People often talk about how much they love adrenaline sports without realising that the adrenaline of fear is mostly counter-productive. Sure, a rise in blood glucose, some mild tachycardia might help if the exposure is brief and avoidable, such as jumping away from a snake, but long term exposure to adrenaline (and it’s concomitant hormone, cortisol) is destructive to both mental and physical health.
One of the biggest problems of adrenaline is that it makes objective assessment of risk near impossible. Once, leading a bolted (sport) route in Canada, I worked myself into such a state of fear that I almost passed out, even though I was on a well bolted slab route where it was safe to fall. Similarly, I’ve frozen when leading rock routes unable to visualise the climbing sequence in a series of holds (something I can normally easily do) because I have become so afraid of falling.
As the years of the pandemic roll on (no-one can agree on whether or not we are still in a pandemic, if we ever were), I’ve become increasingly concerned about how media shapes our views of the world. Most individuals and even government agencies have moved to a “post-pandemic” phase and have left behind some of the more extreme mitigation measures that were enforced in previous years. Some commentators, however, continue to call for a return to stringent mitigation measures, and many people still support these views. It is abundantly clear at this point, that neither side of the debate expresses the “scientific truth”. Sidebar: my rule of thumb is to discount anyone that utters this ominous phrase “the science is settled.” Science is a method which can only support or refute a particular theory.
Years ago I came across a study that indicated that the more TV crime shows an individual watched the more dangerous they rated their neighbourhoods and the less likely participants would be to walk at night. In 2020, a very simple survey from the Civil Unrest and Presidential Election Study had fascinating results when participants were asked four basic questions. Two questions were used to assess how far to the left or right participants were on the political and social spectrum, and then participants were asked to estimate how many unarmed black people were killed by police in 2019. Participants on the far left tended to overestimate the number of unarmed black people killed by police by an order of magnitude. Somewhere between 13 and 27 unarmed black people were killed by police in 2019. 53.5% of the self-identified “very liberal” respondents estimated that police had killed upwards of 1,000 unarmed black people in 2019.
What does all this have to do with adrenaline? Well, if you are continuously exposed to media that is mostly doom, gloom and over-inflated risks, you might find yourself fearful of the future, the environment, people around you, even the air that you breathe. At that point, adrenaline and cortisol are activated, and while both those hormones are excellent for jumping out of the way of a Death Adder, continual fear, anxiety, and apprehension makes it incredibly difficult to evaluate risk clearly. You could find yourself so scared that you almost black out on a rock climbing route or thinking that the police are routinely shooting unarmed black people.
Days 30 and 31 of the Hard Things project are now over. On Day 30 I did 100 squats to the floor in sets of ten. To be honest, I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t have to be winched up on squat number 99 like Pelosi and Schumer were after taking a knee. And, day 31 was a ten minute plank. Now, lets all take a knee to remember the planking craze.
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