On the Isolating, Yet Connective Nature of Being Afraid

Why do we feel fear? What’s happening to our bodies when we do? Can we live without it? Should we? Eva Holland seeks answers in her just-released book Nerve: A Personal History Through the Science of Fear. (You can read an excerpt on The Tyee here.)

Holland guides readers through a dizzying gallery of fear-fuelled experiences — being immobilized by a fear of heights on a frozen creek waterfall, driving after successive near-fatal car accidents, confronting an all-encompassing, lifelong fear of her mother’s death. And with accessible science writing, she eases us into centuries of research on fear.

Fear, Holland finds, can sometimes put us in needless danger, while at other times it proves necessary for our survival. Through the book she works to overcome her fears but also tries to figure out when we should fight our fear responses and when to trust them.

Despite how irrational and embarrassing our responses to fear can seem at times (OK, most times), one can’t help but find this book’s deep wonder and appreciation of the human body infectious. While fear can feel isolating and we all experience it in different ways, it might be one of humanity’s most universal emotions and feelings. In that way, we are never alone.

Holland already had to brave her worst fears to write the book. Now she faces one more terrifying challenge: releasing a book in the midst of a global pandemic.

“It’s an interesting time to be putting a book out into the world,” Holland said from her home in Whitehorse, Yukon, where she works as a freelance writer. Her work has appeared in Pacific Standard, National Geographic News, The Walrus, Hazlitt and others.

“And it’s an interesting time to spend a lot of time thinking about fear and anxiety and panic and survival instincts.”

With launch parties on hold and readers unable to wander bookstores, now could be the worst time to try to sell a new book. But given the scary, lonely times and the book’s relevant subject matter, Holland’s got a bit of an edge.

Holland talked to us about the nature of fear and anxiety and her journey to understand and overcome them. This interview was edited for length and clarity.

The Tyee: What did you learn from this experience of facing your worst fears and your research into fear and anxiety? What kind of answers did you find at the end of your journey through this gauntlet of fear?

Eva Holland: I learned a lot of different things. I learned that changing my relationship with fear was more possible than I expected sometimes. When I first started the research and I pictured the ending of the book, I imagined having to write some pretty mushy, final thoughts about how it’s really all about coming to terms with the nature of your fearful existence or something like that. And there are elements of acceptance in what I learned, but I also was able to make more real change than I expected.

The therapy that I did for the traumatic memories from my car accidents was really effective, for instance, and there was a measurable change in how I responded after doing the therapy and a measurable change in my quality of life as a result. That was big. It was really heartening to see that change is possible.

But I also learned that you’re still you, you’re not going to just become a whole different person if you go through this process of trying to figure some of this stuff out. I’m still fundamentally a more cautious person than a lot of people I know, and I’m still nervous around heights despite everything that I did to improve the situation. It has improved; I’m just still not carefree around heights I would say.

You have a better understanding of why you’re fearful of things and you have a better way of dealing with them, but it doesn’t mean that you’re going to start jumping from hills now. It’s not like because you just finished this book that you’re suddenly a different person.

Exactly. And I do think understanding what’s happening in your mind, in your body, when you react to these things is helpful, to even be able to name it and see it and understand the process. For me, at least, it’s helpful — even if I can’t sort of dispel that fear or reaction, I at least understand what’s happening to me and can sort of see my way through it.

Why did you decide to write this book? It feels like a hellish experience to face all of the worst, nightmarish things in your life.

A few things contributed to my decision to write the book. The incident in the prologue, where I have that panic attack on an ice climbing trip, that was in February 2016, so about six months after my mom’s death. And that was when I really decided to try to understand fear for myself. I hadn’t thought of it as a work thing yet at that point, but I knew my mom’s death, for the reasons I explained in the book, had been this huge fear of mine.

By February I knew that I would do the work through the grief and that I was going to be OK. And I had this empowering feeling of having been through my worst fear and survived. So that gave me a sense that I had the ability to tackle this height situation and change it.

A couple of months later, in April, I had another book proposal that didn’t work out the way I hoped. The response my agent and I had gotten was that people like me and my writing but wanted something with broader, kind of more universal appeal. And so, I’m thinking, what do I know something about, what can I bring to the table as a person with some expertise or some experience that might have broad interest for a large swathe of people?

And I was actually driving on the highway at the end of April 2016 — I had gone to pick up my mom’s car to replace a car that I had crashed in January — and I was driving home on the highway thinking about this as a possible book idea, that this book is about different strands of fear. And then I crashed my mom’s car as well. It was my second rollover in three months. I was really lucky to be physically OK mostly, but the combination was quite psychologically damaging.

It was that night in the hospital in Fort Nelson, actually, that I decided to write this book for sure. I was like, “Yeah, well now I’ve got another fear to sort out.” Not to be too glib about it, but that’s when I decided, April 2016. And then it was two years after that before I got the book deal. It just took me a long time to complete the proposal.

I really like this particular quote that you have in your book: “Fear is an experience that unites us, even as, in the moment, it makes each of us feel alone.” Could you talk a little bit more about that?

Full credit to my book editor Nick Garrison for that one. That was partly his suggested insight, and when he said it, it made a lot of sense to me. When we’re afraid, we feel isolated and alone in our fears, and sometimes we are but often we aren’t. Fear is almost universal. You know, the one exception in chapter eight. [Chapter eight takes a look at Alex Honnold of Free Solo infamy.]

I think that it’s something we all experience, and we have different triggers and different ways of of handling it, but we all know what it feels like. And it’s easy to forget that, because we spend so much time hiding our fears from each other or trying to tough it out. It can seem like you’re the only one who’s afraid of stuff. And one thing that’s been interesting is, ever since I started working on this book, if I tell somebody at a party or something about what I’m working on, they say, “Oh, I’d be so interested to read that. I have a fear of sharks or heights, or balloons,” or whatever. Everybody has something and everybody has experiences with these feelings. So that’s been cool, to be reminded that some of this is really universal.

There’s a tension in the book where you’re seeing that fear lets you know when you’re in danger a lot of the time, but sometimes that fear is irrational and can actually put you in more danger. Could you talk a little bit more about that?

Yeah, the central dilemma of fear is when to trust it or not, because we know that it’s there officially to help us survive, that’s the point. But we also know that we can overreact and we can jump at shadows and we can be afraid of people and places and ideas that we shouldn’t be afraid of. And we can have irrational fear responses that we wish we hadn’t had.

That’s the crux of the thing, really: how do you figure out when to trust it and listen and when to shove it away and try to conquer it or push it down? I don’t think I’ve come up with a firm, broadly applicable answer, but I feel more confident now in my own assessment of when to listen to my fear. And that’s partly because I’ve done some work to tame some of my irrational responses. And now, for me, what I have to do is learn to trust my responses again because I spent so much time telling myself that they were lying to me, because they often were. It’s an interesting thing, and I think it’s something that everybody has to sort of figure out for themselves, but I hope that that the book gives people some ideas of how to go about doing that.

It sounds like the experience in the book didn’t really give you a clear answer, but it helped you sharpen your instincts when it comes to fears that are real and fears that might not be as real.

Yeah, exactly. I hope that it gives people a framework in which to think about these things. And you know, it’s not intended as self-help, exactly, but I hope that people think about their own circumstances as they’re reading about my experiences and what I learned from different researchers and maybe there’s something they can apply in their own life.

Do you think Nerve has something to say in this pandemic?

I hope so. I mean, it’s very much about the individual experience and people vary so much in how they’re handling this pandemic. I know some people are wanting to learn everything they can. You know, immerse themselves in information, and maybe for them learning more about what their bodies and minds are doing in response to frightening news and frightening circumstances is useful. Some people may not be in the mood to learn about how their fight or flight response works or that kind of thing, but I hope that if people are looking for that kind of connection, that they find it useful.

My favourite definition of fear from all my research was a 19th-century psychologist who called fear the anticipation of pain. And I think that’s where a lot of people are right now, particularly in Canada, as we sort of see what’s happening in other parts of the world and are bracing for things to get worse here. We’re all scared of what’s coming and we’re all sharing that fear right now, which is an interesting place for us to be. It’s a tough time, but also a good time to reach out to community.

Is there anything else you would like to mention?

I guess I would say that one thing working on the book taught me, that I don’t really make explicit in the text of the book itself, is just how much people helped me. People were amazing after my mom died, they were amazing about my car accidents, I got literal highway-side support from strangers who were wonderful and kind. My friends did a lot to help me try to deal with my fear of heights. So that was a real lesson for me, how much people were going to have my back, and it’s something that I’m holding on to now. And I hope other people are able to feel that sense of support from people around them too, even though we’re all physically distanced at the moment.