We are afraid of our own vulnerability. We are afraid of our being in part mere machines, things, bodies, and that fear is compounded by the knowledge that machines can, and often do, malfunction. This of course applies to any form of illness and is not confined to madness. It is understandable - surely not ridiculous and pathetic - and it is a reflection of a human fear of unavoidable death.

The neurobiology of fear is to some extent understood. A threat in some form is perceived, and in very broad terms two systems are activated: one rapid and more or less unconscious and mediated at lower levels of the central nervous system, the other slower and conscious and mediated at higher levels.

Research has shown that we often judge ourselves harshly and that we tend to experience negative emotions more quickly and with greater intensity than positive emotions. The nervous ape doesn’t like to be vulnerable or ask difficult questions. Reality can feel threatening. Of course, we may truly believe that loving the work and seeing more clearly is the better approach — the true path to sustainable safety, satisfaction, and success — but the nervous ape needs calming and convincing to go that route.

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.

We are saddled with what psychologists call prepared fears. These include fears of dangerous animals, loud noises, and sudden movements. To this list of prepared fears add that of being expelled by the tribe. University of Virginia professor James “Jim” Detert and I consider being rejected by a group as a survival-based prepared fear. The risk of coming up short in the eyes of an authority such as one’s boss triggers a prepared fear in the brain related to being expelled from the tribe, a reality that might long ago have resulted in death from exposure or starvation. But today when we’re afraid to speak up about failure, our colleagues lose valuable opportunities to learn vicariously. Also, we miss out on opportunities to avoid preventable failures. Meanwhile, distracted by irrational prepared fears, we miss signals of longer-term peril that require slower thinking but constitute true threats to survival, such as the impact of climate change on food supplies and sea levels. Fast, automatic low road processing feeds the confirmation bias, encourages complacency, and hides failure’s useful lessons. Slow high road processing happens when we stop to question the automatic to wonder what is happening and what it might mean. Most important, it happens when we stop to ask ourselves, How might I have contributed to the failure?