Fear inhibits learning. Research in neuroscience shows that fear consumes physiological resources, diverting them from parts of the brain that manage working memory and process new information. This impairs analytical thinking, creative insight and problem solving.

Here’s what they found. In the brains of the students who received negative feedback the sympathetic nervous system lit up. This is the “fight or flight” system, the system that mutes the other parts of the brain and thus allows us to focus only on the information most necessary to survive. When this part of the nervous system is triggered, your heart rate goes up, endorphins flood your body, your cortisol levels rise, and you tense for action. This is your brain on negative feedback: it responds as if to a threat, and it narrows its activity. The strong negative emotions produced by criticism “inhibits access to existing neural circuits and invokes cognitive, emotional, and perceptual impairment,” psychology and business professor Richard Boyatzis said in summarizing the researchers findings.

Negative feedback doesn’t enable learning. It systematically inhibits it and is, neurologically speaking, how to create impairment.

In the students who received attention focused on their dreams and how they might go about achieving them, however, the sympathetic nervous system was not activated. Instead it was the parasympathetic nervous system that lit up. This is sometimes referred to as the “rest and digest” system. To quote the researchers again: “[T]he Parasympathetic Nervous System . . . stimulates adult neurogenesis (i.e., growth of new neurons) . . . , a sense of well being, better immune system functioning, and cognitive, emotional, and perceptual openness.”

In other words, positive, future-focused attention gives your brain access to more regions of itself and thus sets you up for greater learning. We’re often told that the key to learning is to get out of our comfort zones, but this finding gives the lie to that particular chestnut—take us out of our comfort zones and our brains stop paying attention to anything other than surviving the experience. It’s clear that we learn most in our comfort zone, because that’s our strengths zone, where our neural pathways are most concentrated. It’s where we’re most open to possibility, and it’s where we are most creative and insightful.

Rather than informing an appropriate course of action, the more immediate, visceral, intensely powerful, emotional - possibly blunter - response can overwhelm the slower, more elaborately calibrated, evaluative system. We become paralysed by fear. We lose a sense of control and panic ensues. Our thoughts are distorted and we become disorganised by fear. In this frenzied state of mind we cannot respond to reason.

Over time, a person who enjoys a higher vagal tone will begin to see and construct the world differently. I mean this literally, too. As the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett writes in her book How Emotions Are Made, “You may think that in everyday life, the things you see and hear influence what you feel, but it’s mostly the other way around: What you feel alters your sight and hearing.” People who are scared take in a scene differently. Our ears, for example, immediately adjust to focus on high and low frequencies—a scream or a growl—rather than midrange frequencies, which include normal human speech. Anxiety narrows our attention and diminishes our peripheral vision. A feeling of happiness, by contrast, widens our peripheral vision. A person who feels safe because of the reliable and empathetic presence of others will see the world as a wider, more open, and happier place.

Slow (high road) processing is thoughtful, rational, and accurate, while fast (low road) processing is instinctive and automatic. Why are these distinctions important? It’s easy and natural for us to process a failure through fast, instinctive, automatic low road pathways in our brain. The problem is that low road cognition triggers an immediate response to failure in the brain’s amygdala (that fear module for self-protection that in today’s world sometimes holds us back from risk-taking). As we have already seen, how we interpret events affects our emotional responses to them. Fortunately, we can learn how to reinterpret events in our lives to avoid persevering in unproductive negative feelings. To do that, you must override the amygdala, with its superfast pathway from perceived threat to fear, to challenge its automaticity with information and reasoning.