Using Bubbles to Overcome Fear
Ant Middleton is a former UK Elite Forces soldier.
As you’d expect, his job could be incredibly intense, dealing with very real life-or-death situations. He was regularly facing fear head on and feeling fear in those situations is to be expected. The problem was, as he shares in his book Fear Bubble: Harness Fear and Live Without Limits, the fear began to seep beyond the battlefield and at times became all-consuming.
Ant would spend months on tour, feeling like he was trapped in a bubble of constant dread. As soon as he touched down back in the UK the bubble would burst, and life returned to being good. But as the next tour loomed, he would experience a ‘gut-wrenching feeling again’ and didn’t want to return. He loved his job, so struggled to understand why he was being consumed by this feeling of dread. He admitted to himself, “I was shit scared. Fear got a grip of me.” He didn’t know what to do.
Fear vs Anxiety
The fear had become an intense and chronic anxiety. In research by Joseph LeDoux PhD and Daniel S Pine MD (1), they use the following definitions for fear and anxiety.
Fear - the feelings that come up when the source of harm, the threat, is either immediate or imminent
Anxiety - the feelings that occur when the source of harm is uncertain or is distal in space or time
Ant decided to see if he could break this anxiety into smaller, manageable less all-consuming packets of fear.
He reasoned that at home two weeks out from his next tour, there was no need to feel scared. There were no immediate threats. Even when he arrived on base there was nothing to be scared of in that highly guarded and defended environment. Even when he was dropped into the battlefield, it would be in a location away from any action with, his fellow soldiers around him. There was no imminent threat there, so no need to feel fear.
It was only when he got to the target where the bad guys were that it was appropriate to feel scared. That was when the threat was imminent, when the bullets were about to fly.
At that point he’d enter the fear bubble and the gut-wrenching dread would take hold. Once he was being lifted out of the area by helicopter and they were at a safe altitude the feeling of elation would take over. He wouldn’t allow himself to feel fear again until the next mission was in play.
Although he’d been able to break the fear down into a more manageable chunk, it was often still too long in a fear bubble with an active operation lasting hours or days.
He realised he needed to make a change. Heading into a terrorist compound early one morning, he came up with a new approach.
Fear is a magic shrinking potion. If you don't learn to harness it, it will make you smaller and smaller and smaller.
Ant Middleton
Visualising Bubbles
As Ant made his way toward a wall of this compound, through his night vision goggles he could see the smoke from a cigarette and the tip of an AK47. On the other side of this wall was an armed combatant. He told himself that’s where the fear was.
This time he actually visualised a bubble – 10 metres ahead of him at that corner. The visualisation changed everything. Instead of fear feeling like a vague concept with the power to overwhelm him, he gave fear a place and a time.
He could see this bubble glimmering, waiting for him to step into it. He took a deep breath and stepped into it and the fear hit him. He was in the bubble and made the conscious decision to act. He did what was required and the fear bubble burst.
In the shadows he saw someone enter a building in the compound. He approached the door. He visualised the bubble again. He stepped into it, kicking the door down, clearing the room and once again, bursting the bubble.
He had compartmentalised the fear and this worked a treat.
Compartmentalising
Compartmentalisation is a term coined by Sigmund Freud, is a defence mechanism, and strategy the psyche uses to avoid feeling anxiety.
People compartmentalise frequently in their everyday lives to avoid the stress and anxiety associated with conflicting thoughts or feelings, often in different areas, such as work, school, family, etc. For example, we’ve argued with our partner in the morning and then put any negative emotions aside to be able to focus on work. It gives us a temporary respite from mental stress by creating mental partitions to help avoid emotional overload (2).
It can be helpful and the approach that Ant uses is a positive coping strategy. It can become negative if we don’t process those emotions and confront the underlying issue. We need to come back to what happened and the thoughts and feelings at a later to ensure we process them to avoid this changing from a positive coping mechanism to a negative one (3).
Bravely overcoming one small fear gives you the courage to take on the next.
Robin Sharma
Get addicted to the process
Once Ant had burst a fear bubble, he’d get a rush and look for the next one feeling like he was fuelled by adrenaline as each bubble burst. Instead of dreading the next moment, he began almost craving it.
It’s most likely it’s not just adrenaline he was getting a hit from. Feel-good neurotransmitters and hormones can come into play when we are dealing with fear, including endorphins, dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin.
Side note: I got sucked down a rabbit hole here trying to get to the bottom of the neurobiology of fear. One of my final year subjects at uni was in the field of neuroscience, so I do geek out on this. It’s far more complex than the simple fight-flight-freeze response from the amygdala. What’s interesting is our understanding of fear is evolving - we don't have all the answers yet.
Dopamine is released during stress. Acute stress, or when the stress is moderate or controllable, appears to increase dopaminergic reward sensitivity to allow successful coping with the recruitment of appropriate reward-related neural connections (4). That’s that feel-good sensation we get from dopamine.
However, chronic stress, or when it is unpredictable, incontrollable and unavoidable, results in blunted dopaminergic reward sensitivity which can induce the loss of pleasure or a lack of motivation and lead to depressive behaviour (5, 6).
Stressful stimuli also activate oxytocin neurons and promote oxytocin release. Oxytocin modulates stress responses and facilitates adaptation to stress, including increasing our resilience to stress (7). It can also explain why doing scary things with others can be a bonding experience - oxytocin is sometimes referred to as the ‘love hormone’ for its involvement in trust and bonding.
The release of serotonin during stressful experiences has also been shown to contribute to stress resilience (8).
All of this helps to explain why Ant’s approach worked, as well as the negative impacts he felt when the fear turned into chronic anxiety. By containing our exposure to fear and making it more manageable we can get that feel-good buzz when we overcome it and have us wanting more.
Know when to step out
The final critical lesson for Ant was realising he didn’t have to burst every bubble.
Sometimes he’d step in, feel the emotions and realise he wasn’t ready, that it was too much. When operational conditions allowed, he’d step out of the bubble, take a moment to compose himself and then try again.
In Susan Jeffer’s book Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, she shares that the underlying cause of fear is our doubting our ability to deal with the situation. She says, “All you have to do to diminish your fear is to develop more trust in your ability to handle whatever comes your way.”
He knew it was important not to stay in the fear bubble for too long. Otherwise those emotions and sensations would start to drain him and be overwhelming. He’d start overthinking things and risk the fear freezing him to the spot while simultaneously draining his courage.
He had to consciously commit to the action needed to make the bubble burst - he had to create that belief that he could do what was needed. If he couldn’t, then he’d step out, take a moment to compose himself and then have another crack.
Putting it all together
1. SEE IT Visualise the bubble
2. GET IN IT Step into the bubble
3. FEEL IT Feel the fear and dread (and that’s ok)
4. COMMIT TO IT Commit to the required actions
5. DO IT Take the required action
And pop, the bubble bursts.
Ant was approached by a school kid who was really struggling and had exams coming up he was dreading. Ant shared his approach of using fear bubbles. He told him to treat each question as a fear bubble. See question 1, visualise the fear bubble, step in, answer the question, and burst the bubble. Then go on to the next. It worked a treat – the kid found he enjoyed going from bubble to bubble, even enjoying his exam and finishing it early.
Without fear, there’s no challenge. Without challenge, there’s no growth. Without growth, there’s no life.
Ant Middleton
CLOSE
Our nervous systems are naturally wired to sense fear. Our fear response is a survival mechanism that keeps us alert and helps us avoid dangerous situations. But if fear arises away from tangible threats, it can be detrimental to our well-being - and that’s what Ant was dealing with before he came up with this approach.
The goal in life is not to avoid fear - far from it. When we take risk, push our boundaries, try something new, or get out of our comfort zone, we are going to face some kind of fear. The goal is to make the fear manageable. I think Ant’s approach has the potential to be a powerful way to not just manage fear but to really harness it.
So next time you feel dread ahead of something you fear in some way, or perhaps you are avoiding a situation because you feel afraid, try this approach and see if it helps.
If you do, I’d love to hear how you go!
Sarah
References
Using Neuroscience to Help Understand Fear and Anxiety: A Two-System Framework, Joseph LeDoux PhD, Daniel Pin, MD, American Journal of Pyschiatry, 9 Sep 2016,
Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts, Eds Burness Moore & Bernard Fine, 1990, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, p. 49.
What Does It Mean to Compartmentalize? Krista Jordan, PhD, 18 Aug 22, <https://www.choosingtherapy.com/compartmentalization/>
4. University of California - San Diego. "How fear unfolds inside our brains." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 14 March 2024. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/03/240314145305.htm>.
Stelly, C. E., Tritley, S. C., Rafati, Y. & Wanat, M. J. Acute stress enhances associative learning via dopamine signaling in the ventral lateral striatum. J. Neurosci. 40, 4391–4400 (2020).
Cabib, S. & Puglisi-Allegra, S. The mesoaccumbens dopamine in coping with stress. Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev. 36, 79–89 (2012).
Marinelli, M. Dopaminergic reward pathways and effects of stress. In Stress and addiction: Biological and psychological mechanisms (ed. al’Absi, M.) 41–83. (Elsevier Science, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2007).
Takayanagi Y, Onaka T. Roles of Oxytocin in Stress Responses, Allostasis and Resilience. Int J Mol Sci. 2021 Dec 23;23(1):150. doi: 10.3390/ijms23010150. PMID: 35008574; PMCID: PMC8745417.
Stefano Puglisi-Allegra, Diego Andolina, Serotonin and stress coping, Behavioural Brain Research, Volume 277, 2015, Pages 58-67,