savings, that fear overtakes our brains. And while fear is a deep-seated and adaptive evolutionary drive for self-preservation, it makes it impossible to concentrate on anything but saving our skin by getting out of the box intact.

Ultimately, no good can come from this type of decision-making. Fear prompts retreat. It is the antipode to progress. Just when we need new ideas most, everyone is seized up in fear, trying to prevent losing what we have left.

Furthermore, there is a dangerous snowball effect to fear-based behavior. “[W]hen our brains sense pain, or anticipate loss, we tend to hold onto what we have,” he observes. “When everyone does this at once, the result is a downward economic spiral.”

Clearly this is not a time to throw caution to the wind. But it is a time to be exploring and preparing for the opportunities that will emerge from this mess. Because two things are certain: 1) they will emerge, and 2) they will not look the same as they did before.

The only way this is going to happen is by distancing ourselves from irrational fear. That means tuning out fearmongering media. It means disabling the stock market widget on your desktop. It means prioritizing and promoting a culture of exploration within your organization, where new idea-sharing is safe and encouraged—and idea-hoarding is taboo.

And it means, above all else, maintaining a rational, long-term view of risk and opportunity…even when our brain’s wiring tempts us to do the opposite.

NB: Berns, a pioneer in the emerging field of neuroeconomics, has also written a fascinating book on this topic.